Ex Libris 
 C. K. OGDEN
 
 GUI! LORD'S LIFE ON EARTH.
 
 Our Lord's 
 Life on Earth. 
 
 REV. WILLIAM HANN"A, D.D., LL.D. 
 
 Author of 
 
 "THE LIFE OF DR. CHALMERS," KTC. 
 
 LONDON 
 THE RELIGIOUS TRACT SOCIETY, 
 
 56 PATERNOSTER Row, 65 ST. PAUL'S CHURCHYARD, 
 AND 164 PICCADILLY.
 
 PEEFATOEY NOTE. 
 
 THE venerable author of this "Life of our Lord" died in 
 London on May 24th, 1882. Any reference here to his long 
 and useful life is uncalled for. Still it may interest the 
 readers of this volume to know that its publication, in this 
 abridged form, was the last literary work which occupied 
 Dr. Hanna's attention. Only a few days before his death he 
 expressed to the officers of the Eeligious Tract Society his 
 earnest desire that the volume might be issued in such a form 
 and at such a price as to be within the reach of the largest 
 possible number of readers. 
 
 The author's last wish is re-echoed here. May the book 
 find very many readers, and may it bring home, with fresh 
 power and sweetness to their hearts, the truth of our Saviour's 
 words, and the joy of that salvation which comes through 
 His death ! 
 
 June 1882. 
 
 1C77195
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 THE EARLIER YEARS- 
 PAGE 
 
 i. The Annunciation Mary and Elisabeth, .... 1 
 
 n. The Nativity . , . 5 
 
 m. The Presentation in the Temple, , 10 
 
 iv. The Visit of the Magi, 16 
 
 v. The Massacre of the Innocents, and the Plight into Egypt, ; 23 
 
 vi. The Thirty Years at Nazareth Christ among the Doctors, . 31 
 
 vii. The Forerunner, 40 
 
 vni. The Baptism, . . 50 
 
 IX. The Temptation, 58 
 
 x. The First Disciples, 66 
 
 xi. The First Miracle, 76 
 
 xii. The Gleansing of the Temple, 83 
 
 xin. The Conversation with Nicodemus, 90 
 
 xrv. The Woman of Samaria, 99 
 
 xv. The Jewish Nobleman and the Roman Centurion, . . . 108 
 
 xvi. The Pool of Bethesda, 115 
 
 XVH. The Synagogue of Nazareth, 122 
 
 xvni. First Sabbath in Capernaum, and First Circuit of Galilee, . 127 
 
 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE 
 
 i. The Two Healings The Leper and the Paralytic, ... 137 
 
 II. The Charge of Sabbath-breaking, 144 
 
 in. The Calling to the Apostolate of St. Peter, St. Andrew, St. 
 
 James, St. John, and St. Matthew, 154 
 
 iv. The Sermon on the Mount, 161 
 
 v. The Raising of the Widow's Son and the Ruler's Daughter, . 169 
 
 vi. The Embassy of the Baptist The Great Invitation, . . 176 
 
 vii. The Woman who was a Sinner, 184 
 
 vni. The Collision with the Pharisees The First Parables The 
 
 Stilling of the Tempest The Demoniac of Gadara, . . 190 
 
 ix. The Mission of the Twelve 205 
 
 x. The Feeding of the Five Thousand, and the AValking upon the 
 
 Water, 214
 
 CONTENTS. Vll 
 
 PAOK 
 
 xi. The Discourse in the Synagogue of Capernaum, . . . 221 
 
 xii. Pharisaic Traditions The Syrophcenician Woman, . . . 229 
 
 xin. The Circuit through Decapolis, 237 
 
 xiv. The Apostolic Confession at Caesarea-Philippi, ... 243 
 
 xv. The Rebuke of St. Peter, ... ... 250 
 
 xvi. The Transfiguration, 256 
 
 THE CLOSE or THE MINISTRY 
 
 i. The Descent of the Mount of Transfiguration, .... 264 
 n. The Payment of the Tribute-money The Strife as to who 
 
 should be greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven, . . . 272 
 
 in. Christ and His Brethren, 279 
 
 rv. Christ at the Feast of Tabernacles, 285 
 
 v. Jesus the Light of the World .292 
 
 vi. The Cure of the Man born Blind, 299 
 
 vii. The Good Shepherd, 308 
 
 viii. Incidents in our Lord's last Journey to Jerusalem, . . 318 
 
 ix. Our Lord's Ministry in Persea, 323 
 
 x. The Parables of the Peraean Ministry The Lord's Prayer, . 332 
 
 xi. Jesus the Resurrection and the Life, 336 
 
 xn. The Raising of Lazarus, . . . 345 
 
 xin. The Last Journey through Peraea : The Ten Lepers The 
 Coming of the Kingdom The Question of Divorce Little 
 
 Children brought to Him The Young Ruler, . . . 352 
 
 xiv. Jesus at Jericho The Request of the Sons of Zebedee, . . 357 
 
 xv. The Anointing at Bethany, 365 
 
 THE PASSION WEEK 
 
 8UNDA T. 
 i. The Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem Jesus weeping over 
 
 the City, 372 
 
 MONDAY. 
 n. The Fig-tree withering away The Second Cleansing of the 
 
 Temple, 377 
 
 TUESDAY, 
 m. The Barren Fig-tree Parables of the Two Sons and of the 
 
 Wicked Husbandmen, 382 
 
 iv. The Marriage of the King's Son Question as to the Tribute- 
 money 388 
 
 v. Question of the Sadducees as to the Resurrection of the Dead, 394 
 vi. The Lawyer's Question The Two Great Commandments- 
 Christ, David's Son and David's Lord, 400 
 
 vii. The Woes denounced upon the Pharisees, .... 405 
 
 vm. The Widow's Mite Certain Greeks desire to see Jesus, . 411 
 
 ix. The Prophecies of the Mount, 418
 
 Vlll CONTENTS. 
 
 THURSDA Y. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 x. The Washing of the Disciples' Feet, 423 
 
 xi. The Exposure of Judas, 429 
 
 xn. The Lord's Supper, 439 
 
 xin. Gethsemane, 447 
 
 THE LAST DAY or THE PASSION 
 
 I. The Betrayal and the Betrayer, 458 
 
 n. The Denials, Repentance, and Restoration of St. Peter, . 467 
 
 in. The Trial before the Sanhedrim, 470 
 
 rv. Christ's First Appearance before Pilate, 485 
 
 v. Christ's Appearance before Herod 493 
 
 vi. Christ's Second Appearance before Pilate, .... 501 
 
 vn. The Daughters of Jerusalem Weeping, 511 
 
 vin. The Penitent Thief 518 
 
 ix. The Mother of our Lord, 530 
 
 x. The Darkness and the Desertion 539 
 
 xi. " It is Finished," 547 
 
 xn. The Attendant Miracles . 554 
 
 xiii. The Physical Cause of the Death of Christ, .... 563 
 
 xiv. The Burial, 573 
 
 THE FORTY DAYS AFTER THE RESURRECTION 
 
 I. The Resurrection 579 
 
 n. Appearance to Mary Magdalene, 587 
 
 in. The Journey to Emmaus, 595 
 
 iv. The Evening Meeting, ' . 603 
 
 v. The Incredulity of Thomas, 609 
 
 vi. The Lake-side of Galilee, 617 
 
 vn. Peter and John, 621 
 
 vni. The Great Commission, 627 
 
 ix. The Ascension, 640 
 
 Appendix No. 1 651 
 
 Appendix No. II. 654 
 
 Index of Matters, 657 
 
 Index of Passages, 662
 
 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 I. THE ANNUNCIATION MARY AND ELISABETH. 
 LUKE i. 26-56. 
 
 " IN the sixth month" half a year from the time when, within 
 the holy place at Jerusalem, he had stood on the right side of the 
 altar of incense, and announced to the incredulous Zacharias the 
 birth of the Baptist " the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto 
 a city of Galilee, named Nazareth, to a virgin espoused to a man 
 whose name was Joseph, of the house of David ; and the virgin's 
 name was Mary." Little information is given in the Gospels as to 
 the previous history either of Joseph or Mary. He, we are told, 
 was of the house of David, of royal lineage by direct descent ; but 
 that line now fallen so low that he was but a village tradesman, a 
 carpenter. Mary too, we have reason to believe, was also of the 
 royal stock of David ; yet in so humble a condition of life as made 
 it natural that she should be betrothed to Joseph. This betrothal 
 had taken place, and the new hopes it had excited agitate the 
 youthful Mary's heart. She is alone in her dwelling, when, lifting 
 up her eyes, she sees the form of the angel, and hears his voice say 
 unto her : " Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with 
 thee : blessed art thou among women." To Zacharias he had 
 spoken at once by name, and had proceeded without prelude to 
 deliver the message with which he had been charged. He enters 
 more reverently this humble abode at Nazareth than he had entered 
 the holy place of the great Temple at Jerusalem. He stands more 
 reverently before this youthful maiden than before the aged priest. 
 He cannot open to her his message till he has offered her such 
 homage as heavenly messenger never paid to any member of our 
 race. Is it any wonder that saluted so by one who, wearing, as in 
 all likelihood he did, our human form, was yet like no man she had 
 ever seen, Mary should have been " troubled at his saying," 
 troubled as she felt the privacy of her seclusion thus invaded, and 
 looked upon that strange, unearthly, yet most attractive form which
 
 2 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 stood before her ? She is not so troubled, however, as to hinder 
 her from casting in her thoughts " what manner of salutation this 
 should be." She receives the salutation in silence, with surprise, 
 with awe, with thoughtful wonder. In sympathy with feelings 
 depicted in her alarmed yet inquiring countenance, Gabriel hastens 
 to relieve her fears, and satisfy her curiosity. " Fear not," he says, 
 after a brief pause. " Fear not, Mary ; " the very familiar mention 
 of her name carrying with it an antidote against alarm. "Fear 
 not, Mary; for thou hast found favour with God. And, behold, 
 thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt 
 call his name Jesus. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son 
 of the Highest ; and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne 
 of his father David : and he shall reign over the house of Jacob 
 for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end." 
 
 There was scarce a mother in Israel, in those days, who did not 
 cherish it as the very highest object of desire and ambition to be 
 the mother of the promised Messiah. Mary was a mother in 
 Judah, and the man to whom she was betrothed belonged also to 
 that stock from which the Messiah was to spring. Perhaps the 
 hope had already dawned that this great honour might be in store 
 for her. Her devout and thoughtful habits had made her familiar 
 with the old prophecies that foretold the Messiah's advent, and 
 with the manner in which his kingdom was there spoken of. 
 Obscure and mysterious as much of what Gabriel said may have 
 appeared to her, she seems at once to have apprehended that it was 
 of the birth of this great son of David that he was speaking. She 
 does not ask, she seems not to have needed any information on that 
 point. Nor does she hesitate to accept as true all that Gabriel had 
 declared. She puts indeed a question which, if its meaning had 
 not been interpreted by the manner in which Gabriel dealt with it, 
 and by the subsequent conduct of Mary herself, we might have 
 regarded as akin to that of Zacharias ; as indicating that she too 
 had given way to incredulity. But hers was a question of curiosity, 
 not of unbelief; a question akin, not to the one which Zacharias 
 put about the birth of John, but to that of Abraham about the 
 birth of Isaac s when he said to the angel, Whereby shall I know 
 this 1 a question implying no failure of faith, for we know that 
 Abraham staggered not at the promise through unbelief, but ex 
 pressive simply of a desire for further information, for some sign in 
 confirmation of his faith. He got such a sign and rejoiced. And 
 so with Mary : her question, like the patriarch's, springing not from 
 the spirit of a hesitating unbelief, but from natural curiosity, and 
 the wish to have the faith she felt confirmed. Her desire was 
 granted. She was told that the Holy Ghost should come upon her, 
 that the power of the Highest should overshadow her, that the 
 child afterwards to be born was now miraculously to be conceived.
 
 THE ANNUNCIATION. 3 
 
 And as a sign, this piece of information, new to her we may believe, 
 was given, that her relative, the aged Elisabeth, was also to have a 
 son. Her question having been answered, and the manner of the 
 great event so far revealed as to throw her back simply on the 
 promise and power of God, Mary says : " Behold the handmaid of 
 the Lord ; be it unto me according to thy word." What a contrast 
 here between Zacharias and Mary! The aged priest had been 
 taught from childhood in one of the schools of the prophets, and 
 must have been familiar with all those narratives and prophecies 
 which might have prepared him to believe, and he had besides the 
 experience of years to give power to his trust in God. Mary was 
 of humbler, parentage ; her opportunities of instruction but meagre 
 compared with his; hers too was the season of inexperienced 
 youth ; her faith was as yet unfortified by trial. What he was 
 asked to believe was unlikely indeed, and altogether unlocked for, 
 yet not beyond the powers of nature. What she is asked to believe 
 is a direct miraculous forthputting of the great power of God. 
 Yet the old priest staggers, while the young maiden instantly 
 confides. 
 
 In Mary's immediate and entire belief of the angel's word, a far 
 greater confidence in God was shown than could have been shown 
 by Zacharias, even had he received Gabriel's message as she did, 
 without a suspicion or a doubt. She who, being betrothed, proved 
 unfaithful, was, by the law of Moses, sentenced to be stoned to 
 death, and though that law had now fallen into disuse, or was but 
 seldom literally executed, yet she who was deemed guilty of such a 
 crime stood exposed to the loss of character, and became the marked 
 object of public opprobrium. Mary could not fail at once to per- 
 ceive, and to be sensitive to the misconceptions and the perils which 
 she would certainly incur. She might, in self-vindication, relate 
 that Gabriel had told her, but how many would believe her word ? 
 What voucher could she give that it was actually a heavenly mes- 
 senger she had seen, and that what he had said was true ? Many 
 a distressing fear as to the future, as to the treatment she might 
 receive from Joseph, the calnmnies, the shame, the scorn to which 
 from other quarters she might be exposed, might have arisen, if 
 not to check her faith, yet to hold her own acquiescence in the will 
 of God in timid and trembling suspense ; but, strong in the sim- 
 plicity and fulness of her trust, she puts all fears away, and com- 
 mitting herself into the hands of him whose angel she believes 
 Gabriel to be, she says, " Behold the handmaid of the Lord ; be it 
 unto me according to thy word." 
 
 Let us notice one other element in Mary's faith : its humility, 
 its complete freedom from that undue thought of self which so often 
 taints tiie faith of the most believing. Wonderful as the announce- 
 ment is, that a child born of her should, by such miraculous concep-
 
 4 THE EARLIER YEAES. 
 
 tion as Gabriel had spoken of, be the Son of the Highest, should be 
 a King sitting on the throne of David, his kingdom one that 
 should outrival David's, of which there never should be an end, 
 Mary harbours no doubt, raises no question, thinks not, speaks not 
 of her own unworthiness to have such honour conferred on her, or 
 of her unfitness to be the mother of such a child. As if one so un- 
 worthy of the least of God's mercies had no right or title to question 
 his doings, however great a gift it pleased him to confer, she sinks 
 all thought of self in thought of him, and says, " Behold the hand- 
 maid of the Lord ; be it unto me according to thy word." A finer 
 instance of simple, humble, childlike, unbroken trust, we shall 
 scarcely find in any record human or divine. " Blessed," let us say 
 with her cousin Elisabeth, " is she that believed : for there shall be 
 a performance of those things which were told her from the Lord." 
 " Thou hast found favour," said Gabriel to her, " with God." It is 
 possible to interpret that saying without any reference to Mary's 
 character ; to rest in the explanation, which is no doubt so far 
 true, that it was God's good pleasure to select out of all the maidens 
 of Israel this Mary of Nazareth, to be the most honoured of the 
 daughters of Eve. But if it be true, as we are elsewhere taught, 
 that to him that hath it is given ; that it is done unto every one 
 according to his faith ; that to him that believeth, all things are 
 possible; if all the recorded experience of God's people confirms 
 these general sayings of the Divine word, are we wrong in con- 
 sidering the high honour conferred by God on Mary as a striking 
 exemplification of the principle of adapting the gift to the character 
 and capacity of the receiver ? 
 
 His errand accomplished, Gabriel withdrew ; and after the brief 
 and exciting interview, Mary was left in solitude to her own 
 thoughts. The words she had so lately heard kept ringing in her 
 ears. She tried to enter more and more into their meaning. As 
 she did so, into what a tumult of wonder, and awe, and hope, must 
 she have been thrown ! She longs for some one with whom she 
 can converse, to whom she may unburden her full mind and heart. 
 There is no one near to whom she can or dare lay open all her 
 secret thoughts ; but she remembers now what Gabriel had told her 
 about her kinswoman Elisabeth, who may well be intrusted with 
 the secret, for she too has been placed in something like the same 
 condition. Eager for sympathy, thirsting for companionship and 
 full communion of the heart, she arises in haste, and departs for 
 the distant residence of her cousin, who lives amid the far-off hills 
 of Judah. It is a long for one so young and so unprotected, it 
 might be, a perilous journey ; nearly the whole length of the land 
 at least a hundred miles to traverse. But what is distance, what 
 are dangers to one so lifted up with the exalted hopes to which she 
 has been begotten ! The hundred miles are quickly trodden ; joy
 
 MAKY AND ELISABETH. 5 
 
 and hope make the long distance short. She reaches at last the 
 house in which Elisabeth resides, and, with all due respect such 
 as is due from the inferior in station, the junior in years she 
 salutes the wife of the venerable priest. How filled with wonder 
 must she have been, when, instead of the ordinary return to her 
 salutation, Elisabeth breaks forth at once with the exclamation, 
 " Blessed art thou among women ;" the very words which the angel 
 had so lately spoken in her astonished ear ; " and blessed is the 
 fruit of thy womb." She need not tell her secret ; it is already 
 known. What a fresh warrant this for the truth of all that Gabriel 
 had said ! It comes to confirm a faith already strong, but which 
 might, perhaps, otherwise have begun to falter. It did not waver 
 in the angel's presence ; but had month after month gone by, with 
 no one near to share her thoughts, or build her up in her first trust, 
 might not that trust have yielded to human weakness, and shown 
 some symptom of decay ? Well-timed, then, the kindly aid which 
 the strange greeting of her cousin brought with it, supplying a new 
 evidence that there should indeed be a performance of all those 
 things which were told of the Lord. 
 
 "And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should 
 come to me ?" If in Mary we have one of the rarest exhibitions 
 of humility towards God, of entire acquiescence in his will; in 
 Elisabeth we have as rare and beautiful an instance of humility 
 towards others, the entire absence of all selfish, proud, and envious 
 feelings. Elisabeth leaves out of sight all the outer distinctions 
 between herself and her humbler relative, forgets the difference of 
 age and rank, recognises at once, and ungrudgingly, the far higher 
 distinction which had been conferred by God upon Mary, and 
 wonders even at the fact that to such a home as hers the honoured 
 mother of her Lord should come. But now the same spirit which 
 had enlightened her eyes, and filled her heart, and opened her lips 
 to give such greeting to her cousin, comes in still fuller measure 
 upon Mary, and to the wonderful salutation she gives a still more 
 wonderful response in that strain of rapt and rhythmical praise 
 which the Holy Catholic Church has ever treasured as the first and 
 fullest of our Christian hymns. 
 
 IL 
 
 THE NATIVITY. 
 LUKE n. 1-20. 
 
 IT is difficult, perhaps impossible, to decide whether it was 
 before or after her visit to Elisabeth, that Joseph was made ac- 
 quainted with the condition of his betrothed. It must have
 
 6 TIIE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 thrown him into painful perplexity. He was not prepared at first 
 to put implicit faith in her narrative, but neither was he prepared 
 utterly to discredit it. To put her publicly away by a bill of 
 divorce would have openly stamped her character with shame, and 
 branded her child with infamy. He was unwilling that either of 
 these injuries should be inflicted. To put her away privily would 
 at least so far cover her reputation that the child might still be 
 regarded as his ; and this he had generously resolved to do, A ; /hen 
 the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, removed all his 
 doubts, and led him to take Mary as his wife. This difficulty 
 overcome, Mary was quietly awaiting at Nazareth the expected 
 birth. But it was not at Nazareth that the Messiah was to be 
 born. An ancient prophecy had already designated another 
 village, not in Galilee, but in Judea, as the destined birthplace. 
 " But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah " so had the prophet Micah 
 spoken 700 years before "though thou be little among the 
 thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me 
 that is to be ruler in Israel ; whose goings forth have been from of 
 old, from everlasting." To this village of Bethlehem Mary was to 
 be guided at such a time as should secure the fulfilment of the 
 prophecy. 
 
 A singular instrumentality was employed to gain this end. 
 The Roman Empire had now stretched its dominion to its widest 
 limits, its power extending from the Euphrates to the British 
 Islands from the Northern Ocean to the borders of Ethiopia. 
 Amid the prevalence of universal peace, the Emperor, judging it a 
 fit opportunity to ascertain by accurate statistics the population 
 and resources of the different provinces of his dominions, issued an 
 edict that a general census of the empire should be taken. It 
 gratified his pride ; it would be useful afterwards for many pur- 
 poses of government, such as determining the taxes that might be 
 imposed, or the levies that might be drawn from the different 
 provinces. This edict of Augustus came to be executed in Judea. 
 That country was not yet, in the outward form of its government, 
 reduced to the condition of a Roman province ; but Herod, while 
 nominally an independent king, was virtually a Roman subject, 
 and had to obey this as well as the other edicts of the Emperor. 
 In doing so, however, Herod followed the Jewish usage, and issued 
 his instructions that every family should repair forthwith to the 
 seat of its tribe, where its genealogical records were kept. The 
 distinction of inheritance among the Jews had long been lost, but 
 the distinction of families and tribes was still preserved, and Herod 
 grounded upon that distinction the prescribed mode of registra- 
 tion or enrolment. Joseph and Mary, being both of the house and 
 lineage of David, were obliged to repair to Bethlehem. 
 
 When Mary was at first informed that Joseph and she must go
 
 THE NATIVITY. 7 
 
 to Bethlehe/m, perhaps she shrunk from so long a journey, lingered 
 to the last ere she entered on it, and took it slowly. She was late 
 at least in her arrival at the village. The inn, we may well suppose 
 the single one that so small a place afforded for the entertainment 
 of strangers, 1 was crowded. She had to take the only accommoda- 
 tion that the place afforded. Adopting here the early tradition of 
 the Church, as reported by Justin Martyr, who was born about a 
 century afterwards, and within fifty miles from Bethlehem, let us 
 say, she had to go into one of the caves or grottos in the rock 
 common in the neighbourhood, connected with the inn. There, 
 where the camels and the asses had their stalls ; there, far away 
 from home and friends, among strangers all too busy to care for 
 her ; amid all the rude exposures and confusion of the place, Mary 
 brought forth her first-born son, and when her hour was over, 
 having swathed him with her own weak hands, laid him in a 
 manger. 
 
 A very lowly mode of entering upon human life : nothing 
 whatever to dignify, everything to degrade. Yet the night of that 
 wonderful birth was not to pass by without bearing upon its bosom 
 a bright and signal witness of the greatness of the event. Sloping 
 down from the rocky ridge on which Bethlehem stood, there lay 
 some grassy fields where all that night long some shepherds 
 watched their flocks ; humble, faithful, industrious men ; men, too, 
 of whom we are persuaded that, Simeon-like, they were waiting for 
 the Consolation of Israel; who had simpler and more spiritual 
 notions of their Messiah than most of the well-taught scribes of the 
 metropolis. They would not have understood the angel's message 
 so well ; they would not have believed it so readily ; they would 
 not have hastened so quickly to Bethlehem ; they would not have 
 bent with such reverence over so humble a cradle ; they would not 
 have made known abroad what had been told them concerning 
 this child, made it known as a thing in which they themselves 
 most heartily believed, had they not been devout, believing men. 
 Under the starry heavens, along the lonely hillsides, these shepherds 
 are keeping their watch, thinking perhaps of the time when these 
 very sheepwalks were trodden by the young son of Jesse, or 
 remembering some ancient prophecy that told of the coming of one 
 who was to be David's son and David's Lord. Suddenly the angel 
 of the Lord comes upon them, the glory of the Lord encompasses 
 them with a girdle of light brighter than the mid-day sun could 
 have thrown around them. They fear as they see that form, and 
 
 1 The inn or khan was frequently in the earliest times the house of the sheikh or 
 chief man of the place. A very interesting resume of all the historical notices of the 
 inn or khan of Bethlehem given by Mr. Hepworth DLxon in his volume on "The 
 Holy Land," which makes it more than probable that the place of Christ's birth 
 was close to, if not within, the very house to which Boaz conducted Ruth, and in 
 which Samuel anointed David king.
 
 8 THE EARLIEE YEARS. 
 
 as they are encircled by that glory, but their alarm is instantly 
 dispelled. " Fear not," says the angel, " for, behold, I bring you 
 good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto 
 you is born this day in the city of David, a Saviour, which is Christ 
 the Lord." Mary had been told that her child was to be called 
 Jesus, that he was to be great, to be son of the Highest, the heir 
 to his father David's throne, the head of an everlasting monarchy. 
 Joseph had been told that he was to call the child born of Mary, 
 Jesus, for he was to save his people from their sins, a simpler 
 and less Jewish description of his office. The angel speaks of him 
 to these shepherds in still broader and sublimer terms. Unto 
 them and unto all people this child was to be born, and unto them 
 and unto all he was to be a Saviour, Christ the Lord, the only 
 instance in which the double epithet, Christ the Lord, is given in 
 this form to him. A universal, a divine Messiahship was to be his. 
 
 The shepherds ask no sign as Zacharias and Mary had done ; 
 yet they got one: "And this," said the angel, "shall be a sign 
 unto you ; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, 
 lying in a manger." But one such child, born that night, wrapped 
 up in such a way, lying in such a place, could so small a village as 
 Bethlehem supply. That village lay but a mile or so from the 
 spot they stood on ; the sign could speedily be verified. But they 
 have something more to see and hear ere their visit to the village 
 is paid. The voice of that single angel has scarce died away in the 
 silence of the night lost in wonder they are still gazing on his 
 radiant form when suddenly a whole multitude of the heavenly 
 host bursts upon their astonished vision, lining the illuminated 
 heavens. Human eyes never saw before or since so large a com- 
 pany of the celestial inhabitants hovering in our earthly skies; 
 and human ears never heard before or since such a glorious burst 
 of heavenly praise as those angels then poured forth, couching it 
 in Hebrew speech, their native tongue for the time foregone, that 
 these listening shepherds may catch up at once the cradle-hymn 
 that Heaven now chants over the new-born Saviour ; that these 
 shepherds may repeat it to the men of their own generation ; that 
 from age to age it may be handed down, and age after age may 
 take it up as supplying the fittest terms in which to celebrate the 
 Redeemer's birth, " Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace, 
 goodwill towards men." ' 
 
 That little dropping of its praise committed for human use to 
 human keeping, Heaven hastily veiled itself again from human 
 vision. The whole angelic manifestation passed rapidly away. 
 The shepherds are startled in their midnight rounds ; a flood of 
 glory pours upon*them ; their eyes are dazzled with those forms of 
 light ; their ears are full of that thrilling song of praise ; suddenly 
 the glory is gone ; the shining forms have vanished ; the stars look
 
 THE NATIVITY. 9 
 
 down as before through the darkness; they are left to a silent 
 unspeakable wonder and awe. They soon, however, collect their 
 thoughts, and promptly resolve to go at once into the village. 
 They go in haste ; the sign is verified ; they find Mary and Joseph, 
 and the babe lying in the manger. They justify their intrusion 
 by telling all that they had just seen and heard ; and amid the 
 sorrows and humiliations of that night, how cheering to Mary the 
 strange tidings that they bring ! Having told these, they bend 
 with rude yet holy reverence over the place where the infant 
 Saviour lies, and go their way to finish their night-watch among 
 the hills, and then for all their life long afterwards to repeat to 
 wondering listeners the story of that birth. With those shepherds 
 let us bend for a moment or two over the place where the infant 
 Redeemer lay. 
 
 As we do so, we learn the difference between the inferior and 
 higher forms of an earthly greatness. On that night when Christ 
 was born, what a difference was there in all outward marks of dis- 
 tinction, between that child of the Hebrew mother as he lay in his 
 lowly cradle, and the Augustus Caesar whose edict brought Mary to 
 Bethlehem, as he reposed in his imperial palace ! And throughout 
 the lifetimes of the two there was but little to lessen that distinc- 
 tion. The name of the one was known and honoured over the whole 
 civilised globe : the name of the other scarce heard of beyond the 
 narrow bounds of Judea. And when repeated there, it was too often 
 as a byword and a reproach. How stands it now? The throne 
 of the Caesars, the throne of mere human authority and power, has 
 perished. That name, at which nations trembled, carries no power 
 over the spirits of men. But the empire of Jesus, the empire of 
 pure, undying, self-sacrificing love, will never perish ; its sway over 
 the conscience and hearts of men, as the world grows older, becomes 
 ever wider and stronger. His name shall be honoured while sun 
 and moon endure ; men shall be blessed in him ; all nations shall 
 call him blessed. This world owes an infinite debt to him, were it 
 for nothing else than this, that he has so exalted the spiritual above 
 the material ; the empire of love above the empire of power. 
 
 Again we bend over this infant as he lies in that manger at 
 Bethlehem, and as we do so, strange scenes in his after life rise 
 up on our memory. Those little, tender feet, unable to sustain 
 the infant frame, are yet to tread upon the roughened waters of a 
 stormy lake, as men tread the solid earth ! At the touch of that 
 little, feeble hand, the blind eye is to open, and the tied tongue to 
 be unloosed, and diseases of all kinds are to take wings and flee 
 away ! That soft, weak voice, whose gentle breathings in his 
 infant slumbers can scarce be heard, is to speak to the winds and 
 the waves, and they shall obey it ; is to summon the dead from the 
 sepulchre, and they shall couae forth ! Who then, and what was
 
 10 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 he, whose birth the angels celebrated in such high strains 1 None 
 other than he of whom Isaiah, anticipating the angels, had declared : 
 " Untq us a child is born, unto us a son is given ; and the govern- 
 ment shall be upon his shoulder : and his name shall be called 
 Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, 
 The Prince of Peace." It was He, the Word, who was from the 
 beginning with God, and who was God ; who was thus made flesh, 
 and came to dwell among us. This is, in truth, the central fact or 
 doctrine of our religion : the mystery of mysteries ; the one great 
 miracle of divine, everlasting love. Admit it, and all the other 
 wonders of the Saviour's life become not only easy of belief, they 
 appear but the natural and suitable incidents of such a history as his. 
 Deny it, and the whole gospel narrative becomes an inexplicable 
 enigma. The very heart of its meaning taken out of it, you may 
 try to turn it into a myth or fable if you please ; but a credible 
 story it no longer is. No ; not credible even in that part of it into 
 which nothing of the supernatural enters. Christ was either what 
 he claimed to be, and what all those miraculous attestations con- 
 spire to establish that he was ; he was either one with the Father, 
 knowing the Father as the Father knew him, doing whatever the 
 Father did, so direct and full a revelation of the Father that it 
 could be truly said that he who had seen him had seen the Father 
 likewise ; or his character for simplicity and honesty and truth- 
 fulness stands impeached, and the whole fabric of Christianity is 
 overturned. 
 
 III. 
 
 THE PRESENTATION IN THE TEMPLE. 
 LUKE ii. 21-38. 
 
 ON the eighth day after his birth Christ was circumcised : the 
 visible token of his being one of the seed of Abraham according to 
 the flesh was thus imposed. In his case, indeed, this rite could not 
 have that typical or spiritual meaning which in all other cases it 
 bore. It could point to no spiritual defilement needing to be 
 removed. But though on that ground exemption might have been 
 claimed for him, on other grounds it became him in this as in other 
 respects to fulfil the requirements of the Jewish law. From the 
 earliest period, from the first institution of the rite, it had been 
 the Jewish custom to give its name to the child on the occasion of 
 its circumcision, as it is the Christian custom, borrowed from the 
 Jewish, to give its name to the child on the occasion of its bap- 
 tism. The angel, indeed, who had appeared to Zacharias and to 
 Mary, had in each instance announced beforehand what the names 
 of the two children were to be. These however were not formallv
 
 THE PRESENTATION IN THE TEMPLE. 11 
 
 imposed till the day of their circumcision. In the Baptist's case 
 there was a large assemblage of relations and friends upon that 
 day ; and springing out of the peculiar condition of the father, the 
 naming of John was attended with such striking circumstances, 
 that the fame of them was noised abroad throughout all the hill 
 country of Judea. At Bethlehem Joseph and Mary were too far 
 away from all their kindred to call any assemblage of them to- 
 gether. In their humbler position they might not have done it, 
 even had they been resident at the time in Nazareth. Quietly, 
 privately, obscurely, they circumcised their child, and gave to him 
 the name of JESUS, that name so rich in meaning, so full of promise. 
 
 Forty days after the birth of Jesus, Joseph and Mary carried 
 the infant up to Jerusalem. There was a double object in this 
 visit. Mary had to present the offering which the Jewish law 
 required at the hands of every mother when the days of her puri- 
 fication were accomplished. This offering, in the case of all whose 
 circumstances enabled them to present it, was to consist of a lamb 
 of the first year for a burnt-offering, and a young pigeon or a turtle- 
 dove for a sin-offering. With that consideration for the poor which 
 marks so many of the Mosaic ordinances, it was provided that if the 
 mother were not able to furnish a lamb, a pair of turtle-doves or 
 two young pigeons were to be accepted, the one for the burnt- 
 offering, and the other for the sin-offering. That such was the 
 offering which Joseph and Mary presented to the priest, carried 
 with it an unmistakable evidence of the poverty of then- estate. 
 Besides discharging this duty, Mary had at the same time to dedi- 
 cate her infant son, as being a first-born child, to the Lord, and to 
 pay the small sum fixed as the price of his redemption. 
 
 There were few more common, few less noticeable sights than 
 the one witnessed that forenoon within the Temple when Christ's 
 presentation as a first-born child took place. It happened every 
 day that mothers brought their children to be in this way dedicated 
 and redeemed. It was part of the daily routine work of the priest- 
 in-waiting to take their payments, to hold up the children before 
 the altar, to enrol their names in the register of the first-born, and 
 so to complete the dedication ; a work which from its commonness 
 he went through without giving much attention either to parents or 
 to child, unless indeed there was something special in their rank, 
 or their appearance, or their offerings. But here there was nothing 
 of this kind. A poor man and woman, in humblest guise, with 
 humblest offerings, present themselves before him. The woman 
 holds out her first-born babe ; he takes, presents, enrols, and hands 
 it back to her ; all seems over, and what is there in so common, 
 plain, and simple an old Jewish custom worthy of any particular 
 notice ? We shall be able to answer that question better, by con- 
 sidering for a moment what this rite of the dedication of the first-
 
 12 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 born among the Israelites really meant, especially as applied to this 
 first-born, to this child Jesus. 
 
 When Moses first got his commission from the Lord in Midiau, 
 and was told to go and work out the great deliverance of his people 
 from their Egyptian bondage, the last instruction he received was 
 this : " And thou shalt say unto Pharaoh, Thus saith the Lord, 
 Israel is my son, even my first-born. And I say unto thee, Let my 
 son go, that he may serve me : and if thou refuse to let him go, 
 behold, I will slay thy son, even thy first-born " (Exodus iv. 22, 23). 
 As a mother reclaims her infant from the hands of a cruel nurse, 
 as a father reclaims his son from the hands of a severe and capri- 
 cious schoolmaster, so the Lord reclaimed his son, his first-born 
 Israel, from the hands of Pharaoh. But the king's haughty answer 
 to the demand was : " Who is the Lord, that I should obey his 
 voice to let Israel go 1" Sign after sign was shoAvn, wonder after 
 wonder wrought, woe after woe inflicted, but the spirit of the proud 
 king remained unbroken. At last, all lesser instruments having 
 failed, the sword was put into the hands of the destroying angel, 
 and he was sent forth to execute that foretold doom, which meant 
 to strike at the very heart of the entire community of Egypt fell 
 actually only upon the first-born in every family. The nation was 
 taken as represented by these its first and best. In their simul- 
 taneous death on that terrible night, Egypt throughout all its 
 borders was smitten. But the first-born of Israel was saved, and 
 through them, as representatives of the whole body of the people, 
 all Israel was saved : saved, yet not without blood, not without the 
 sacrifice of the lamb, for every household had the sprinkling of its 
 shed blood upon the lintel and door-post. It was to preserve and 
 perpetuate the memory of this judgment and this mercy, this 
 smiting and this shielding, this doom and this deliverance, that the 
 Lord spake unto Moses, saying, " Sanctify unto me all the first- 
 born, both of man and beast ; it is mine : for on the day that I 
 smote all the first-born in the land of Egypt, I hallowed unto me 
 all the first-born in Israel ; mine they shall be : I am the Lord. 
 And it shall be, when thy son asketh thee in time to come, saying, 
 What is this 1 that thou shalt say unto him, By strength of hand 
 the Lord brought us out from Egypt, from the house of bondage : 
 and it came to pass, when Pharaoh would hardly let us go, that 
 the Lord slew all the first-born in the land of Egypt, both the first- 
 born of man, and the first-born of beast : therefore I sacrifice to the 
 Lord all that openeth the matrix, being males ; but all the first-born 
 of my children I redeem." 1 During the earlier and simpler patri- 
 archal economy, the first-born in every family was also its priest. 
 Had that rule been followed when the twelve tribes were organised 
 into the Theocracy, the first-born invested with a double sacredness 
 1 Exod. xiii. 1 ; Numb. iii. 13 ; Exod. xiii. 14, 15.
 
 THE PRESENTATION IN THE TEMPLE. 13 
 
 as peculiarly the redeemed of the Lord, would have been consecrated 
 to the office of the priesthood. Instead of this, the Tribe of Levi 
 was set apart, that it might supply all the priests required for the 
 services of the sanctuary ; and the first-born for whom they were 
 thus substituted were redeemed or released from that service by the 
 payment each, on the day of their presentation in the Temple, of a 
 merely nominal gratuity ; by that payment, the original right and 
 title, as it were, of the first-born to the office of the priesthood, being 
 still preserved. 
 
 This rite, then, of the presentation of the first-born in the 
 Temple, had a double character and office. It was a standing 
 memorial or remembrancer of a past fact in the history of the 
 Jewish people, the deliverance of their forefathers from the bond- 
 age of Egypt, and especially of the shielding of their first-born from 
 the stroke which fell on all the first-born of the Egyptians ; but the 
 deliverance from Egyptian bondage was itself a type and prophecy 
 of another higher and wider deliverance, and especially of the 
 manner in which that deliverance was to be wrought out. 
 
 In the light of this explanation, let us look yet once again at 
 our Lord's presentation in the Temple as a first-born child, and see 
 whether as the eye of faith looks through the outward actions to 
 that which the actions symbolise, looks through the outward form 
 and discerns the spiritual significance the whole scene does not 
 become, as it were, transfigured before us. You mount the steps, 
 and come up into this Temple at Jerusalem. It is neither a feast- 
 day nor a Sabbath-day, nor is it the fixed hour for prayer. A few 
 priests or Levites, or other hangers-on of the Holy Place, are loiter- 
 ing in the outer courts. A man and woman in Galilean dress, 
 the woman bearing an infant in her arms, cross the court and go 
 forward to where the priest is standing, whose duty it is to present 
 whatever individual sacrifices or oblations may that day be offered. 
 They tell the priest their errand, hand to him or to one of his 
 attendants the two young turtle-doves, and the five shekels of the 
 Sanctuary. He, in his turn, goes through with his part of the pre- 
 scribed ceremonial, and gives the child back again to his parents 
 as a first-born child that had been duly devoted to the Lord. The 
 father, the mother, the priest, whatever onlookers there are, all 
 imagine that nothing more has been done in all this than is so often 
 done when first-born children are consecrated. But was it so? 
 Who is this child that lies so passive on its mother's breast, and, 
 all unconscious of what is being done with him, is handled by the 
 officiating priest ? He is, as his birth had proclaimed him to be, 
 one of the seed of Abraham, and yet he afterwards said of himself, 
 " Before Abraham was, I am." He is, as the angel had proclaimed 
 him to be, David's son and David's heir ; but as he said afterwards 
 of himself, the root as well as the branch of David : David's Lord
 
 14 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 as well as David's son. He is the first-born of Mary, but he is 
 also the first-born of every creature, the beginning of the creation 
 of God. He is the infant of a few weeks old, but also the Ancient 
 of Days, whose goings forth were from of old, from everlasting. 
 Here then at last is the Lord, the Jehovah, whom so many of the 
 Jews were seeking, brought suddenly, almost, as one might say, 
 unconsciously into his own Temple. Here is the Lamb of God, of 
 old provided, now publicly designated and set apart, of which the 
 paschal one, the sight of whose blood warded off the stroke of the 
 destroying angel, was but the imperfect type. Here is the one and 
 only true High Priest over the house of God, consecrated to his 
 office, of whose all-prevailing, everlasting, and unchangeable priest- 
 hood, the Aaronic priesthood, the priesthood of the first-born, was 
 but the dim shadow. Here is the Son presented to the Father, 
 within the Holy Place on earth, as he enters upon that life of 
 service, suffering, sacrifice, the glorious issue of which was to be 
 his entering not by the blood of bulls and goats, but by his own 
 blood, into that Holy Place not made with hands, having obtained 
 eternal redemption for us, there for ever to present himself before 
 the Father, as the living head of the great community of the 
 redeemed, the general assembly and church of the first-born which 
 are written in heaven. 
 
 How little did that Jewish priest, who took the infant Saviour 
 and held him up before the altar, imagine that a greater than 
 Moses, one greater than the Temple, was in his arms. How little 
 did he imagine as he inscribed the new name of Jesus in the roll 
 of the first-born of Israel, that he was signing the death-warrant of 
 the Mosaic economy now waxing old and ready to vanish away ; 
 that he was ushering in that better, brighter day, when neither of 
 the Temple upon Mount Zion, nor of that upon Gerizim, it should 
 be said that there only was the true worship of Jehovah celebrated ; 
 but when, taught by this very Jesus to know God as Our Father 
 in Heaven, unfettered and redeemed humanity in every land should 
 worship him who is a Spirit in spirit and in truth. Yet even so it 
 was ; Christ's first entrance into the Temple, his dedication there 
 unto the Lord, was no such common ceremonial as we might fancy 
 it to be. Simple in form, there lay in it a depth and sublimity of 
 meaning. It was nothing else than the first formal earthly presen- 
 tation to the Father of the incarnate Son of God, his first formal 
 earthly dedication to that great work given him to do. And was 
 it not meet when the Father and the Son were brought visibly 
 together in this relationship, that the presence of the Holy Spirit 
 should be manifested ; that by that Spirit Simeon and Anna should 
 be called in, and by that Spirit their lips should be made to speak 
 the infant Saviour's praise ; that so within the Temple, Father, Son, 
 and Holy Spirit might all appear, dignifying with their presence
 
 THE PRESENTION IN THE TEMPLE. 15 
 
 our Lord's first entrance into the Holy Place ; his consecration to 
 his earthly mediatorial work 1 
 
 Two fitter channels through which the Spirit's testimony might 
 thus be given could scarcely have been chosen. Simeon and Anna 
 both belonged to that limited number, who in the midst of all the 
 crude and carnal conceptions of the Messiah prevalent among their 
 countrymen, were waiting for Christ and longing for his coming, 
 not so much for the temporal as for the spiritual benefits which his 
 coming and kingdom were to convey. Both were well stricken in 
 years, fit representatives of the closing age of Judaism ; both were 
 full of faith and hope, fit representatives of that new age whose 
 earliest dawn they were among the first to notice and to welcome. 
 
 So ardent as his years ran on had Simeon's faith and hope 
 become, that this one thing had he desired of the Lord, that before 
 his eyes closed in death they might rest upon his Saviour. And 
 he was heard as to that for which he had so longed. It was re- 
 vealed to him that the desire of his heart should be granted, but 
 how and when he knew not. That forenoon, however, a strong 
 desire to go up into the Temple seizes him. He was not ac- 
 customed to go there at that hour, but he obeys that inward 
 impulse, which perhaps he recognised as the work of the Divine 
 Spirit, by whom the gracious revelation had been made to him. 
 He enters the Temple courts; he notices a little family group 
 approach ; he sees an infant dedicated to the Lord. That infant, 
 an inward voice proclaims to him is the Messiah he had been 
 waiting for, the Consolation of Israel come at last in the flesh. 
 Then comes into his heart a joy beyond all bounds. It kindles in 
 his radiant looks ; it beats in his swelling veins ; the strength of 
 youth is back again into his feeble limbs. He hastens up to Mary, 
 takes from the wondering yet consenting mother's hands the con- 
 secrated babe, and clasping it to his beating bosom, with eyes 
 uplifted to heaven, he says, " Lord, now lettest thou thy servant 
 depart in peace, according to thy word ; for mine eyes have seen 
 thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before the face of all 
 people ; a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people 
 Israel." Joseph and Mary stand lost in wonder. How has this 
 stranger come to see aught uncommon in this child ; how come to 
 see in him the salvation of Israel ? Have some stray tidings of 
 his birth come into the holy city from the hill country of Judea, 
 or has the wondrous tale the shepherds of Bethlehem "made 
 known abroad," been repeated in this old man's hearing 1 What 
 he says is in curious harmony with all the angel had announced to 
 Mary and to the shepherds about the child, and yet there is a 
 difference; for now, for the first time, is it distinctly declared 
 that this child shall be a light to lighten the Gentiles; nay, his 
 being such a light is placed even before his being the glory of
 
 16 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 Israel. Has Simeon had a separate revelation made to him from 
 heaven, and is this an independent and fuller testimony borne to 
 the Messiahship of Jesus ? 
 
 Simeon's prophetic portraiture of the intention and effect of 
 the advent of the Eedeemer had been scarcely completed when 
 another testimony was added; that of the aged Anna, the daughter 
 of Phanuel, who like her venerable compeer appears but this once 
 in the sacred page, and then is hidden for ever from our eyes. It 
 is not said that any special impulse drew her to the Temple. It 
 was her daily haunt. Instantly serving God day and night, her 
 life was one of fastings and prayers. When it was also made 
 known to her that the infant whom she met in the Temple was no 
 other than the Christ of God, her song of praise was added to that 
 of Simeon, but the words of it are lost. It would, we may be 
 assured, be a suitable accompaniment, a fit response to his. He, 
 as may be believed, retired from the Temple to close his eyes in 
 peace, but she was moved to go about and speak of the Lord 
 whom she had found to all that looked for redemption in Jeru- 
 salem, the first preacher of the gospel, the first female evangelist 
 vn the holy city. 
 
 IV. 
 
 THE VISIT OF THE MAGI. 
 
 MATTHEW n. 1-12. 
 
 IT is impossible to determine the date of the visit of the wise 
 men from the East. It must have occurred not long after the 
 birth, while Joseph and Mary still lingered in Bethlehem, and it is 
 of little moment whether we place it before or after the presentation 
 in the Temple at Jerusalem. The epithet by which Matthew 
 describes to us these Eastern strangers is not so vague and in- 
 definite as it seems in our translation. He calls them Magi from 
 the East. The birthplace and natural home of the magian worship 
 was in Persia. And there the Magi had a place and power such as 
 the Chaldaeans had in Babylon, the Hierophants in Egypt, the 
 Druids in Gaul, and the Brahmins still have in India. They 
 formed a tribe or caste, priestly in office, princely in rank. They 
 were the depositaries of nearly all the knowledge or science existing 
 in the country where they lived ; they were the first professors and 
 practisers of astrology, worshippers of the sun and the other 
 heavenly bodies, from whose appearance and movements they drew 
 their divination as to earthly events, all illustrious births below, 
 being indicated, as they deemed, by certain peculiar conjunctions 
 of the stars above. Both as priests and diviners they had great 
 power. They formed, in fact, the most influential section of the
 
 THE VISIT OF THE MAGI. 17 
 
 community. In political affairs their influence was predominant. 
 The education of royalty was in their hands ; they filled all the 
 chief offices of state ; they constituted the supreme council of the 
 realm. As originally applied to this Median priest-caste, the term 
 Magi was one of dignity and honour. Afterwards, when transferred 
 to other countries, and employed to designate not that peculiar 
 sacerdotal order, but all persons of whatever description who were 
 professors of astrology and practisers of divination, as these 
 astrologers and diviners sunk in character, and had recourse to 
 all kinds of mean imposture, the name of magian or magician was 
 turned into one of dishonour and reproach. There seems no 
 reason, however, to doubt that it was in its earlier and honourable 
 meaning that it is used in the Gospel narrative. 
 
 Remarkable passages, both from Eoman and Jewish writers, 1 
 have been quoted which inform us that at the period of our Saviour's 
 birth, there prevailed generally over the East, in regions remote 
 rom Palestine, a vague but strong belief that one born in Judea 
 was to arise and rule the world. Popularly this expectation was 
 confined to the appearance of some warrior chief, who, by the 
 might of his victorious arms, was to subdue the nations under him. 
 But there were many then in every land whose faith in their old 
 hereditary religions had been undermined ; who from those Jews 
 now scattered everywhere abroad, had learned some of the chief 
 elements of the pure Israelitish faith ; and half embracing it, had 
 risen to a desire and hope which took a higher ground, and who in 
 this expected king that was to spring out of Judah, were ready to 
 hail a spiritual guide and deliverer. Such, we believe, were the 
 Magi of Matthew's narrative. Balaam, a man of their own or a 
 kindred tribe, in their own or in a neighbouring country, had 
 centuries before foretold that a star should come out of Jacob, and 
 a sceptre rise out of Israel (Numb. xxiv. 17). This and other of 
 those old Jewish prophecies which pointed to the same event may 
 have in some form or other reached their ears, preparing them for 
 the birth of one who in the first instance was to be the king of 
 the Jews, but whose kingdom was to connect itself with other than 
 mere earthly interests, to have intimate relationships with man's 
 highest hopes and his eternal destiny. Sharing the general hope, 
 but with that hope purified and exalted, let us believe that these 
 Magi were earnestly, devoutly, waiting the coming of this new king 
 of the Jews and of mankind. Their office and occupation led them 
 to the nightly study of the starry heavens ; but still as they gazed 
 and speculated and divined, they felt that it was not from that 
 glittering broad-spread page of wonders hung above their heads 
 that any clear or satisfying information as to the divine character 
 and purposes was to be derived. Much as they fancied they could 
 1 Suetonius, Tacitus, Josephus.
 
 18 THE EARLIER YEAES. 
 
 glean from them as to man's earthly fortunes, what could the bright 
 mute stars tell them of the eternal destinies of those unnumbered 
 human spirits which beneath their light were, generation after 
 generation, passing away into the world beyond the grave 1 How 
 often may the deep sigh of disappointment have risen from the 
 depths of these men's hearts, as to all their earnest interrogatories 
 not a word of distinct response was given, and the heavens they 
 gazed on kept the untold secret locked in their capacious bosom ! 
 But the sigh of the earnest seeker after truth, like the sigh of the 
 lowly, penitent, and contrite heart, never rises to the throne of 
 heaven in vain. Many errors may have mingled with those men's 
 religious opinions, much superstition have been in their religious 
 worship, but God met in mercy the truth-seeking spirit in the midst 
 of its errors, and made its very superstition pave the way to faith. 
 
 One night, as those Magi stood watching their cloudless skies, 
 their practised eye detected a new-come stranger among the stars. 
 The appearance of new stars is no novelty to the astronomer. We 
 have authentic records of stars of first magnitude, rivalling in their 
 brilliance the brightest of our old familiar planets, shining out 
 suddenly in places where no star had been seen before, and after a 
 season vanishing away. Singular conjunctions of the planets have 
 also been occasionally observed, some of which are known to have 
 occurred about the time of the Eedeemer's birth. It may possibly 
 have been some such strange appearance in the heavens that 
 attracted the eyes of the wise men. It is said, however, in the 
 narrative, that the star went before them till it came and stood over 
 where the young child was. Understanding this as implying an 
 actual and visible movement of the star that it went, lantern-like, 
 before them on their way, and indicated in some way, as by a 
 finger of pointing light, the very spot where they were to find the 
 child as no such function could be discharged by any of the 
 ordinary inhabitants of the heavens, all about its appearance must 
 be taken as supernatural, and we must regard it as some star-like 
 meteor shining in our lower atmosphere. But be it what it might, 
 however kindled, whatever curiosity its strange appearance might 
 excite, though the Magi, penetrated by the popular belief, might 
 naturally enough have regarded it as an omen of the great expected 
 birth, the star could of itself tell nothing. However miraculous 
 its appearance, if left without an interpreter, it was but a dumb 
 witness after all. The conviction is almost forced upon us that, in 
 addition to the external sign, there was some divine communication 
 made to these Magi, informing them of the errand which the star 
 was commissioned to discharge. But why the double indication of 
 the birth, the star without, the revelation made within 1 Why, 
 but as an evidence and illustration of the care and gracious con- 
 descension of Him who not only to the spiritual communioatiop
 
 THE VISIT OF THE MAGL 19 
 
 added the external sign, to be a help to the weak, infant, staggering 
 faith, but who, in the very shaping of that outward sign, was 
 pleased to accommodate himself to these men's earthly calling; 
 and while to Mary and to the shepherds Jews living in a land 
 where stories of angelic manifestations were current angels were 
 sent to make announcement of the Eedeemer's birth, to those 
 astrologers of the East he sends a star, meeting them in their own 
 familiar walks, showing itself among the divinities of their erring 
 worship, gently to lead them into His presence to whom the world's 
 true worship was to be given. 
 
 But when this star appeared, and after they understood what 
 its presence betokened, was it a spontaneous impulse on their part 
 to go and do homage to the new-born King, or did He who revealed 
 the birth enjoin the journey ? Whatever the prompting human 
 or divine on which they acted, it does not appear that in the 
 first instance anything beyond the general information was com- 
 municated, that somewhere in Judea the birth had taken place. 
 The star, it would appear, did not go before them all the way, for 
 in that case they would not have needed to institute any further 
 inquiry. Its first office discharged, the star disappeared, leaving 
 them to have recourse to such common sources of information as 
 lay open to them. It was at Jerusalem, in the capital of the 
 country over which this new-born King was to reign ; it was there, 
 if anywhere, the needed intelligence was to be obtained. To 
 Jerusalem, therefore, they repair. Entering the holy city, they 
 put eagerly and expectantly the question, " Where is he that is 
 born King of the Jews ? for we have seen his star in the east, and 
 are come to worship him." 
 
 The question takes the startled city by surprise. No one here 
 has seen the star, no one here has heard about this king. The 
 tidings of the arrival of those distinguished strangers, and of the 
 question which they asked, are carried quickly to the palace, and 
 circulate rapidly through the city. Herod is troubled. The usurper 
 trembles on his throne. Has a new claimant, with better title to 
 that throne, indeed been born ] How comes it, if it be so, that he 
 has never heard of such a birth ? Has treachery been already busy 
 at its work; have they been concealing from him this event 1 ? 
 Have the enemies of himself and of his family been cloaking thus 
 their projects, waiting only for the fit time to strike the blow, and 
 hurl him from his seat ? The blood he had already shed to reach 
 that height begins to cry for vengeance, and spectres of the 
 slaughtered dead shake their terrors in his face. Herod's trouble 
 at the tidings we well can understand, but why was it that all 
 Jerusalem was troubled along with him? Was it the simple fear 
 of change, the terror of another revolution; the knowledge of 
 Herod's jealous temper and bloodthirsty disposition; the alarm
 
 20 THE EAELIEK YEARS. 
 
 lest his vindictive spirit might prompt to some new deed of cruelty, 
 in order to cut off this rival 1 If so, how low beneath the yoke of 
 tyranny must the spirit of those citizens of Jerusalem have sunk ; 
 how completely, for the time, must the selfish have absorbed the 
 patriotic sentiment in their breasts ! 
 
 But whatever alarm he felt, whatever dark purposes were 
 brooding in his heart, Herod at first concealed them. He must 
 know more about this affair, get some information before he acts. 
 He calls together the chief priests and the scribes, and at no loss, 
 apparently, to identify the King of the Jews that the Magi asked 
 about, with the Christ, the Messiah of ancient prophecy, he demands 
 of them where Christ should be born. As little at a loss, they lay 
 their hand at once upon the prophecy of Micah, which pointed to 
 Bethlehem as the birthplace. Furnished with this information, 
 the king invites the Magi to a private interview, conveys to them 
 the information he had himself received, and concealing his sinister 
 designs, sends them off to Bethlehem to search diligently for the 
 child, and when they had found him, to bring him word again, 
 that he too, as he falsely said, might go and worship him. 
 
 Let us reflect a moment upon the impression which this visit to 
 Jerusalem, and the state of things discovered there, was fitted to 
 make upon these eastern visitors. It must surely have surprised 
 them to come among the very people over whom this new-born 
 King was to rule, to enter the capital of their country, the city of 
 the chief priests and scribes by whom, if by any, an event so signal 
 should have been known, and to find there no notice, no knowledge 
 of the birth ; to find instead, that they, coming from a strange 
 land, professors of another faith, are the first to tell these Jews of 
 the advent of their own king. It must have done more than 
 surprise them ; they too, in their turn, must have been troubled 
 and perplexed, to see how the announcement, when it was made, 
 was received ; to see such jealousy, such alarm ; and, at the last, 
 so great incredulity or indifference, that near as Bethlehem was, 
 and interesting as was the object of their visit to it, there were 
 none among those inhabitants of Jerusalem who cared to accompany 
 them. Was there nothing here to awaken doubt, for such faith 
 as theirs to stagger at? Might they not have been deceived 1 
 Perhaps it was a delusion they had listened to ; a deceitful appear- 
 ance they had seen in their own land. Had these Magi been men 
 of a weak faith or an infirm purpose, they might, instead of going 
 on to Bethlehem, have gone forth despondingly and distrustfully 
 from Jerusalem, and taken their way back to their own homes. 
 But strange and perplexing as all this is, it neither shakes their 
 faith nor affects their conduct. They had good reason to believe 
 that the communication at first made to them came to them from 
 God and once satisfied of this, no conduct on the part of others,
 
 THE VISIT OF THE MAGI. 21 
 
 however unaccountable or inconsistent, moves them away from the 
 beginning of their confidence. Though all the dwellers in Jeru- 
 salem be troubled at tidings which should have been to them 
 tidings of great joy ; though not a Jew be ready to join them, or 
 to bid them God-speed ere they leave the city's gate, to Bethlehem 
 they go. 
 
 But a new perplexity arises. Somewhere in that village the 
 birth has taken place, but who shall tell them where ? If the 
 inhabitants of the capital knew and cared so little about the matter, 
 what help will they get from the villagers at Bethlehem? They 
 may require to search diligently, as Herod bade them, and yet, 
 after all, the search may be vain. Just then, in the midst of their 
 perplexity, the star which they had seen in the east once more 
 shone out above their heads, to go before them till it stood over 
 where the young child lay. No wonder that when they saw that 
 star, they rejoiced with an exceeding great joy. It dispelled all 
 doubt, it relieved from all perplexity. When first they saw it in 
 the east, it wore the face of a stranger among old friends ; now it 
 wears the face of an old friend among strangers, and they hail it as 
 we hail a friend we thought was lost, but who comes to us at the 
 very time we need him most. 
 
 Following its guidance, they enter the indicated house, and stand 
 before a mother and her child ; a mother of very humble appearance ; 
 a child clad in simplest attire. Can this, they think, as they look 
 around, be the roof beneath which infant royalty lies cradled ! Can 
 that be the child they have come so far to see and worship ! Had 
 they known all about that infantwhichwe now know; had they known 
 that an angelic choir had already sung his birth, lading the midnight 
 breezes with a richer freight of melody than they had ever wafted 
 through the skies ; had they known that in that little hand which 
 lay folded there in feebleness, in the gentle breath which was 
 heaving that infant bosom, the power of omnipotence lay slumber- 
 ing, that at the touch of the one, the blind eye was to open and 
 the tied tongue to be unloosed, that at the bidding of the other, 
 the wildest elements of nature in their stormiest march were to 
 stand still, devils were to be driven out from their usurped abodes, 
 and the dead to come forth from the sepulchre ; had they known 
 that at the death of this Son of Mary, the sun was to be darkened, 
 the rocks were to be rent, and the graves to give up their old 
 inhabitants, that he himself was to burst the barriers of the tomb, 
 and rise in triumph, attended by angel escort, to take his place at 
 the right hand of the Majesty in the heavens, we should not have 
 wondered at the ready homage which they rendered to him. But 
 they knew nothing of all this. What they did know we cannot 
 tell. We only know that instantly, in absence of all outward 
 warrant for the act, in spite of the most unpromising appearances,
 
 22 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 they bow the knee before that undistinguished infant, lower than 
 it bent before the haughty Herod at "Jerusalem ; bow in adoration 
 such as they never rendered to any earthly sovereign. And that 
 act of worship over, they open their treasures and present to him 
 their gifts : the gold, the frankincense, and the myrrh, the rarest 
 products of the East ; an offering such as any monarch might have 
 had presented to him by the ambassadors from any foreign prince. 
 When we take the whole course of these men's conduct into account; 
 when we remember that they had none of the advantages of a 
 Jewish birth or education, of an early acquaintance with the Jewish 
 Scriptures ; when we think of their starting on their long and 
 perilous journey with no other object than the making of this single 
 obeisance to the infant Eedeemer of mankind ; when we look at 
 them standing unmoved, amid all the discouragements of the 
 Jewish metropolis ; when we attend them on their solitary way to 
 Bethlehem; when we stand by their side, as beneath that lowly 
 roof they silently worship, and spread out their costly gifts, we 
 cannot but regard their faith as in many of its features unparalleled 
 in the gospel narrative; we cannot but place them in the front 
 rank of that goodly company in whose acts the power and the 
 triumph of a simple faith shine forth. 
 
 That single act of homage rendered, they return to their own 
 country, and we hear of them no more. They come like spirits 
 casting no shadow before them ; and like spirits they depart, passing 
 away into that obscurity from which they had emerged. But our 
 affection follows them to their native land, would fain penetrate 
 the secret of their after lives and deaths. Did these men see, and 
 hear, and know no more of Jesus 1 Were they living, when after 
 thirty years of profoundest silence, not a rumour of his name 
 going anywhere abroad tidings came at last of the words he spake, 
 he deeds he did, the death he died 1 We would fain believe, so 
 far, the quaint old legend of the middle ages, that connects itself 
 with the fancied resting-place of their relics in the Cathedral of 
 Cologne ; we would fain believe that they lived to converse with 
 one of the apostles of the Lord, and to receive Christian baptism 
 at his hands. However it may have been, we can scarce believe 
 that He whose star carried them from their eastern homes to 
 Bethlehem, and whose Spirit prompted the worship they then 
 rendered, left them to die in heathen ignorance and unbelief. Let 
 us cherish rather the belief that they who bowed so reverently 
 before the earthly cradle, are now worshipping with a profounder 
 reverence before the heavenly throne. 
 
 But what special significance has this incident in the early life 
 of our Eedeemer? Why were these men summoned from their 
 distant homes to come so far, to pay that single act of homage to 
 the infant Jesus, and then retire for ever from our sight ? Why, but
 
 THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS. 23 
 
 that even with the first weak beginnings of the Saviour's earthly 
 life, there might be a foretokening of the wide embrace of that 
 kingdom he came to establish ; a first fulfilling of those ancient 
 prophecies which had foretold that the Gentiles should come to this 
 light, and kings to the brightness of its rising ; that all they from 
 Sheba should come, bringing gold and incense. These eastern 
 Magi were the earliest ambassadors from heathen lands, the first 
 shadowy precursors of that great company to be gathered in from 
 the east, and from the west, and from the north, and from the south, 
 to sit down with Abraham in the kingdom of the just. In these 
 persons, and in their act, the Gentile world, of which they formed 
 a part, gave an early welcome to the Redeemer, and hastened to 
 lay its tribute at his feet. They were in fact, and this should 
 bind them the closer to our hearts, they were our representatives 
 at Bethlehem, making for us Gentiles the first expression of our 
 faith, the first offer of our allegiance. 
 
 V. 
 
 THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS, AND THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT. 
 MATTHEW n. 13-23. 
 
 THERE are three Herods who appear prominently in the pages 
 of the New Testament. First, Herod the Great, the son of a crafty 
 and wealthy Idumean or Edomite, who, during the reign of the 
 last of the Asmonean princes, attained to great political influence 
 in Judea, securing for his eldest son Phasselus the governorship of 
 Jerusalem ; and for Herod, his younger son, the chief command in 
 Galilee. Phasselus was cut off in one of those political commotions 
 which the raising of a foreign family to such an elevated position 
 engendered, but Herod escaped all the perils to which he was thus 
 exposed, distinguished himself by his address and bravery, showed 
 great political foresight in allying himself closely with the power 
 which he saw was to prevail in Judea as over all other lands, 
 sought and won the personal friendship of Cassius and of Mark 
 Antony, and, mainly by the influence of the latter, was proclaimed 
 King of the Jews. 
 
 Second, Herod Antipas, a son of this first Herod, who, in that 
 division of his father's kingdom which took place at his decease, 
 became Tetrarch of Galilee and Perea. This was the Herod who 
 so often appears in the narrative of our Lord's ministry, who at 
 first heard John the Baptist gladly, but who afterwards gave the 
 order for his execution ; who happened to be in Jerusalem at the 
 time of Christ's trial and condemnation, and who was brought then 
 into such singular contact with Jesus.
 
 24 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 Third, Herod Agrippa, a grandson of the first Herod, though 
 not a son of Herod Antipas, who was invested by the Romans with 
 the royal dignity, and ruled over all the country which had been 
 subject to his grandfather. This was the Herod who appears in 
 the history of the Acts of the Apostles ; who stretched forth his 
 hands to vex certain of the church ; who killed James, the brother 
 of John, with the sword ; who because he saw that it pleased the 
 Jews, proceeded to take Peter also; and whose awful death so 
 soon afterwards at Csesarea, St. Luke has so impressively recorded. 
 
 Our Saviour, we know, was born near the end of the long reign 
 of the first of these Herods. That reign had long been outwardly 
 brilliant and prosperous. He had defeated all the schemes of his 
 political opponents. With a firm and cruel hand he had kept down 
 all attempts at intestine revolt. By a large remission of taxation, 
 by extraordinary liberality in times of famine, by lavish expendi- 
 ture on public works, the erection of new cities and the rebuilding 
 of the Temple at Jerusalem, he had sought to dazzle the public 
 eye and win the public favour. But nothing could quench the 
 Jewish suspicion of him as an Edomite. This suspicion fed upon 
 his attempts to introduce and encourage heathen games and 
 pastimes, and grew intensely bitter as it watched with what 
 unrelenting hate he persecuted and cut off all the members of that 
 Maccabean family whose throne he had usurped, around whom 
 Jewish gratitude and hope still fondly clung. This ill-concealed 
 enmity preyed upon the proud, dark spirit of Herod. It taught 
 him to see his deadliest foes in the bosom of his own family. Pas- 
 sionately attached to her, he had married the beautiful but ill-fated 
 Mariamne, the daughter of Alexander, one of the Asmonean 
 princes. She inherited the pride and ambition of her family; 
 bitterly resenting, as well she might, the secret order which she 
 discovered Herod had issued, that she should be cut off if he failed 
 to secure the throne for himself in the embassage to Eome which 
 he undertook after the defeat of Mark Antony, his first patron. 
 Her resentment of this order had the worst interpretation put 
 upon it, and in the transport of a jealousy in which both personal 
 and political elements were combined, Herod ordered her to be 
 beheaded. Then followed those transports of remorse, which, for 
 a time, bereft the frantic prince of reason. Mariamne gone, the 
 father's jealousy was directed to his two sons by her, in whose 
 veins the hated Asmonean blood was flowing. He sent for Anti- 
 pater, his son by the wife he had divorced in order to marry 
 Mariamne, and set him up as their rival and his successor. But 
 the popular favour clung to Alexander and Aristobulus, the sons 
 of the murdered Mariamne. Herod's court and family became a 
 constant gloomy scene of dissension and distrust. Charges of 
 treasonable designs on the part of Alexander and Aristobulus
 
 THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS. 25 
 
 against his person and government were secretly poured into the 
 ear of Herod. Men of inferior rank, supposed to be implicated, 
 were seized, tortured, and executed, till at last, by their father's 
 own order, the two young princes, then in the flower of their early 
 manhood, were strangled. Antipater had been the chief instrument 
 in urging Herod on to this inhuman deed, and now in that very 
 son whom he had done so much for, he found the last worst object 
 of his jealous wrath. Antipater was proved to have conspired to 
 poison his old, doting, diseased, and dying father. He was sum- 
 moned to Jerusalem. Herod raised himself from his bed of suffer- 
 ing, and gave the order for his execution. His own death drew on. 
 It maddened him to think that there would be none to mourn for 
 him; that at his death there would be a general jubilee. The 
 fiendish idea seized him, that if there were none who voluntarily 
 would weep for him, there should at least be plenty of tears shed 
 at his death ; and so his last command a command happily not 
 executed was, that the heads of all the chief families in Judea 
 should be assembled in the Hippodrome, and that as soon as it was 
 known that he had drawn his last breath, they should be merci- 
 lessly slaughtered ; and thus, his body consumed by inward ulcers, 
 and his spirit with tormenting passions, Herod died. 
 
 I have recited thus much of this king's history, that you may 
 see in what harmony with his other doings was his massacre of the 
 innocents at Bethlehem. When he heard of the coming of the 
 Magi, and of the birth of this new King of the Jews, the sceptre 
 was already dropping from his aged and trembling hands. But as 
 the dying hand of avarice clutches its gold the firmer as it feels the 
 hour draw on when it must give it up, so did the dying hand of 
 ambition clutch the sceptre, and he determined that if he could 
 hold it no longer, he would at least try to cut off all who might 
 claim to wield it at his death. A lifetime's practice had made him 
 a proficient in craft. He inquired privily of the wise men as to 
 the time at which the star appeared. Had he even then, when he 
 made this inquiry, matured his bloody project ; and did he wish 
 by knowing the precise time of the star's appearance to assure 
 himself of the exact age of the child he intended to destroy ; or 
 was the inquiry made for the purpose of ascertaining whether any 
 like star had been seen anywhere in Judea, seeking thus to confirm 
 or invalidate what the wise men said 1 This only we can say, that 
 if it were but a few days after the birth of Jesus that the Magi 
 visited Jerusalem, and if the order that Herod afterwards issued to 
 his executioners was founded on the information given him as to 
 the time of the star's appearance, then the first appearance of the 
 star must have been coincident, not with the birth of Jesus, but 
 with the annunciation of that birth to Mary. Herod may have 
 fancied from what he learned from the Magi that the child must
 
 26 THE EAELIER YEAES. 
 
 now be about a year old, and, giving a broad margin that no chance 
 of escape might be given, his order ran that all under two years 
 of age should be destroyed. 
 
 Perhaps, however, Herod's only object in his first private inter- 
 view with the Magi was to extract from them all the information 
 he could, with no precise or definite purpose as to how he should 
 act upon the information so obtained. When he told them to go 
 and search diligently for the child, and, when they had found him, 
 to 'come and bring him word, it was not with any purpose on his 
 part to go and worship him in saying that he meant to do so, we 
 may well believe him to have been playing the hypocrite, but 
 neither may it have been with an already fixed resolution to act as 
 he afterwards did. But the wise men did not return ; he ascer- 
 tained that they had been in Bethlehem, that they had left that 
 place, that without coming to see him and report as to the result of 
 their search, they were already beyond his reach on their way back 
 to their distant home. The birth was by this very circumstance 
 made all the surer in his eyes, and to his natural alarm at such a 
 birth, there was now added bitter chagrin at being mocked in this 
 way by these strangers. Had they seen through the mask which 
 he imagined he had fashioned so artfully and worn so well ? 
 Nothing galls the crafty more than when their craft is discovered, 
 and the discovery is turned against themselves. Angry with the 
 men who had treated him thus, Herod is angry, too, with himself 
 for having given them the opportunity to outwit him. Whj 
 had he not sent some of his own trusty servants with them to 
 Bethlehem 1 Why had he been so foolish as to trust these 
 foreigners ? Irritated at them, irritated at himself, determined 
 that this child shall not escape, he sends his bandits out upon their 
 bloody errand. 
 
 . That errand was to be quickly and stealthily executed. In so 
 small a village as Bethlehem, and in the thinly-scattered population 
 which lay around it, there could be but a few male infants under 
 two years old. It is but one of the dreams of the middle-age 
 imagination which has swelled the numbers of the slaughtered to 
 thousands ; one or two dozens would be nearer to the mark. A 
 few practised hands such as Herod could easily secure would have 
 little difficulty in finishing their work in the course of one forenoon. 
 It was spring-time of the year, 1 the parents were busy in the fields; 
 the unprotected homes lay open. Before any concerted resistance 
 could be offered, half the children might be slain. Every precau- 
 tion, we may believe, was taken by Herod, that it should not be 
 known at whose instance the deed was done. He was too wily a 
 politician to make any such public manifestation of his vindictive 
 
 1 It has been calculated that Herod died between the 13th March and the 4th 
 \pril 750 A.U.C.
 
 THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT. 27 
 
 alarm, as his sending forth a company of executioners, clothed 
 visibly with the royal authority would have made. But secretly, 
 promptly, vigorously as his measures were taken, they came too late. 
 When told that not a child of the specified age had been permitted 
 to escape, he may have secretly congratulated himself on that peril 
 to his government being thus summarily set aside. But an eye more 
 vigilant than his was watching over the safety of the infant Jesus. 
 In a dream of the night the angel of the Lord had appeared to 
 Joseph; told him of the impending peril, and specially directed 
 him as to the manner of escape. Without an hour's delay the 
 warning given was acted on. The journey from Bethlehem to the 
 nearest part of Egypt was soon performed, and, secured from the 
 stroke of Herod's bandits, and placed beyond the after reach of 
 Herod's wrath, the child was safe. The flight was hasty, and the 
 sojourn in Egypt but short. The way for the return was soon 
 open, and in fulfilment of his promise the angel came to Joseph to 
 tell him that they were dead who sought the young child's life. 
 Struck by all the circumstances which had accompanied the birth 
 there, Joseph and Mary had perhaps resolved to take up their resi- 
 dence in Bethlehem. But on entering Judea they heard that though 
 Herod was dead, his son Archelaus ruled in his stead ; a prince who 
 early proved that the spirit of his father had descended on him, one 
 of the first acts of his reign being the slaughter of three thousand 
 of his countrymen in Jerusalem. The apprehensions of Joseph 
 were verified by the angel once more appearing to him in a dream, 
 and directing him to pass on through Judea, and take up his abode 
 again in Nazareth, a hamlet in the province of Galilee. 
 
 In the narrative of this passage of our Lord's infant life as given 
 by St. Matthew, two things strike us. 
 
 1. The prominent part assigned to, and assumed by, Joseph as 
 the earthly guardian of the child ; the frequency, the minuteness, 
 and the manner in which these divine intimations were made to him 
 on which he acted. In every instance it was in a dream of the 
 night that the heavenly warning came. Nor was the warning in 
 any instance vague, but remarkably definite and satisfactory. He 
 was told at first not simply that danger was at hand ; he was told 
 specifically what that danger was : " Herod will seek the young 
 child to destroy him." He was told not simply to escape from 
 Bethlehem, but to flee into Egypt ; of Herod's death he got timely 
 information, and while hesitating as to what he should do on his 
 return into Judea, he had his doubts removed, and his fears allayed 
 by another divine direction. Are we wrong in interpreting the 
 heavenly messenger's manner of acting towards the foster-parent of 
 our Saviour as indicative of a very watchful and tender soh'citude 
 on Joseph's part for the safety of that strange child to whom he was 
 united by so strange a tie ? He appears as the heaven-appointed,
 
 28 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 heaven-instructed sentinel, set to watch over the infant days of the 
 Son of the Highest, chosen for this office, and aided in its discharge, 
 not without such regard to his personal qualifications as is ordi- 
 narily shown under the divine government in the selection of fit 
 agents for each part of the earthly work. We are led thus to 
 fchink of him as taking an almost more than paternal interest in 
 the babe committed to his care, thinking about him so much and 
 BO anxiously by day that his dreams by night are of him, and that 
 it is in these dreams the angel comes to give the needed guidance, 
 and to seal, as it were, by the divine approval, the watchful care 
 by which the dreams had been begotten. And we are the more 
 disposed to think thus favourably of Joseph as we reflect upon the 
 peculiar relationship in which he stood to Jesus, and remember 
 that this is the only glimpse we get of the manner in which the 
 duties of that relationship were discharged. In the record of our 
 Lord's ministry he never appears. The conclusion seems natural 
 that he had died before that ministry began. It is only in his con- 
 nection with the birth and infancy and childhood of Jesus that any 
 sight of Joseph is obtained, and it pleases us to think that he who 
 was honoured to be the guardian of that sacred life in the first great 
 peril to which it was exposed, was one not unworthy of the trust, 
 but who lovingly, faithfully, tenderly executed it. 
 
 2. In reading this portion of the Gospel of St. Matthew, we are 
 struck with the frequent references to the history and prophecies of 
 the Old Testament. Such references are peculiar to St. Matthew, 
 and they are due to the character of those to whom his Gospel was 
 ^specially addressed, and to the object he had especially in view. 
 His Gospel was written for converted Jews, and his great aim was 
 to present to such Jesus Christ as the Messiah promised to their 
 fathers. Continually, therefore, throughout his narrative, as almost 
 nowhere in the narratives of the other Evangelists, he quotes from 
 the Old Testament Scriptures with the view of showing how accu- 
 rately and completely they were fulfilled in the life and death of 
 Jesus of Nazareth. The very formula, " that it might be ful- 
 filled," is peculiar to the first Gospel. The method thus followed 
 by St. Matthew was admirably fitted to soothe the prejudices of 
 Jewish converts, and establish them in a true faith in Christ. Thus 
 it is that in the passage now before us. he attempts to obviate 
 objections that might naturally arise in Jewish minds, on their 
 being told of such events to them so untoward and unlocked for 
 in the life of the infant Messiah, as his being forced to find a 
 temporary retreat in the land of Egypt, the slaughter of so many 
 infants on his account, and the fixing of his abode in a remote 
 hamlet of Galilee. Nothing could be more calculated to allay any 
 prejudice created by the recital of such incidents than to point to 
 parallel or analogous ones in the history of ancient Israel. The
 
 THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT. 29 
 
 three citations of this kind which St. Matthew makes, differ some 
 what in their character. Of only one of them is it certain that 
 there was a literal fulfilment of a prophecy uttered with immediate 
 and direct reference to Christ. He came and dwelt, it is said, in 
 Nazareth, "that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the 
 prophets, He shall be called a Nazarene." Yet it is singular that 
 this prophecy, which was obviously one spoken directly of the 
 Messiah, is nowhere to be found in the Old Testament Scriptures 
 as they now are in our hands. But this hinders not our belief that 
 by some one or other of the ancient prophets the words that St. 
 Matthew quotes had been spoken. As Jude recites and verifies a 
 prophecy of Enoch of which otherwise we should have been igno- 
 rant, as St. Paul reports a saying of our Lord which otherwise 
 should not have been preserved, so St. Matthew here records a 
 prophecy which but for his citation of it would have perished. 
 
 It is different, however, with the other two citations from 
 ancient prophecy. These we can readily lay our hands upon, and 
 in doing so become convinced that St. Matthew did not and could 
 not mean to assert that in the events which he related they had 
 directly and literally been verified. His object was rather to 
 declare and that was sufficient that the incidents to which those 
 old prophecies did in the first instance refer, were not only kindred 
 in character, but were typical or symbolically prophetic of those 
 which he was describing in the life of Jesus. He quotes thus a 
 part of that verse in the llth chapter of Hosea which runs thus : 
 " When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son 
 out of Egypt." If that ancient Israel of which the Lord had said, 
 ' He is my son,' ' He is my first-born,' while yet he was as it were 
 but an infant, was carried down into, and thereafter brought safe 
 out of, Egypt, was it a strange thing that He who was Jehovah's 
 own and only Son, the first-born among many brethren, of whom 
 and of whose Church that Israel was a type, should in his infancy 
 have passed through a like ordeal of persecution and of deliver- 
 ance ? The point of the fulfilment of the prophecy here alleged 
 does not lie in Hosea's having Christ actually and personally in his 
 eye when he penned the words quoted by St. Matthew, but in the 
 fact related by Hosea having a typical reference to a like fact in 
 that after history which stands shadowed forth throughout in the 
 outward history of ancient Israel. 
 
 It is in the same way that we are to understand the quotation 
 from the 31st chapter of the prophecies of Jeremiah. It is in direct 
 connection with his statement of the fact that Herod sent forth and 
 slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, from two years old 
 and under, that St. Matthew says, " Then was fulfilled that which 
 was spoken by Jeremy the prophet." " But Matthew," says Calvin, 
 "does not mean that the prophet had predicted what Herod should
 
 30 THE EAELIEK YEARS. 
 
 do, but that at the advent of Christ that mourning was renewed 
 which many ages before the women of Benjamin had made." 
 Primarily the words of the prophet referred to the carrying away 
 of a large portion of the tribes of Benjamin and Judah captives 
 to Babylon. In describing the bitter grief with which the heart of 
 the country was then smitten, Jeremiah, by a figure as bold as it 
 is picturesque and impressive, summons the long-buried Rachel, the 
 mother of Benjamin, from her grave, representing her as reused 
 from the sleep of ages to bewail the captivity of her children. But 
 Rachel's grave lay near to Bethlehem, and now another bitter woe 
 had come upon the land in the murder of those innocents in that 
 village ; and what more natural than that Matthew should revive, 
 re-appropriate, and re-apply that image of Jeremiah, representing 
 Rachel as anew issuing from her tomb to weep over these her 
 slaughtered children 1 
 
 But there was something more here than a mere apposite appli- 
 cation to a scene of recent sorrow of a poetical image that originally 
 referred to the grief caused by the captivity. That very grief 
 which filled the land of Judah may have been intended to prefigure 
 the lamentation that now filled Bethlehem and all its borders. 
 Rachel rising from her tomb, and filling the air then with her 
 .amentations, may have been meant to stand as a tvjpe or repre- 
 sentative of these mothers of Bethlehem, all torn- in heart by the 
 snatching of their little ones from their struggling arms, and the 
 killing of them before their eyes. If it be so, then that passage 
 hi Jeremiah speaks of something more than of the mere suffering 
 inflicted and the sorrow it produced. The weeping Rachel is not 
 suffered to weep on, to weep out her grief. There are words of 
 comfort for her in her tears. There is a message from the Lord 
 to her that speaks in no ambiguous terms of the after-destiny, the 
 future restoration of those children so rudely torn from their 
 maternal embrace. For what are the words which immediately 
 follow those which St. Matthew has quoted : " Thus saith the 
 Lord, Refrain thy voice from weeping, and thine eyes from tears : 
 for thy work shall be rewarded, saith the Lord ; and they shall 
 come again from the land of the enemy. And there is hope in 
 thine end, saith the Lord, that thy children shall come again to 
 their own border." If we have any right to apply this part of the 
 prophecy to this incident of the evangelic history, then may we 
 take the words that I have now quoted as carrying with them the 
 assurance that those children who perished under the stroke of 
 Herod's hirelings died not spiritually ; that they shall come again 
 from the land of the last enemy, come again with Him whose birth 
 vras so mysteriously connected with their death. We know that 
 those infants, whose ghastly remains the weeping mothers gathered 
 up to lay in their untimely graves, shall rise again in the resurrec-
 
 THE THIRTY YEARS AT NAZARETH. 31 
 
 tion ut the last day. To them that resurrection, itself a fruit of 
 the Saviour's advent, must come as a boon, a benefit, not as a bane 
 or curse. -Let it be what it may to others, who have had full 
 opportunity to receive or reject the Saviour, to them it can be no- 
 thing else than a resurrection unto everlasting life. To believe 
 otherwise of them, and of all who die in infancy, would be to 
 believe that those who are called away from this world while yet 
 the first dew-drops of life are on them, are placed thereby in a 
 worse condition that that in which it is the declared purpose of the 
 gospel to place all mankind. It is a belief which we cannot adopt. 
 Our assurance is clear, and, as we think, well grounded though 
 these grounds we cannot now pause to unfold that all who die in 
 infancy are saved. Distinguished among them all, let us believe 
 this of those slaughtered babes of Bethlehem. Their fate was 
 singularly wrapped up with that of the infant Saviour. The stroke 
 that fell on them was meant for him; the sword of persecution 
 which swept so mercilessly in many an after age through the ranks 
 of Christ's little ones was first reddened in their blood. The 
 earliest victims to hatred of the Nazarene if not consciously and 
 willingly, yet actually dying for him let us count them as the 
 first martyrs for Jesus, and let us believe that in them the truth of 
 the martyr's motto was first made good, " Near to the sword, near 
 to God." " blessed infants !" exclaims Augustine ; " He who at 
 his birth had angels to proclaim him, the heavens to testify, and 
 Magi to worship him, could surely have prevented that these should 
 have died for him, had he not known that they died not in that 
 death, but rather lived in higher bliss." 
 
 VI. 
 
 THE THIRTY YEARS AT NAZARETH CHRIST AMONG THE DOCTORS. 
 LUKE ii. 40-52. 
 
 UP among the hills of Galilee, in a basin surrounded by swell- 
 ing eminences, which shut it in on every side, lies the little village 
 of Nazareth. Its name does not occur in Old Testament history. 
 Josephus never mentions it, though he speaks of places lying all 
 round it. Its inhabitants were not worse than their neighbours, 
 nor exposed on account of their character to any particular con- 
 tempt ; yet Nathanael, himself a Galilean, could say, Can there any 
 good thing come out of Nazareth ? so small and insignificant was 
 the place. It was here, as in a fit retreat, that the childhood, 
 youth, and early manhood of our Lord passed quietly and unnoticed 
 away. Those thirty years oi the life of the Son of God upon this 
 earth, how deeply hidden from us do they lie 1 how profound the
 
 32 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 silence regarding them which the sacred writers preserve ! a silence 
 all the more remarkable when we consider how natural and strong 
 is our desire to know something, to be told something of the earlier 
 days of any one who, at some after period of his life, has risen to 
 distinction. But all that here is told us of the first twelve years 
 of our Saviour's life is that the child grew, waxed strong in spirit, 
 was filled with wisdom, and that the grace of God was upon him. 
 Had any of the wonders which attended his birth been renewed, 
 had anything supernatural occurred in the course of those years, 
 we may presume it would have been related or alluded to. No- 
 thing of that kind, we may infer, did happen. Outwardly and 
 inwardly the growth of Jesus under Mary's care at Nazareth, 
 obeyed the common laws under which human infancy and child- 
 hood are developed. Beyond that gentle patience which nothing 
 could ruffle, that simple truthfulness which nothing could turn 
 aside ; beyond that love which was always ready to give back smile 
 for smile to Mary and the rest around, and to go forth rejoicingly 
 on its little errands of kindness within the home of the carpenter ; 
 beyond that wisdom which, wonderful as it was, was childlike 
 wisdom still, growing as his years grew, and deriving its increase 
 from all the common sources which lay open to it ; beyond the 
 charm of all the graces of childhood in their full beauty and in their 
 unsullied perfection, there was nothing externally to distinguish 
 his first twelve years. So we conclude from the absence of all notices 
 of them in the gospel narrative. Of the void thus left, however, 
 the Christian Church became early impatient. Many attempts were 
 made to fill it up. In the course of the first four centuries nume- 
 rous pseudo-gospels were in circulation, a long list of which has 
 been made up out of the references to them which occur in the 
 preserved writings of that period. 1 Some of these apocryphal 
 gospels are still extant, two of them entitled the Gospel of the 
 Infancy ; and it is very curious to notice how those succeeded who 
 trisd to lift the veil which covers the earlier years of Christ. One 
 almost feels grateful that such early attempts were made to fill up 
 the blank which the four Evangelists have left. 2 They enable us 
 
 1 See Jones on the Canon. 
 
 3 These Gospels of the Infancy of our Lord are full of miracles of the most frivo- 
 lous description, miracles represented as wrought first by the simple presence of the 
 infant, by the clothes he wore, the water in which he was washed, wrought after- 
 wards by the Son of Mary himself as he grew up at Nazareth, many alleged incidents 
 of his boyhood there being gravely related, as when we are told that he and the 
 other children of the village went out to play together, busying themselves in making 
 clay into the shapes of various birds and beasts, whereupon Jesus commanded his 
 beasts to walk, his birds to fly, and so excelled them all ; or again, when we are told 
 that passing by a dyer's shop he saw many pieces of cloth laid out to be dyed, all of 
 which he took and flung into a neighbouring furnace, throwing the poor owner of the 
 shop into an agony of consternation and grief, and then pleasantly relieving him by 
 drawing all the pieces out of the furnace, each one now of the very colour which had 
 been desired. Such are the specimens, chosen chiefly because they are the least
 
 CHRIST AMONG THE DOCTORS. 33 
 
 to contrast the simplicity, the naturalness and consistency of all 
 that the Evangelists have recorded of Christ, with such empty and 
 unmeaning tales. They do more. These apocryphal gospels were 
 written by Christians ; by men who wished to honour Christ in 
 all they said about him ; by men who had that portraiture of his 
 character before them which the four Gospels supply ; and yet we 
 find them narrating, as being in what seemed to them entire har- 
 mony with that character, that when boys interrupted Jesus in his 
 play, or ran against him in the street of the village, he looked 
 upon them and denounced them, and they fell down and died. It 
 was said, I believe by Rousseau, that the conception and delinea- 
 tion of such a character as that of the man Christ Jesus, by such 
 men as the fishermen of Galilee, would have been a greater miracle 
 than the actual existence of such a man. In these apocryphal 
 gospels we have a singular confirmation of that saying ; we have 
 the proof that men better taught, many of them, than the Apostles, 
 even when they had the full delineation of the manhood of Jesus 
 in their hands, could not attempt a fancy sketch of his childhood 
 without not only violating our sense of propriety, by attributing 
 to him the most puerile and unmeaning displays of divine power, 
 but shocking our moral sense, and falsifying the very picture they 
 had before their eyes, by attributing to him acts of vengeance. 
 
 Joseph and Mary "went to Jerusalem every year at the feast 
 of the Passover." The Mosaic law required that all the male in- 
 habitants of Judea should go up three times yearly to the capital, 
 to keep the three great festivals of the Passover, Pentecost, and 
 Tabernacles. A later Rabbinical authority had laid an injunction 
 upon women to attend the feast of the Passover. Living as they 
 did in so remote a part of the country, it is probable that the 
 parents of our Lord satisfied themselves with going up together 
 once yearly to Jerusalem ; Joseph thus doing less, and Mary more 
 than the old law enjoined. When Jesus was twelve years old, 
 Joseph and Mary took him up with them to Jerusalem. He had 
 then reached that age when, according to Jewish reckoning, he 
 crossed the line which divides childhood from youth, got the new 
 name of a son of the Lord, and had he been destined to any public 
 office, would have passed into the hands of the Rabbis, for the 
 higher instructions which their schools supplied. Jesus, however, 
 had received no other instruction than the village school, attached 
 to the synagogue at Nazareth, had supplied, and was destined to 
 no higher employment than that of the trade his father followed. 
 The purpose of Joseph and Mary in taking him up with them to 
 
 absurd of the many which are recorded in these Gospels. It was thus, as these 
 writers would exhibit it, that the early boyhood of our Lord was spent ; it was 
 by miracles such as those which I have recited, that he even then distinguished 
 himself.
 
 34 THE EAELIEK YEAES. 
 
 Jerusalem was not that he might be placed at the feet of Gamaliel, 
 or any other of the great distinguished teachers of the metropolis, 
 but simply that he might see the holy city, and take part with them 
 in the sacred services of the Passover. 
 
 There a new world opened to the boy's wondering eyes. With 
 what interest must he have looked around, when first he trod the 
 courts of the Temple, and gazed upon the ministering priests, the 
 altar with its bleeding sacrifice and rising incense, the holy place, 
 and the secret shrine that lay behind the veil ! The places, too, of 
 which we shall have to speak immediately, where youths of his 
 own age were to be found, would not be left unvisited. What 
 thoughts were stirred within his breast by all these sights, it 
 becomes us not even to attempt to imagine. The key is not in our 
 hands with which we might unlock the mysteries of his humanity 
 at this stage of its development. He has himself so far unveiled 
 his thoughts and feelings as to teach us how natural it was that 
 he should linger in the holy city, and under the power of a new 
 attraction feel for a day or two as if the ties that bound him to 
 Nazareth and to his home there were broken. 
 
 The seven days of the feast went by. It had been a crowded 
 procession from Galilee, which Joseph and Mary had joined. 
 Galilee was then, as Josephus informs us, very thickly populated, 
 studded with no less than two hundred and forty towns, containing 
 each fifteen thousand inhabitants or more, sending forth in the war 
 with the Eomans an army of no less than one hundred thousand 
 men. The separate companies which this crowded population sent 
 up at the Passover time to Jerusalem would each be large, and as 
 the youths of the company consorted and slept near one another in 
 the course of the journey, it is the less surprising that, on leaving 
 Jerusalem to return to Nazareth, Joseph and Mary should not 
 during the day have missed their son, who had stayed behind, nor 
 have become aware of his absence till they sought for him among 
 his companions when they rested for the night. The discovery 
 was a peculiarly distressing one. What if some oversight had been 
 committed by them 1 if they had failed to tell their son of the 
 time of the departure, if they had failed to notice whether he was 
 among the other youths before they left the city ? They had such 
 confidence in that child, who never before in a single instance had 
 done anything to create anxiety or distrust ; they were so sure 
 that he would be where, as they thought, he ought to be, that they 
 had scarcely felt perhaps an ordinary degree of parental solicitude. 
 And where could he now be ; what could have happened to him ? 
 Their eager inquiries would probably soon satisfy them that he had 
 not fallen aside by the way, that he had never joined the returning 
 travellers, that he must have remained behind in Jerusalem. But 
 with whom ? for what ? He knew no friends there with whom to
 
 CHEIST AMONG THE DOCTORS. 35 
 
 stay. Had some accident befallen him ? was he detained against 
 his will ? Did any one at Jerusalem know the secrets of his birth ; 
 were there any there who still sought the young child's life 1 Herod 
 was dead ; Archelaus was banished ; the parents themselves had 
 not been in Jerusalem since the time they had presented the infant 
 in the Temple. It was not likely they should be recognised ; none 
 of their friends at Nazareth knew about the mysteries of the con- 
 ception and the birth. They had thought there was no risk in 
 taking Jesus with them, but now their hearts are full of dark fore- 
 bodings ; some one may have known, may have told ; some secret 
 design may still have been cherished. Where was their child, and 
 what had happened to him 1 
 
 You may imagine what a night of sleepless anxiety followed 
 their discovery at the first nightly resting-place of the caravan. 
 Mid-day saw them back in the city. It is said to have been after 
 three days' search they found him ; if we count the day of their 
 return as one of these three, there would still be one entire day's 
 fruitless search. There may have been two such days, days of 
 eager inquiry everywhere throughout the city, in the house where 
 they had lived, among all those with whom they had had any con- 
 verse or connection. At last they find the lost one, not in the 
 courts of the Temple, not in any of those parts of the edifice con- 
 secrated to public worship, but in one of those apartments in the 
 outer buildings used as a school of the Rabbis. Among the Jews 
 at this period, each synagogue had a schoolroom attached to it, in 
 which the rudiments of an ordinary education were taught. Be- 
 sides, however, these schools for primary instruction, wherever 
 there were ten men in a position to devote their whole time to this 
 purpose, a room was built for them, in which they carried on their 
 pupils in all the higher walks of the sacred learning of the Jews. 
 These constituted the schools of the Rabbis, and formed an im- 
 portant instrument in the support and extension of that system oi 
 Rabbinism which, as Milman tells us, " became, after the ruin of 
 the Temple, and the extinction of the public worship, a new bond 
 of national union, and the great distinctive feature in the character 
 of modern Judaism." There were three apartments employed in 
 this way, attached to the Temple. It was in one of these that 
 Joseph and Mary found their son. He was sitting in the ordinary 
 attitude, and engaged in the ordinary exercises of a pupil in the 
 middle of the doctors, hearing them and asking them questions, 
 the Jewish method of education being chiefly catechetical, the 
 pupil himself sometimes answering the questions put, and astonish- 
 ing his hearers with his wisdom. When this strange, rude-looking, 
 bright-looking, solemn-looking Galilean boy first came in among 
 them, was it the wisdom he then showed which drew the hearts of 
 some of these Rabbis to him, and led them, as if anxious to gain
 
 36 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 a scholar who might turn out to be the chief ornament of their 
 school, to take him in and treat him tenderly ? Was it with them, 
 in the room they occupied in the outer Temple buildings, that the 
 two nights in which Jesus was separated from his parents were 
 spent 1 The tie, whatever it was, between him and them, is now 
 destined to be broken, never to be renewed. 
 
 Joseph and Mary find him in the midst of them. Joseph is too 
 much astonished to say anything, nor is it likely that Mary spoke 
 till he had gone with her apart : but now her burdened mother's 
 heart finds utterance. " Son," she says to him, " why hast thou 
 thus dealt with us 1" words of reproach that were new to Mary's 
 lips. Never before had she to chide that child. Never before 
 had he done anything to require such chiding. But now, when it 
 appears that no accident had happened, no restraint had been exer- 
 cised, that it had been of his own free will that Jesus had parted 
 from his parents, and was sitting so absorbed by other persons and 
 with other things, she cannot account for such conduct on his part. 
 It looks like neglect, and worse ; like indifference to the pain which 
 he must have known this separation would cost them. " Son," she 
 says, " why hast thou thus dealt with us 1 Behold, thy father and 
 I have sought thee sorrowing." 
 
 Innocently, artlessly, childishly, in words which, though not 
 meant to meet the reproach with a rebuke, yet carried with them 
 much of the meaning and effect of the words spoken afterwards 
 at the marriage-feast at Cana, Jesus answers, " How is it that ye 
 sought me ? " ' could you, Mary, believe that I would act under 
 other than heavenly guidance ; could you allow the idea of my 
 being liable to any risk or danger simply because I was not under 
 your eye and care ; do you not know, were you not told whose 
 Son I truly am ; and should not that knowledge have kept you 
 from seeking and sorrowing as you have done : wist ye not, that 
 wherever I was I must have been still beneath that Father's eye 
 and care, whatever I was about, I must have been about that 
 Father's business ? x Mary, you have called me Son, and I acknow- 
 ledge the relationship ; you have called Joseph my father ; that 
 relationship I disown ; my own, my only Father is He in whose 
 house you have now found me, whose will I came on earth to do : 
 about whose matters I must constantly, and shall now henceforth 
 and for ever be engaged.' 
 
 It is in this consciousness of his peculiar relationship to God 
 now for the first time, perhaps, fully realised that we catch the 
 true meaning, and can discern something of the purpose of this 
 early, only recorded incident in the history of our Lord's youth. 
 Mary, we are told, understood not the answer of her son. With 
 the knowledge that she possessed, we can scarcely imagine that she 
 
 i " Wist ye not that T must be in my Father's house ? "REVISED VERSION.
 
 CHEIST AMONG THE DOCTORS. 37 
 
 had any difficulty in at once perceiving that Jesus spake of his 
 Father in heaven, and comprehending in so far at least the mean- 
 ing of his words. But there may have been a special reason for 
 Mary's surprise here the difficulty she felt of comprehension and 
 belief. It cannot readily be imagined that she had herself told her 
 child during the first twelve years of his life, or that any one else 
 had told him, of the mystery of his birth. From the first dawning 
 of conscious intelligence he must have been taught to call Joseph 
 father, nor had it outwardly been communicated to him that he 
 was only his reputed father, that he had no earthly parent, that 
 his true and only-father was God. If that were the actual state 
 of the connection between Mary and Jesus up to the time of this 
 incident in the Temple ; if she had never breathed to him the 
 great secret that he was none other than the Son of the Highest ; 
 if there had been nothing, as she knew there was not, in the quiet 
 tenor of the life which for twelve years Jesus lived, to afford any 
 outward indication or evidence, either to himself or others, of the 
 nature of his Sonship to God, then how surprised must Mary 
 have been when in the Temple, and by that answer to her question, 
 Jesus informed her that he knew all, knew whence he was, knew 
 for what he came, knew that God was his Father in such a sense 
 that the discharge of his business carried with it an obligation 
 which, if the time and the season required, overbore all obligation 
 to real or reputed earthly parents. 
 
 But whether it came upon Mary by surprise or not, was there 
 no object in letting us and all believers in the Saviour know, as the 
 record of this incident does, that Jesus was thus early and fully 
 alive to the singularity of his relationship to God ? Conceive that 
 it had been otherwise ; that these thirty years had been veiled in an 
 impenetrable obscurity ; that not one single glimpse had been given 
 of how they passed away ; that our first sight of the man Christ 
 Jesus had been when he stood before John to be baptized in the 
 Avaters of the Jordan, and to receive the Holy Ghost descending 
 upon him. How natural in that case had been the impression that 
 it was then for the first time, when the voice from heaven declared 
 it, that he knew himself to be the Son of God ; that it was then, 
 when the Spirit first descended, that the Divine associated itself in 
 close and ineffable union with the human. Then had those thirty 
 years appeared in a quite different light to us ; then had we con- 
 ceived of him as living throughout their course the simple common 
 life of a Galilean villager and craftsman. But now we know and 
 we have to thank this narrative of St. Luke for the information 
 that if not earlier, yet certainly at his twelfth year, the knowledge 
 that he and the Father were .one, that the Father was in him, and 
 that he was in the Father, had visited and filled his spirit, had 
 animated and regulated his life. "With what a new sacredness and
 
 38 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 dignity do the eighteen years that intervened between this incident 
 and that of his public manifestation to Israel become invested, and 
 what new lessons of instruction do they bring us ! At the bidding 
 of a new impulse, excited within his youthful breast by this first 
 visit to the Temple, he breaks for a day or two all earthly bonds, 
 and seems lost amid the shadows of the Sanctuary, absorbed with 
 the higher things of Him who was worshipped there. But at the 
 call of duty his hour for public service, for speaking, i cting, 
 suffering, dying, before all and for all, not yet come he yields at 
 once to the desire of Joseph and Mary, and returns with them to 
 Nazareth; becoming subject to them, burying, as it were, this 
 great secret in his breast; consenting to wait, submitting to all 
 the restraints of an ordinary household, putting himself once more 
 under the yoke of parental authority, taking upon him all the 
 common obligations of a son, a brother, a neighbour, a friend, a 
 Galilean villager, a Jewish citizen ; discharging all without a taint 
 of sin ; travelling not an inch beyond the routine of service ex- 
 pected in these relationships ; doing absolutely nothing to betray 
 the divinity that lay within, nothing to distinguish himself above 
 others, or proclaim his heavenly birth ; living so naturally, unosten- 
 tatiously, undemonstratively, that neither did his brethren, the 
 inmates of his home, his own nearest relatives, believe in him, dis- 
 cerning not in all those years any marks of his divine prophetic 
 character ; his name so little known in the immediate neighbour- 
 hood that Nathanael, who lived in Cana, a few miles off, had never 
 heard of him, and was quite unprepared to believe Philip, when he 
 told him that in one Jesus of Nazareth he had found him of whom 
 Moses in the law, and the prophets, did write. 
 
 From the bosom of that thick darkness which covers the first 
 thirty years of our Lord's earthly life, there thus shines forth the 
 light which irradiates the whole period, and sheds over it a lustre 
 brighter than ever graced the life of any other of the children of 
 men. You may have wondered at this one event of his childhood 
 being redeemed from oblivion, so insignificant does it seem, and at 
 first sight so little correspondent with our preconceived conceptions 
 of the great Messiah's character and work Looking at Jesus as 
 nothing more than the son of Joseph and Mary, there might be 
 some difficulty in explaining his desertion of them at Jerusalem. 
 But when you reflect on his self-recognition at this time as the 
 Son of God ; on his declaration of it to Mary ; on his thenceforth 
 acting on it in life; on his words in the Temple, followed by 
 eighteen years of self-denial, and gentle, cheerful, prompt obedience ; 
 on his growing consciousness of his divine lineage, and his earthly 
 work and heavenly heritage ; on the evils he came on earth to ex- 
 pose and remedy ; on the selfishness, the worldliness, the formalism, 
 the hypocrisy, he detected all around him at Nazareth ; when you
 
 CHRIST AMONG THE DOCTORS. 39 
 
 reflect further on his divine reticence, on his sublime and patient 
 self-restraint, on his refraining from all interference in public 
 matters, and all exposure to public notice, on his devoting himself 
 instead to the tasks of daily duty in a very humble sphere of life ; 
 when you reflect fixedly and thoughtfully on these things, do you 
 not feel that there rests on this portion of the life of Jesus, and 
 upon its introductory and explanatory incident, an interest different 
 indeed in kind, yet in full and perfect harmony with that belonging 
 to the period when he stood forth as the Saviour of the world 1 If 
 he came to empty himself of that glory which he had with the 
 Father before the world was, to take upon him the form of a 
 servant, to seek not his own glory, to do not his own will, not to 
 be ministered unto but to minister, then assuredly it was not only 
 during the three years of his public ministry, but during all the 
 three-and-thirty years of his life on earth, that the ends of his 
 mission were accomplished. 
 
 We think, I apprehend, too little of these quiet domestic years 
 of secluded unpretending piety at Nazareth. Our eyes are dazzled 
 by the outward glory which surrounded his path when he burst at 
 last from his long concealment, and showed himself as the Son of 
 the Highest ; and yet there is a sense in which we should have more 
 interest in the earlier than in the later period of his life. It is 
 liker the life we have ourselves to lead. The Jesus of Nazareth is 
 more of a pattern to us than the Jesus of Gethsemane and the 
 Cross. He was not less the Son of God in the one case than in the 
 other ; not less in the one character than in the other has he left 
 us an example that we should follow his steps. It was thus the 
 great lesson of his life at Nazareth, as interpreted by his sayings in 
 the Temple, that we should be doing our Father's business in the 
 counting-house, in the workshop, at the desk, as much as in any of 
 the higher or more public walks of Christian or philanthropic effort ; 
 that a life confined and devoted to the faithful execution of the 
 simple, humble offices of daily domestic duty, if it be a life of faith 
 and love, may be one as full of God, as truly divine and holy, as 
 Christ-like and as honouring to Christ, as a life devoted to the most 
 important public services that can be rendered to the Church 
 on earth. In the quiet and deep -lying valleys of life, all hidden 
 from human eye, who may tell us how many there are who, built 
 up in a humble trust in Jesus, and animated by their hope in him, 
 are performing cheerfully their daily tasks because a Father's 
 wisdom has allotted them, and bearing patiently their daily burdens 
 because they have been imposed by a Father's love 1 Content to 
 live and labour, and endure and die, unnoticed and unknown, 
 earthly fame hanging no wreath upon their tomb, earthly eloquence 
 dumb over their dust, these are they, the last among men, who 
 shall be among the first in the kingdom of the just.
 
 40 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 VII. 
 
 THE FORERUNNER. 
 LUKE 1. 1-25, 57-80 ; MATT. in. 1-12; MARK i. 1-8. 
 
 THE same angel who announced to Mary at Nazareth ths birth 
 of Jesus, had six months previously announced the birth of John 
 to the aged priest Zacharias, as he ministered before the altar, 
 within the Temple at Jerusalem. Zacharias was informed that his 
 wife Elisabeth should have a son, whose name was to be John, who 
 was to be "great in the sight of the Lord," going before him "in 
 the spirit and power of Elias, to make ready a people prepared for 
 the Lord." Zacharias doubted what the angel said. At once as a 
 punishment of his incredulity, and as a new token of the truth of 
 the angelic message, he was struck with a temporary dumbness. 
 When he came forth he could not tell his brother priests or the 
 assembled people anything about what he had seen or heard within. 
 From the signs he made, and the strange awe-struck expression of 
 his countenance, they fancied he had seen a vision ; but it is not 
 likely that he took any means of correcting whatever false ideas 
 they entertained. His one wish was to get home and reveal the 
 secret to his wife Elisabeth. His days of ministration lasted but a 
 week, and as soon as they were over, he hastened to his residence in 
 the hill country of Judea. In due time what Gabriel had foretold 
 took place. The child was born. The eighth day, the day for its 
 circumcision and the bestowing of its name, arrived. A large circle 
 of relatives assembled. They proposed that the child should be 
 called Zacharias, after his father. Foreseeing that some such pro- 
 posal might be made, Zacharias had provided against any other 
 name than that assigned by the angel being given to his son. 
 Acting upon his instructions, Elisabeth interposed, and declared 
 that the child's name should be John. The relatives remonstrated. 
 None of her kindred, they reminded her, had ever borne that name. 
 The dumb father was now by signs appealed to. He called for a 
 writing-table, and wrote the few decisive words, "His name is 
 John." They were all wondering at the prompt and peremptory 
 settlement of this question, when another and greater ground of 
 wonder was supplied ; the tongue of the dumb was loosed, and, in 
 rapt, rhythmical, prophetic strains that remind us forcibly of those 
 in which, three months before, and in the same dwelling, Mary and 
 Elisabeth had exchanged their greetings, he poured out fervent 
 thanks to God for having visited and redeemed his people, and 
 foretold the high office which his own new born son was to execute 
 as Forerunner of the Messiah.
 
 THE FORERUNNER. 41 
 
 With that scene of the circumcision day the curtain drops upon 
 the household of Zacharias and Elisabeth, nor is it lifted till many 
 years are gone, and then it is the child only, now grown to man- 
 hood, who appears. His parents had been well stricken in years 
 at the date of his birth, and as no mention of them is made after- 
 wards, we may presume that like Joseph they were dead before 
 anything remarkable in the life of their son had happened. Little 
 as we know of the first thirty years of the life of Jesus, we know 
 still less of the like period in the life of John. All that we are 
 told is that till the time of his showing unto Israel he was in the 
 deserts, in those wild and lonely regions which lay near his birth- 
 place, skirting the north-western shores of the Dead Sea. True to 
 the angelic designation, accepting the vow that marked him as a 
 Nazarite from his birth, John separated himself early from home 
 and kindred, retired from the haunts of men, buried himself in the 
 rocky solitudes of the wilderness, letting his hair grow till it fell 
 loose and dishevelled over his shoulders, denying himself to all 
 ordinary indulgences whether of food or dress, clothing himself 
 with the roughest kind of garment he could get, a robe of hair- 
 cloth, bound around him with a leathern girdle, satisfying himself by 
 feeding on the locusts and wild honey of the desert. But it was 
 not in a morose or ascetic spirit that he did so. He had not fled 
 to those solitudes in chagrin, to nurse upon the lap of indolence 
 regrets over bygone disappointments ; nor had he sought there to 
 shroud his spirit in a religious gloom deep as that of Engedi and 
 Adullam, which may have been among his haunts. His whole 
 appearance and bearing, words and actions, when at last he stood 
 forth before the people, satisfy us that there was little in him of the 
 mystic, the misanthrope, or the monk. Though dwelling apart 
 from others, avoiding observation, and shunning promiscuous inter- 
 course, he was not wasting those years in idleness, heedless of the 
 task for the performance of which the life he led was intended, as 
 we presume he must have been informed by his parents, to prepare 
 him to execute. Through the loop-holes of retreat we can well 
 imagine the Baptist as busily scanning the state of that community 
 upon which he was to act. When he stepped forth from his 
 retirement, and men of all lands and classes gathered round him, 
 he did not need any one to tell him who the Pharisees, or the 
 Sadducees, or the publicans were, or what were their peculiar and 
 distinctive faults. He appears from the first to have been well 
 informed as to the state of things outside the desert. It may, in 
 truth, in no small measure have served to fit him for his peculiar 
 work that removed from all the influences which must have 
 served, had he lived among them, to blunt his sense of surrounding 
 evils, and to mould his character and habits according to the 
 prevailing forms and fashions of Jewish life he was carried by
 
 42 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 the Spirit into the desert to be trained and educated there, thence, 
 as from a watch-tower, to look down upon those strange sights 
 which his country was presenting, undistractedly to watch, pro- 
 foundly to muse and meditate, the fervour of a true prophet of the 
 Lord kindling and glowing into an intenser fire of holy zeal ; till 
 at last, when the hour for action came, he launched forth upon his 
 brief earthly work, with a swift impetuosity like the rush of those 
 short-lived cataracts, yet with a firmness of unbending will and 
 purpose, like the stability of those rocky heights among which for 
 thirty years he had been living. 
 
 But what had those thirty years in the current of Jewish history 
 presented 1 At their beginning those intestine wars which pre- 
 viously had somewhat weakened the Roman power, had closed in 
 the peaceful establishment of the Empire under Augustus Csesar. 
 The dangers to Jewish liberty grew all the greater, and the im- 
 patience of the people under the Roman yoke became the more 
 intense ; the extreme patriot party, who were in favour with the 
 people generally, became fanatic in their zeal. After the death 
 of Herod the Great, while yet it remained uncertain whether 
 Augustus would recognise the accession of Archelaus to the throne, 
 an insurrection broke out in Jerusalem, which was only quelled by 
 the slaughter of three thousand of the insurgents, and by the 
 ill-omened stoppage of the great Passover festival. Augustus, 
 unwilling to lay any heavier yoke on those who were already 
 fretting beneath the one they bore, confirmed the will of Herod 
 by which he divided his kingdom among his sons, suffered the 
 Jews still to have nominally a government of their own, and 
 recognised Archelaus as king over Judea and Samaria. His reign 
 was a short and troubled one, and at its close Judea and Samaria 
 were attached to Syria, made part of a Roman province, and had 
 procurators or governors from Rome set over them, of whom the 
 sixth in order was Pontius Pilate, who entered upon his office 
 about the very time when the Baptist began his ministry. The 
 lingering shadows of royalty and independence were thus removed. 
 Not content with removing them, the usurper intermeddled with 
 the ecclesiastical as well as the civil government of Judea. In 
 the Mosaic institute, the High Priest, the most important public 
 functionary of the Jews, attained his office hereditarily, and held 
 it for life. The Emperor now claimed and exercised the right of 
 investiture, and appointed and deposed as he pleased. During the 
 period between the death of Herod and the destruction of 
 Jerusalem, we read of twenty-eight High Priests holding the office 
 in succession, only one of whom retained it till his death. This 
 dependence on Rome, not only for the appointment but for con- 
 tinuance in it, necessarily generated great servility on the part of 
 aspirants to the office, and great abuses in the manner in which its
 
 THE FORERUNNER. 43 
 
 duties were discharged. A supple, sagacious, venal man, like 
 Annas, though not able to establish himself permanently in the 
 chair, was able to secure it in turn for five of his sons, for his 
 son-in-law Caiaphas, with whom he was associated at the time 
 of the crucifixion, and afterwards for his grandson. Such a 
 state of things among the governing authorities fomented the 
 popular animosity to the foreign rule. The whole country was in 
 a ferment. Popular outbreaks were constantly occurring. The 
 public mind was in such an inflammable condition that any 
 adventurer daring enough, and strong enough to raise the standard 
 of revolt, was followed by multitudes. Among those insurrectionary 
 chiefs, some of whom were of the lowest condition and the most 
 worthless character, Judas of Galilee distinguished himself by his 
 open proclamation of the principle that it was not lawful to pay 
 tribute to Caesar, and his political creed was adopted by thousands 
 who had not the courage, as he had, to pay the penalty of their 
 lives in acting it out. It can easily be imagined what a fresh hold 
 their faith and hopes as to the foretold Messiah would take upon 
 the hearts of a people thus galled and fretted to the uttermost by 
 political discontent. The higher views of his character would 
 naturally be swallowed up and lost in the conception of him as the 
 great deliverer who was to break those hated bonds which bound 
 them, restore the old Theocracy, and make Jerusalem, not Eome, 
 the seat and centre of a universal monarchy. 
 
 Such was the state of public affairs and of the public feeling, 
 when a voice, loud and thrilling like the voice of a trumpet, issues 
 from the desert, saying, "Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is 
 at hand." Crowds come forth to listen ; they look at the strange 
 man, true son of the desert, from whose lips this voice cometh. He 
 lias all the aspect, he wears the dress, of one of their old prophets. 
 They ask about him; he is of the priestly order. Some old 
 men begin now to remember about his father in the Temple, and 
 the strange "sayings that were noised abroad through all the hill 
 country of Judea " soon after his birth. They listen to his words ; 
 it is true he does not directly claim divine authority; the old 
 prophetic formula, "Thus saith the Lord," he does not employ; he 
 points to no sign, he works no miracle ; he trusts to the simple 
 power of the summons he makes, the prophecy he utters ; yet there 
 is something in the very manner of his utterance so prophet-like, 
 that a prophet they cannot help believing him to be. There is 
 nothing particularly ingratiating in his call to repent, but the 
 announcement that the kingdom of heaven is at the door, and that 
 they must all at once arise and prepare for it, meets the deepest, 
 warmest wishes of their hearts. It is at hand at last, this strange 
 man says, the kingdom for which they have so long been waiting; 
 and shall they not go forth to welcome its approach, and rejoice in
 
 44 THE EAELIER YEARS. 
 
 its triumphs ? The spell of the Baptist's preaching, in whatever it 
 lay, was one that operated with a speed and a power, and to an 
 extent of which we have the parallel only in times of the greatest 
 excitement, like those of the Crusades, or of the Reformation. 
 " Then went out to him," we are told, " all Judea, and they of 
 Jerusalem, and all the region round about Jordan, and were 
 baptized of him in Jordan, confessing their sins." It would seem 
 as if, with one consent, the entire population of the southern part 
 of Palestine had gathered around the Baptist, and for the time 
 were pliant in his hands. It may have facilitated their assemblage, 
 if, as has been conjectured, it was a Sabbatic year when John 
 began his work, and the people, set free from their ordinary 
 labours, were ready to follow him, as he led them to the banks of 
 the Jordan to be baptized. 
 
 This baptism in the river was so marked a feature in the 
 ministry of John, that it gave him his distinctive title, The 
 Baptist. It was a new and peculiar rite ; of Divine appointment, 
 as appears not only from the question which our Lord put to the 
 Jewish rulers, " The baptism of John, was it from heaven, or of 
 men ? " but also from the declaration of John himself, " He that 
 sent me to baptize with water." It may have been suggested by, 
 as it was in some respects similar to, the various ablutions or wash- 
 ings with water prescribed in the Mosaic ritual ; yet from all of 
 these baptisms, if baptisms they could be called, it differed in many 
 respects. They were all intended simply as instruments of purifica- 
 tion from ceremonial defilement ; it had another character and 
 object. With a few exceptional cases, they were all performed by 
 the person's own hands, who went through the process of purifica- 
 tion ; it was performed by another, by the hands of John himself, 
 or some of his disciples. They were repeated as often as the 
 defilement was renewed; it was administered only once. There 
 was indeed one Jewish custom which, if then in use, presents a 
 clear analogy to the baptism of John. When proselytes from 
 heathenism were admitted into the pale of the Jewish common- 
 wealth, after circumcision they were baptized. "They bring the 
 proselyte," says an old Jewish authority, 1 " to baptism, and being 
 placed in the water, they again instruct him in some weightier and 
 in some lighter commands of the law, which, being heard, he 
 plunges himself and comes up, and behold he is an Israelite in all 
 things." It would look as if the baptism of John was borrowed 
 from this proselyte baptism of the Jews ; but though it were, it 
 will at once appear to you that the former rite had marked 
 peculiarities of its own. And as it stood thus distinguished from 
 all Jewish, so also did it stand distinguished from the Christian rite 
 ordained by our Lord himself, which involved a fuller faith, 
 1 Maimonides.
 
 THE FORERUNNER. 45 
 
 symbolised a higher privilege, and was always administered in the 
 name of Christ. The one rite might be regarded indeed as running 
 into and being superseded by the other, but of the great difference 
 between them we have proof in the fact that those who had 
 received the baptism of John were nevertheless re-baptized on their 
 admission into the Christian Church. 1 John's baptism, like every- 
 thing about his ministry, was imperfect, preparatory, temporary, 
 and transient, involving simply a confession of unworthiness, and a 
 faith in One to come, through whom the remission of sins was to 
 be conveyed. 
 
 The people who flocked around John readily submitted to his 
 baptism, whether regarding it as altogether new, or the modified 
 form of some of their own old observances. The accompaniment .of 
 his teaching with the administration of such an ordinance may have 
 helped to reconcile the Pharisees, who were such lovers of the 
 ritualistic, to a preaching which had little in itself to recommend it 
 to them, as the absence on the other hand of all doctrinal instruc- 
 tion, all references to the unseen world, to angels and spirits, and 
 the resurrection, may have helped to conciliate the prejudices of 
 the Sadducees. At any rate, we learn that, borne along with the 
 flowing tide, Pharisees and Sadducees did actually present them- 
 selves before John to claim baptism at his hands. His quick, keen, 
 spiritual insight at once detected the veiled deceit that lay in their 
 doing so, and in the very spirit which his great Master afterwards 
 displayed, he proceeded to denounce their hypocrisy, giving them 
 indeed the very title which Jesus bestowed on them. John's 
 whole ministry, his teaching and baptizing, if it meant anything, 
 meant this, that without an inward spiritual change, without peni- 
 tence, without reformation, no Israelite was prepared to enter into 
 that kingdom whose advent he announced. His preaching was the 
 preaching of repentance, his baptism the baptism of repentance; 
 the one great lesson the whole involved, was that all Israel had 
 become spiritually unfit for welcoming the Messiah, and sharing 
 the blessings of his reign. But here were some, the Pharisees and 
 Sadducees who now stood before him, of whom he knew, that so 
 far from their entertaining the least idea that they required to go 
 through any such process, regarded themselves as pre-eminently 
 the very ones to whom from their position in Israel this kingdom 
 was at once to bring its blessings. Penetrating their secret 
 thoughts, the Baptist said to them, "Think not to say within your- 
 selves, We have Abraham to our father," and therefore are, simply 
 as his descendants, entitled to all the benefits of that kingdom 
 which is to be set up in Judea; "I say unto you, that God 
 is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham;" a 
 dim, yet not uncertain pre-intimation of the spiritual character 
 1 See Acts xix.
 
 46 THE EA11LIEK YEAES. 
 
 and wide extension of the new kingdom of God; the possibility 
 even of the outcast and down- trodden Gentile being admitted 
 into it. 
 
 John's bold and honest treatment of the Pharisees and Sad- 
 ducees only made him look the more prophet-like in the eyes of 
 the common people. It encouraged them to ask, What shall we 
 do then ? In a form of precept like to that which Christ frequently 
 employed, John said to them, "He that hath two coats, let him 
 impart to him that hath none. He that hath meat, let him do 
 likewise." There is no better sign morally of a community than 
 when such kindly links of brotherly sympathy so bind together all 
 classes, as that those who have are ever ready to help those who 
 want ; as, on the other hand, there is no clearer proof of a com- 
 munity morally disorganised than the absence of this benevolent 
 disposition. Judea was at this time, both as to its religious and 
 political condition, thoroughly disorganised ; and in inculcating in 
 this direct and emphatic way the great duty of a universal charity, 
 John was at once laying bare one of the sorest of existing evils, 
 and pointing to the method of its cure. 
 
 Then came to him the Publicans also, those Jews who for gain's 
 sake had farmed the taxes imposed by the Eomans ; a class odious 
 and despised, looked upon by their countrymen generally as traitors, 
 who, by extortion, drew large profits out of the national degrada- 
 tion. They, too, get the answer exactly suited to them : " Exact 
 no more than what is appointed to you." Then came to him 
 soldiers, Jews we may believe who had enlisted under the Roman 
 standard, and who not satisfied with the soldier's common pay 
 abused their power as the military police of the country, and by 
 force, or threat of accusation before the higher authorities, sought 
 to improve their condition. They, too, get the answer suited to 
 their case: "Do violence to no man: neither accuse any falsely, 
 and be content with your wages." These are but a few stray 
 specimens of the manner in which the Baptist dealt with those 
 who came to him : one quite new, yet so much needed. What 
 power must have been exerted over a people so long accustomed 
 to the inculcation of a mere ceremonial pietism, by this thoroughly 
 intrepid, downright, plain, practical, unaccommodating and uncom- 
 promising kind of teaching ! The great secret of its success lay 
 here, that unsupported by any confirming signs from heaven, in 
 a certain sense not needing them, he inculcated the duties of 
 justice, truthfulness, forbearance, charity, by a direct appeal to the 
 simple, naked sense of right and wrong that dwells in every 
 human bosom. And the world has seldom seen a more striking 
 proof of the power of conscience, and of the response which, 
 when taken suddenly and before it has time to get warped and 
 biassed, conscience will give to all direct, sincere, and vigorous
 
 THE FOKERUNNER. 47 
 
 addresses to it, than when those multitudes from Judea and Jeru- 
 salem, and all the land, gathered round the Baptist on the banks of 
 the Jordan. 
 
 What an animating spectacle must these banks have then 
 exhibited ! Our last and best describer of Palestine 1 brings the 
 scene thus before our eyes : " No common spring or tank would 
 meet the necessities of the multitudes. The Jordan now seemed 
 to have met with its fit purpose. It was the one river of 
 Palestine sacred in its recollections, abundant in its waters; and 
 yet at the same time the river not of cities but of the wilderness, 
 the scene of the preaching of those who dwelt not in king's 
 palaces, nor wore soft clothing. On the banks of the rushing 
 stream the multitudes gathered ; the priests and scribes from 
 Jerusalem, down the pass of Adummim ; the publicans from 
 Jericho on the south, and the Lake of Gennesareth on the north ; 
 the soldiers on their way from Damascus to Petra, through the 
 Ghor, in the war with the Arab chief Hareth ; the peasants from 
 Galilee, with One from Nazareth, through the opening of the 
 plain of Esdraelon. The tall reeds or canes in the jungle waved, 
 shaken by the wind ; the pebbles of the bare clay hills lay around, 
 to which the Baptist pointed as capable of being transformed 
 into the children of Abraham; at their feet rushed the refresh- 
 ing stream of the never-failing river." 
 
 This description, indeed, applies to a period in the narrative a 
 little further on than the one which is now immediately before us. 
 The " One from Nazareth" may have left his village home, and been 
 already on the way, but as yet he was buried in obscurity, deep 
 hidden among the people. All the people were musing in their 
 hearts whether John were not himself the Christ. He knew what 
 was in their hearts ; he knew how ready they were to hail him as 
 their promised deliverer. No man of his degree has ever had a 
 fairer opportunity of lifting himself to high repute upon the 
 shoulders of an acclaiming multitude. Did the tempting thought 
 for a moment flit across his mind that he should seize upon the 
 occasion so presented? If it did, he was in haste to expel the 
 intruder, and prevent the multitude by at once proclaiming that he 
 was not the great prophet they were ready to believe he was ; that 
 another was at hand much greater than he to whom he was not 
 worthy to discharge the lowest and most menial office of a slave 
 the carrying of his sandal, the unloosing of his shoe-latchet. He, 
 John, baptized with water unto repentance, an incomplete and 
 altogether preparatory affair, but the greater than he would baptize 
 with the Holy Ghost and with fire. 
 
 Such was the prompt and decisive manner in which he dis- 
 owned all high pretensions. And when, shortly afterwards, 
 i Stanley.
 
 4 8 THE EAKLIER YEARS. 
 
 posterior to our Lord's baptism, of which they may have heard 
 nothing, a deputation from Jerusalem came down to ask him, Who 
 art thou ? he met the question with the emphatic negative, I am 
 not the Christ. Art thou Elias then ? they said. John knew that 
 the men who put this query to him were caring only about his 
 person, and careless about his office, in the true spirit of all 
 religious formalists, wanting so much to know who the teacher was, 
 and but little heeding what his teaching meant ; he knew that their 
 idea was that the heavens were to give back Elijah to the earth, 
 and that he was to appear in person to announce and anoint the 
 Messiah, and that many of them believed that besides Elias another 
 of the old prophets was to arise from the dead, to dignify by his 
 presence the great era of the Messiah's inauguration. Answering 
 their questions according to the meaning of the questioners when 
 they said, Art thou Elias 1 he said, I am not; when they asked 
 him, Art thou that prophet? he answered, No. And when still 
 further they inquired, Who art thou then, that we may give an 
 answer to them that sent us ? he said, that he was but a Voice and 
 nothing more, "the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Make 
 straight the way of the Lord, as said the prophet Esaias." Pressing 
 him still further by the interrogation, why it was that he baptized 
 if he were neither Christ, nor Elias, nor that prophet ; he speaks 
 again of his own baptism as if it were too insignificant a matter 
 for any question about his right to administer it being raised or 
 answered, and of the greater than he already revealed to him by the 
 sign from heaven : " I baptize with water, but there standeth one 
 among you whom ye know not. He it is who coming after me is 
 preferred before me, whose shoe-latchet I am not worthy to unloose." 
 
 It is this prompt acknowledgment of his own infinite inferiority 
 to Christ, his thorough appreciation of the relative position in which 
 he stood to Jesus, the readiness with which he undertook the 
 honourable but humble task of being but his herald, the un- 
 impeachable fidelity and unfaltering steadiness with which he 
 fulfilled the special course marked out for him by God, and above 
 all the entire and apparently unconscious self-abnegation which in 
 doing so he displayed, that shine forth as the prominent features 
 in the personal character of the Baptist. 
 
 To these, particularly to the last, we shall have occasion here- 
 after to allude. Meanwhile, let us dwell a moment on the place 
 and office which the ministry of John occupied midway between the 
 old and the new economy. " The law and the prophets were until 
 John." In him and with him they expired. He was a prophet, 
 the only one among them all whose coming and whose office were 
 themselves of old the subject of prophecy, honoured above them all 
 by the nearness of his standing to Jesus, by his being the friend of 
 the Bridegroom, to whom it was given to hear the Bridegroom's
 
 THE FORERUNNER. 49 
 
 living voice. But he was more than a prophet. Of the greatest of 
 his predecessors, of Moses, of Elijah, of Daniel, it was true that 
 they filled but a limited space in the great dispensation with 
 which they were connected; their days but an handbreadth in 
 the broad cycle of events with which their lives and labours 
 were wrapped up, the individuality of each, if not lost among, 
 yet linked with that of a multitude of compeers. But John pre- 
 sents himself alone. The prophet of the desert, the forerunner of 
 the Lord, appears without a coadjutor, a whole distinct economy 
 in himself. To announce Christ's advent, to break up the way 
 before him, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord, this 
 Avas the specific object of that economy which began and ended in 
 John's ministry. 
 
 The kind and amount of the service which the Baptist thus 
 rendered, as well as the need of it, it is difficult for us now 
 thoroughly to understand and appreciate. In what respect Christ 
 would have been placed at a disadvantage had not John preceded 
 him ; in what respects the Baptist did open up the way before the 
 Lord ; in what respects John's ministry told upon the condition of 
 the Jewish people, morally and spiritually, so as to make it dif- 
 ferent from what it otherwise would have been, so as to make 
 the soil all the better prepared to receive the seed which the 
 hand of the Divine sower scattered, it is not very easy for us 
 to estimate. One thing is clear enough, that it was John's hand 
 which struck the first bold stroke at the root of the strong national 
 prejudice which narrowed and carnalised the expected kingdom of 
 their Messiah. It is quite possible that, as to the true nature and 
 extent of the coming kingdom, John may have been as much in 
 the dark as the twelve apostles were till the day of Pentecost. 
 One thing, however, was revealed to him in clearest light and it 
 was upon his knowledge of this that he spoke with such authority 
 and power that whatever the future kingdom was to be, it should 
 be one in which force and fraud, and selfishness and insincerity, 
 and all sham piety, were to be denied a place ; for which those 
 would stand best prepared who were readiest to confess and give 
 up their sins, and to act justly and benevolently towards their 
 fellow-men, humbly and sincerely towards their God. You have 
 but the rudiments, indeed, of the true doctrine of repentance in the 
 teaching of the Baptist the Christian doctrine but in germ ; but 
 it is not difficult to see in it the same great lesson broached as to 
 the inner and spiritual qualifications required of all the members of 
 the kingdom of Christ, which was afterwards, with so much greater 
 depth and fulness, unfolded privately to Nicodemus at the very 
 beginning of our Lord's ministry in Judea, when he said to him, 
 " Except a man be born again, he cannot see, he cannot enter into 
 the kingdom of God ;" and publicly to the multitudes on the hill- 
 D
 
 50 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 side of Galilee, when the Lord said to them, " Blessed are the poor 
 in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." 
 
 It would be quite wrong, it would indicate an ignorance of the 
 peculiar service which the Baptist was called upon to render, were 
 we to imagine that there must be a preparatory process of repent- 
 ance and reformation gone through by each of us before we believe in 
 Jesus, and by faith enter the kingdom. Our position is so different 
 from that occupied by the multitude to whom John preached, that 
 what was most suitable for them is not so suitable for us. 
 
 And yet not without some broad and general lessons for the 
 Church, at all times and in all ages, was it ordered so that the 
 gentle preacher of peace should be preceded by the stern preacher 
 of repentance ; that John should be seen in the desert in advance 
 of Jesus, in his appearance, his haunts, his habits, his words, his 
 ordinance, proclaiming and symbolising the duty and discipline of 
 penitence. It was only thus, by the ministry of the one running 
 into the ministry of the other, that the Christian life, in its acts 
 of penitence, as well as in its acts of faith and love, could stand 
 before us in vivid relief, embodied in a full-orbed and personal 
 portraiture. Jesus had no sin of his own to mourn over, no evil 
 dispositions to subdue, no evil habits to relinquish. In the person, 
 character, and life of Jesus, the great and needful duty of morti- 
 fying the body of sin and death could receive no visible illustration. 
 He could supply to us no model or exemplar here. Was it not 
 then wisely ordered that moving before, and for a time beside him, 
 there should be seen that severer figure of the Baptist, as if to tell 
 us that the proud spirit that is in us must be bowed, and the 
 mountain-heights of pride in us be laid low, and the crooked things 
 be made straight, and the rough places plain, to make way for the 
 coming in of the Prince of Peace, and the setting up of his kingdom 
 in our hearts ; that we must go with the Baptist into the solitudes 
 of the desert, as well as with the Saviour into the happy homes 
 and villages of Galilee ? Would you see, in its full, finished, and 
 perfect form, the character and course of conduct, which, as fol- 
 lowers of the Crucified, we are to aim at and to realise, go study it 
 in the life of Jesus. But would you see it in its formation as well 
 as in its finish, go study it in the life of the Baptist ; put the two 
 together, John and Jesus, and the portraiture is complete. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 THE BAPTISM. 
 MATT. in. 13-17 ; MARK i. 9-11 ; LUKE in. 21-23 ; JOHN i. 30-33. 
 
 WE have no definite information as to the date of the com- 
 mencement of John's ministry, or his own age at that time. As
 
 THE BAPTISM. 51 
 
 we know, however, that he was six months older than Jesus, as we 
 are told that Jesus was about thirty years of age when he began 
 his public ministry, and as that was the age fixed in the Jewish law 
 for the priests entering on the duties of their office, it seems reason- 
 able to conclude that the ministry of John had already lasted for 
 six months when Jesus presented himself before the Baptist on the 
 banks of the Jordan. This would allow full time for intelligence 
 of a movement which so rapidly pervaded the entire population 
 of the southern districts of the country, penetrating Galilee, and 
 reaching even to Nazareth. Moved by this intelligence, other 
 Galileans of that district as well as Jesus may have followed the 
 wake of the multitude, and directed their steps to the place where 
 John was baptizing. In these circumstances Christ's departure 
 from his home may not have created the surprise which it other- 
 wise would have done. When Mary saw her son, who had hitherto 
 so quietly and exclusively devoted himself to their discharge, throw 
 up all his household duties and depart ; when she learned whither 
 it was that his footsteps were tending, and gathered, as she may 
 have done, from the tidings which were then afloat, that it was 
 none other than the son of her relative Elisabeth who was shaking 
 the entire community of the south by his summons to repent, and 
 his proclamation of the nearness of the kingdom, she could scarcely 
 have let Jesus go, for the first time that he had ever so parted from 
 her, without following him with many wistful, wondering anxieties 
 and hopes. But she did not know that he now left that home in 
 Nazareth never but for a few days to return to it. Had she known 
 it, could she have let him go alone 1 It was alone, however, and 
 externally undistinguished among the crowd, that Jesus stood 
 before John, and craved baptism at his hands. He did this in 
 the simplest, least ostentatious way, allowing the great mass of the 
 baptisms to be over, mingling with the people, and offering himself 
 as one of the last to whom the rite was to be administered. " It 
 came to pass," Luke tells us, that " when all the people were bap- 
 tized," Jesus was baptized also. But his baptism did not go past 
 as the others did. So soon as John's eye fell upon this new candi- 
 date for the ordinance, he saw in him one altogether different in 
 person and character from any who had hitherto been baptized. 
 He felt at once as if this administration of his baptism would be 
 altogether out of place ; that for Jesus to be baptized by him would 
 be to invert the relationship in which he knew and felt that they 
 stood to one another. By earnest speech or expressive gesture he 
 intimated his unwillingness to comply with the request. The word 
 which St. Matthew uses in telling us that John forbade him, is one 
 indicative of a very strenuous refusal on his part. This refusal he 
 accompanied with the words : " I have need to be baptized of thee, 
 and comest thou to me ? "
 
 62 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 These words, you will particularly remark, were spoken at the 
 commencement of their interview, before the baptism of our Lord, 
 before that sign from heaven was given of which he had been fore- 
 warned, and for which he was to wait before pronouncing of any 
 individual that he was the greater One who was to come, who was 
 to baptize with the Holy Ghost and with fire. Till he saw the 
 Spirit descending and remaining, John could not know certainly, 
 and had no warrant authoritatively to say that this was He of 
 whom he spake. From the Baptist saying twice afterwards, " I 
 knew him not," it has been imagined that up to this meeting John 
 had never seen Jesus, had no personal acquaintance with his rela- 
 tive the son of Mary ; and the distance at which they lived from 
 one another, with the entire length of the land between them, the 
 retired life of the one at Nazareth, and the dwelling of the other in 
 the desert, have been referred to as explaining the absence of all 
 acquaintance and intercourse. That there could have been but 
 little intercourse is clear; that they may never have seen each 
 other till now is possible. But if so, how are we to explain John's 
 meeting the proposal of Jesus with so instant and earnest a decla- 
 ration, and saying to him, I have need to be baptized of thee, and 
 comest thou to me 1 Jesus must either, before these words were 
 spoken, have told John who he was, and the Baptist must have 
 known from ordinary sources what a sinless and holy life he had 
 been leading for these thirty years at Nazareth, or this knowledge 
 must have been supernaturally communicated; for knowledge of 
 Jesus to this extent at least, that he was no fit subject for a baptism 
 which was for sinners, was obviously implied in this address. 
 
 Is it, however, so certain, or even so probable, that John and 
 Jesus had never met till now? Zacharias and Elisabeth had to 
 instruct their son as to his earthly work, his heavenly calling, and 
 in doing so must have told him of the visit of Mary, and the birth 
 of Jesus. He must have learned from them enough to direct his 
 eye longingly and expectantly to his Galilean relative as no other 
 than the Messiah, for whose coming he was to prepare the people. 
 True, he retired early to the desert, which was his place of ordinary 
 residence till the time of his showing unto Israel, but did that imply 
 that he never was at Jerusalem, never went up to the great yearly 
 festivals ? Jesus was once, at least, in Jerusalem in his youth, and 
 may have been often there before his thirtieth year. So, too, may 
 it have been with John, and if so, they must have met there, and 
 become acquainted with one another. Much, however, as there 
 may have been to lead John to the belief that Jesus was he that 
 was to come after him, the lapse of those thirty years, during which 
 the two had been almost totally separated, and the absence of all 
 sign or token of the Messiahship during Christ's secluded life at 
 Nazareth, may have led him to doubt. Even after he had received
 
 THE BAPTISM. 53 
 
 his great commission he might continue in the same state of uncer- 
 tainty, waiting, as he had been instructed, till the sign from heaven 
 was given. Whatever John's inward surmises or convictions may 
 have been, he must have felt that it became him neither to speak 
 of them nor to act on them, till the promised and visible token of 
 the Messiahship lighted on him whom he was then to hold forth to 
 the people as the Lamb of God, who was to take away the sin of 
 the world. Such we conceive to have been the state of John's 
 mind and feelings towards Jesus when he presented himself before 
 him for baptism. From previous acquaintance he may instantly 
 have recognised him as the son of Mary, to whom his thoughts and 
 hopes had for so many years been pointing. He certainly did at 
 once recognise him as his superior, as one at least so much holier 
 than himself that he shrunk from baptizing him. But he did 
 not certainly know him as the Christ the Son of God ; did not so 
 know him at least as to be entitled to point him out as such to the 
 people. When he actually did so, he was at pains to tell those 
 whom he addressed that it was not upon the ground of any pre- 
 vious personal knowledge, or individual connection, that he spake 
 of him as he did. " I knew him not," he said ; " but he that sent 
 me to baptize with water, the same said unto me, Upon whom 
 thou shalt see the Spirit descending, and remaining on him, the 
 same is he which baptizeth with the Holy Ghost. And I saw, and 
 bear record that this is the Son of God." 
 
 We now know more of Jesus than perhaps John did when 
 Christ stood before him to be baptized ; we know that he was the 
 Holy One of God. who had no sin of his own to confess, no pollu- 
 tion to wash away ; and we too, like John, may wonder that the 
 sinless Son of God should have submitted to such a baptism as his, 
 a baptism accompanied with the acknowledgment of sin, and the 
 profession of repentance, and which was the symbol of the removal 
 of the polluting stains of guilt. But our Lord's words fall upon 
 our ears as they did on those of John : " Suffer it to be so now, 
 for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness." Firmly, yet 
 gently, authoritatively yet courteously, clothing the command in 
 the form of a request, he carries it over the reluctance and remon- 
 strance of the Baptist. " Suffer it to be so now," for this once, so 
 long as the present transient earthly relationship between us sub- 
 sists. Suffer it, " for so it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness." 
 It is not then as a violator but as a fulfiller of the law that Jesus 
 comes to be baptized; not as one who confesses to the want of 
 such a perfect righteousness as might be presented for acceptance 
 to God, but as one prepared to meet every requirement of his 
 Father, and to render to it an exact and complete obedience. 
 Who could speak thus, as if it were such an easy, as well as such a 
 becoming thing in him to fulfil all righteousness, but the only
 
 54 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 begotten of the Father, he who, in coming into this world, could 
 say, Lo ! I come to do thy will, God. 
 
 And here in subjecting himself to the baptism of John, you 
 have the first instance of Christ's acting in his public official char- 
 acter as the Messiah. He steps forth at last from his long retire- 
 ment, his deep seclusion at Nazareth, to appear how ? to do what ? 
 to appear as an inferior before the Baptist, to ask a service at 
 his hands, to enrol himself as one of his disciples ; for this was the 
 primary purpose of this ordinance. It was the initiatory rite by 
 which repentant Israelites enrolled themselves as the hopeful expec- 
 tants of the coming kingdom ; and He, the head of that kingdom, 
 stoops to enrol himself in this way among them. " By one spirit," 
 says the apostle, "we are all baptized into one body;" the outward 
 baptism the sign or symbol of our incorporation into that one body 
 the Church. In the same way the Lord himself enters into that 
 body, honours the ordinance which God had sent John to admin- 
 ister, conforms even to that preparatory and temporary economy 
 through which his infant Church was called to pass, putting himself 
 under the law, making himself in all things like unto his brethren. 
 Still, however, the difficulty returns upon us, as to what mean- 
 ing such a rite as that of John's baptism could have in the case of 
 Jesus ; sin he had none to confess, nor penitence to feel, nor refor- 
 mation to effect, nor a faith in the One to come to cherish. Yet 
 his baptism in the Jordan was not without meaning; nay, its 
 singular significance reveals itself as we contemplate the sinlessness 
 of his character. "We rightly regard the baptism of Jesus as the 
 first act of his public ministry ; and does he not present himself at 
 the very outset in that peculiar character and office which he 
 sustains throughout his mediatorial work, identifying himself with 
 his people as their representative and their head ; taking on him 
 their sins, numbering himself with transgressors, doing now, 
 enduring afterwards, what it became them as sinners to do, as 
 sinners to suffer ? 
 
 But let us now fix our eye on what happened immediately after 
 the baptism of Christ. He came up straightway out of the water. 
 He did not wait, as the Jews asked the proselyte to do, to listen to 
 still further instruction out of the law ; instruction likely to be 
 the more deeply impressed by the time and circumstances under 
 which it was given. He did not wait, as we are led, from the 
 very expression employed here, to believe that many of those did 
 who received the baptism from John. In him there was no need 
 for such delay or any such instruction. The law of his God, was it 
 not written wholly, deeply, indelibly, in his heart 1 Straightway, 
 therefore, he goes forth from under the Baptist's hands. John's 
 wondering eye is on him as he ascends the river banks. There he 
 throws himself into the attitude, engages in the exercise of prayer,
 
 THE BAPTISM. 55 
 
 and then it is, as with uplifted hands he gazes into the heavens, 
 that he sees them opened above his head, the Spirit of God descend- 
 ing like a dove, and lighting on him, and a voice from heaven say- 
 ing to him, "Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well 
 pleased. " 
 
 It is evident that these supernatural appearances gave to the 
 baptism of Jesus a new character in the Baptist's eyes, as they 
 should do in ours. In the descending dove, outward emblem of the 
 descending Spirit, he not only saw the pre-appointed token that the 
 greater than he who was to baptize with the Holy Ghost was 
 before him, but in the whole incident he beheld the first great step 
 in our Lord's public and official life : the setting of him openly 
 apart as the Lamb for the sacrifice ; his consecration to, and his 
 qualification for, the great office of the one and only High Priest 
 over the House of God. 
 
 As Jesus stepped forth after the baptism on the banks of the 
 river, he stood severed from the past, connected with a new future ; 
 Nazareth, its quiet home, its happy days, its peaceful occupations, 
 lay behind; trials and toils, and suffering and death, lay before 
 him. He would not have been the Son of man had he not felt the 
 significance and solemnity of the hour ; he would not have been 
 the full partaker of our human nature had the weight of his new 
 position, new duties, new trials, not pressed heavily upon his heart. 
 He turns, in the pure, true instinct of his sinless humanity to seek 
 support and strength in God, to throw himself and all his future 
 upon his Father in prayer. But who may tell us how he felt, and 
 what he prayed ; what desires, what hopes, what solicitudes went 
 up from the heart, at least, if not from the lips, of this extraordi- 
 nary suppliant ! Never before had the throne of the heavenly 
 Grace been thus approached, and never before was such answer 
 given. The prayer ascends direct from earth to heaven, and brings 
 the immediate answer down. It is as he prays, that the Spirit 
 conies, bringing light, and strength, and comfort to the Saviour, 
 sustaining him under that consciousness of his Sonship to God, 
 which now fills, expands, exalts his weak humanity. And does 
 not our great Head and Representative stand before us here a type 
 and pattern of every true believer in the Lord as to the duty, the 
 privilege, the power of prayer 1 Of him, and of him only of the 
 sons of men, might it be said that he prayed without ceasing ; that 
 his life was one of constant and sustained communion with his 
 Father ; and yet you find him on all the great occasions of his life 
 having recourse to separate, solitary, sometimes to prolonged acts 
 of devotion. His baptism, his appointment of the twelve apostles^ 
 his escape from the attempt to make him a king, his transfiguration, 
 his agony in the garden, his death upon the cross, were all hallowed 
 by prayer. The first and the last acts of his ministry were acts of
 
 56 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 prayer : from the lowest depth, from the highest elevation of that 
 ministry, he poured out his spirit in prayer. For his mission on 
 earth, for all his heaviest trials, he prepared himself by prayer. 
 And should we not prepare for our poor earthly service, and fortify 
 ourselves against temptations and trials, by following that great 
 example] The heavens above are not shut up against us, the 
 Spirit who descended like a dove has not taken wings and flown 
 away for ever from this earth. There is a power by which these 
 heavens can still be penetrated, which can still bring down upon us 
 that gentle messenger of rest, the power that lies in simple, 
 humble, earnest, continued believing prayer. 
 
 The Holy Spirit as he descended upon Jesus was pleased to 
 assume the form and gentle motion of a dove gliding down from 
 the skies. He came not now as a rushing mighty wind. He sat 
 not on Jesus as a cloven tongue of fire. It was right that when he 
 came to do the work of quick and strong conviction, necessary in 
 converting the souls of men, to bestow those gifts by which the 
 first missionaries of the cross should be qualified for prosecuting 
 that work, the rush as of a whirlwind should sweep through the 
 room in which the disciples were assembled, and the cloven tongues 
 of fire should come down and rest upon their heads. But the 
 visitation of the Spirit to the Saviour was for an altogether different 
 purpose, and it could not be more fitly represented than by the 
 meek-eyed dove, the chosen symbol of gentleness and affection. 
 The eagle with its wing of power, its eye of fire, its beak of terror, 
 was the bird of Jove ; the dove the bird of Jesus. To him the 
 Spirit came not, as in dealing with the souls of men, to bring light 
 out of darkness, order out of confusion ; but to point out as the 
 Saviour of the world, the meek and the lowly, the gentle and the 
 loving Jesus. 
 
 But was no ulterior purpose served by the descent of the Spirit 
 on this occasion 1 We touch a mystery here we cannot solve, and 
 need not try to penetrate. The sinless humanity of Jesus was 
 brought into intimate and everlasting union with the divine nature 
 of the Son of God, doubly secured as we should say from sin, and 
 fully qualified for all the Messianic service, and yet we are taught 
 that that humanity was impregnated and fitted for its work by the 
 indwelling of the Holy Spirit. He was born of the Holy Ghost. 
 He was led by the Spirit into the wilderness. In the synagogue of 
 Nazareth, where he had first opened his lips as a public teacher, 
 there was given to him the book of the prophet Isaiah : he read the 
 words, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me ; and having read the 
 passage out, he closed the book, and said, This day is this Scripture 
 fulfilled in your ears. John testified of him saying : " He whom 
 God hath sent speaketh the words of God, for God giveth not the 
 Spirit by measure unto him." Jesus said of himself : ''HI cast
 
 THE BAPTISM. 57 
 
 out devils by the Spirit of God, then is the kingdom of God come 
 unto you." God sent Peter to Cornelius in opening the kingdom 
 to the Gentiles. " God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy 
 Ghost and with power." It was through the eternal Spirit that he 
 offered himself without spot to God (Heb. be 14). He was declared 
 to be the Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of holiness, 
 by the resurrection from the dead (Eom. i. 4). It was through the 
 Holy Ghost that he gave commandments to the apostles whom he 
 had chosen, until the day in which he was taken up (Acts i. 2). So 
 it is that through every stage of his career the Spirit is Avith him, 
 qualifying him for every work, why or how, he alone could tell us 
 who could lift that veil which shrouds the innermost recesses of the 
 Spirit of the Incarnate Son of God. 
 
 As the Spirit lighted upon Jesus, there came to him a voice 
 from heaven. This voice was twice heard again ; on the Mount 
 of Transfiguration, and within the Temple. It was the voice of the 
 Father. No man, since the fall of our first parent, had ever heard 
 that voice before, as no man has ever heard it since. The fall 
 sealed the Father's lips in silence ; all divine communications after- 
 wards with man were made through the Son. It was he who 
 appeared and spake to the patriarchs ; it was he who spake from 
 the summit of Sinai, and was the giver of the law ; but now for the 
 first time the Father's lips are opened, the long-kept silence is 
 broken, that this testimony of the Father to the Sonship of Jesus, 
 this expression of his entire good pleasure with him as he enters 
 upon his ministry, may be given. That testimony and expression 
 of approval were repeated afterwards in the very same words at the 
 transfiguration; the words indeed on that occasion were spoken 
 not to, but of Jesus, and addressed to the disciples ; and so with a 
 latent reference perhaps to Moses and Elias, the Father said to 
 them : " This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased : hear 
 ye him." But at the baptism St. Mark and St. Luke agree in 
 stating that the words were spoken not of, but directly to, Christ 
 himself. Primarily and eminently it may have been for Christ's 
 own sake that the words were upon this occasion spoken ; and as 
 we contemplate them in this light, we feel that no thought can 
 fathom their import, nor gauge what fulness of joy and strength 
 they may have carried into the bosom of our Lord. But here too 
 there is a veil which we must not try to lift. Instead of thinking 
 then what meaning or power this assurance of his Sonship, and of 
 the Father's full complacency in him, may have had for Christ, let 
 us take it as opening to our view the one and only way of our 
 adoption and acceptance by the Father, even by our being so well 
 pleased in all things with Christ, our having such simple, implicit 
 faith in him, that the Father, looking upon us as one with him, 
 becomes also well pleased with us.
 
 58 THE EAELIER YEARS. 
 
 IX. 
 
 TIIE TEMPTATION. 
 MATTHEW rv. 1-11 ; MARK i. 12, 13 ; LUKE iv. 1-13. 
 
 SATAN was suffered to succeed in his temptation of our first 
 parents. His success may for the moment have seemed to him 
 complete, secure ; for did not the sentence run, " In the day that 
 thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die'"? And did not that 
 sentence come from One whose steadfast truthfulness, dispute it 
 as he might in words with Eve, none knew better than himself ? 
 Having once then got man to sin, he might have fancied that he 
 had broken for ever the tie that bound earth to heaven, that he 
 had armed against the first inhabitants of our globe the same 
 resistless might, and the same unyielding justice, by which he and 
 the partners of the first revolt in heaven had been driven away into 
 their dark and ignominious prison-house. But if such a hope had 
 place for a season in the tempter's breast, it must surely have given 
 way when, summoned together with his victims into the divine 
 presence, the Lord God said to him : "I will put enmity between 
 thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed ; it shall 
 bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel." Obscure as these 
 words may at the time have seemed, yet must they have taught 
 Satan to know that his empire over this new-formed world was 
 neither to be an undisputed nor an undivided one. An enmity of 
 some kind between his seed and the woman's seed was to arise ; no 
 mere temporary irritation and insubordination on the part of his 
 new subjects, but an enmity which would prove fatal to himself and 
 to his kingdom, the final advantage in the predicted warfare being 
 all against him, for while he was to bruise the heel of his enemy, 
 that enemy was to bruise his head, to crush his power. 
 
 It could not therefore have been with a sense of security free 
 from uneasy anticipations, that from the days of the first Adam 
 down to the birth of the second, the god of this world held his 
 empire over our earth. His dominion was the dominion of sin and 
 death, and his triumph might seem complete, none of all our race 
 being found who could keep himself from sin ; whilst every one 
 that sinned had died. But were there no checks to the exercise of 
 his power, nothing to inspire him with alarm ] Had not Enoch 
 and Elijah passed away from the world without tasting death 1 
 And must it not have appeared to him an inscrutable mystery that 
 so many human spirits escaped at death altogether from beneath 
 his sway ? There were those prophecies, besides, delivered in Judea, 
 of which he could not be ignorant, getting clearer and clearer as 
 they grew in number, speaking of the advent of a great Deliverer
 
 THE TEMPTATION. 69 
 
 of the race ; there were those Jewish ceremonies prefiguring some 
 great event disastrous to his reign ; there was the whole history 
 and government of that wonderful people, the seed of Israel, 
 guided by another hand than his, and regulated with a hostile 
 purpose. 
 
 All this must have awakened dark forebodings within Satan's 
 breast ; forebodings stirred into a heightened terror when one of 
 the woman's seed at last appeared, who, for thirty years, with 
 perfect ease, apparently without a struggle, resisted all the seduc- 
 tions by which his brethren of mankind had been led into sin. 
 The visit of Gabriel to Nazareth, the angelic salutations, the angels 
 that appeared and the hymns that floated over the hills of Beth- 
 lehem, the adoration of the shepherds, the worship of the wise 
 men, the prophecies of the Temple, all these, let us believe, were 
 known to the great adversary of our race ; but not one, nor all of 
 them together, excited in him such wonder or alarm as this simple 
 fact, that here at last was one who stood absolutely stainless in 
 the midst of the world's manifold pollutions. So long, however, as 
 Jesus lived quietly and obscurely at Nazareth, he might be per- 
 mitted to enjoy his solitary triumph undisturbed, but his baptism 
 in the Jordan brings him out from his retreat. This voice from 
 heaven, a voice that neither man nor devil had ever heard before, 
 resounding through the opened skies, proclaims Him to be more 
 than a son of man to be, in very deed, the Son of God. Who can 
 this mysterious being be? an alien and an enemy, Satan has 
 counted him from his youth. But his Sonship to God ! What can 
 that imply ; how is it to be manifested 1 The time has come for 
 putting him to extreme trial, and, if he may not be personally over- 
 come, for forcing him to disclose his character at the commencement 
 of his career. 
 
 The opportunity for making the attempt is given. " Then was 
 Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the 
 devil" It was not, we may believe, under anything like com- 
 pulsion, outward or inward, that Jesus acted when immediately 
 after his baptism he retired to the desert. Between the promptings 
 of the Spirit of God and the movements of Christ there ever must 
 have been the most entire consent and harmony. Why, then, so 
 instantly after his public inauguration to his earthly work, is there 
 this voluntary retirement of our Lord, this hiding of himself in 
 lonely solitudes ? Accepting here the statement of the Evangelist, 
 that it was to furnish the Prince of Darkness with the fit oppor- 
 tunity of assaulting him, may we not believe that these forty days 
 in the wilderness without food served some other ends besides, 
 did for our Lord in his higher vocation what the forty days of 
 fasting did for Moses and Elijah in their lesser prophetic office ; 
 that they were days of preparation, meditation, prayer, a brief
 
 60 THE EAKLIER YEAKS. 
 
 season interposed between the peaceful private life of Nazareth and 
 the public troubled life on which he was about to enter, for the 
 purpose of girding him up for the great task assigned to him, a 
 season of such close, absorbing, elevating, spiritual exercises, that 
 the spirit triumphed over the body, and for a time felt not even 
 the need of daily food ? It was not till these forty days were over 
 that he was an-hungered, nor was it till hunger was felt that the 
 tempter came in person to assault. The expressions usea indeed 
 by St. Mark and St. Luke appear to imply that the temptation ran 
 through all the forty days ; but if so, it must, in the first instance, 
 have been of an inward and purely spiritual character, such as we 
 can well conceive mingling with and shadowing those other exer- 
 cises to which the days and nights of that long solitude and fasting 
 were devoted. 
 
 And yet, though the holy spirit of our Lord prompted him to 
 follow with willing footstep the leadings of the Holy Ghost, his 
 true humanity may well have shrunk from what awaited him in 
 the desert. He knew that he was there to come into close contact 
 with, to meet in personal encounter the Head of that kingdom he 
 was commissioned to overthrow; and, even as in the Garden 
 human weakness sank tremblingly under the burden of im- 
 measurable woe, so here it may have shrunk from such an inter- 
 view and such a conflict, needing as it were to be urged by Divine 
 compulsion, and thus authorising the strong expression which St. 
 Mark employs, "Immediately the Spirit driveth him into the 
 wilderness." It may in fact have been no small part of that trial 
 which ran through the forty days that he had continually before 
 him, the approach and the encounter with the Prince of Darkness. 
 
 Whatever that state of his spirit was which rendered him 
 insensible to the cravings of hunger, it terminates with' the close of 
 the forty days. The inward supports that had borne him up during 
 that rapt ecstatic condition are removed. He sinks back into a 
 natural condition. The common bodily sensations begin to- be 
 experience^ ; a strong craving for food is felt. Now, then, is the 
 moment for the tempter to make his first assault upon the Holy 
 One, as weak, famished, the hunger of his long fast gnawing at his 
 heart, he wanders with the wild beasts as his sole companions over 
 the frightful solitudes. Coming upon him abruptly, he says to 
 Jesus, "If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be 
 made bread." The words of the recent baptismal scene at the 
 Jordan are yet ringing in Satan's ears. He knows not what to 
 make of them. He would fain believe them false ; or better still, 
 he would fain prove them false by prevailing upon Christ himself 
 to doubt their truth. For, for him to doubt his Father's word 
 would be virtually to renounce, disprove his Sonship. Even then 
 as by his artful insidious speech to the woman in the garden Yea,
 
 THE TEMPTATION. 6 1 
 
 hath God said, In the day thou eatest thou shalt die ? he sought 
 to insinuate a secret doubt of the divine truthfulness and divine 
 goodness, so here, into the bosom of Jesus in the wilderness he 
 seeks to infuse a kindred doubt. 
 
 ' If thou be really the Son of God, as I have so lately heard 
 thee called. But canst thou be ? can it be here, and thus alone in 
 these desert places, foodless, companionless, comfortless, for so 
 many days that God would leave or trust his Son ? But if thou 
 wilt not doubt that thou art his Son, surely God could never mean 
 nor wish that his Son should continue in such a state as this ? If 
 thou be truly what thou hast been called, then all power must be 
 thine ; whatsoever things the Father doeth, thou too must be able 
 to do. Show, then, thy Sonship, exert thy power, relieve thyself 
 from this pressing hunger ; " command that these stones be made 
 bread." ' The temptation here is twofold : to shake if possible 
 Christ's confidence in Him who had brought him into such a con- 
 dition of extreme need, and to induce him, under the influence of 
 that distrust, to exert at once his own power to deliver himself, to 
 work a miracle to provide himself with food. The temptation is 
 at once repelled, not by any assertion of his Sonship, or of his 
 abiding trust in God, in opposition to the insidious doubt sug- 
 gested, for that doubt the Saviour never cherished; the shaft 
 that carried this doubt in it, though artfully contrived and skilfully 
 directed, glanced innocuous from the mind of that confiding Son, 
 who was ever as well pleased with the Father, as the Father had 
 declared himself to be with him. 
 
 Nor was the temptation repelled by any such counter argu- 
 ment as that it was inadmissible to exert his Divine power merely 
 for his own benefit ; but by a simple quotation from the book of 
 Deuteronomy : " It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, 
 but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." 
 Jesus waives thus all question about his being the Son of God, or 
 how it behoved him in that character to act. He takes his place 
 as a son of man, and lays his hand upon an incident in the history 
 of the children of Israel, who, led out into the wilderness, and 
 continuing as destitute of common food for forty years as he had 
 been for forty days, received in due time the manna provided for 
 them by God, Avho said to them afterwards, by the lips of Moses : 
 "The Lord thy God humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, 
 and fed thee with manna, that he might make thee know that 
 man doth not live by bread alone, but by every word that pro- 
 ceedeth out of the mouth of God." It was by the word of the 
 Lord's creative power that for those hungry Israelites the manna 
 was provided ; that word went forth at the Lord's own tune, and 
 to meet his people's wants in the Lord's own way ; and upon that 
 word, that is, upon Him whose word it was, Jesus, when now
 
 62 THE EARLIEK YEARS. 
 
 like the Israelites an-hungered in the wilderness, will rely. It is 
 not necessary for him to turn stones into bread in order to sustain 
 his life ; other kind of food his Father, if he so pleased, could 
 provide, and he will leave him to do as he pleases. From that 
 entire dependence on his Father, to which in his present circum- 
 stances, and under that Father's guidance, he had been shut up, 
 he had no desire to be relieved would certainly do nothing 
 prematurely to relieve himself, and least of all at Satan's bidding 
 would use the higher, the divine faculty that was in him, as a 
 mere instrument of self -gratification. It was in the same spirit of 
 self-denial, that ever afterwards he acted. Those who taunted 
 him on the cross by saying, "If thou be the Son of God, come 
 down from the cross," knew not how exact an echo their speech at 
 Calvary was of Satan's speech in the wilderness, how thoroughly 
 they were proving their parentage, as being of their father the 
 Devil. But Jesus would do neither as Satan nor these his children 
 bade him. His power divine was given him to execute the great 
 office of our spiritual deliverer : his way to the execution of his 
 office lay through trial, suffering, and death, and he would not call 
 that power in to save him from any part of the required endurance; 
 neither from the hunger of the wilderness, nor from any of the far 
 heavier loads he had afterwards to bear. 
 
 Foiled in his first attempt, accepting but profiting by his defeat, 
 the artful adversary at once reverses his method, and assaults the 
 Saviour precisely on the other side. He has tried to shake Christ's 
 trust in his Father ; he has failed ; that trust seems only to gather 
 strength the more severely it is proved ; he will work now upon 
 that very trust, and try to press it into presumption. " Then the 
 Devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him on a 
 pinnacle of the Temple, and saith unto him, If thou be the Son of 
 God, cast thyself down. " ' I acknowledge that you have been right 
 in the wilderness, that you have acted as a true Son of the Father. 
 You have given, in fact, no mean proof of your entire confidence in 
 him as your Father, in standing there in the extremity of hunger, 
 and virtually saying, I am here by the will of God, here he can and 
 he will provide, I leave all to him. But come, I ask you now to 
 make another and still more striking display of your dependence 
 in all possible conjunctures on the Divine aid. Show me, and all 
 those worshippers in the court below, how far this faith of yours 
 in your Father will carry you. Do now, what in the sight of all 
 will prove you to be the very one the Jews are looking for. If 
 thou be the Son of God then, as we shall presume thou art, cast 
 thyself down; the God who sustained thy body without food in 
 the wilderness, can surely sustain it as you fling yourself into the 
 yielding air ; the people who are longing to see some wonder done 
 ly their expected Messiah, will hail you as such at once, when they
 
 THE TEMPTATION. 63 
 
 see you, instead of being dashed to pieces, floating down at their 
 feet as gently as a dove, and alighting in the midst of them. Give 
 to me and them this proof of the greatness of your faith, the 
 reality of your Sonship to God ; and if you want a warrant for the 
 act in those Scriptures which you have already quoted, remember 
 what is written in one of those ancient Psalms, a psalm that the 
 wise men say relates to you : " He shall give his angels charge 
 concerning thee, and in their hands shall they bear thee up, lest at 
 any time thou dash thy foot against a stone." ' 
 
 As promptly as before the Lord replies : " It is written again, 
 Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." Here again there is 
 no attempt at argument, no correction of the quotation which the 
 tempter had made, no reminding him that, in quoting, he had 
 omitted one essential clause, " He shall keep thee in all thy ways," 
 the ways of his appointment, not of thine own fashioning. The 
 one Scripture is simply met by the other, and left to be interpreted 
 thereby. "Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." To trust 
 was one thing, to tempt another. Jesus would rely to the very 
 uttermost upon the Divine faithfulness, upon God's promised care 
 and help ; but he would not put that faithfulness to a needless 
 trial. If put by the Devil in a position of difficulty and danger, 
 he will cherish an unbounded trust in God, and if extrication from 
 that position be desirable, and no other way of effecting it be left, 
 he will even believe that God will miraculously interpose in his 
 behalf. But he will not of his own accord, without any proper 
 call or invitation, for no other purpose than to make an experi- 
 ment of the Father's willingness to aid him, to make a show of the 
 kind of heavenly protection he could claim ; he will not voluntarily 
 place himself in such a position. He was here on the pinnacle of 
 the Temple ; from that pinnacle there was another open, easy, safe 
 method of descent ; why should he refuse to take it if he desired 
 to descend; why fling himself into open space? If he did so 
 unasked, unordered by God himself, what warrant could he have 
 that the Divine power would be put forth to bear him up ? God 
 had indeed promised to bear him up, but he had not bidden him 
 cast himself down, for no other purpose than to see whether he 
 would be borne up or no ; to do what Satan wished him to do, 
 would be to show not the strength of his faith, but the extent of 
 his presumption. Thus once again by that sword of the Spirit, 
 which is the Word of God, is the second thrust of the adversary 
 turned aside. 
 
 These first two temptations, whilst opposite in character, have 
 yet much that is common to both. The preface to each of them 
 is the same : " If thou be the Son of God," a preface obviously 
 suggested by the recent testimony at the baptism. They have also 
 the common object of probing to the bottom, and thus trying to
 
 64 TIIE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 ascertain, the powers and privileges which this Sonship to God 
 conferred. There was curiosity as well as malice in the double 
 effort to do so, and the subtlety of their method lay in this, that 
 they were so constructed that had Christ yielded to either, in the 
 very disclosure of his Godhead, there had been an abuse of its 
 power. Had Jesus taken the Devil's way of proving his strength, 
 he would have taken the very way to have broken it. In those 
 first two temptations, Satan had spoken nothing of himself had 
 revealed nothing of his purposes : but balked in them he now drops 
 the mask, appears in his own person, and boldly claims homage 
 from Christ : "Again, the Devil taketh him up into an exceeding 
 high mountain, and showeth him all the kingdoms of the world, 
 and the glory of them; and saith unto him, All these things will 
 I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me." Had it 
 been upon the actual summit of the Temple at Jerusalem that 
 Jesus previously had been placed, and if so, how was his con- 
 veyance thither effected 1 was it upon the actual summit of some 
 earthly mountain that the feet of our Saviour were now planted, 
 and if so, how was it, how could it be that all the kingdoms of 
 the world and the glory of them were brought before his eye? 
 We have no answer to give to those questions ; we care not to 
 speculate as to the outward mode in which each temptation was 
 managed. We are willing to believe anything as to the accessories 
 of this narrative which leave untouched its truthfulness as a historic 
 record of an actual and personal encounter between the Prince of 
 Darkness and the Prince of Light. That the gospel narrative is 
 such a record, we undoubtingly believe, and are strengthened in 
 our faith as we perceive not only the suitableness and the subtlety 
 of each individual temptation, as addressed to the humanity of our 
 Lord, assaulting it in the only quarters in which it lay open to 
 assault; but the comprehensiveness of the whole temptation, as 
 exemplifying those classes of temptations by which humanity at 
 large, by which each of us, individually, is seduced from the path 
 of true obedience unto God. The body, soul, and spirit of our 
 Lord were each in turn invaded ; by the lust of the flesh, by the lust 
 of the eyes, by the pride of life, it was attempted to draw him away 
 from his allegiance. The first temptation was built upon bodily 
 appetite, the hunger of the long fast ; the second, upon the love of 
 ostentation, the desire we all have to show to the uttermost in what 
 favour we stand with God or men ; the third, upon ambition, the 
 love of earthly, outward power and glory. 
 
 The third had, however, a special adaptation to Christ's per- 
 sonal character and position at the time ; and this very adaptation 
 lent to it peculiar strength, making it, as it was the last, so also 
 the most insidious, the most alluring of the three. Jesus knew 
 the ancient prophecies about a universal monarchy that was to be
 
 THE TEMPTATION. fi5 
 
 set up in the days of Messiah the Prince. From the days of hi* 
 childhood, when in the Temple he had sat among the doctors, 
 hearing them and asking them questions, the sacred volume which 
 contained these prophecies had been in his hands. Who shall tell 
 us with what interest, with what wonder, with what self-application 
 these prophecies were pondered by him in the days of his youth, 
 during which he grew in wisdom as he grew in years 1 Who shall 
 tell us how soon or how fully he attained the sublime consciousness 
 that he was himself the Messiah of whom that volume spake ; 
 Whatever may have been his earlier experience, at the time at least 
 when the attestation at his baptism was given, that consciousness 
 filled and pervaded his spirit. But he fell not into the general 
 delusion which, in its desire for a conquering and victorious prince, 
 lost sight of a suffering, dying Redeemer. He knew full well that 
 the path marked out for him as the Saviour of mankind lay through 
 profoundest sorrow, and would end in an agonising death. . How 
 much of all this Satan knew, it would be presumptuous to conjec- 
 ture. This, however, we are assured that he knew, for he had 
 heard and could quote the ancient prophecies which pointed to it, 
 he knew about a monarchy that in the last days the God of heaven 
 was to set up, which was to overturn his own, which was to 
 embrace all the kingdoms of the world, and into which all the 
 glory of these kingdoms was to be brought. And he may, we 
 might almost say, he must have known beforehand of the toil and 
 strife, and hard endurance through which the throne of that 
 monarchy was to be reached by his great rival. 
 
 And now that rival is before him, just entering upon his career. 
 Upon that rival he will make a bold attempt. He will show him 
 all those kingdoms that have been so long under his dominion as 
 the god of this world. He will offer them all to him at once, 
 without a single blow being struck, a single peril encountered, a 
 single suffering endured. He will save him all that conflict which, 
 if not doubtful in the issue, was to be so painful in its progress. 
 He will lay down his sceptre, and suffer Jesus to take it up. In one 
 great gift he will make over his whole right of empire over these 
 kingdoms of the world to Christ, suffer him at once to enter upon 
 possession of them, and clothe himself with all their glory. This 
 is his glittering bribe, and all he asks in return is that Jesus shall 
 do him homage, as the superior by whom the splendid fief was 
 given, and under whom it is held. 
 
 A bold and blasphemous attempt, for who gave him those 
 kingdoms thus to give away ? And how could he imagine that 
 Jesus was open to a bribe, or would ever bow the knee to him 1 
 Let us remember, however, that we all judge others by ourselves ; 
 that there are those who think that every man has his price ; that, 
 make the bribe but large enough, and any man may be bought. 
 E
 
 66 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 And at the head of such thinkers is Satan. He judged Jesus by 
 himself. And even as through lust of government he, archangel 
 though he was, had not hesitated to withdraw his worship from the 
 Supreme, so may he have thought that, taken unawares, even the 
 Son of God himself might have fallen before the dazzling tempta- 
 tion. Had he done so, Satan would indeed have triumphed ; for 
 putting wholly out of the question the violated relationship to the 
 Father, Jesus would thus have renounced all the purely moral and 
 religious purposes of his mission would have ceased to be regarded 
 as the author of a spiritual revolution, and the founder of a spiri- 
 tual kingdom, affecting myriads of human spirits from the begin- 
 ning to the end of time, and would thenceforth have taken up the 
 character of a mere vulgar earthly monarch. 
 
 But Satan knew not with whom he had to do. The eye of 
 Jesus may for a moment have been dazzled by the offer made and 
 this implied neither imperfection nor sin but it refused to rest 
 upon the seducing spectacle. It turned quickly and resolutely 
 away. No sooner is the bribe offered than it is repelled. In haste, 
 as if that magnificent panorama was not one on which even his 
 pure eye should be suffered to repose ; as if this temptation were 
 one which even he could not afford to dally with ; in anger too at 
 the base condition coupled with the bribe, and as if he who offered 
 it could no longer be suffered to remain in his presence, he calls 
 the Devil by his name and says : " Get thee hence, Satan ; for it 
 is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only 
 shalt thou serve." Satan had wanted Jesus to give him some proof 
 of his Divine power, and now he gets it ; gets it as that command 
 is given which he must instantly obey. At once all that glittering 
 illusion that he had conjured up vanishes from the view. At once 
 his hateful presence is withdrawn, the conflict is over, the victory 
 is complete. Jesus stands once more alone in the wilderness, but 
 he is not left alone. Angels come and minister unto him, gazing 
 with wonder on that mysterious man who has entered into this 
 Solitary conflict with the head of the principalities and powers of 
 darkness, and foiled him at every point. 
 
 X. 
 
 THE FIRST DISCIPLES. 
 JOHN i. 29-51. 
 
 FROM the forty days in the desert, from the long fast, from the 
 triple assault, from the great victory won, from the companionship 
 of the ministering angels, Jesus returns to the banks of the Jordan, 
 and mingles, unnoticed and unknown, among the disciples of the
 
 THE FIRST DISCIPLES. 67 
 
 Baptist. On the day of his return, a deputation from the Sanhe- 
 drim in Jerusalem arrives, to instituted formal and authoritative 
 inquiry into the character and claims of the great preacher of 
 repentance. John's answers to the questions put by these deputies 
 are chiefly negative in their character. He is not the Christ ; he is 
 not Elijah risen from the dead ; neither is he that prophet, by 
 whom, as they imagined, Elijah was to be accompanied ; who he is 
 he would not say, however pointedly interrogated. But what he is, 
 he so far informs them as to quote and apply to himself the 
 passage from the prophecies of Isaiah, which spake of a voice crying 
 in the wilderness, "Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his 
 paths straight." Challenged as to his right to baptize, if he is not 
 that Christ, nor Elias, nor that prophet, John can now speak as he 
 had not been able to do previously. Hitherto he had spoken inde- 
 terminately of one whom he knew not, the greater than he, who 
 was to come after him ; but now the sign from heaven had been 
 given, the Spirit had been seen descending and abiding on Jesus. 
 From the day of his baptism Jesus had withdrawn John knew not 
 whither, but now he sees him in the crowd, and says : " I baptize 
 with water : but there standeth one among you, whom ye know not ; 
 he it is, who, coming after me, is preferred before me, whose shoe's 
 latchet I am not worthy to unloose." 
 
 Having got so little to satisfy them as to who the Baptist was, 
 it does not seem that the deputies from Jerusalem troubled them- 
 selves to make any inquiries as to who this other and greater 
 than John was. Nor was it otherwise with the multitude. Though 
 the words of the Baptist, so publicly spoken, were such as might 
 well awaken curiosity, the day passed, and Jesus remained un- 
 known, assuming, saying, doing nothing by which he could be 
 recognised. That John needed to point him out in order to re- 
 cognition confirms our belief, derived in the first instance directly 
 from the narrative itself, that at the baptism none but John 
 and Jesus heard the voice from heaven, or saw the descending 
 dove. Had the bystanders seen and heard these, among the dis- 
 ciples of John there would have been some ready at once to 
 recognise Jesus on his return from the desert. But it is not so. 
 Jesus remains hidden, and will not with his own hand lift the 
 veil, will not bear any witness of himself, leaves it to another 
 to do so. 
 
 But he must not continue thus unknown, that were to frus- 
 trate the very end of all John's ministry. The next day, therefore, 
 as John sees Jesus coming to him, whilst yet he is some way off, 
 he points to him, and says : " Behold the Lamb of God, which 
 taketh away the sin of the world ! This is he of whom I said, 
 After me cometh a man which is preferred before me ; for he was 
 before me. And I knew him not: but that he should be made
 
 68 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 manifest to Israel, therefore am I come baptizing with water." " I 
 saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it abode 
 upon him. And I knew him not : but he that sent me to baptize 
 with water, the same said unto me, Upon whom thou shalt see the 
 Spirit descending, and remaining on him, the same is he which 
 baptize th with the Holy Ghost. And I saw, and bare record that 
 this is the Son of God." 
 
 John's first public official testimony to Christ was, as it seems to 
 us, particularly remarkable, as containing no reference whatever to 
 that character or office in which the mass of the Jewish people might 
 have been willing enough to recognise him, but confined to those 
 two attributes of his person and work which they so resolutely re- 
 jected. There is no mention here of Jesus as Messiah the Prince, 
 the King of Israel. The record that John bears of him is, that he 
 is the Son of God, the Lamb of God. He had lately heard the 
 voice from heaven saying, " Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I 
 am well pleased." In giving him then this title, in calling him the 
 Son of God, John was but re-echoing, as it were, the testimony of the 
 Father. Taught thus to use and to apply it, it may be fairly ques- 
 tioned, whether the Baptist in his first employment of it entered 
 into the full significance of the term, as declarative of Christ's unity 
 of nature with the Father. That in its highest, its only true sense 
 indeed, it did carry with it such a meaning, and was understood to 
 do so by those who knew best how to interpret it, appears in many 
 a striking passage of the life of Jesus, and most conspicuously of all 
 in his trial and condemnation before the Jewish Sanhedrim. It 
 was a title whose assumption by Jesus involved, in the apprehension 
 of those who regarded him but as a man, nothing short of blasphemy. 
 Such is the title here given to him by the Baptist. Whether he 
 fully understood it or not, we can trace its adoption and employ- 
 ment to an obvious and natural source. 
 
 But that other title, the Lamb of God, and the description 
 annexed to it, " who taketh away the sin of the world," how came 
 the Baptist to apply these to Christ, and what did he mean by 
 doing so ? Here we cannot doubt that the same inner and divine 
 teaching, which taught him in a passage of Isaiah's prophecies to 
 see himself, taught him in another to see the Saviour, and that it 
 was from that passage in which the prophet speaks of the Messiah 
 as a lamb brought to the slaughter, as a sheep dumb before his 
 shearers, that he borrowed the title now for the first time bestowed 
 upon Jesus. From the same passage, too, he learned that the 
 Anointed of the Lord was to be "wounded for our transgressions, 
 to be bruised for our iniquities, the chastisement of our peace was 
 to be upon him, and with his stripes we are to be healed." Here 
 in Jesus, John sees the greater than himself whose way he was to 
 prepare before him, but that way he sees to be one leading him to
 
 THE FIRST DISCIPLES. 69 
 
 suffering and to death ; his perhaps the only Jewish eye at that 
 moment opened to discern the truth that it was through this 
 suffering and this death that the spiritual victories of the great 
 King were to be achieved, that it was upon them that his spiritual 
 kingdom was to have its broad and deep foundations laid. John's 
 baptism had hitherto been one of repentance for the remission of 
 sins. This remission had been held out in prospect as the end to 
 which repentance was to conduct; but all about its source, its 
 fulness, its certainty had been obscure, obscure perhaps to John's 
 own eyes, obscure at least in the manner of his speaking about it; but 
 now he sees the Lamb of God, the suffering, dying Jesus, taking 
 away by bearing it the sin of the world, not taking away by 
 subduing it the sinfulness of the world, that John could not have 
 meant, this Jesus has not done, but taking the world's sin away 
 by taking it on himself, and expiring beneath its load, making the 
 great atoning sacrifice, fulfilling all the types of the Jewish cere- 
 monial, all that the paschal lamb, all that the lamb of the morning 
 and evening sacrifice, had been typifying. 
 
 In the two declarations then of John, " This is the Son of 
 God," " Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the 
 world," you have in a form as distinct, as short and compendious as 
 it is anywhere else to be found, the gospel of the kingdom. The 
 divine nature of the man Christ Jesus, the completeness and 
 efficacy of the shedding of his blood, of the offering up of himself 
 for the remission of sins, are they not here very simply and plainly 
 set forth ? We are not asked to believe that the Baptist himself 
 understood his own testimony to Christ, as with the fight thrown 
 on it by the Epistles, and especially in this instance, by the Epistle 
 to the Hebrews, we now understand it; but assuredly he under- 
 stood so much of it as that he himself saw in Christ, and desired 
 that others should see in him, the heaven-laid channel, opened up 
 through his life and death, of that divine mercy which covereth all 
 the transgressions of every penitent believing soul. 
 
 How interesting to hear this gospel of the grace of God preached 
 so early, so simply, so earnestly, so believingly by him whose office 
 in all the earlier parts of his ministry was so purely moral, a call 
 simply to repentance, to acts and deeds of justice, mercy, truth. 
 But this was the issue to which all those preparatory instructions 
 were to conduct. The law in the hands of John was to be a 
 schoolmaster to guide at last to Christ; and when the time for 
 that guidance came, was it not with a sensation of relief, a bound- 
 ing throb of exulting satisfaction, that conscious of how impotent 
 in themselves all his efforts were to get men to repent and reform, 
 while the pardon of their sins was anxiously toiled after in the 
 midst of perplexity and doubt, instead of being gratefully and 
 joyfully accepted as God's free gift in Christ the Baptist pro-
 
 70 THE EARLIEE YEARS. 
 
 claimed to all around, "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh 
 away the sin of the world. " 
 
 Nor was he discouraged that his announcement met with no 
 response that day from the crowd around, that still his voice was 
 as the voice of one crying in a wilderness. The many who waited 
 on his ministry, and partook of his baptism, came from curiosity, 
 acted on a passing impulse, hoped that some new and better state 
 of things socially and politically was to be ushered in by this 
 strange child of the desert, and had no deeper wants to be sup- 
 plied, or spiritual longings to be satisfied. Quite strange if not 
 unmeaning, yet unwelcome to their ears, this new utterance of 
 the Baptist. It was not after the Lamb of God, not after one who 
 was to take away their sins, that they were seeking. But there 
 were others of a different mould, partakers of the spirit of Simeon 
 and Anna, waiting for the Consolation of Israel, for the coming of 
 one to whom, whatever outward kingdom he was to set up, they 
 mainly looked as their spiritual Lord and King, in the days of 
 whose kingdom peace was to enter troubled consciences, and there 
 should be rest for wearied hearts. The eyes of these waiters for 
 the morning saw the first streaks of dawn in the ministry of the 
 Baptist, and some of them had already enrolled themselves as his 
 disciples, attaching themselves permanently to his person. 
 
 The next day after he had given his first testimony to Christ's 
 lamb-like and sacrificial character and office, a testimony ap- 
 parently so little heeded, attended at least with no outward and 
 visible result, John is standing with two of these disciples by his 
 side. He will repeat to them the testimony of yesterday ; they had 
 heard it already, but he will try whether it will not have another 
 and more powerful effect when given not promiscuously to a 
 general audience, but specifically to these two. Looking upon Jesus 
 as he walked, he directed their attention to him, by simply saying 
 once again, " Behold the LAMB OF GOD !" leaving it to their 
 memory to supply all about him which in the course of the two 
 preceding days he had declared. Not now without effect. Neither 
 of these two men may know as yet in what sense he is the Lamb 
 of God, nor how by him their sin is to be taken away ; but both 
 have felt their need of some one willing and able to guide their 
 agitated hearts to a secure haven of rest, and they hope to find in 
 him thus pointed out the one they need. They follow him. John 
 restrains them not ; it is as he would wish. Willingly, gladly, he 
 sees them part from him to follow this new Master. He knows 
 that they are putting themselves under a better, higher guidance 
 than any which he can give. But who are these two men t One 
 of them is Andrew, better known to us by his brotherhood to 
 Simon. The other reveals himself by the very manner in which 
 he draws the veil over his own name. He would not name him-
 
 THE FIRST DISCIPLES. 71 
 
 self, and by that very modesty which he displays he stands 
 revealed. It is no other than that disciple whom Jesus loved ; 
 no other than the writer of this Gospel, upon whose memory those 
 days of his first acquaintance with Jesus had fixed themselves in 
 the exact succession of their incidents so indelibly, that though he 
 writes his narrative at least forty years after the death of Christ, 
 he writes not only as an eye-witness, but as one who can tell day 
 after day what happened, and no doubt the day was memorable to 
 him, and the very hour of that day, on which he left the Baptist's 
 side to join himself to Jesus. 
 
 John and Andrew follow Jesus. We wonder which of the two 
 it was that made the first movement towards him. Let us believe 
 it to have been John, that we may cherish the thought that he 
 was the first to follow as he was the last to leave. He was one 
 at least of the first two men who became followers of the Lamb ; 
 and that because of their having heard him described as the 
 Lamb of God. When this first incident in his own connection 
 with Jesus is considered, need we wonder that this epithet "the 
 Lamb" became so favourite a one with John; that it is in his 
 writings, and in them alone of all the writings of the New Testa- 
 ment, that it is to be found, occurring nearly thirty times in the 
 book of the Apocalypse. 
 
 The two disciples follow Jesus, silently, respectfully, admiringly 
 anxious to address him, yet unwilling to obtrude. He relieves 
 them from their embarrassment. The instinct of that love which 
 is already drawing them to him, tells him that he is being 
 followed for the first time by human footsteps, answering to warm- 
 beating, anxious human hearts. He turns and says to them, " What 
 seek ye?" a vague and gene-ral question, which left it open to 
 them to give any answer that they pleased, to connect their move- 
 ment with him or not. But their true hearts speak out. It is not 
 any short and hurried converse by the way that will satisfy their 
 ardent longings. They would have hours with him, days with him, 
 alone in the seclusion of his home. " Kabbi" they say to him, the 
 first time doubtless that Jesus was ever so addressed, " where 
 dwellest thou ? He saith to them, Come and see ; and they came 
 and saw where he dwelt, and abode with him that day, for it was 
 about the tenth hour." If, in his Gospel, John numbers the hour* 
 of the day according to the Eoman method of computation, then it 
 must have been early in the morning, at ten o'clock, having eight 
 hours of that day to run, that Christ's invitation was given and 
 accepted. We incline to believe, however, that John follows not 
 the Koman but the Jewish method of counting, and if so, then it 
 was in the afternoon, at four o'clock, that the two disciples accom- 
 panied our Lord. And this we are constrained to hold, even though 
 it gives scant time for the other incident, the bringing of Simon to
 
 72 THE EAKLTER YEARS 
 
 Jesus, to liappeii during the same day, which from the specific and 
 journal-like character of this part of John's narrative, we can 
 scarcely help conceiving that it did. 
 
 But where and whose was the abode to which Jesus conducted 
 John and Andrew, and how were their hours employed 1 It could 
 only have been some house which the hospitality of strangers had 
 opened for a few days' residence, to one whom they knew not, and 
 over all the intercourse that took place beneath its roof the veil is 
 drawn. It is the earliest instance this of that studied reserve as to 
 all the minuter details of Christ's daily life and conversation upon 
 which we may have afterwards to offer some remarks. John has 
 aot yet learned to lay his head on that Master's bosom, but already 
 he is sitting at his feet. And there for all day long, and on into 
 the quiet watches of the night, would he sit drinking in our Lord's 
 first opening of his great message of mercy from the" Father. 
 Andrew has something of the restless active spirit of his brother in 
 him, and so no sooner has he himself attained a sure conviction that 
 this is indeed the Christ whom he has found, than he hurries out 
 to seek his own brother Simon, and bring him to Jesus. We 
 should have liked exceedingly to have been present at that inter- 
 view, to have stood by as Jesus for the first time looked at Simon, 
 and Simon for the first time fixed his eye on Jesus. The Lord 
 looks upon Simon and sees all he is, and all that he is yet to be. 
 His great confession, his three denials, his bitter repentance, his 
 restoration, the great services rendered, the death like that of his 
 Master he is to die, all are present to the thoughts of Jesus as he 
 looks. "Thou art Simon," he says at once to him, as if he had 
 known him from his youth, " Simon, the son of Jona : thou shalt 
 be called Cephas, which is by interpretation, a stone." On an 
 after occasion Jesus explained more fully why it was that this new 
 name of Peter the Rock was bestowed. Here we have nothing but 
 the simple fact before us, that it was at the first meeting of the two, 
 and before any converse whatever took place between them, that 
 the change of name was announced ; with what effect on Peter we 
 are left to guess, his very silence, a silence rather strange to him, 
 the only thing to tell us how deep was the impression made by this 
 first interview with Christ. 
 
 The next day, the fifth from that on which this chronicling of 
 the days begins, Jesus goes forth on his return to Galilee, finds 
 Philip by the way, and saith to him, " Follow me." Philip was of 
 Bethsaida. Bethsaida lay at the northern extremity of the Sea of 
 Galilee, not on the line of Christ's route from Bethabara to Nazareth 
 or Cana. We infer from this circumstance, that like John, Andrew, 
 and Peter, Philip had left his home to attend on the ministry of 
 the Baptist. On the banks of the Jordan, or afterwards from one 
 or other of his Galilean countrymen, who had already joined them-
 
 THE FIRST DISCIPLES. 73 
 
 selves to Christ, he had learned the particulars of his earlier earthly 
 history. Any difficulty that he might himself have had in re- 
 cognising the Messiahship of one so born and educated, was soon 
 got over, the wonder at last enhancing the faith. Finding Nathanael, 
 Philip said to him, " We have found him of whom Moses in the 
 law, and the prophets did write, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of 
 Joseph." It was a very natural reply for one who lived so near to 
 Nazareth, and knew how insignificant a place it was, to say : " Can 
 there any good thing, any such good thing, come out of Nazareth ? " 
 Come and see, was Philip's answer. It proved the very simplicity 
 and docility of Nathanael's nature, that he did at once go to see. 
 Perhaps, however, his recent exercises had prepared him for the 
 movement. Before Philip called him, he had been under the fig- 
 tree, the chosen place for meditation and prayer with the devout of 
 Israel. There had he been pondering in his heart, wondering 
 when the Hope of Israel was to come, and praying that it might 
 be soon, when a friend conies and tells him that the very one 
 he has been praying for has appeared. With willing spirit he 
 accompanies his friend. Before, however, he gets close to him, 
 Jesus says, Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile ! Ho\i 
 much of that very guileless spirit which we have learned to call 
 by his name is there in Nathanael's answer ! Without thinking 
 that he is in fact accepting Christ's description of him as true, and 
 so exposing himself to the charge of no small amount of arrogance, 
 disproving in fact that charge by the very blindness that he shows 
 to the expression of it, he says, "Whence knowest thou me?" 
 Our Lord's reply, " Before that Philip called thee, when thou wast 
 under the fig-tree, I saw thee," we may regard as carrying more 
 with it to the conscience and heart of Nathanael than the mere 
 proof that Christ's eye saw what no human eye, placed as he was at 
 the time, could have seen, but that the secrets of all hearts lay 
 open to him with whom he had now to do. Nathanael comes with 
 doubting mind, but a guileless heart ; and so now, without dealing 
 with it intellectually, the doubt is scattered by our Lord's quick 
 glance penetrating into his inner spirit, and an instant and sure 
 faith is at once planted in Nathanael's breast. 
 
 I am apt to think from the very form of Nathanael's answer, 
 from the occurrence in it of a phrase that does not seem to have 
 been a Jewish synonym for the Messiah, that Nathanael too had 
 been at the Jordan, and had heard there the testimony that John 
 had borne to Jesus. Eabbi, he says, Thou art what I have lately 
 heard thee called, and wondered at them calling thee, " Thou art 
 the Son of God, thou art the King of Israel." There was some- 
 thing so fresh, so fervent, so full-hearted in the words, they fell so 
 pleasantly on the ear of Jesus, that a bright vision rose before his 
 eye of the richer things that were yet in store for all that believed
 
 74 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 on him. First, he says to Nathanael individually, Because I said 
 unto thee, I saw thee under the fig-tree, believest thou ? thou shalt 
 see greater things than these ; and then looking on the others, 
 whilst still addressing himself to him, he adds : Verily, verily. I 
 say unto you, Hereafter, or rather From this time forward ye shall 
 see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending 
 upon the Son of Man. You have heard that, a few weeks ago, on 
 the banks of the river, the heavens opened for a moment above my 
 head, and the Spirit was seen coming down like a dove upon me. 
 That was but a sign. Believe what that sign was meant to con- 
 firm ; believe in me as the Lamb of God, the Saviour of the world, 
 the baptizer with the Holy Ghost, and your eye of faith shall be 
 quickened, and you shall see those heavens standing continually 
 open above my head, opened by me for you ; and the angels of 
 God, all beings and things that carry on the blessed ministry of 
 reconciliation between earth and heaven, between the souls of be- 
 lievers below and the heavenly Father above, going up and bring- 
 ing blessings innumerable down, ascending and descending upon 
 the Son of Man. Son of God, my Father called me so at my 
 baptism, the devil tempted me as such in the desert, the Baptist 
 gave me that name at Bethabara, and thou, Nathanael, hast be- 
 stowed it on me now once again ; but the name that I now like 
 best, and shall oftenest call myself, is that of the Son of Man ; and 
 yet I am both ; and in being both truly and eternally fulfil the 
 dream of Bethel. It was but in a dream that your father Jacob 
 saw that ladder set up on earth, whose top reached to heaven, up 
 and down which the angels were ever moving. It shall be in no 
 dream of the night, but in the clearest vision of the day, in the 
 hours when the things of the unseen world shall stand most truly 
 and vividly revealed, you shall see in me that ladder of all gracious 
 communication between earth and heaven, my humanity fixing 
 firmly the one end of that ladder on earth, in my divinity the 
 other end of that ladder lost amid the splendours of the throne. 
 
 At first sight the narrative of these five days after the temp- 
 tation, which we have thus followed to its close, has but little to 
 attract. It recounts what many might regard as the compara- 
 tively insignificant fact of the attachment of five men all of them 
 Galileans, none of them of any note or rank among the people 
 to Christ. But of these five men four afterwards became apostles 
 (all of them, indeed, if, as is believed by many of our best critics, 
 Nathanael and Bartholomew were the same person) ; and two of 
 them, Peter and John, are linked together in the everlasting 
 remembrance of that Church which they helped to found. Had 
 the Baptist's ministry done nothing more than prepare those five 
 men for the reception of the Messiah, and hand them over so pre- 
 pared to Jesus, to become the first apostles of the faith, it had not
 
 THE FIRST DISCIPLES. 75 1 
 
 been iu vain. These five men were the first disciples of Jesus, 
 and in the narrative of their becoming so we have the history of 
 the infancy of the Church of the living God, that great community 
 of the saints, that growing and goodly company, swelling out to 
 a multitude that no man can number, out of every kindred, and 
 tongue, and people, and nation. If there be any interest in tracing 
 the great river that bears at last on its broad bosom the vessels of 
 many lands, to some little bubbling fountain up among the hills ; if 
 there be any interest in tracing the great monarchy whose power 
 overshadowed the earth, to the erection of a little organised com- 
 munity among the Sabine hills ; if the traveller regards with 
 wonder the little gushing stream, or the historian the first weak 
 beginnings of the Eoman commonwealth ; then may the same 
 emotion be permitted to the Christian as he reads the page that 
 tells of the first foundations being laid of a spiritual kingdom, 
 which is to outlive all the kingdoms of this earth, and abide in 
 its glory for ever. 
 
 Still another interest attaches to the narrative now before us. 
 It tells us of the variety of agencies employed in bringing the first 
 of his disciples to Christ. Two of these five men acted on the 
 promptings of the Baptist, one of them on the direct call or 
 summons of our Lord himself ; one at the instance of a brother, 
 one on the urgency of a friend. It would be foolish to take these 
 cases of adherence to the Christian cause as typical or representa- 
 tive of the numbers brought respectively to Christ by the voice of 
 the preacher, the word of Christ himself, and the agency of relative 
 or acquaintance ; but we cannot go wrong in regarding this variety 
 of agency within so narrow limits, as warranting all means and 
 methods by which any can be won to a true faith in Christ. What- 
 ever these means and methods may be, in order to be effectual they 
 must finally resolve themselves into direct individual address. It 
 was in this way the first five disciples were gathered in. By John 
 speaking to two, Jesus to one, Andrew to one, Philip to one. It 
 is the same species of agency similarly employed which God has 
 always most richly blessed ; the direct, earnest, loving appeal of 
 one man to his acquaintance, relative, or friend. How many are 
 there among us who have been engaged for years either in sup 
 porting by our liberality, or aiding by our actual service one or 
 other of those societies whose object is to spread Christianity, 
 but who may seldom if ever have endeavoured, by direct and 
 personal address, to influence one human soul for its spiritual and 
 eternal good 1 Not till more of the spirit of John and Jesus, 
 of Andrew and Philip, as exhibited in this passage, descend upon 
 us, shall we rightly acquit ourselves of our duty as followers of the 
 Lamb. 
 
 But the chief interest of the passage lies in the conduct of our
 
 76 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 Lord himself. Those five days were not only the birth-time of 
 the Church, they were the beginning of Christ's public ministry ; 
 and how does that ministry open ? Silently, gently, unostenta- 
 tiously ; no public appearances, no great works done, no new in- 
 strumentality employed ; by taking two men to live with him for 
 a day, by asking another to follow him, by dealing wisely and 
 tenderly and encouragingly with two others who are brought to 
 him, so enters the Lord upon the earthly task assigned to him. 
 Would any one sitting down to devise a career for the Son of God 
 descending upon our earth, to work out the salvation of our race, 
 have assigned such an opening to his ministry, and yet could 
 anything have been more appropriate to him who came not to be 
 ministered unto but to minister, than this turning away from being 
 ministered unto by the angels in the desert, to the rendering of 
 those kindly and all-important services to John and Andrew and 
 Peter, and Philip and Nathanael ? 
 
 XI. 
 
 THE FIRST MIRACLE. 
 JOHN H. 1-12. 
 
 "AND the third day there was a marriage in Cana of 
 Galilee." Looking back to the preceding narrative, you observe 
 that from the time of the arrival at Bethabara of the deputation 
 from Jerusalem sent to inquire into the Baptist's character and 
 claims, an exact note of the time is kept in recording the incidents 
 which followed. "The next day," i.e. the first after that of the 
 appearance of the deputation, John sees Jesus coming unto him, 
 and points him out as the " Lamb of God, which taketh away the 
 sin of the world." " Again the next day after," standing in com- 
 pany with two of his disciples, John repeats the testimony, and 
 the two disciples followed Jesus ; one of them, Andrew, going and 
 bringing his own brother Simon ; the other John, sitting at his 
 new Master's feet. " The day following," Jesus, setting out on his 
 return to Galilee, findeth Philip. Philip findeth Nathanael, and 
 so, accompanied by these five (Andrew, John, Peter, Philip, and 
 Nathanael), Jesus proceeds upon his way back to his home. Occur- 
 ring in a narrative like this, where the regular succession of events 
 is so accurately chronicled, we naturally, in coming to the expres- 
 sion, " the third day," interpret it as meaning the third day after 
 the one that had immediately before been spoken of, that is, the 
 one of Christ's departure from the banks of the Jordan. Two 
 days' easy travel carry him and his new attendants to Nazareth, 
 but there is no one there to receive them. The mother of Jesus
 
 THE FIEST MIRACLE. 77 
 
 and his brethren are at Cana, a village lying a few miles farthei 
 to the north. Thither they follow them, and find that a marriage 
 is being celebrated there, to the feast connected with which Jesus 
 and his five disciples are invited. One of the five, Nathanael, 
 belonged to Cana, and might have received the invitation on his 
 own account as an acquaintance of the family in whose house the 
 marriage -feast was held. But the others were strangers, only 
 known to that family as having accompanied Jesus for the last few 
 days, their tie of discipleship to him quite a recent one, and as yet 
 scarcely recognised by others. That on his account alone, and in 
 consequence of a connection with him of such a kind, they should 
 have been at once asked to be present at an entertainment to 
 which friends and relatives only were ordinarily invited, would 
 seem to indicate some familiar bond between the family at 
 Nazareth and the one in which this marriage occurs. The idea of 
 some such relationship is supported by the freedom which Mary 
 appears to exercise speaking to the servants not like a stranger, 
 but as one familiar in the dwelling. Besides, if Simon, called the 
 Canaanite, was called so because of his connection with the village 
 of Cana, his father Alphseus or Cleophas, who was married to a 
 sister of Christ's mother, may have resided there, and it may have 
 been in his family that this marriage occurred. Could we but be 
 sure of this, which certainly is probable, and which early tradition 
 affirms, the circumstance that when Jesus seated himself at this 
 marriage-feast he sat down at a table around which mother, and 
 brothers and sisters, and uncle and aunt, and cousins of his own 
 now gathered, it would give a peculiarly domestic character to the 
 scene, and throw a new charm and interest around the miracle 
 which was wrought at it. At any rate, we may assume that it 
 was in a family connected by some close ties, whether of ac- 
 quaintance or relationship with that of Jesus that the marriage- 
 least was kept. 
 
 "And when they wanted wine, the mother of Jesus saith to 
 him, They have no wine." The wine, provided only for the 
 original number of guests, began to fail. Mary, evidently watch- 
 ing with a kind and womanly interest the progress of the feast, 
 and rightly ascribing the threatened exigency to the unexpected 
 arrival of her son and his companions, becomes doubly anxious to 
 shield a family in which she took such an interest from the painful 
 feeling of having failed in the duties of hospitality. But why did 
 Mary, seeing what she did, and feeling as she did, go to Jesus and 
 say to him, "They have no wine"? That she expected him in 
 some way to interfere is evident ; but what ground had she to 
 expect that he would do so in any such manner as he did 1 She had 
 never seen him work a miracle before. She had no reason, from 
 past experience to believe that he would or could make wine at
 
 78 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 will, or that by his word of power he would supply the deficiency. 
 She had, however, been laying up in her heart, and for thirty years 
 revolving all that had been told her at the beginning about her 
 son. She had none at Nazareth but Joseph to speak to ; none but 
 he who would have believed her had she spoken. Joseph now is 
 dead, and she is left to nurse the swelling hope in her solitary 
 breast. At last the period comes, when rumours of the great 
 preacher of repentance who has appeared in the wilderness of 
 Judea, and to whom the whole country is rushing, spread over 
 Galilee. Her son hears them, and rises from his work, and bids 
 her adieu ; the first time that he has parted from her since she had 
 lost him in Jerusalem, now eighteen years ago. What can be his 
 object in leaving her, his now widowed mother ? She learns 
 perhaps he himself tells her that he goes with other Galileans 
 who want to see and hear the new teacher, it may be to enrol 
 themselves by baptism as his disciples. She asks about this new 
 teacher. Can it be that she discovers him to be no other than the 
 son of her relative Elisabeth, whose birth was in so strange a 
 manner linked with that of Jesus 1 If so, into what a tumult of 
 expectation must she have been thrown ! 
 
 But whether knowing aught of this or not, now at last, after a 
 two months' absence, her son rejoins her, strangely altered in his 
 bearing ; attended, too, by those who, young as he is, hail him as 
 their Master, and pay him all possible respect. She scarcely 
 ventures to ask him what has happened in the interval of his 
 absence ; but them she fully questions ; and as they tell her that 
 John had publicly proclaimed her son to be no other than He 
 whose coming it was his great object to announce ; had pointed to 
 him as the Lamb of God, the Son of God, the Baptizer with the 
 Holy Ghost ; as they tell that they had found in him the Messias, 
 the Christ, of whom Moses in the law and the prophets did write, 
 and that it was as such they were now following him, to what a 
 pitch of joyful expectation must she have been raised ! Now at last 
 the day so long looked for has come. Men have begun to see in 
 him, her son, the Hope of Israel. Soon all Israel shall hail him 
 as their Messiah. Meanwhile he is here among friends and re- 
 latives ; has willingly accepted the invitation given to join this 
 marriage-feast ; has lost nothing, as it would seem, of all his early 
 kindly feelings to those around him. What will he think, what 
 will he do, if he be told that owing to his presence, and that of his 
 disciples, a difficulty has arisen, and discredit is likely to be thrown 
 upon this family, which has shown itself so ready to gratify him, by 
 asking these strangers to share in the festivities of the occasion ? 
 She thinks, perhaps, of the cruse of oil, of the barley-loaves of the 
 old .proj hets. Surely if her son be that great Prophet that is to 
 appear, he might do something to provide for this unforeseen emer-
 
 THE FIKST MIRACLE. 79 
 
 gency ; to meet tiiis want ; to keep the heart of this poor, perhaps, 
 but generous household from being wounded. But what shall she 
 ask him to do 1 what shall she suggest ? She will leave that to 
 himself. She knows how kind in heart, how wise in counsel he is, 
 and believes now that his power is equal to his will She modestly 
 contents herself with simply directing his attention to the fact, and 
 saying to him, " They have no wine. 
 
 It is the very delicacy of this approach and address which 
 renders so remarkable our Lord's reply, " Woman, what have I to 
 do with thee ]" exactly the same form of expression which, on more 
 than one occasion, the demons, whom he was about to dispossess, 
 addressed to Jesus, when they said to him, What have we to do 
 with thee ? or, What hast thou to do with us, Jesus, thou Son of 
 God 1 On their part, such language implied a repudiation of his 
 interference; a denial of, and a desire to resist, his power and 
 authority. And what can the same form of expression mean as 
 addressed now by Jesus to his mother ? Interpret it as we may ; 
 soften it to the uttermost so as to remove anything like harshness ; 
 still it is the language of resistance and reproof. There may have 
 been some over-haste or impatience on Mary's part ; some motherly 
 vanity mingling with her desire to see her son exert his power, and 
 reveal his character before these assembled guests, which required 
 to be gently checked ; but our Lord's mam object in speaking to 
 her as he did, was to teach Mary that the period of his subjection 
 to her maternal authority had expired ; that in the new character 
 he had assumed, in that new sphere of action upon which he had 
 entered, it was not for her, upon the ground simply of her relation- 
 ship to him, to dictate or suggest what he should do. There was 
 some danger of her forgetting this ; of her cherishing and acting on 
 the belief that he was still to be her son, as he had been through- 
 out those thirty by-past years. It was right, it was even kind, that 
 at the very outset she should be guarded against this danger, and 
 saved the disappointment she might have felt had the limits of her 
 influence and authority been left vague and undefined. Jesus 
 would, therefore, have her to know definitely, and from the begin- 
 ning of his ministry, that mother though she was as to his humanity, 
 this gave her no right to interfere with him as the Son of the 
 Highest, the Saviour of mankind. Thus gently but firmly does he 
 repel the bringing of her maternal relationship to bear upon his 
 Messianic work ; thus gently but firmly does he assert and vindi- 
 cate his perfect independence, disengaging himself from this the 
 closest of earthly ties, that he may stand free in all things to do 
 only the will of his Father in heaven. This manner of his conduct 
 to the mother whom he so tenderly loved, may be regarded as the 
 first of those repeated rebukes which Jesus gave by anticipation to 
 that idolatrous Teverence which has carried the human bond into
 
 80 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 the spiritual kingdom ; carried it even into the heavenly places ; 
 exalting Mary as the Queen of heaven ; seating the crowned mother 
 on a throne sometimes on a level with, sometimes above that 
 occupied by her Son, teaching us to pray to her as an equal inter- 
 cessor with Christ. 
 
 " Woman, what have I to do with thee ? Mine hour is not yet 
 come." "With him no impatience, no undue haste, no hurrying 
 prematurely into action. He has waited quietly those thirty years, 
 without a single trial of that superhuman strength which lay in 
 him, content to bide till the set time came. And now he waits, 
 even as to the performance of his first miracle, till the right and 
 foreseen hour for its performance has arrived. As to this act of hi? 
 power, and as to every act of it ; as to this incident of his life, and 
 as to every incident of it, he could tell when the hour had not 
 come, and when it had. He who at this marriage-feast could sa5 
 to Mary, "Mine hour is not yet come," could say to the Omniscient 
 in the upper chamber at Jerusalem, " Father, the hour is come, 
 glorify thy Son." Mapped out before his foreseeing eye in all its 
 times, places, events, issues, lay the whole of his earthly life and 
 ministry. The perfect unbroken unity of design and action running 
 through the whole proclaims a previous foresight, a premeditated, 
 well-ordered plan. It has not been so with any of those men who 
 have played the greatest and most prominent parts on the stage of 
 human history. Their own confessions, the story of their lives, 
 their earlier compared with their later acts, all tell us how little 
 they knew or thought beforehand of what they finally were to be 
 and do. Instead of one fixed, uniform, unchanging scheme and pur- 
 pose running through and regulating the whole life, in all its lessei 
 as well as its greater movements, there have been shiftings and 
 changings of plan to suit the shiftings and the changes of circum- 
 stance. Surprisals here, disappointments there ; old instruments of 
 action worn out and thrown away, new ones invented and employed ; 
 the life made up of a motley array of many-coloured incidents, out 
 of which have come issues never dreamt of at the beginning. Was 
 it so with the life that Jesus lived on earth 1 Had he been a mere 
 man, committing himself to a great work under the guidance of a 
 sublime, yet purely human, and therefore weak and blind impulse, 
 had he seen only so far into the future as the unaided human eye 
 could carry, how much was there in the earlier period of his 
 ministry to have excited false hopes, how much in the latter to have 
 produced despondency ! But the people came in multitudes around 
 him, and you can trace no sign of extravagant expectation. The 
 tide of popular favour ebbs away from him, and you see no token 
 of his giving up his enterprise in despair. No wavering of purpose, 
 no change of plan, no altering of his course to suit new and 
 obviously unforeseen emergencies. There is progress : a steady
 
 THE FIRST MIRACLE. 81 
 
 advance ouvvard to the final consummation of the cross and the 
 burial, the resurrection and ascension ; but all is consistent, all is 
 harmonious. 1 
 
 Our Lord's answer to Mary was ill fitted, we might imagine, to 
 foster hope, postponing apparently to an indefinite period any 
 interposition on his part. And yet she turns instantly to the 
 servants, and says to them, " Whatsoever he saith unto you, do 
 it." However surprised or perplexed she may have been, she 
 appears as confident as ever that lie would interpose. It may have 
 been her strong and hopeful faith which, notwithstanding the 
 discouraging reply, sustained her expectation ; or there may have 
 been something in the tone and manner of her son, something in 
 
 1 This feature in our Lord's character appears to have strongly impressed the mind 
 of Napoleon I., as appears from the following extracts : 
 
 " In every other life than that of Christ, what imperfections, what inconsistencies ! 
 Where is the" character that no opposition is sufficient to overwhelm ? Where is the 
 individual whose conduct is never modified by event or circumstance, who never 
 yields to the influences of the time, never accommodates himself to manners or 
 passions that he cannot prevail to alter ? 
 
 " I defy you to cite another life like that of Christ, exempt from the least vacilla- 
 tion of this kind, untainted by any such blots or wavering purpose. From first to last 
 he is the same ; always the same, majestic and simple, infinitely severe and infinitely 
 gentle ; throughout a life that may be said to have been lived under the public eye, 
 Jesus never gives occasion to find fault ; the prudence of his conduct compels our 
 admiration by its union of force and gentleness. Alike in speech and action, Jesus 
 is enlightened, consistent, and calm. Sublimity is said to be an attribute of 
 Divinity ; what name then shall we give to him in whose character were united 
 every attribute of the sublime ? 
 
 " I know men ; and I tell you that Jesus is not a man. 
 
 "In Lycurgus, Numa, Confucius, and Mahomet, I only see legislators who, 
 having attained to the first place in the State, have sought the best solution of the 
 ociaJ problem ; I see nothing in them that reveals Divinity ; they themselves have 
 not pitched their claims so high. 
 
 " It is evident that it is only posterity that has deified the world's first despots, 
 heroes, the princes of the nations, and the founders of the earliest republics. For 
 my part, I see in the heathen gods and those great men, beings of the same nature 
 with myself. Their intelligence, after all, differs from mine only in form. They 
 burst upon the world, played a great part in their day, as I have done in mine. 
 Nothing in them proclaims divinity ; on the contrary, I see numerous resemblances 
 between them and me, common weaknesses and errors. Their faculties are such as 
 I myself poss'ess ; there is no difference save in the use that we have made of them, 
 in accordance with the different ends we had in view, our different countries and the 
 circumstances of our times. 
 
 " It is not so with Christ. Everything in him amazes me his spirit outreaches 
 mine, and his will confounds me. Comparison is impossible oetween him and any 
 other being in the world. He is truly a being by himself : his ideas and hw senti- 
 ments, the truth that he announces, his manner of convincing, are ali beyond 
 humanity and the natural order of things. 
 
 " His birth, and the story of his life, the profoundness of his doctrine which 
 overturns all difficulties, and is their most complete solution, his Gospel, the singu- 
 larity of this mysterious being, his appearance, his empire, his progress through al] 
 centuries and kingdoms, all this is to me a prodigy, an unfathomable mystery, 
 which plunges me into a reverie from which there is no escape, a mystery which is 
 ever within my view, a permanent mystery which I can neither deny nor explain. 
 
 " I see nothing here of man. Near as I may approach, closely as I may examine, 
 all remains above my comprehension, great with a greatness that crushes me ; it is 
 in vain that I reflect all remains unaccountable." Sentiments de NapoUon. sur le 
 Christianisme, par le CHEVALIER DE BEAUTERNE. 
 F
 
 82 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 the way he laid the emphasis as he pronounced the words, Mine 
 hour is not yet come, which conveyed to her the impression that 
 the hour was approaching, was near, a speedy compliance shining 
 through the apparent refusal. But why did she give that order to 
 the servants, or how could she anticipate that it was through their 
 instrumentality that the approaching supply was to be conveyed 1 
 Without some hint being given, some word or look of Jesus point- 
 ing in that direction, she could scarcely have conjectured beforehand 
 what the mode of his action was to be. 
 
 Leaving the mystery which arises here unresolved, as being left 
 without the key to open it, let us look at the simple, easy, unosten- 
 tatious way in which the succeeding miracle was wrought. There 
 stand at the entrance, perhaps, of the dwelling six water-pots of 
 stone ; Jesus saith to the servants, Fill the water-pots with water. 
 They do so, filling them to the brim. Jesus saith, Draw out now, 
 and bear to the governor of the feast. They do so ; it is not water, 
 but choicest wine they bear The ruler of the feast at once detects 
 it as better wine than they had previously been drinking, and 
 addresses the bridegroom. The latter gives no reply, for he does 
 not know whence or how this new supply of better wine has come. 
 As little know the guests who partake of it ; nor, perhaps, till the 
 feast is over, and the servants tell what had been done, is it known 
 by what a miracle of power the festivities of that social board had 
 been sustained. What a veiling this of the hand and power of the 
 operator ! Imagine only that Jesus had asked the servants, while 
 the water was water still, to draw it out and fill each goblet, had 
 asked each guest to lift up his cup and taste, and see what kind of 
 liquid it contained, and then, by a word of his power, had turned 
 the crystal water into the ruddy wine. With what gaping wonder 
 would every one have then been filled ! Instead of this, ordering 
 it so that what came to the guests appeared to come through the 
 ordinary channel, without word or touch, aught said or done, in 
 obedience to an inward volition of the Lord, the water hidden in 
 the vessels is changed instantaneously into wine. There was the 
 same dignified ease and simplicity, the same absence of ostentation, 
 about all Christ's miracles, proper to him who used not a delegated 
 but an intrinsic power. 
 
 When we speak of a miracle as a breaking-in upon the ordinary 
 and established course of nature, let us not think of it as if it were 
 discord thrust into a harmony; something loose, irregular, dis- 
 jointed, coming in to mar the beautiful and orderly progression. 
 In that harmonious progression, the lower ever yields to the higher. 
 The vital powers, for instance, in plants and animals, are ever 
 modifying the mechanical powers, the laws of motion ; the will of 
 man pomes in, in still more striking manner, to do the same thing 
 with all the powers and processes of nature. You do not say that
 
 THE CLEANSING OF THE TEMPLE. 83 
 
 such crossings and counteractions of lower by higher laws disturb 
 the harmony of nature ; they go to constitute it. And we believe 
 that just as falsely as you would say that the order of nature was 
 broken, the law of gravitation was violated, when the sap ascends 
 in the stem of the tree, and is distributed upwards through its 
 branches ; just as falsely is it said of the miracles of Christianity, 
 that they break that order, or violate any of nature's laws ; for did 
 we but know enough of that spiritual kingdom for whose establish- 
 ment and advancement they were wrought, we should perceive that 
 here too there was law and order, and that what we now call 
 miracles were but instances of the lower yielding to the higher; 
 that the grand, unbroken harmony of the vast universe, material, 
 mental, moral, spiritual, may be sustained and promoted. 
 
 XII. 
 
 THE CLEANSING OF THE TEMPLE. 
 JOHN n. 12-21 ; MATT. xxi. 10-17. 
 
 THE miracle at the marriage-feast drew a marked line of dis- 
 tinction between Jesus, the Baptist, and the austere Essenes, those 
 eremites who dwelt apart, shut up in a kind of monastic seclusion, 
 and who renounced the use of wine, condemned marriage,' and 
 denounced all bodily indulgence as injurious to the purity of the 
 spirit. By acting as he did at Cana, Jesus at the very outset of 
 his career placed himself in direct opposition to the strictest class 
 of pietists then existing, in direct opposition to the spirit and 
 practice of those in all ages who have sought, by withdrawal from 
 the world and estrangement from all objects of sense, to cultivate 
 communion with the unseen, to rise to a closer intercourse with and 
 nearer resemblance to the Deity. 
 
 One effect of this first display by Jesus of his supernatural 
 power was a strengthening of the faith of the men who had recently 
 attached themselves to him. " His disciples," it is said, " believed 
 in him." They had believed before, but they believed more firmly 
 now. The ground of their first faith had been the testimony of 
 the Baptist. Their faith had grown during the few days of private 
 intercourse with Jesus which succeeded, and now by the manifesta- 
 tion of his power and glory, it was still more strengthened. It was 
 still, as later trial too clearly proved, weak and imperfect. But 
 their minds and hearts were in such a condition that they lay open 
 to the influence of additional light as to their Master's character, 
 additional evidence of his authority and power. But there were 
 other spectators of the miracle upon whom it exerted no such 
 happy influence. After the marriage-feast at Cana broke up,
 
 84 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 " Jesus and his mother, and his brethren, and his disciples went 
 down to Capernaum." This is the first mention of those brethren 
 of Christ who appear more than once in the subsequent history, 
 always associated with Mary, as forming part of her family, care- 
 fully distinguished from the apostles and disciples of the Lord. 
 They are represented on one occasion as going out after him, 
 thinking he was beside himself; and when he was told that Mary 
 and they stood at the outskirts of the crowd desiring to see him, 
 he exclaimed, " Who is my mother, and who are my brethren ? 
 Whosoever shall do the will of my Father who is in heaven, the 
 same is my brother, and sister, and mother." On another occasion, 
 the Nazarenes referred to them when, astonished and offended, they 
 said to one another, " Is not this the carpenter's son ? is not his 
 mother called Mary, and his brethren, James, and Joses, and 
 Simon, and Judas'? And his sisters, are they not all with us?" 
 John tells that at a still later period, in the beginning of the last 
 year of our Lord's ministry, these relatives taunted him, saying, 
 " If thou do these things, show thyself to the world ; for neither 
 did his brethren believe in him." Had we been reading these 
 passages for the first time, we should scarcely have understood 
 them otherwise than as referring to those who were related to Jesus 
 as children of the same mother. This would of course imply that 
 Mary had other children than Jesus, an idea to which from the 
 earliest period there seems to have been the strongest repugnance. 
 Kesting upon the well-known usage which allowed the term brother 
 and sister to be extended to more distant relationships, and upon 
 the acknowledged difficulty which arises in connection with the 
 names of our Lord's brothers as given by the Evangelists, both the 
 Greek and the Latin Churches, though adopting different theories 
 as to the exact nature of the relationship, have indignantly re- 
 pudiated the idea of Mary's having any but one child, and have 
 regarded those spoken of as his brothers as being either his half- 
 brothers, sons of Joseph by another marriage, or his cousins, the 
 children of Mary's sister, the wife of Alphseus or Cleophas. It 
 would be out of place here to enter upon the discussion of this 
 difficult question. I can only say that, after weighing all the objec- 
 tions which have been adduced, I can see no sufficient reason for 
 rejecting the first and most natural reading of the passages I have 
 referred to, for not believing that they were brothers and sisters of 
 Jesus, who grew up along with him in the household at Nazareth. 
 Perhaps our readiness to admit this may partly spring from our 
 not sharing the impression that there is anything in such a belief 
 either derogatory to the character of Mary, or to the true dignity 
 of her first-born Son. 
 
 Whoever they were, and however related to him, these brethren 
 of the Lord, his nearest relatives, who had all along been living, if
 
 THE CLEANSING OF THE TEMPLE. 85 
 
 not under the same roof, yet in close and intimate acquaintance 
 with him, sat beside his disciples at that marriage-feast, and saw 
 the wonder that was done, and they did not believe. As months 
 rolled on, they saw and heard of still greater wonders wrought in 
 the presence of multitudes. Eesiding with Mary at Capernaum, 
 they lived in the very heart of that commotion which the teaching 
 and acts of Jesus excited. Neither did they then believe. Their 
 unbelief may have been in part sustained by Christ's having ceased 
 to make their home his home, and chosen twelve strangers as his 
 close and constant companions and friends. Nor did any of them 
 believe in Jesus all through the three years of his ministry. But it 
 is pleasing to note that, though so long and so stubbornly main- 
 tained, their unbelief did at last give way ; you see them in that 
 upper room to which the apostles retired after witnessing the 
 ascension : " And when they were come in, they went up into an 
 upper room, where abode both Peter and James, and John and 
 Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James 
 the son of Alphseus, and Simon Zelotes, and Judas the brother of 
 James. These all continued with one accord in prayer and suppli- 
 cation, with the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with 
 his brethren." How many an apt remark on the peculiar barriers 
 which the closer ties of domestic life often oppose to the influence 
 of the one Christian member of a household, and on the peculiar 
 encouragement which such a one has to persevere, might be 
 grounded upon the fact that it was not till after his death that our 
 Lord's own immediate relatives believed in him. 
 
 When the marriage-feast at Cana was over, Jesus and his 
 mother, and his brethren, and his disciples went down to Caper- 
 naum. Of this town we shall have more to say hereafter, when it 
 became the chosen centre of our Lord's Galilean ministry. One 
 advantage of the short visit that Jesus now paid to it was, that it 
 put him on the route along which the already gathering bands of 
 visitors from Northern Galilee passed southwards to the capital. 
 The Passover was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 
 Hitherto, though some time had passed (two or three months per- 
 haps, but there are no materials for exactly determining) since his 
 baptism, and the public proclamation of his Messiahship, Jesus had 
 taken no public step, none implying any assumption on his part 
 of the office to which he had been designated. Of the few men 
 who attended him. there was but one whom he had asked to follow 
 him ; nor was it yet understood whether he and the rest were to 
 accompany him for more than a few days. The miracle at Cana 
 was rather of a private and domestic than of a public character. 
 Nothing that we know of was said or done by Jesus at Capernaum, 
 or throughout the short visit to Galilee, to indicate his entrance on 
 a public career.
 
 86 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 But now he is in Jerusalem, in the place where most appro- 
 priately the first revelation of himself in his new character is made. 
 Let us acknowledge that it is not in the form in which we should 
 have expected it ; nor in that form in which any Jew of that age 
 would ever have imagined that the Messiah should first show him- 
 self. We may be able, by meditating a little upon it, to see more 
 of its suitableness than at first sight appears. But even a first 
 glance reveals how utterly unlike it was to the popular Jewish 
 conception of the advent of the Messiah. One of the first things 
 our Lord does at Jerusalem is to go up into the Temple. He 
 passes through one of the gates of its surrounding walls. He 
 enters into the large open area which on all sides encompasses the 
 sacred edifice. What a spectacle meets his eye ! There all round, 
 attached to the walls, are lines of booths or shops in which money- 
 changers are plying their usurious trade. The centre space is 
 crowded with oxen and with sheep exposed for sale, and between 
 the buyers and the sellers all the turbulent traffic of a cattle-market 
 is going on. It goes on within the outer enclosure, but close upon 
 the inner buildings of the Holy Place ; so close that the loud hum 
 from the crowded court of the Gentiles must have been heard to 
 their no small disturbance by the priests and worshippers within. 
 How comes all this ? and who is responsible for this desecration of 
 the Temple ? The origin of it in one sense was natural enough. 
 At all the great festivals, but especially at the Passover, an almost 
 inconceivable number of animals were offered up in sacrifice. 
 Josephus tells us of more than two hundred thousand victims 
 sacrificed in the course of a single Passover celebration. The 
 greatest proportion of these were not brought up from the country 
 by the offerers, but were purchased on their arrival at Jerusalem. 
 An extensive traffic, yielding no inconsiderable gain to those 
 engaged in it, was thus created. Some open area for conducting 
 it was needed. The heads of the priesthood, to whom the custody 
 of the Temple was committed, saw that good rents were got for 
 any suitable market-ground which the city could supply. They 
 were tempted to fill their own coffers from this source. Jerusalem 
 could furnish no place so suitable for the exposure of the animals 
 as the Court of the Gentiles. What more convenient than that 
 the victims should be purchased in the very neighbourhood of the 
 place where they were to be offered up ? The greed of gain pre- 
 vailed over all care for the sanctity of the Temple. The Court of 
 the Gentiles was let out to the cattle-dealers, and a large amount 
 was thus added to the yearly revenue of the Temple. Still another 
 source of gain lay open, and was taken advantage of. Every 
 one who came up to the Passover, and desired to take part in the 
 festival, had to present a half-shekel of Jewish money to the 
 priests. This kind of money was not now in general use ; it was
 
 THE CLEANSING OF THE TEMPLE. 87 
 
 scarce even in Judea, unknown beyond that land. Nothing, how- 
 ever, but the half-shekel of the sanctuary would be taken at the 
 Temple. To supply themselves with the needed coin, visitors had 
 to go to the money-changer. And where can he find a fitter place 
 to erect his booth and set out his table than within the very area 
 in which the larger traffic was going on ? He offers so much to 
 the priesthood to be permitted to do so ; the bribe is taken, and 
 the booth and the tables are erected. And so, amid a perfect 
 Babel of tongues, and thronging, jostling crowds of men and 
 beasts, the buying and the selling and the money-changing are all 
 going on. 
 
 Into the heart of this tumultuous throng Jesus enters. Of the 
 many hundreds there, few have ever seen him before ; few know 
 anything about him, either about his baptism in the Jordan, or his 
 late miracle at Cana. He appears as a stranger, a young man clad 
 in the simple garb of a Galilean peasant, without any badge of 
 authority in his hand. He looks around with an eye of indignant 
 sorrow, pours out the changers' money, overthrows their tables, 
 forming a scourge of small cords drives the herds of cattle before 
 him, and, mingling consideration with his zeal, says to them who 
 sold the doves, " Take these things hence ; make not my Father's 
 house a house of merchandise." Why is it that at the touch of 
 this slender scourge, and the bidding of this youthful stranger, 
 buyers and sellers stop their traffic, the money-changers suffer their 
 money to be rudely handled, and their tables to be overturned 1 The 
 slightest resistance of so many against one would have been sufficient 
 to have arrested the movement. But no such resistance is attempted, 
 no opposition is made, by men not likely from their occupation to 
 be remarkable for mildness of disposition or pliability of character. 
 How are we to explain this 1 We can understand how, at the last 
 Passover, at the close of his ministry, when Jesus, then so well 
 known, so generally recognised by the people as a prophet, repeated 
 this cleansing of the Temple, there should have been a yielding to 
 his authoritative command. But what are we to say of such an 
 occurrence taking place at the very commencement of his ministry, 
 his first public act in Jerusalem ? It is a mysterious power which 
 some men, in time of excitement, by look and word and tone ot 
 command, can exercise over their fellow-men. But grant that 
 rare power in its highest degree to Jesus, it will scarce account for 
 this scene in the Court of the Gentiles at Jerusalem. It would 
 seem as if, in eye and voice and action, the divine power and 
 authority that lay in Jesus broke forth into visible manifestation, 
 and laid such a spell upon those rough cattle-drivers and those 
 cold calculators of the money-tables, that all power of resistance 
 was for the time subdued. It would seem as if it pleased him to 
 exert here within the Temple the same influence that he did after-
 
 88 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 wards in the Garden, when he stepped forth from the darkness 
 into the full moonlight, and said to the rough band that advanced 
 with their lanterns and swords and staves to take him, " I that 
 speak unto you am he ;" and when at the sight and word they 
 reeled backward and fell to the ground. The effect in both cases 
 was but temporary. High priests and officers were soon upon 
 their feet again ; and, wondering at their own weakness in yielding 
 to a power which at the moment they were impotent to resist, 
 proceeded to lay hold upon Jesus, and lead him away unto 
 Caiaphas. So was it also, we believe, in the Temple court. A 
 sudden, mysterious, irresistible power is upon that crowd. They 
 yield, they know not why. But by and by the spell would seem 
 to be withdrawn. They soon recover from its effect. Nor is 
 it long till, wondering at their having allowed a single man, and 
 one who had no right whatever to interfere with arrangements 
 made by the chief authorities, and to lord it over them, they 
 return, resume their occupations, and all goes on as before. 
 
 It was with no intention or expectation of putting an end in this 
 way to the desecration of the Holy Place that Jesus acted. What, 
 then, was the purpose of his act ? It was meant to be a public 
 proclamation of his Sonship to God ; an open assertion and exercise 
 of his authority as sustaining this relation ; a protest in his 
 Father's name against the conduct of the priesthood in permitting 
 this desecration of the Holy Place. It was far more for the priest- 
 hood than for the crowd in the market-place that it was meant. 
 They were not ignorant that the chief object of the ministry of 
 the Baptist, with which the whole country was ringing, was to 
 announce the immediate coming of the Messiah. They had not 
 long before sent a deputation to the banks of the Jordan to ask 
 John whether he himself were not the Messiah whose near advent 
 he was foretelling. The members of that deputation heard of the 
 baptism of Jesus ; in all likelihood they had not left the place when 
 Jesus came back from the temptation in the Wilderness, and was 
 publicly pointed to by John as the greater than himself who was 
 to come after him, the Lamb of God, the Son of God. From the 
 lips of the men whom they had sent, or from the lips of others, 
 they must have known all about what had happened. And now 
 here among them is this Jesus of Nazareth ; here he is come up 
 to the Temple, speaking and acting as if it were his part and office 
 authoritatively to interpose and cleanse the building of all its 
 defilements. What else could the priesthood who had charge of 
 the Temple understand than that here was claimed a jurisdiction 
 in regard to it superior to their own ? What else could they 
 understand when the words were heard, or were repeated to them, 
 "Make not my Father's house a house of merchandise," than that 
 here was one who claimed a relationship to God as his Father, and
 
 THE CLEANSING OF THE TEMPLE. 89 
 
 a right over the Temple as his Father's house, which none but One 
 could claim ? They go to him, therefore, or they call him before 
 them, and entering, you will remark, into no justification of their 
 own deed in hiring out the Temple court as they had done, 
 entering into no argument with him as to the Tightness or wrong- 
 ness of what he had done, rather admitting that if he were indeed 
 a prophet, as his acts showed that he at least pretended to be, his 
 act was justifiable ; they proceed upon the assumption that he was 
 bound to give to them some proof of his carrying a Divine com- 
 mission, and they say to him, "What sign showest thou unto us, 
 seeing thou doest these things?" 
 
 He had shown a good enough sign already, had they read it 
 aright. He was about to show signs numerous and significant 
 enough in the days that immediately succeeded ; but to such a 
 haughty challenge as this, coming, as he knew, from men whom 
 no sign would convince of his Messiahship, he had but this reply : 
 " Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." A 
 truly dark saying ; one that, not only they did not and could not 
 at the time understand, but that they were almost certain to mis- 
 understand, and, misunderstanding, to turn against the speaker, as 
 if he meant to claim the possession of a power which he never 
 could be called upon to exercise. Then said the Jews, inter- 
 preting, as they could scarce fail to do, his words as applicable to 
 the material Temple : " Forty-and-six years has this Temple been 
 in building, and wilt thou rear it up in three days I" 1 
 
 Jesus made no attempt to rectify the error into which his 
 questioners had fallen. He could not well have done so without 
 a premature disclosure of his death and resurrection, a thing that 
 he carefully avoided till the time of their accomplishment drew 
 near. He left this mysterious saying to be interpreted against 
 himself. It seems to have taken a deep hold, to have been widely 
 circulated, and to have fixed itself very deeply in the memory of 
 the people. Three years afterwards, Avhen they were trying to 
 convict him of some crime in reference to religion, this first saying 
 of his was brought up against him, as one uttered blasphemously 
 against the Temple, but the two witnesses could not agree about 
 the words. And when the cross was raised, those who passed by 
 
 1 It is curious that, in saying so, they have left to us one of the few fixed and 
 certain data upon which we can determine the year when the public ministry of our 
 Lord began. We know that the building, or rather rebuilding of the Temple, was 
 (TOmmenced by Herod in the eighteenth year of his reign ; that is, speaking accord- 
 ing to the Roman method of counting their years from the foundation of Rome, 
 during the year that began in the spring of 734, and ended in that of 735. Forty- 
 six years from this would bring us to the year 780-781. Historical statements and 
 astronomical calculations conspire to make it probable that it was in the year 750 
 A.y.c. that Herod died. If Christ were bom a few months before that death, 
 thirty years forward from that time brings us to the year 780, as that in which our 
 Lord's ministry commenced ; the two independent computations thus singuJarly 
 confirming one another.
 
 90 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 railed on him, saying, " Ah, thou that destroyest the Temple, and 
 buildest it in three days, save thyself." Whatever differences there 
 were in the remembrances and reports of the people, in one thing 
 they agreed, in the attributing the destruction of the Temple that 
 Jesus had spoken of here, to himself. But he had not spoken of 
 the destruction as effected by his own hands, but by those of the 
 Jews themselves. And he had not had in his eye the material Temple 
 on Mount Moriah, but the temple of his body, which they "were to 
 destroy, and which he, three days afterwards, was to raise from 
 the dead. All this became plain afterwards, and went, when his 
 real meaning stood revealed in the event, mightily to confirm the 
 faith of his followers. And in one respect it may still go to con- 
 firm ours, for does not that saying of Jesus, uttered so early, 
 his first word, we may say, to the leaders of the people at 
 Jerusalem, does it not, along with so many other like evidences, 
 go to prove how clearly the Lord saw the end from the be- 
 ginning ? 
 
 XIIL 
 
 THE CONVERSATION WITH NICODEMUS. 
 JOHN ni. 1-21. 
 
 CHRIST'S first visit to Jerusalem, after his baptism, appears to 
 have been a brief one ; not longer, perhaps, than that usually paid 
 by those who went up to the Passover. Besides the cleansing of 
 the Temple, he wrought some miracles which are left unrecorded, 
 but which we may believe were of the same kind as his subsequent 
 ones, and these were generally miracles of healing. Many believed 
 on him when they saw those miracles performed ; believed on him 
 as a wonder-worker, as a man who had the great power of God at 
 his command ; but their faith scarcely went further, involved in it 
 little or no recognition of his true character and office. Although 
 they believed in him, Jesus did not believe in them (for it is the 
 same word which is used in the two cases). Knowing what was in 
 them, as he knew what was in all men, undeceived by appearance 
 or profession, he entered into no close or friendly relations with 
 them ; made no hasty or premature discovery of himself. 
 
 But there was one man to whom he did commit himself on the 
 occasion of this first and short residence in Jerusalem, to whom he 
 did make such a discovery of himself, as we shall presently see he 
 never made to any other single person in the whole course of his 
 ministry. This was a man of the Pharisees, one of the sect that 
 became the most bitter persecutors of Christ ; a ruler too of the 
 Jews, a man well educated, of good position, and in high office ; a 
 member of the Saiihedrim. He was one of the body that not long
 
 THE CONVERSATION WITH NICODEMUS. 91 
 
 ago had sent the deputation down to the Jordan to inquire about 
 the Baptist. He knew all about John's ministry, about his 
 announcing that the kingdom of God was at hand, that there was 
 One coming after him who was to baptize, not with water, but with 
 the Holy Ghost. He had been wondering what this ministry of 
 John could mean, when Jesus appeared in the city, cleansed the 
 Temple, wrought those miracles. He saw that among the class to 
 which he belonged, the appearance and acts of the young Nazarene, 
 who had assumed and exercised such an authority within the 
 Courts of the Temple, and when challenged had given such an 
 unsatisfactory reply, had excited nothing but distrust and antipathy; 
 a distrust and antipathy, however, in which he did not, could not 
 share. He could not concur with those who spake of him as an 
 ignorant rustic, a mere blind zealot, whom a fit of fanaticism had 
 driven to do what he did in the Temple ; still less could he agree 
 with those who spake of him as an impostor, a deceiver of the 
 people. "We do not know what words of Christ's he heard, what 
 acts of his he witnessed ; but the impression had come upon him, 
 whencesoever it came, that he was altogether different from what 
 his fellow-rulers were disposed to believe. Could this indeed be 
 the man of whom John spake so much ; could this be indeed the 
 Christ, the Messiah for whom so many were longing ? If he was, 
 what new and higher truths would he unfold, what a glorious 
 kingdom would he usher in ! Eestless and unsatisfied with things 
 as they were, all his Pharisaic strictness in the keeping of the law 
 having failed to quiet his conscience, and give comfort to his heart, 
 Nicodemus was looking about and longing for further light. 
 Perhaps this stranger, who has come to Jerusalem, may be able to 
 help him. He may be poor and mean, a Galilean by birth, without 
 official rank or authority ; but what of that, if he be really what he 
 seems, one clothed with a Divine commission ; what of that, if he 
 can quench in any way this thirst of heart and soul which burns 
 within ? If he could be seen by him alone, Jesus would surely lay 
 aside that reserve which he appeared to maintain, and instruct him 
 fully as to the mysteries of the coming kingdom. But how could 
 such a private interview be brought about? He might send for 
 him ; and sent for by one in his position, Jesus might not refuse to 
 come. But then it would be noised abroad that he had been 
 entertaining the Nazarene in his dwelling. Or he might go to him 
 when he was teaching in public ; but then it would be seen and 
 known of all men that he had paid him an open mark of respect. 
 He was not prepared to face either of these alternatives ; he was 
 too timid, thought too much of what his companions and friends 
 and the general public of the city might think or say. Yet he is 
 too eager to throw the chance away. He must see Jesus, and as 
 his fears keep him from going to or sending for him by day, he
 
 92 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 goes by night, breaks in upon his retirement, asks and obtains the 
 audience. 
 
 There was something wrong, no doubt, in his choosing such a 
 time and way for the interview. It would have been a manlier, 
 more heroic thing for him to have braved all danger, and risen 
 above all fear of man. But whatever blame we may choose on 
 this ground to attach to Nicodemus, let it not obscure our percep- 
 tion of his obvious honesty and earnestness, his intense desire for 
 further enlightenment, his willingness to receive instruction. He 
 came by night, but he was the only one of his order who came at 
 all. He came by night, but it was not to gratify an idle curiosity, 
 but in the disquiet of a half-awakened conscience to seek for peace. 
 Rabbi, he says, as soon as he finds himself in Christ's presence. 
 He salutes him with all respect. The Rabbis of the Temple would 
 have scorned the claim of one so young in years, unknown in any 
 of their schools, who had given no proof of his acquaintance with 
 their laws and their traditions, to be regarded as one of them. 
 But the Ruler, in all likelihood by many years Christ's senior, and 
 one who on other grounds might have counted on being the saluted 
 rather than the saluter, does not hesitate to address him thus: 
 "Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God: for 
 no man can do those miracles that thou doest except God be with 
 him." He shows at once his respect, his candour, his intelligence, 
 and his faith. He does not doubt that those are real miracles 
 which Jesus has been working; he is ready to trace to its true 
 source the power employed in their accomplishment; he is pre- 
 pared at once to acknowledge that the worker of such miracles 
 must be one sent and sanctioned by God. In saying so, he knows 
 that he is saying more than perhaps any other man of his station 
 in Jerusalem would be ready to say. He thinks that he says 
 enough to win for himself a favourable reception. Yet he is 
 speaking far below the truth, much under his own half-formed 
 conceptions and beliefs. It is but as a teacher, not as a prophet, 
 much less the great Prophet, that he addresses Jesus. 
 
 One might have expected that, having addressed him as such, 
 he would go on to put the questions to which he presumed that 
 such a teacher could give replies. But he pauses, perhaps imagin- 
 ing that, gratified by such a visit, pleased at being saluted thus by 
 one of the rulers, Jesus will salute him in return, and save him the 
 trouble of inquiry by making some disclosures of the new doctrine 
 which, as a teacher sent from God, he had come to teach ; or by 
 telling him something more about that new kingdom which so 
 many were expecting to see set up. How surprised he must have 
 been when so abruptly, yet so solemnly, without exchange of salu- 
 tation or word of preface, Jesus says, "Verily, verily, I say unto 
 thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of
 
 THE CONVEKSATION WITH NICODEMUSr. 93 
 
 God.' Such a man as Nicodemus could scarcely have been so stupid 
 as to believe that, in speaking of being born again, Jesus meant a 
 second birth of the body. He is so disconcerted, however, disap- 
 pointed, perplexed, besides being perhaps a little irritated, by both 
 the manner and the substance of the grave, emphatic utterance, 
 one which, however general in its terms, was obviously spoken with 
 a direct and personal reference, that, in his confusion, he seizes 
 upon the expression as the only one that had as yet conveyed any 
 definite idea to his mind. As affording him some ground of excep- 
 tion, some material for reply, and taking it in its literal sense, he 
 says : How can a man be born again when he is old, old as I am ? 
 Can he enter the second time into his mother's womb, and be born 1 
 The wise and gentle teacher in whose hands he now is, takes no 
 notice of the folly or the petulance of the remark. He reiterates 
 what he had said, modifying, however, his expressions, so that 
 Nicodemus could not fail to see of what kind of second birth it 
 was that he was speaking : " Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except 
 a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the 
 kingdom of God." 
 
 Had Nicodemus only had time at first to collect his thoughts, 
 he would have remembered that it was no new term, framed now 
 for the first time, that Jesus had been employing in speaking of a 
 second birth ; it being a proverbial expression with his countrymen 
 with reference to those who became proselytes to the Jewish faith, 
 and were admitted as such into the Jewish community, that they 
 were as men new-born. The outward mode of admitting such 
 proselytes to the enjoyment of Jewish privileges was by baptism, 
 by washing with water. John had adopted this rite, and by de- 
 manding that all Jews should be baptized with the baptism of 
 repentance, as a preparation on their part for the coming of the 
 kingdom, he had in fact already proclaimed, that, as every heathen 
 man became as a new man on entering into the commonwealth of 
 Israel, so every Jewish man must become a new man before entering 
 into that new kingdom which the Messiah was to introduce and 
 establish. It was virtually to symbolise the importance and neces- 
 sity of repentance, that change of mind and heart which formed 
 the burden of his preaching, as a qualification in all candidates for 
 admission into the kingdom that John came baptizing with water. 
 But he took great pains to inform his hearers that, while he bap- 
 tized with water, there was One coming immediately, who was to 
 baptize with the Holy Ghost. Was it likely then, or we may even 
 say, was it possible that, when Nicodemus now heard Jesus say, 
 " Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter 
 into the kingdom of God," he could fail to perceive the allusion to 
 the water-baptism of John and the Spirit-baptism of the Messiah 1 
 In common with all his countrymen, Nicodemus had assumed that,
 
 94 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 be it what it might, come how or when it might, the Messianic 
 Kingdom would be one within which their very birth as Jews 
 would entitle them to be ranked. The popular delusion John had 
 already, by his baptism and his teaching, done something to rectify. 
 The full truth it was reserved for Jesus to proclaim, and he does 
 it now to Nicodemus. This master in Israel has come to Jesus 
 to be taught ; let him know then that it is not a new doctrine, 
 but a new life which Jesus has come to proclaim and to impart. 
 It is not by knowing so much, or believing in such truths, or prac 
 tising such duties, that a man is to qualify himself for becoming 
 a subject of the spiritual kingdom of Jesus Christ. First of all, 
 as a necessary preliminary, he must be born again ; born of the 
 Spirit, have spiritual life imparted, before he can see so as to 
 apprehend its real nature, before he can enter so as to partake of 
 its true privileges, the kingdom of God. This kingdom is not an 
 outward or a national one, not the kingdom of a creed, or of an 
 external, organised community. It is a kingdom exclusively of the 
 new-born of those who have been begotten of the Spirit of those 
 who have been born again, not of blood, nor of the flesh, nor of the 
 will of man, but of God. For that which is born of the flesh is 
 flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. 
 
 A mystic thing it looks to Nicodemus, this second birth, this 
 birth of the Spirit; secret, invisible, impalpable; its origin and 
 issues hidden, remote. Marvel not, says Jesus, at its mysterious- 
 ness. The night is quiet, around you, not a sound of bending 
 branch or rustling leaf comes from the neighbouring wood ; but 
 now the air is stirred as by an invisible hand ; the sigh of the 
 night-breeze comes through the bending branches and rustling 
 leaves ; you hear the sound ; but who can take you to that breeze's 
 birthplace, and show you where and how it was begotten ; who can 
 carry you to its place of sepulchre, and show you where and how it 
 died 1 Not that the wind, the air in motion, is a whit more 
 wilful or capricious, or less obedient to fixed laws than any other 
 elements, or is chosen upon that account to represent the operations 
 of God's Spirit on the souls of men. All its movements are 
 fixed and orderly; but as the movements of an invisible agent, 
 they elude our observation; nor, if you sought for a material 
 emblem of that hiddenness with which the Holy Spirit works, 
 could you find in the whole creation one more apt than that which 
 Jesus used, when he said to Nicodemus, " The wind bloweth where 
 it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell 
 whence it cometh or whither it goeth : so is every one that is born 
 of the Spirit." 
 
 Already a dim apprehension of that for which he was being 
 apprehended of Christ has begun to dawn upon Nicodemus. He 
 receives the truth as affirmed by Jesus as to the necessity of the
 
 THE CONVERSATION WITH NICODEMUS. 95 
 
 new birth. He begins even to understand something as to its 
 nature. Yet a haze still hangs over it. He wonders and he doubts, 
 giving expression to his feelings in the question, " How can these 
 things be ] " 
 
 If Christ's answer may be taken as the best interpretation of 
 this question, Nicodemus was now troubling himself not so much 
 either with the nature or the necessity of the new birth, as with 
 the manner of its accomplishment ; the kind of instrumentality by 
 which so great an inward change was to be effected ; for, read 
 aright, our Lord's reply is not only a description of that instrumen- 
 tality, but an actual employment of it. First, however, a gentle 
 rebuke must be given : Art thou a master of Israel, and knowest 
 not these things 1 Hast thou forgotten all that is written in the 
 book of the law and in the prophets, about the coming of those 
 days in which the Lord would pour out his Spirit upon all flesh ; 
 about the new covenant that the Lord would then enter into with 
 his people, one of whose two great provisions was to be this : " I 
 will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within you ; 
 and I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them 
 an heart of flesh "1 (Ezek. xi. 19). What had so often and so long 
 beforehand been thus spoken of was now about to be executed. 
 The Spirit of God was waiting to do his gracious work, in begetting 
 many sons and daughters to the Lord. Let Nicodemus be assured 
 of this, on the testimony of one whose knowledge of the spirit- 
 world was immediate and complete. He had spoken very con- 
 fidently about his knowledge of Jesus. We know, he had said, 
 thou art a teacher sent from God. Let him listen now to words 
 of equal confidence, which no mere human teacher, though he 
 were even sent by God, could well, upon such a subject, have em- 
 ployed : " Verily, verily, I say unto thee, We speak that we do 
 know, and testify that we have seen ; and ye receive not our wit- 
 ness." 'This work of the Spirit in regenerating is connected with 
 another my own in redeeming. The one is but an earthly opera- 
 tion ; a work performed within men's souls : but the other, how high 
 have you to rise to trace it to its source ; how far to go to follow 
 it to its issues ? " If I have told you these earthly things, and ye 
 believe not, how shall ye believe if I tell you of heavenly things." 
 
 ' And yet who can speak of these heavenly things as I can do ? 
 You take me, Nicodemus, to be a teacher sent from God, perhaps 
 you might even acknowledge me as a prophet ; but know me that 
 I am no other than He, the Son of man, the Son of God, coming 
 down from heaven, ascending to heaven, but leaving not heaven 
 behind me in my descent, bringing it along with me ; while here 
 on earth, being still in heaven. " No man, I say unto thee, hath 
 ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even 
 the Son of man which is in heaven.'"
 
 96 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 And having thus proclaimed the ground and certainty of hia 
 knowledge of all the earthly and all the heavenly things pertaining 
 to the kingdom, Jesus goes on to preach his own gospel beforehand 
 to Nicodemus, taking the lifting-up of the serpent in the wilderness, 
 as the type to illustrate his own approaching lifting-up on the cross, 
 declaring this to be the great and gracious design of his death, that 
 whosoever believeth in him might not perish, but have eternal life : 
 " For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son ; 
 that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have ever- 
 lasting life." 
 
 It does not fall within our scope to illustrate at large or attempt 
 to enforce the great truths about the one and only manner of enter- 
 ing into Christ's spiritual kingdom ; about the universal need of 
 the Spirit-birth in order to make this entrance; about his own 
 character and office ; the manner and objects of his death ; the 
 faith which, trusting to him, brings with it everlasting life ; the 
 moral guilt that lies in the act of rejecting him as a Redeemer; 
 the true character of that temper of mind and heart which prompts 
 to faith on the one side, and to unbelief on the other, which are 
 all brought out in the discourse of our Lord to Nicodemus. But 
 it does fall precisely within our present design that I ask you to 
 reflect a moment or two, first, upon the Time at which this dis- 
 course was delivered ; and next, as to its Effect upon him to whom 
 it was addressed. 
 
 It was delivered weeks or months before the Sermon on the 
 Mount, or any other of Christ's public addresses to the people. 
 Standing in time the first, it stands in character alone. You search 
 in vain through all the subsequent discourses of our Lord for any 
 such clear compendious comprehensive development of the Chris- 
 tian salvation ; of its source in the love of the Father ; its channel 
 in the death of his only begotten Son ; and of the great Agent by 
 whom it is appropriated and applied. You search in vain for any 
 other instance in which the three persons of the Trinity were 
 spoken of by our Lord consecutively and conjunctly ; to each being 
 assigned his proper part in the economy of our redemption. It 
 may even be doubted whether in the whole range of the apostolic 
 epistles there be a passage of equal length in which the manner of 
 our salvation through Christ is as fully and distinctly described. 
 
 Delivered thus at the very beginning of our Lord's ministry, 
 it utters a loud and unambiguous protest against the error of 
 those who would have us to believe that there was a decided and 
 essential difference between the earlier and later teachings of our 
 Saviour ; between the doctrine taught by Christ, and that taught 
 afterwards by his apostles. It is quite true that until within a 
 few months of the final decease accomplished at Jerusalem, our 
 Lord studiously avoided all reference to his death. It is quite
 
 THE CONVEKSATION WITH NICODEMTJS. 97 
 
 true that, in not a single instance not even where one would 
 most naturally have expected it in the prayer that he taught to 
 his disciples, is there an allusion by Jesus to that death, as sup- 
 plying the ground of our forgiveness. But that this marked 
 silence is misinterpreted, when it is inferred that he did not assign 
 to it that place and importance given to it afterwards, we have 
 here, in this discourse to Nicodemus, the most convincing proof. 
 
 But if he never afterwards unfolded his gospel so plainly or so 
 fully, why did he do so now ; why reveal so much to Nicodemus 
 that he appears to have withheld from the multitude? Am I 
 wrong in regarding this as due in part to the very circumstance 
 that this was a nocturnal and a solitary interview with Nicodemus 1 
 No one but this ruler of the Jews may have heard the words that 
 Jesus spake that night, and he would be the last man to go and repeat 
 them to others. There is good reason to believe that the Gospel 
 of St. John was written and published some years after those of 
 the other Evangelists. It is in the Gospel of St. John alone that 
 the interview with Nicodemus is recorded. The other Evangelists 
 appear to have been ignorant of it. How the beloved disciple 
 came to his knowledge of it, it is not necessary for us to inquire. 
 He may have received it from the lips of Nicodemus himself. 
 Enough for us to know that it was not currently reported in the 
 Church till St. John gave it circulation. At any rate we may be 
 sure that it remained unknown all through the period of our Lord's 
 own life. It was not, then, in violation of the rule that he acted 
 on afterwards that he spoke now so plainly and fully as he did to 
 Nicodemus. It was a rare opportunity, one that never perhaps 
 returned, to have before him one so qualified by capacity, by 
 acquirement, by honesty, by earnestness, to receive the truth ; and 
 the very manner in which the Saviour hastened to reveal it, is 
 to us the proof that he saw good soil here into which to cast the 
 seed, and the proof too how grateful to him the oflice of his hand 
 in sowing it. 
 
 He knew indeed that the seed then sown was long to be 
 dormant. For three years there was no token of its germination. 
 Nicodemus never sought a second interview with Jesus, but kept 
 studiously aloof. Once, indeed, and it is the only sight throughout 
 three years that we get of him, he ventured to say a word in the 
 Council against a hasty arrest and condemnation of Jesus, but he 
 met with such a sharp rebuff that he never opened his lips again. 
 The memorable words, however, of the midnight meeting at Jeru- 
 salem had not been forgotten. There was much in them that he 
 could not understand. Who was He who had spoken of himself 
 as the Son of man, the Son of God ; of his ascending and descend- 
 ing to and from heaven ; of being in heaven even when he stood 
 there on earth 1 He had spoken of his being lifted up, that men 
 a
 
 98 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 might believe in him, and, believing, might not perish, but have 
 everlasting life. What could that lifting up of Jesus be, and how 
 upon it could there hang such issues ? Much to perplex here, yet 
 much to stimulate ; for that life, that eternal life, of which Christ 
 had spoken, was the very life that above all things he was longing 
 to possess and realise. In this troubled state of mind and heart, 
 with what an anxious eye would Nicodemus watch the after- 
 current of our Lord's history ! For a year and a half he had 
 disappeared from Judea ; was heard of only as saying and doing 
 wonders down in Galilee. Then came the final visit to the capital, 
 the great commotion in the Temple, the raising of Lazarus, the 
 seizure, the trial, the condemnation. Was Nicodemus present, 
 with the rest of that Council of which he was a member, on the 
 morning of the crucifixion ? If he was, he must ingloriously have 
 kept silence, for the vote was unanimous. I would rather believe, 
 from what happened on the after part of that day, that he was not 
 present, did not obey the hasty summons. With him or without 
 him, the verdict is given. The licence to crucify is extorted from 
 the vacillating Governor ; the cross is raised. At last, the words 
 that three years before had sounded in the ruler's listening ear, 
 and which had since been frequently recalled, the mystery of their 
 meaning unrevealed, are verified and explained. The cross is 
 raised; Jesus is lifted up. The darkened heavens, the reeling 
 earth, the prayer for his crucifiers, the promise to the penitent who 
 dies beside him, the voice of triumph at the close, proclaim the 
 death of that only begotten Son of God, whom He had given to be 
 the Saviour of the world. The scales drop off from the eyes they 
 so long had covered. Fear goes out, and faith comes into Nico- 
 demus's breast, a faith that plants him by Joseph's side in the 
 garden, and unites their hands in the rendering of the last services 
 to the body, which they buried in the new sepulchre. 
 
 What a flood of light fell then on the hitherto mysterious words 
 of the Crucified ; what a rich treasure of comfort would the medi- 
 tation of them unfold all his life long afterwards to Nicodemus; 
 and what an honour to him that he was chosen as the man to 
 whom were first addressed those words which have comforted so 
 many millions since, and are destined to comfort so many millions 
 more in the years that are to come : " God so loved the world, that 
 he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him 
 should not perish, but have everlasting life !"
 
 THE WOMAN OF SAMARIA. 99 
 
 XIV. 
 
 THE WOMAN OF SAMARIA. 
 JOHNIV. 
 
 COMING, as he did, to a community that had long been accus- 
 tomed to act in its corporate capacity as a nation in covenant with 
 God; coming to be nationally received or nationally rejected as 
 the Messiah; a reception or rejection which could only be embodied 
 in some decisive expression of the will of the nation, made through 
 its authorised heads and representatives, our natural expectation 
 is that Christ's public manifestations of himself would be made 
 principally in Judea and at Jerusalem. And the actual opening of 
 his public ministry convinces us that had no check or hindrance 
 been interposed, had any readiness been shown by the rulers of the 
 people to look favourably on his character and claims, Judea and 
 Jerusalem would have been the chief scene of his labours. For 
 before he opened his lips as a teacher sent from God, to any 
 Galilean audience, or in any provincial synagogue, he presented 
 himself in the capital, and by a bold and striking act, fitted to draw 
 all eyes upon him, asserted his authority within the Temple, as the 
 house of his Father, which it became him to cleanse. The bold 
 beginning was well sustained both by word and deed, but no 
 favourable impression was made. The only one of the Killers' who 
 made any approach came to him by night, and went away to lock 
 up deep within his breast the wonderful revelation that was made 
 to him. Jesus retired from Jerusalem, but lingered still in Judea, 
 spending the summer months which succeeded the Passover in 
 some district of the country, not far from that in which John was 
 baptizing. It seems strange to us that after the sign from heaven 
 had been given that the greater than he had appeared, instead of 
 joining himself to Jesus, as one of his disciples, John should have 
 kept aloof, and continued baptizing, preserving thus a separate 
 following of his own. And it seems equally strange, that now for 
 a short time, and for this short time only, our Lord's disciples the 
 men who had voluntarily attached themselves to him, none of 
 whom had as yet been separated from their earthly callings, or set 
 apart as those through whom a new order of things was to be 
 instituted should also have engaged in baptizing, if not at the 
 suggestion, yet by the permission and under the sanction of their 
 Master. Whatever reasons we may assign for the separate 
 baptisms of John and Jesus being for this short season contem- 
 poraneously sustained, they serve to bring out fully and in striking 
 contrast the character and disposition towards Jesus of the Pharisees 
 on the one hand, and of the Baptist on the other. At first, in Judea,
 
 100 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 as in Galilee, the common people heard Christ gladly, and came in 
 great numbers to be baptized. This for the Pharisees is a new 
 matter of offence, out of which, however, they construct an im- 
 plement of mischief, which they hasten to employ. There can be 
 little doubt that the question which arose between John's disciples 
 and the Jews was stirred by the latter, had respect to the relative 
 value of the two baptisms, and was intended to sow the seeds of 
 dissension between the two discipleships. Fresh from the dispute, 
 and heated by it, some of John's disciples came to him, and said 
 unto him, evidently with the tone of men complaining of a griev- 
 ance by which their feelings have been hurt : " Rabbi, he that was 
 with thee beyond Jordan, to whom thou barest witness, behold, 
 the same baptizeth, and all men come to him." 
 
 We may be all ready enough to acknowledge the superiority of 
 another to ourselves in regard to qualities or acts in which we 
 never sought for prominence or praise. Even as to those qualities 
 and acts in which we may have ourselves excelled, we may not be 
 unwilling to confess the superiority of another, provided that we 
 do not come into direct comparison with him, in presence of those 
 who embody the expression of their preference in some marked 
 piece of conduct. But it does subject our weak nature to an 
 extreme trial when, by his side, in the very region in which he 
 has attained extraordinary and unlooked-for success, a man sees 
 another rise whose success so far outstrips his own as to throw it 
 wholly into the shade. Remember, now, that the Baptist was but 
 a man, with all the common infirmities of our nature clinging to 
 him; that up to the time he had baptized Jesus, his course had 
 been one of unparalleled popularity ; that from that time the tide 
 of the popular favour began to ebb away from him, and to rise 
 around this other, till at last he hears the tidings, He baptizeth, 
 and all men now go to him. And then, listen to his answer to the 
 complaint of his disciples: "A man," he said, " can receive nothing, 
 except it be given him from heaven." ' This growing baptism of 
 Jesus, this lesser baptism of mine, are both as Heaven has willed. 
 The multitudes that once flocked to me were sent by God ; the 
 power which I had over them I got from God ; and if the Lord 
 who sent and gave is pleased now to withdraw them from me, to 
 bestow them upon another, still will I adore his name. Nor is it 
 bare submission to his will I cherish. I hear of and I rejoice at 
 the success of Christ. " Ye yourselves bear me witness, that I said, 
 I am not the Christ, but that I am sent before him. He that hath 
 the bride is the bridegroom : but the friend of the bridegroom, 
 which standeth and heareth him, rejoiceth greatly because of the 
 bridegroom's voice. This my joy therefore is fulfilled. He must 
 increase, but I must decrease." ' Rare and beautiful instance of 
 an unenvying humility; all the rarer and more beautiful as
 
 THE WOMAN OF SAMARIA. 101 
 
 occurring, not in one of weak and gentle nature, but in a character of 
 masculine energy, in which are often to be found only the stronger 
 passions of humanity. A rare and beautiful sight it is to see the 
 gentle Jonathan not only give way to David, as successor to his 
 father's kingdom, but content to stand by David's side, and live 
 under the shadow of his throne ; but a rarer, I believe, and still 
 more beautiful thing it is to see the strong-willed Baptist not only 
 make room for Jesus, but rejoice that his own light, which had 
 " shone out so brilliantly, enlightening for a season the whole 
 Jewish heavens, faded away and sunk out of sight in the beams of 
 the rising Sun of righteousness." And John's final testimony upon 
 this occasion to the character and office of Jesus is as striking as 
 the involuntary display that he makes of his own character, going 
 much beyond what he had said before, and containing much that 
 bears a singular likeness to what Jesus had shortly before said of 
 himself to Nicodemus : " He that cometh from above is above all ; 
 he that is of the earth is earthly, and speaketh of the earth ; he 
 that cometh from heaven is above all : and what he hath seen and 
 heard, that he testifieth ; and no man receiveth his testimony. He 
 that hath received his testimony hath set-to his seal that God is 
 true. For he whom God hath sent speaketh the words of God: for 
 God giveth not the Spirit by measure unto him. The Father 
 loveth the Son, and hath given all things into his hand. He that 
 believeth on the Son hath everlasting life : and he that believeth 
 not the Son shall not see life ; but the wrath of God abideth on 
 him." l 
 
 Such was the testimony elicited from John on being told of the 
 large concourse of people which had gathered round Jesus and his 
 disciples. Very different was the effect which this intelligence 
 produced in Jerusalem. It fanned the hostile feeling already 
 kindled in the breasts of the Pharisees. How that feeling might 
 have manifested itself had Jesus continued in Judea, his disciples 
 gone on baptizing, and the people kept flocking to them, we cannot 
 tell. As from one quarter there burst about this time on the head 
 of John the storm that closed his public career, so from another 
 quarter might a storm have burst on the head of Jesus with like 
 effect. 
 
 Foreseeing the peril to which he might be exposed, Jesus, 
 " when he knew how the Pharisees had heard that he made and 
 baptized more disciples than John, left Judea, and departed again 
 into Galilee." His nearest and most direct route lay through the 
 central district of Samaria. This district was inhabited by people 
 of a foreign origin, and with a somewhat curious history. When 
 the king of Assyria carried the Ten Tribes into captivity, it is said 
 that, in order to fill the void which their exile created, he brought 
 1 John iii.
 
 102 THE EARLIER YEAES. 
 
 " men from Babylon, and from Cuthah, and from Ava, and from 
 Hamath, and from Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of 
 Samaria instead of the children of Israel; and they possessed 
 Samaria, and dwelt in the cities thereof." 1 These certainly were 
 idolaters, worshippers of a strange medley of divinities, and brought 
 with them their old faiths to their new home. Shortly after their 
 settlement, a frightful plague visited them, and it occurred to them- 
 selves, or was suggested by the neighbouring Israelites, that it had 
 fallen upon them because of their not worshipping the old divinity 
 of the place. In their alarm they sent an embassy to their monarch, 
 who, either humouring or sharing their fears, sent one of the captive 
 Jewish priests to instruct them in the Israelitish faith. This 
 faith they at once accepted and professed, combining it with their 
 old idolatries : " They feared the Lord," we are told, "and served 
 their own gods." 2 Gradually, however, they were weaned from 
 their ancient superstitions. When, under the decree of Cyrus, the 
 captives of Judah and Benjamin, returning from Babylon, set about 
 rebuilding the Temple at Jerusalem, the Samaritans proposed to 
 join them in the work. The proposal was haughtily rejected, and 
 that rejection was the first of a long series of disputes. A fresh 
 ground of offence arose when Manasseh, a grandson of one, and 
 brother of another High Priest, had, contrary to the laws and 
 customs of the Jews, married a daughter of Sanballat, the governor 
 of the province of Samaria. Called upon to renounce this alliance 
 and repudiate his wife, Manasseh, rather than do so, fled from 
 Jerusalem, and put himself under the protection of his father-in- 
 law. A considerable number of the Jews, who were dissatisfied 
 with the great strictness with which Nehemiah was administer- 
 ing affairs at Jerusalem, followed him. The Samaritans, thus 
 strengthened in numbers, and having now a member of one of the 
 highest families of the priesthood among them, erected a rival 
 temple on Mount Gerizim, and set up there a ritual of worship in 
 strict accordance with the Mosaic institute. Their history from 
 this time to the time of Christ is a very chequered one. Their 
 territory was invaded by John Hyrcanus, one of the family of the 
 Maccabees, who plundered their capital, and razing the stately 
 temple on Mount Gerizim from its foundations, left it a heap of 
 ruins, so that when Jesus passed that way, an altar reared upon 
 these ruins was all that Gerizim could boast. 
 
 Notwithstanding all these vicissitudes, and all the harsh hostili- 
 ties to which they were exposed, the Samaritans became purer and 
 purer in their faith, till all relics of their Medo-Persian idolatries 
 had disappeared. They received, as of Divine authority, the five 
 Books of Moses, the Pentateuch, but they rejected all the books of 
 history and prophecies which followed, and which were full, as the 
 1 2 Kings xvii. 24. 2 2 Kings xvii. 33.
 
 TIIE WOMAN OF SAMARIA. 103 
 
 Jews believed, of intimations of the future subjection of the whole 
 world to Israelitish sway, and the establishment of Jerusalem, as 
 the central place of worship, and the seat of universal empire. 
 
 But though the Jews despised the Samaritans as a people of a 
 mixed origin and a mutilated faith, and the Samaritans repaid the 
 contempt, we are not to think that the two communities lived so 
 much apart that there was no traffic or intercourse between them. 
 There was little or no interchange of kindly or social feeling ; but 
 it was quite within the limits of the common usage for the disciples 
 to go into a Samaritan town to buy bread for themselves and their 
 Master by the way. 
 
 Their morning's walk had carried Jesus and his disciples across 
 or along the plain of Mukhna to the entrance of that narrow valley 
 which lies between Mounts Ebal and Gerizim. Here, upon a spur 
 of the latter height, which runs out into the plain, was Jacob's 
 Well, the town of Sychar, the ancient Shechem, the modern 
 Nablous, lying about a mile and a half away, up in the valley, at the 
 base of Gerizim. It was the sixth hour our twelve o'clock and 
 the Syrian sun glared hotly upon the travellers. Wearied with the 
 heat of the day and the toil of the morning, Jesus sat down by the 
 well-side, while his disciples went on to Sychar to make the necessary 
 purchases. As Jesus is sitting by the well alone, a woman of 
 Samaria approaches. He fixes his eye upon her as she comes near ; 
 watches her as she proceeds to draw the water, waiting till the full 
 pitcher is upon the well-mouth, and then says to her, " Give me to 
 drink." He is a Jew ; she knows it by his dress and speech. Yet, 
 as one willing to be indebted to her, he asks a favour at her hands ; 
 a favour for which, if his look do not belie him, he will be grateful. 
 Not as one unwilling to grant the favour, but surprised at its being 
 asked, her answer is : " How is it that thou, being a Jew, askest 
 drink of me, who am a woman of Samaria?" He will answer this 
 question, but not in the way that she expects. The manner of his 
 dispensation of the great gift he came from heaven to bestow stands 
 embodied in the words : " Thou wouldest have asked, and I would 
 have given thee the living water." 1 
 
 The woman has taken him to be a common Jew, an ordinary 
 wayfarer, whom thirst and the fatigue of travel have overcome, 
 forcing him, perhaps unwillingly, to ask for water to drink. He 
 will fix her attention upon himself ; he will stir up her feminine 
 curiosity by telling her that he who asks has something on his part 
 
 1 There is no doubt that the well still shown to travellers near Nablous is the 
 weil of Jacob. Its position near to Sychar ; its importance, as inferred from its 
 dimensions, being a well of nine feet in diameter and seventy-five in depth ; cut out 
 of the solid rock, with sides hewn and smooth as Jacob's servants may be supposed 
 to have left them, go far, of themselves, to determine its identity ; and the con- 
 clusion is confirmed by an undivided, unbroken tradition, Jewish, Samaritan. 
 Arabian, Turkish, Christian.
 
 104 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 to give ; that if she only knew who he was, and what that living 
 Abater was which he had at command, instead of stopping to inquire 
 why he had asked water of her, she would he asking it of him, and 
 what she asked he without question would have given. Living 
 water ! better water than that which she has in her pitcher. 
 Could it be by going deeper down, and getting nearer to the 
 bubbling spring beneath, that he could get such water, or was it 
 water of superior quality from some other well than this of Jacob ? 
 Sir, she says, addressing him with awakening interest and an 
 increasing respect : " Sir," she says, in her ignorance and con- 
 fusion, " thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep : 
 from whence then hast thou that living water ? Art thou greater 
 than our father Jacob, who gave us the well, and drank thereof 
 himself, and his children, and his cattle 1" Her thoughts are 
 wandering away back to the first drinkers at this well, when its 
 waters first burst out in their freshness, imagining that it must be 
 of them, or of the water of some other neighbouring well, that this 
 stranger had been speaking. Again, waiving as before all direct 
 reply to her question, Jesus with increased solemnity says : " Who- 
 soever drinketh of this water shall thirst again : but whosoever 
 drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst ; but 
 the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water 
 springing up into everlasting life." It is not this water, then ; it 
 is no common water; it is water that this man alone can give; 
 water which is not to be taken in draughts, with which you may 
 quench your thirst now, and then wait till the thirst comes back 
 again ere another draught be taken; but water of which a man 
 should constantly be drinking, and if he did so would be constantly 
 satisfied, so that there would be no recurring intervals of desire 
 and gratification, this water as received turning into a well within 
 the man himself, springing up into everlasting life. Beginning to 
 understand a little, seeing this at least, that it was of some element 
 altogether different from any water that she had ever tasted, yet 
 clinging still to the notion that it must be some kind of material 
 water that he means, she says : " Sir, give me this water, that I 
 thirst not, neither come hither to draw." 
 
 One part of Christ's object has now been gained; he has 
 awakened not an idle, but a very eager curiosity ; he has forced 
 the woman's attention on himself as having some great benefit in 
 his hand which he is not unwilling to bestow. Through a figura- 
 tive description of what this benefit is, he will not or cannot carry 
 her further at present. Abruptly breaking the conversation off at 
 this point, he says to her : " Go, call thy husband, and come hither." 
 With great frankness she says, " I have no husband." Jesus said 
 to her, " Thou hast well said, I have no husband ; for thou hast 
 had live husbands, and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband ;
 
 THE WOMAN OF SAMARIA. 105 
 
 in that saidst thou truly." In the past domestic history of this 
 woman there had been much that was peculiar, though up to the 
 last connection she had formed there may not have been anything 
 that was sinful. Christ's object, however, was not so much to 
 convict her of bygone or existing guilt, as to convince her that he 
 was in full possession of all the secrets of her past life, and so to 
 create within her a belief in his more than human insight. Not so 
 much as one overwhelmed with the sense of shame, but rather as 
 one surprised into a new belief as to the character and capabilities 
 of the stranger who addresses her, she replies, " Sir, I perceive that 
 thou art a prophet." If she had been a woman of an utterly aban- 
 doned character, whose whole bygone life had been one series of 
 flagrant offences, whose conscience, long seared with iniquity, Christ 
 was now trying to quicken, very curious would it appear that so 
 soon as the quickening came, waiving all questions about her own 
 character, she should so instantly have put the question about the 
 true place of religious worship, whether here at Gerizim, or there 
 at Jerusalem. 
 
 There may have been an attempt to parry conviction, and to 
 turn aside the hand of the convincer, by raising questions about 
 places and forms of worship ; but I cannot think, had this been the 
 spirit and motive of this woman's inquiries, that Jesus would have 
 dealt with them as he did; for, treating them evidently as the 
 earnest inquiries of one wishing to be instructed, assuming all the 
 dignity of that office which had been attributed to him, he says to 
 her : ' Woman, believe me, the hour cometh (I speak as one before 
 whose eye the whole history of the future stands revealed the 
 hour cometh, I came myself into the world to bring it on) when 
 that strong bias to worship that lies so deep in the hearts of men, 
 shall have found at last its one only true and worthy object in that 
 God and Father of all, who made all, and who loves all, and hast 
 sent me to reveal him to all ; when, stripped of all the restraints 
 that have hitherto confined it to a single people, a single country, 
 a single town ; relieved of all the supports that were required by 
 it in its weak and tottering childhood, the spirit of a true piety 
 shall go forth in freedom over the globe, seeking for those what- 
 ever be the places they choose, the outward forms that they adopt, 
 for those who will adore and love and serve him in spirit and in 
 truth, and wherever it finds them, owning them as the true wor- 
 shippers of the Father. Woman, believe me, the hour cometh, 
 when neither in this mountain nor yet in Jerusalem, nor here, nor 
 there, nor anywhere exclusively, shall men worship the Father. 
 " God is a Spirit ; and they that worship him must worship him in 
 spirit and in truth.'" The newness, the breadth, the sublimity, if 
 not also the truth of his teaching, at once suggested to the mind of 
 the listener the thought of that Messiah for whom every Samaritan
 
 106 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 and Jew alike were looking. " I know," she said, " that Messias 
 cometh : when he is come, he will tell us all things." Jesus saith 
 to her, " I that speak unto thee am he." 
 
 Why was it that that which he so long and studiously concealed 
 from the Jewish people, that which he so strictly enjoined his dis- 
 ciples not to make known to them, was thus so simply, clearly, and 
 directly told ? In the woman herself to whom the wonderful reve- 
 lation was made, there may have been much to draw it forth. The 
 gentle surprise with which she meets the request of the Jewish 
 stranger ; the expression of respect she uses so soon as he begins 
 to speak of God, and some gift of his she might enjoy ; her guile- 
 less confession when once she found she was actually in a prophet's 
 presence ; her instant readiness to believe that Jew though he was 
 apparently of no note or mark among his brethren he was yet 
 a prophet ; her eager question about the most acceptable way of 
 worshipping the Most High ; the quick occurrence of the coming 
 Messiah to her thoughts; the full, confiding, generous faith that 
 she at once reposed in him when he said, I that speak unto thee 
 am he ; her forgetfulness of her individual errand to the well ; her 
 leaving her pitcher there behind her ; her running into the city to 
 call all the men of Sychar, saying, Come, see a man who told me 
 all things that ever I did, is not this the Christ ? all conspire to 
 convince us that, sinful though she was, she was hungering ana 
 thirsting after righteousness, waiting for the consolation of Israel, 
 we trust prepared to hail the Saviour when he stood revealed. 
 
 But besides her individual character, there was also the circum- 
 stance that she was a Samaritan. It is the first time that Jesus 
 comes into close, private, personal contact with one who is not of 
 the seed of Israel; for though she claimed Jacob as her father, 
 neither this woman nor any of the tribe she belonged to were of 
 Jewish descent. " I am not come," said Jesus afterwards, defining 
 the general boundaries of his personal ministry, " but to the lost 
 sheep of the house of Israel." When he sent out the Seventy, his 
 instructions to them were : " Go not into the way of the Gentiles, 
 and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not." And yet there 
 were a few occasions, and this is the first of them, in which Christ 
 broke through the restraints under which it pleased him ordinarily 
 to act. I believe that there are just four instances of this kind 
 recorded in the Saviour's life : that of the woman of Samaria, of 
 the Eoman Centurion, of the Canaanitish woman, of the Greeks 
 who came up to Jerusalem. All these were instances of our Lord's 
 dealings with those who stood without the pale of Judaism, and as 
 we come upon them in the narrative, we shall be struck with the 
 singular interest which Jesus took in each ; the singular care that 
 he bestowed in testing and bringing out to view the simplicity and 
 strength of the desire towards him, and faith in him, that were
 
 THE WOMAN OF SAMARIA. 107 
 
 displayed ; the fulness of the revelations of himself that he made, 
 and of that satisfaction and delight with which he contemplated 
 the issue. It was the great and good Shepherd, stretching out his 
 hand across the fence, and gathering in a lamb or two from the 
 outfields, in token of the truth that there were other sheep which 
 were not of the Jewish fold, whom also he was in due time to 
 bring in, so that there should be one flock and one shepherd. 
 
 Our idea, that it was this circumstance, her Samaritan nation- 
 ality, which lent such interest, in our Saviour's own regard, to his 
 interview with this woman by the well -side, is confirmed by casting 
 a glance at its result. Jesus at their entreaty turned aside, and 
 abode two days with the Sycharites. You read of no sign or 
 wonder wrought, no miracle performed, save that miracle of know- 
 ledge which won the woman's faith. Though no part of it is 
 recorded, his teaching for those few days in Sychar was, in its 
 general character, like to his teaching by the well-mouth, and on 
 the ground alone of the truthfulness, the simplicity, the purity, the 
 spirituality, and the sublimity of that teaching, many believed on 
 him, declaring they knew that this was indeed the Christ, the 
 Saviour of the world. 
 
 The phrase is so familiar to the Christian ear, that we may fail 
 to mark its singularity as coming from the lips of these rude 
 Samaritans. No Saviour this for Jew alone, or Samaritan alone ; 
 for any one age or country. Not his the work to deliver from 
 mere outward thraldom, to establish either in Jerusalem or else- 
 where any temporal kingdom : his the wider and more glorious 
 office to emancipate the human spirit, and be its guide to the 
 Father of the spirits of all flesh. Compare the notions which 
 these simple villagers had of the Messiah, with those prevalent 
 among the Jews ; compare with them any of the most intelligent 
 of our Lord's apostles up to the day of Pentecost, and your very 
 wonder might create doubt, did you not remember that it was not 
 from the books of Daniel and Zechariah and Ezekiel, the books 
 from which the Jews by false interpretations derived their ideas 
 of the Messiah's character and reign, that the Samaritans derived 
 theirs, but from the Pentateuch alone, the five books of Moses; 
 and when you turn to the latter, and look at the prophecies regard- 
 ing Christ which they contain, you will find that the two things 
 about him to which they point, that he should be a prophet sent 
 from God, and that his office should have respect to all mankind, 
 that to him should the gathering of the people be, and that in him 
 should all families of the earth be blessed, were the very two 
 things that the faith of these Samaritans embraced when they said, 
 " We know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world" 
 
 The conversation by the well, the two fruitful days at Sychar, 
 what is the general lesson that they convey? That wherever
 
 108 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 Christ finds an open listening ear, he has glad tidings that he is 
 ready to pour into it ; that wherever he finds a thirsting soul, he 
 has living waters with which he delights to quench its thirst ; that 
 to all who are truly seeking him, he drops disguise, and says, 
 "Behold, even I that speak unto you am he;" that wherever he 
 finds minds and hearts longing after a revelation of the Father, 
 and the true mode of worshipping him, to such is the revelation 
 given. Had you but stood by Jacob's well, and seen the kok of 
 Jesus, and listened to the tones of his voice ; or had you been in 
 Sychar during those two bright and happy days, hearing the 
 instructions so freely given, so gratefully received, you would have 
 had the evidence of sense to tell you with what abounding joy to 
 all who are waiting and who are willing, Jesus breaks the bread 
 and pours out the water of everlasting life. Multiplied a thousand- 
 fold is the evidence to the same effect now offered to the eye and 
 ear of faith. Still from the lips of the Saviour of the world, over 
 all the world the words are sounding forth : "If any man thirst, 
 let him come to me and drink." Still the manner of his dispen- 
 sation of the great gift stands embodied in the words: "Thou 
 wouldest have asked, and I would have given thee the living 
 water." And still these other voices are heard catching up and 
 re-echoing our Lord's own gracious invitation : " And the Spirit 
 and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. 
 And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him 
 take the water of life freely." 
 
 XV. 
 
 THE JEWISH NOBLEMAN AND THE ROMAN CENTURION. 
 JOHN rv. 46-54 ; LUKE vn. 1-10. 
 
 SEATED by the side of Jacob's well, and seeing the Samaritan 
 woman draw water out of it, Jesus seizes on the occasion to 
 discourse to her of the water of life. So soon as she hears from 
 his own lips that he is the Messiah, this woman leaves her water- 
 pot behind her, and hurries into the neighbouring city to announce 
 to others the great discovery which has been made to her. She 
 has scarcely left the Saviour's side, ere his disciples present them- 
 selves with the bread which they had bought in Sychar, offering it, 
 and saying to him, " Master, eat." But, as if hunger had gone 
 from him, and he cared not now for food, he answers, " I have 
 meat to eat that ye know not of." Wondering at his manner, his 
 appearance, his speech, so different from what they had expected, 
 the disciples say to one another it is the only explanation that 
 occurs to them "Hath any man brought him ought to eat 1 ?"
 
 THE JEWISH NOBLEMAN AND THE ROMAN CENTURION. 109 
 
 Correcting the false conception, our Lord replies : " My meat is to 
 do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work." He had 
 been eating that meat, he had been doing that will, while they 
 were away ; and so grateful had it been to him to be so engaged, 
 so happy had he been in instructing a solitary woman, and sending 
 her away, in full belief in his Messiahship, to go and bring others 
 to him, that, in the joy of a spirit whose first desire had been 
 granted to it, the bodily appetite ceases to solicit, and the hunger 
 of an hour ago is no longer felt. She is gone, but already fore- 
 seeing all, he anticipates her return, hears and acts upon the 
 invitation given, has the fruit of these two productive days at 
 Sychar before his eyes, looking upon the few sheaves then gathered 
 in as the first-fruits of a still wider, richer harvest. The idea of 
 that harvest filling his mind, he looks over the fields around him, 
 and blending the natural and the spiritual together, he says to his 
 disciples : " Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then 
 cometh harvest ? Behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and 
 look on the fields, for they are white already to harvest." 
 
 It has always been a question whether there was any allusion 
 made or intended by Christ to the actual condition of the fields 
 around him as he spake. I cannot but think, though it be in 
 opposition to the judgment of some of our first scholars, that there 
 was. Jesus was speaking at the time when there were as yet 
 four months unto the harvest. If it were so, then we have good 
 ground for settling at what period of the year this visit of our 
 Lord to Sychar took place. The harvest in Palestine begins about 
 the middle of April. Four months back from that time carries us 
 to the middle of December, the Jewish seed-time. If so, the 
 interval between the first Passover at which our Lord had his 
 conversation with Nicodemus, which took place, as we know, at 
 the commencement of the early harvest, and the conversation 
 with the woman of Samaria, an interval of no less than eight 
 months, were spent by Jesus in Judea, giving to the rulecs of the 
 people a privileged opportunity of considering Christ's character 
 and claims. Nothing but disappointment, neglect, indifference, or 
 alienation, having been manifested, Jesus retired to Galilee, taking 
 Samaria by the way. The two days at Sychar presented a striking 
 contrast to his reception in Judea. How will they stand in com- 
 parison with the reception that awaits him in Galilee ] 
 
 Cana lies farther north than Nazareth. The road to the one 
 would lead close to, if not through the other. On this occasion 
 Jesus appears to have passed by Nazareth. Perhaps it was to 
 avoid such a reception as he knew to be awaiting him there, or it 
 may have been simply because Mary and the family had shifted 
 their residence, and were now living near their relatives at Cana. 
 The rumour of the first miracle which he had wrought there some
 
 110 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 months before may have spread widely in the neighbourhood. It 
 was done, however, so quietly, and in such a hidden manner, that 
 one can well conceive of different versions of it going abroad. It 
 was different with those reports which the Galileans who had 
 been up at the last Passover brought back from Jerusalem. Our 
 Lord's miracles there, whatever they were, were done openly ; many 
 had believed because of them. The Galileans who were at the feast 
 had seen them all, and on their return home had filled the country 
 with the noise of them, all the more gratified, perhaps, that he who 
 had drawn all eyes upon him at Jerusalem was one of themselves. 
 And now it is told abroad that he has come back from Judea and 
 is at Cana. 
 
 The tidings reach the ear of a nobleman in Capernaum, a Jew 
 of high birth connected with the court of Herod Antipas, at the 
 very time that a grievous malady is on his son, and has brought 
 him to the very brink of death. He had not heard, perhaps, that 
 Jesus had restored the dying to health; so far as we know, the 
 healing of his son may have been the first miracle of that kind 
 which Jesus wrought ; but he has heard of his turning the water 
 into wine, he has heard of the wonders wrought at Jerusalem. He 
 by whom such miracles had been done should be able to rebuke 
 disease. It is at least worth trying whether he will or can. The 
 distance to Cana is but a short one, some twenty miles or so. He 
 will send no servant, he will go himself, and make the trial. He 
 went, saw Jesus, told him his errand, and besought him that he 
 would come down and heal his son. Why was it that before 
 Jesus made any reply, or gave any indication of his purpose, he 
 said, as the fruit of some deep inward thought which the applica- 
 tion had suggested, " Except ye see signs and wonders ye will not 
 believe "? It was because he saw all that was in that man, all' the 
 motives by which he had been prompted to this visit ; the strong 
 affection for his son, which Jesus will not rebuke ; his willingness 
 to be at any pains on his behalf, to seek help from any quarter ; 
 his partial faith in Christ's power to help for without some faith 
 of this description he would not have come at all ; yet the absence 
 of all deeper faith springing from a sense of spiritual disease, which 
 should have brought the man to Jesus for himself as well as for his 
 son, and which should have taught him to look to Jesus as the healer 
 of the soul. It was because he saw in this nobleman a specimen of 
 his countrymen at large, and in his application a type and prelude 
 of the multitude of like applications afterwards to be made to him. 
 
 It may have served to suggest this the more readily to Christ's 
 thoughts, and give the greater intensity to the emotion excited 
 within his breast, that he had just come from Sychar, where so 
 many had believed in him without any sign or wonder done, 
 believed in him as a teacher sent from God, believed in him as
 
 THE JEWISH NOBLEMAN AND THE EOMAN CENTUKION. Ill 
 
 the Messiah promised to their fathers. What a contrast between 
 those simple-minded, simple-hearted Samaritans, whose love and 
 wonder, faith and penitence, joy and gratitude had been so 
 quickly, so purely, so exclusively awakened, and this nobleman 
 of Capernaum and his Galilean fellow-countrymen 1 We know 
 that Jesus never returned to Sychar, though he must more than 
 once have passed near to it on his way to and from Jerusalem. 
 We know that he gave positive instructions to the Seventy to go 
 into no city of the Samaritans. It was in fulfilment of his design 
 that his personal ministry should be confined to the lost sheep of 
 the house of Israel, that he laid this restraint upon himself and 
 his disciples. But can we think that it cost him no self-denial, 
 that it was with no inward pang that Jesus turned away from those 
 who showed themselves so willing to receive, to those who were 
 for ever asking a sign from heaven, and who, " after he had done 
 so many miracles, yet believed not in him"? (John xii. 37.) Why 
 was it then, that when the Pharisees came forth, and began to 
 question him, seeking of him a sign from heaven, " he sighed deeply 
 in his spirit, and said, Why doth this generation seek after a sign ? " 
 (Mark viii. 12.) The deep sigh came from the depth of a spirit 
 moved and grieved at this incessant craving for outward seals and 
 vouchers, this unwillingness to believe in him simply on the ground 
 of his character and his doctrine. Though he did not meet the 
 peculiar demand of the Pharisees, who, unsatisfied even with his 
 other works, sought from him a special sign from heaven, our Lord, 
 we know, was lavish in the performance of miracles, supplied 
 willingly and largely that ground of faith which they afforded, 
 appealed often and openly to the proof of his divine mission which 
 they supplied. Yet all this is consistent with his deploring the 
 necessity which required such a kind of evidence to be supplied, 
 and his mourning over that state of the human spirit out of which 
 the necessity arose. " The works that I do, bear witness of me, 
 that the Father hath sent me." "If I do not the works of my 
 Father, believe me not. But if I do, though ye believe not me, 
 believe the works." 1 Such was Christ's language openly addressed 
 to the rulers of the people at Jerusalem. Nor was it differently 
 that he spoke to his disciples in private : " Believe me that I am 
 in the Father, and the Father in me : or else believe me for the 
 very works' sake." 2 Jesus would rather have been believed in 
 without the works, would rather that he had not had the works 
 to do in order to win the faith. It is not, then, a faith in the 
 reality of miracles, nor in him simply as the worker of them, nor 
 in anything he was or said or did that rests exclusively upon his 
 having performed them, which constitutes that deeper faith in him- 
 self to which it is his supreme desire to conduct us. And when 
 i John v. 36 ; x. 37, 38. John xiv. 11.
 
 112 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 we read of Jesus sighing when signs were asked, and sighing as 
 miracles were wrought by him, we cannot interpret his sighing 
 otherwise than as the expression of the profound grief of his spirit 
 over those who were so little alive to the more spiritual evidence 
 that his character and works carried along with them, as to need 
 to have these outward props and buttresses supplied. 
 
 " Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe." We 
 are scarcely surprised that the nobleman of Capernaum, when his 
 eager entreaty was met in this way, by the utterance of so broad an 
 aphorism, should have felt somewhat disappointed and chagrined. 
 There was some hope for him, indeed, had he reflected on it, in the 
 words that Christ had used ; for if Jesus had not meant to do this 
 sign and wonder, he would not have spoken as he did. But the 
 father is in no mood to take up and weigh the worth and meaning 
 of Chris Vs words. What he wants is that Christ should go down 
 with him immediately to Capernaum ; he has some hope, that if 
 there, he may be able to cure his son. He has no idea of a healing 
 wrought at a distance, effected at Cana by a word of the Lord's 
 power, an act of the Lord's will. " Sir," he says, " come down ere 
 my child die :" a tinge of impatience, perhaps of pride, yet full of 
 the good compensatory element, strong parental love. " Jesus 
 saith unto him, Go thy way ; thy son liveth." It is the first time, 
 it is one of the few instances in which Jesus stood face to face 
 with earthly rank and power. Perhaps this nobleman presumed on 
 his position, when he said, with something of an imperative tone, 
 " Sir, come down ere my child die." If so, he must have been not 
 a little astonished to find the tone of command rolled back upon 
 him thus : " Go thy way, thy son liveth." How high above the 
 nobility of earth rises the royalty of heaven ! This is the style 
 and manner of Him who saith, and it is done ; who commandeth, 
 and creation throughout all its borders obeys. None ever did 
 such works on earth as Jesus did ; none ever did them in such a 
 simple, easy, unaffected manner ; the manner becoming one who 
 was exerting not a delegated but a native power. 
 
 The manner and the substance of the declaration told alike at 
 once upon the nobleman. It satisfied him that the end of his visit 
 was gained. He believed in the word of Jesus, that the death 
 he dreaded was not to come upon his son, that the child he loved 
 so tenderly was to be spared to him. How exactly this had been 
 brought about he did not as yet know. Whether the cure had 
 been instantaneous and complete, or whether the crisis of it had 
 passed, and the recovery had begun ; whether it had been by his 
 possession of a superhuman knowledge, or by his exercise of a 
 superhuman power, that Jesus had been able to announce to him 
 the fact, " Thy son liveth," he neither stayed, nor did he venture 
 to ask any explanation. It was enough for him to be assured of
 
 THE JEWISH NOBLEMAN AND THE ROMAN CENTUEION. 113 
 
 the fact, and there was something in the manner in which that 
 Go thy way had been spoken, which forbade delay. He meets his 
 servants by the way, bearers of glad tidings. With them he can 
 use all freedom. He asks all about the cure, and learns that it 
 had not been slowly but instantaneously that the fever had gone, 
 and that the time at which it had done so was the very time at 
 which these words of Jesus, " Thy son liveth," had been spoken 
 at Cana. He had gone out to that village but half a believer in 
 Christ's power in any way to help, limiting that power so much in 
 his conception that it had never once occurred to him that Jesus 
 could do anything for him unless he saw the child. But now he 
 feels that he has been standing in the presence of One, the extent 
 of whose power he had as much underrated as the depth and the 
 tenderness of his love. Awe, conviction, gratitude, fill his soul. 
 A double sign and wonder has been done in Israel. A child has 
 been cured of a fever at Capernaum by one standing miles away 
 at Cana, and a father has been cured of his unbelief, the same 
 kind of power that banished the disease from the body of the one, 
 banishing distrust from the heart of the other. 
 
 How far above all that he had ever asked ! His child was 
 dying when the father left Capernaum, was still nearer death when 
 he arrived at Cana ; had Jesus done what the father wanted, and 
 gone down with him to Capernaum, his son might have been dead 
 ere they got there. The word of power is spoken, and just as the 
 disease is clasping its victim in a last embrace, it has to relax its 
 grasp, take wings, and fly away. The father has gone unselfishly, 
 affectionately, on an errand of love, seeking simply his child's life, 
 not asking or caring to get anything himself from Christ. But now 
 in this Jesus he recognises a higher and greater than a mere healer 
 of the body : spiritual life is breathed into his own souL Nor is 
 this all ; he returns to Capernaum to tell all the wonders of the 
 cure ; tells them to the healed child, who also believes, and 
 strange would be the meeting afterwards between that child and 
 Jesus, he tells them to the other members of his family, and each 
 in turn believes. He himself believed, and with him all his house, 
 the first whole household brought into the Christian fold. 
 
 Let us compare for a moment this case with that of the Eoman 
 Centurion. Both plead for others ; the one for his child, the other 
 for his servant, and the pleading of both is signally successful ; 
 the compliance prompt and generous. Such honour does Jesus 
 put on all kindly intercession with him on behalf of those to whom 
 we are bound by ties of relationship and affection. In both the 
 cases, too, Christ adopts the unusual method of curing at a dis- 
 tance, curing by a word. But the treatment of the two applicants 
 is different: suited to the state, the character, the necessities of 
 each. The one's faith is limited and weak, and needs to be ex-
 
 114 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 panded and strengthened ; the other's is strong, and waits only 
 to be exhibited in combination with that humility which covers 
 it as with a crown of glory. The one man, little knowing what 
 Christ can do for him, and impatient at what looks like a repulse, 
 says in his haste, Sir, come down ere my child die. The other, 
 having a boundless faith in Jesus, ventures not at first to prescribe 
 any special mode of cure, but contents himself with sending some 
 elders of the Jews to ask that Christ's healing power should be 
 exercised on behalf of his servant. Jesus goes not with him who 
 asks him to do so, having a far greater thing to do for him than 
 to comply with his request. But he no sooner gets the message 
 delivered by deputy from the other, than he says, I will come and 
 heal him, and sets off instantly on the errand. But he knew that 
 he should be arrested by the way. He knew that the Roman 
 Centurion had such a sense of his own unworthiness that he shrank 
 from receiving him into his house ; he knew that he had such con- 
 fidence in his power, that all he wanted was that Jesus should will 
 it and his servant should be cured. He knew that there was a 
 humility and a faith in the breast of this Gentile officer the first 
 Gentile that ever applied to him such as was not to be found in 
 any Israelitish bosom. It was to bring these before the eyes of 
 his fellow-countrymen, and to hold them up for admiration and 
 rebuke, that he did not at the first act as he had done at Cana, 
 but made that movement towards the Centurion's dwelling. Won- 
 derful, indeed, the faith embodied in the message which the Cen- 
 turion sent : ' I, a Roman officer, have a limited authority, but 
 within its limits this authority is supreme. I can say unto one of 
 my soldiers, Go, and he goeth ; to another, Come, and he cometh ; 
 to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it. But thou, Jesus, art 
 supreme over all. As my soldiers are under me, so under thee are 
 all the powers and processes of nature. Thou canst say to this 
 disease, Come, and it cometh; to that other disease, Go, and it 
 goeth ; to thy servants, Life and Death, Do this, and they do it. 
 Say thou then but the word, and my servant shall be healed.' And 
 Jesus marvelled when he heard the message, and he turned about 
 and said to the people that followed him, it was very much for 
 their sakes that he had arranged it so, that so many peculiarities 
 should attend this miracle, and such a pre-eminence be given to this 
 first exhibition of Gentile faith in him, I say unto you, I have 
 not found so great faith, no, not in Israel. It was the highest 
 exercise of human faith in him that Jesus had yet met with, and 
 he wondered and rejoiced that it should be found beyond the 
 bounds of Israel. Midway between the Gentile and the Jew stood 
 the woman of Samaria ; outside the bounds of Judaism stood this 
 Roman Centurion. Was it to prefigure the great future of the 
 gathering-in of all people, and nations, and tongues, and tribes,
 
 THE POOL OF BETHESDA. 115 
 
 that so early in his ministry such manifestation of a faith in the 
 Saviour was made 1 
 
 XVI. 
 
 THE POOL OF BETHESDA, 
 JOHN v. 
 
 COULD we ascertain what the feast was to which Jesus went 
 up, and at which he healed the man beside the Pool of Bethesda, 
 it would go far to settle the question as to the length of our 
 Lord's public ministry ; but after all the labour that has been 
 bestowed on the investigation, it remains still uncertain whether 
 it was the Passover, or one of the other annual festivals. This 
 much, at least, appears probable, that it was our Lord's second 
 appearance in Jerusalem after his baptism, and that it occurred at 
 or near the close of a year, the most of which had been spent in 
 Judea. On the occasion of this second visit, Jesus went one 
 Sabbath-day to walk through the cloisters or colonnades that were 
 built round a large swimming-bath, called the Pool of Bethesda, 
 Tradition has for many ages pointed to a large excavation 360 
 feet long, 130 feet broad, and 75 feet deep, lying outside the 
 north wall of the Harem enclosure, and near to St. Stephen's Gate, 
 as having been this pool. The peculiar character of its masonry 
 establishes the fact that it must have been intended originally as a 
 reservoir for water. At one of its corners there are two arched 
 openings or vaults, one twelve, the other nineteen feet wide, ex- 
 tending backward to an unknown distance, forming part, it may 
 have been, of the porches of which the Evangelist speaks. These 
 porches, on the day on which Jesus visited them, were crowded. 
 They formed one of the city resorts; and besides numbers of 
 others that frequented them for the ordinary use of the waters, 
 there lay around a great multitude of the blind, the halt, the 
 withered, waiting fcr the moving of the water. 
 
 Wandering through these crowded porches, and looking at the 
 strange array of the diseased waiting there for the auspicious 
 moment, the eye of Jesus rests on one who wears a dejected and 
 despairing look, as if he had given up all hope. Thirty-eight 
 years before, the powers of life and motion had been so enfeebled 
 that it was with the greatest difficulty, and at the slowest pace, he 
 could creep along the ground. His friends had got tired perhaps 
 of helping him otherwise, and as their last resource, had carried 
 him to the porches of the pool, and left him there to do the best 
 for himself he could. And he had done that best often and often, 
 yet had failed. Every time the troubling of the water came, he
 
 116 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 had made the effort; but every time he had seen some one of 
 more vigour and alertness, or better helped, get in before him and 
 snatch the benefit out of his hands. Jesus knew all this : knew 
 how long it had been since the paralytic stroke first fell on him ; 
 how long it was since he had been brought to try the efficacy of 
 these waters ; how the expectation of cure, at first full and bright, 
 had been gradually fading from his heart. To rekindle the dying 
 hope, to fix the man's attention on himself, Jesus bends over the 
 bed on which he lies, looks down at him, and says, Wilt thou be 
 made whole ? Were the words spoken in mockery ? That could 
 not be ; a glance at the speaker was sufficient to disprove it. But 
 the question surely would not have been asked had the speaker 
 known how helpless was he to whom it was addressed. He said, 
 "I have no man, when the water is troubled, to put me into the 
 pool, but while I am coming another steppeth down before me." 
 As he gives this explanation, he looks up more earnestly into the 
 stranger's face a face he had never seen before and gathers a 
 new life and hope from the expression of sympathy, the look of 
 power that countenance conveys. 
 
 "Jesus saith unto him, Rise, take up thy bed, and walk." 
 The command was instantly obeyed. The cure was instantly com- 
 plete. The short time, however, that it had taken for him to 
 stoop and lift the mattress on which he lay, had been sufficient for 
 Jesus to pass on, and be lost among the crowd. The stopping, 
 the question, the command, the cure, all had been so sudden, the 
 man had been so taken by surprise, that he doubts whether he 
 would be able to recognise that stranger if he saw him again. 
 Lifting his bed, and rejoicing in the new sensation of recovered 
 strength, he walks through the city streets in search of his old 
 home and friends. The Jews an expression by which, in his 
 Gospel, John always means, not the general community, but some 
 of the ecclesiastical heads and rulers of the people the Jews see 
 him as he walks, and say to him, " It is the Sabbath-day ; it is 
 not lawful for thee to carry thy bed." No answer could be more 
 natural, as no excuse could be more valid, than that which the 
 man gave when he said, " He that made me whole, the same said 
 unto me, Take up thy bed, and walk." His challengers do not 
 ask him anything about the healing as soon as they hear of it, 
 they suspect who the healer was but fixing upon the act in which 
 the breach of the Sabbath lay, and as if admitting the validity of 
 the man's defence, in throwing the responsibility of that act 
 upon him who had ordered him to do it, "They asked him, 
 What man is that which said unto thee, Take up thy bed, and 
 walk 1 " He could not tell, and so the conversation by the way- 
 side dropped. 
 
 Soon after, the healed man is in the Temple, thanking God, let
 
 THE POOL OF BETHESDA. 117 
 
 us believe, for the great mercy bestowed upon him. Jesus, too, is 
 there ; but they might have passed without the healed recognising 
 the healer. It was not the purpose, however, of our Lord that 
 it should be so. Finding the man among the worshippers, he 
 says to him, " Sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee." 
 Nothing more seems to have been said; nothing more to have 
 passed between the two ; but that short sentence, what a light it 
 threw upon the distant past ! reminding the man that it had been 
 to the sins of his youth that he had owed the eight-and-thirty 
 years of infirmity that had followed ; and what a solemn warning 
 did they carry as to the future ! reminding him that if, on being 
 restored to strength, he should return to sin, a still worse thing 
 than so many years of bodily infirmity might be in store for him. 
 Jesus gives this warning, and passes on. Kecognising him at once 
 as he who had cured him beside the pool, the man inquires about 
 him of the bystanders, and learns now who he is. And he goes 
 and tells the Jews ; not, let us hope, from any malicious motive, or 
 any desire to put an instrument into the hands of Christ's enemies. 
 Considering where and how he had so long been lying, he may 
 have known so little of all that had recently happened, as to 
 imagine that he was at once pleasing the rulers, and doing a ser- 
 vice to Jesus, by informing them about his cure. But it was no 
 new intelligence that he conveyed. The Jews, we presume, knew 
 well enough who had effected this cure. But it was the first 
 instance in which they had heard of Jesus healing on the Sabbath- 
 day of itself in their eyes a violation of its sanctity ; and as it 
 would appear that, not content with this offence, he had added 
 another in ordering the man to carry on that day a burden through 
 the streets a thing strictly and literally prohibited by the law, 
 it may have gratified the Jews to be able to convict Jesus of a 
 double breach of the Sabbath law by direct and indubitable evi- 
 dence from the man's own lips. You can imagine the secret though 
 malignant satisfaction with which they got and grasped this weapon, 
 one at once of defence and of assault ; how they would use it in 
 vindicating their rejection of Christ as a teacher sent from God, 
 for could God send a man who would be guilty of such flagrant 
 breaches of his law ? how they would use it in carrying out those 
 purposes of persecution already brooding in their breasts. Their 
 hostility to Jesus, which had been deepening ever since his daring 
 act of cleansing the Temple, now reached its height. From this 
 time forth and it deserves to be especially noted as having 
 occurred at so early a stage, inasmuch as it forms the key to much 
 of our Lord's subsequent conduct they sought to slay him, because 
 he had done those things on the Sabbath-day. But though the 
 purpose to slay him was formed, it was not expressed nor attempted 
 to be carried out. Things were not yet ripe for its execution.
 
 118 THE EARLIEE YEARS. 
 
 Jesus might be convicted as a Sabbath-breaker, and all the oppro- 
 brium of such a conviction be heaped upon his head ; but as things 
 then stood, it would not be possible to have the penalty of death 
 inflicted on him upon that ground. They must wait and watch for 
 an opportunity of accusing him of some crime which will carry that 
 penalty even in the eyes of a Roman judge. 
 
 Though not serving them much in this respect, they have not 
 to wait long till, in their very presence so that they have no need 
 to ask for other proof Jesus commits a still higher offence than 
 that of violating the Sabbath. Aware of the charges that they 
 were bringing against him as to his conduct at the Pool of Beth- 
 esda, he seizes upon some public opportunity when he could openly 
 address the rulers; and in answer to the special accusation of 
 having broken the Sabbath, he says to them, ' " My Father worketh 
 hitherto, and I work." The rest into which my Father entered 
 after his work of creation, of which your earthly Sabbatic rest is 
 but a type, was not one of absolute inactivity of the suspension, 
 cessation of his agency in and over the vast creation he had formed. 
 He worketh on still ; worketh on continuously, without distinction 
 of days, through the Sabbath-day as through all days, sustaining, 
 preserving, renewing, vivifying, healing. Were this work Divine 
 to cease, there would not be even that earthly Sabbath for you to 
 rest in. And as he, my Father, worketh, so work I, his Son, 
 knowing as little of distinction of days in my working as he. By 
 process of nature, as you call it that is, by the hand of my Father 
 a man is often cured on the Sabbath-day. And it is only what 
 He thus does that I have done, and my authority for doing so is 
 this, that I am his Son.' 
 
 Whatever difficulty the men to whom this defence of his alleged 
 Sabbath-breaking was offered, may have had either in understand- 
 ing its nature or appreciating its force, one thing is clear, that they 
 did at once and most clearly comprehend that in speaking of God 
 as his Father in the way he did, Jesus was claiming to stand to 
 God, not simply in the relationship of a child such a relationship 
 as that in which we all, as the creatures of his power and the 
 preserved of his providence, may be regarded as standing but in 
 that of a close, personal, peculiar sonship belonging to him alone, 
 involving in it, as all true filiation does, unity of nature between 
 the Father and the Son. It was thus that the Jews understood 
 Jesus to speak of the Father and of himself, when he so associated 
 himself with the Father, as to imply that if his Father was not a 
 breaker of the Sabbath in healing men upon that day, neither was 
 he, his Son ; and so they sought the more to kill him, because he 
 had not only broken the Sabbath, but said also that God was his 
 own Father, making himself equal with God. 
 
 If the Jews had misunderstood Jesus, what was easier than
 
 THE POOL OF BETHESDA. 119 
 
 for him to have said so ; to have denied and repudiated the alle- 
 gation that he had intended to claim anything like equality with 
 God? Instead of this, what does Jesus do? He goes on to 
 reassert, to explain, and to expand what had been implied in the 
 compendious expression he had employed. Anything like such 
 distinction between the Father and the Son as that the one would 
 or could judge, or will, or act independently of the other without 
 or against the other he emphatically and reiteratedly repudiates : 
 " Verily, verily, I say unto you, the Son can do nothing of him- 
 self;" "I can of my own self do nothing." The very nature of 
 the relationship forbade it that the Son ever would or could assert 
 for himself any such independence of the Father as the creature, in 
 its wilfulness and sinfulness, is apt to assert for itself. But though 
 all such separation and independence of council and of action is 
 here precluded, so complete is the concert that what things soever 
 the Father doeth the same doeth the Son likewise. Some things 
 that the great Divine Master Workman does, a superior scholar 
 may copy or imitate. But Jesus does not say, What things the 
 Father does, the Son does other things somewhat like them ; but 
 the same things, and whatever things the Father doeth, the same 
 doeth the Son, and doeth them likewise, i.e. in the very same 
 manner, by the exercise of the same power, for the furtherance of 
 the same ends. 
 
 In far greater works than that simply of healing, will the unity 
 of action between them be made to appear. One of these greater 
 works is that of quickening the dead, by the incommunicable pre- 
 rogative of the Creator. This prerogative the Father and the Son 
 have equally. As he wills, and by his will, the Father quickeneth ; 
 so too does the Son. The highest form of life is that which is 
 breathed into souls spiritually dead. This life is of the Son's 
 imparting equally as of the Father. It comes through the hearing 
 of Christ's word ; through a believing in the Father as he who 
 sent the Son. Verily, verily, I say unto you, the hour is coming, 
 and now is, when the dead the spiritually dead shall hear the 
 voice of the Son of God, and they that hear shall live. Another 
 work peculiar to Divinity is that of judging ; approving, con- 
 demning, assigning to every man at last, in strict accordance with 
 what he is, and has been, and has done, his place and destiny. 
 Who but the all-wise, all-just, all-gracious God is competent for 
 such a task ? but that task, in the outward execution of it, the 
 Father has devolved upon the Son, giving him authority to execute 
 it, because he is not simply the Son of God, in which character he 
 needs not such authority to be conveyed to him ; but because he is 
 also the Son of man, and it is in that complex or mediatorial office 
 with which he is invested, that he is to sit upon the Throne of 
 Judgment at the last, when all the inhabitants of the earth shall
 
 1 20 THE EAELIER YEARS. 
 
 stand before his tribunal. Should this then be a subject for marvel ? 
 for the hour was coming, though not yet come, when all that are 
 in their graves shall hear Christ's voice and shall come forth ; they 
 that have done good to the resurrection of life, and they that 
 have done evil to the resurrection of condemnation. Having thus 
 unfolded the great truth of the unity of will, purpose, and action, 
 between the Father and the Son, Jesus ceases to speak of himself in 
 the third person, and proceeds onwards to the close of his address, 
 to speak in the first person, and that in the plainest way, 1 of the 
 testimonies that had been borne to him : that of the Father, that 
 of John, that of his own works, that of the Holy Scriptures, 
 all of which these Jews had wilfully rejected. Now the accused 
 becomes the accuser. Now he who had been charged as a Sabbath- 
 breaker rises to the height of that very elevation which they had 
 regarded him as a profane and blasphemous man for venturing to 
 claim; and he tells these unbelieving Jews, as one knowing the 
 hearts of all men, and entitled to judge, and exercising that very 
 authority with which, as the Son of man, he had been clothed, 
 he tells them, that they had not the love of God in them, nor his 
 word abiding in them ; that they did not believe Moses when he 
 wrote of him ; that, much as they reverenced their Scriptures, they 
 only believed in them so far as they tallied with their own thoughts 
 and fancies. Still further, he declares that there was this great 
 obstacle in the way of their receiving one who came to them as 
 Jesus did, in the name of the Father, to do alone the Father's will, 
 that they were all too busy seeking after the honour that came from 
 man, minding earthly things, and seeking not the honour that 
 came from the one only living and true God ; attributing thus all 
 their perverseness to moral causes, to motives operating within, 
 over which they should have had control; this being their con- 
 demnation, that they would not come to him that they might have 
 life. He would, but they would not. 
 
 If Jesus Christ were but a man, what are we to make of such 
 a discourse as this 1 What are we to make of the first part of it, 
 in which he speaks of the Father and his connection with him ? 
 What of the second part of it, in which he speaks to the Jews and 
 of their treatment of him ? We know not which would be the 
 worst, the arrogance in the one direction, or the presumption and 
 uncharitableness in the other, if this were but a man speaking of 
 the Creator, and to his fellows. It can alone relieve him from the 
 guilt of profane assumption towards God, and unlicensed liberty 
 with man, to believe that Jesus was really that which the Jews 
 regarded him as claiming to be, the Son of, the equal with, the 
 Father, whom all men should honour even as they honour God. 
 
 But let me ask now your particular attention to the circum- 
 1 John v. 30-47.
 
 THE POOL OF BETHESDA. 121 
 
 stances under which this marvellous discourse was spoken, and to 
 the object which, in the first instance, as at first delivered, it was 
 intended to serve. Jesus voluntarily, intentionally, created the 
 occasion for its delivery. The miracle here, the healing of the 
 impotent man at the Pool of Bethesda, was a wholly secondary 
 or subordinate matter, intended to bring Christ into that relation- 
 ship with the Jewish rulers, which called for and gave its fitness 
 and point to this address. Why did Jesus choose a Sabbath-day 
 to walk in the porches of Bethesda ? Why did he do what only 
 on one or two occasions afterwards he did, instead of waiting to 
 be applied to, himself single out the man and volunteer to heal 
 him ? Why did he not simply cure the man, but bid him also take 
 up his bed and walk ? He might have chosen another day, and 
 then, in the story of the cure, we should have had but another 
 instance added to the many of the exertion of our Lord's divine 
 and beneficent power. He might have simply told the man to rise 
 up and walk, and none could have told how the cure had been 
 effected, or turned it into any charge. He chose that day, and he 
 selected that man, and he laid on him the command he did, for the 
 very purpose of bringing himself front to front with the Jewish 
 rulers. At first the question between them seems to refer only to 
 the right keeping of the Sabbath. Had Jesus as a man, as a Jew, 
 broken the Sabbath law in curing a man upon that day 1 ? Had 
 he broken it in telling the man he healed to carry his bed through 
 the city ? Had the Jews not misunderstood, overstrained the law, 
 sticking to its letter, and violating its spirit ? These were grave 
 questions, with which, as we shall find, Jesus afterwards did deal, 
 when on another Sabbath he volunteered another cure. But here 
 Christ waives all lesser topics that, among the rest, of the right 
 interpretation of the Sabbath law- and uses the antecedent cir- 
 cumstances as the basis on which to assert, and then amplify and 
 defend, the truth of his true and only sonship to the Father. It 
 was a critical point in his life the first breaking out of the conflict. 
 His ministry in Judea was now about to close. Aware of the 
 design against his life which had now been formed, and wishing to 
 baffle it for a season, he retires to Galilee. But he will not leave 
 Jerusalem till he has given one full and public testimony as to who 
 and what he is, so that the Jews in continuing to reject him, shall 
 not have it in their power to say that he has not revealed his own 
 character, nor expressed to them the real grounds upon which their 
 opposition to him is based.
 
 122 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 XVII. 
 
 THE SYNAGOGUE OF NAZARETH. 
 
 UKE IV. 16-31. 
 
 IN the route commoniy taken from Jerusalem to the Sea of 
 Galilee, one of the most interesting day's travel is that which 
 carries you from Jenin across the three valleys into which, at its 
 upper extremity, the great plain of Esdraelon divides, and up to 
 Nazareth, as it lies imbedded in the southern ridge of the hills of 
 Galilee. Crossing the first valley, we skirted the base of the 
 mountains of Gilboa, and paused for a few moments upon a gentle 
 elevation, now occupied by a few houses of the humblest descrip- 
 tion, on which Jezreel, the ancient capital of Israel, once stood, 
 with the palace of Ahab in its centre, and the vineyard of Naboth 
 in its outskirts. Our eye wandered along the twelve or fourteen 
 miles of dead-level that run from Jezreel to Carmel, and the figure 
 of the great prophet running before the king's chariot rose before 
 us. We turned round and gazed upon the slopes of Gilboa, and the 
 tide of Saul's last battle seemed to roll over them, and the sounds 
 of the funeral dirge of David to be lingering still among the hills. 
 The crossing of the next valley carried us to the base of Little 
 Hermon, where a small hamlet lies, consisting of a few miserable- 
 looking hovels, surrounded by ill-kept gardens. This was the 
 Shunem in which the house once stood which had in it the 
 prophet's chamber ; and these were the gardens in one of which 
 the widow's son once sickened unto death. Leaving behind us 
 the place which, in the old prophetic times, saw the dead child 
 given back to his mother, climbing Little Hermon and descending 
 on the other side, we entered another village which witnessed 
 another dead son given back to another widowed mother, by him 
 who touched the bier, and said, " Young man, I say unto thee, 
 arise." Here, in this village of Nain, we came for the first time 
 on the traces of our Lord's Galilean ministry. The third plain 
 passed, a steep ascent carried us to the summit of that range of 
 hills which forms the north-eastern boundary of the plain of 
 Esdraelon. Descending, we came upon a circular, basin-shaped 
 depression, girdled all round by a dozen or more swelling hill-tops 
 that rise from three to four hundred feet above the valley they 
 enclose. Near to the foot of the highest of these surrounding 
 hills, nestled in a secluded upland hollow, lies the village of 
 Nazareth. No village in Palestine is liker what it was in the days 
 of Jesus Christ, and none more fitting to have been his residence 
 during the greater part of his life on earth. The seclusion is
 
 THE SYNAGOGUE OF NAZARETH. 123 
 
 perfect, greater even than that of Bethany, which on one side 
 looks out openly upon the country that stretches away to the 
 shore of the Dead Sea. Nazareth is closed in on every side, 
 offering to us an emblem of the seclusion of those thirty years 
 which were passed there so quietly. Pure hill breezes play over 
 the village, and temper the summer heat. The soil around is rich, 
 and yields the fairest flowers and richest fruits of Palestine. You 
 seem shut out from the world, and yet you have but to climb a 
 few hundred feet to the top of the overlooking hill, and one of the 
 widest, finest prospects in all the Holy Land bursts upon your 
 view. Away in the west, a sparkling light plays upon the waters 
 of the Mediterranean, revealing a portion of the Great Sea that 
 formed the highway to the isles of the Gentiles. The ridge of 
 Carmel runs out into the waters, closing in the bold promontory 
 on the top of which Elijah stood and discomfited the prophets of 
 Baal. Southward, below your feet, stretches the great battle- 
 plain of Palestine, behind which rises the hilly district of Samaria, 
 through the opening between which and the mountains of Gilboa 
 the eye wanders away eastward across the whole breadth of the 
 Holy Land, till it rests upon that range, the everlasting eastern 
 background of every Syrian prospect the mountain range of 
 Bashan and Gilead and Moab. Turning northward, the whole 
 hill-country of Galilee lies spread out before us, the Sea of Gen- 
 nesaret hidden, but a glimpse of Safed obtained, the city set upon 
 a hill, above and beyond which there rise the snowy heights of 
 Hermon, called by the Arabs the Sheikh of the Mountains. 
 
 Up to the hill-top which commands this magnificent prospect, 
 how often in childhood, youth, and early manhood must Jesus 
 have ascended, to gaze who shall tell us with what thoughts ? 
 upon the chosen scene of his earthly ministry, and upon that sea 
 over whose waters the glad tidings of salvation were to be borne to 
 so many lands. It pleases us to think that so many years of our 
 Lord's life were spent in such a home as that which Nazareth 
 supplied ; one so retired, so rich in natural beauty, with glimpses 
 of the wide world around for the morning or evening hours. 
 There it was, in the fields below the village, that he had watched 
 how the lilies grew, and seen with what a gorgeous dress, in 
 colouring above that of kingly purple, their Creator clothed them. 
 There, in the gardens, he had noticed how the smallest of all seeds 
 grew into the tallest of herbs. There, outside the house, he had 
 seen two women grinding at one mill ; inside, a woman hiding the 
 leaven in the dough. There, in the market-place, he had seen the 
 five sparrows sold for the two farthings. The sheep-walks of the 
 hills and the vineyards of the valleys had taught him what were 
 the offices of the good shepherd and the careful vine-dresser ; and 
 all the observations of those thirty years were treasured up to be
 
 124 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 drawn upon in due time, and turned into the lessons by which the 
 world was to be taught wisdom. 
 
 No means are left for ascertaining what impression was made 
 during these thirty years upon the inmates of his home, the play- 
 mates of his boyhood, the associates of his youth, the villagers 
 generally in midst of whom he grew up. It may readily be be- 
 lieved that the gentleness, the truthfulness, the lovingness dis- 
 played by him, must have won respect. Yet we can imagine, too, 
 that the unearthly purity and sanctity of such a childhood and 
 such a manhood may have created an awe, a sense of distance and 
 separation which, in meaner spirits, might deepen into something 
 like aversion and dislike. At last he leaves them, and is not seen 
 in Nazareth for many months. But the strangest tidings about him 
 are afloat through the village. First, they hear of what happened 
 at his baptism in the Jordan, then of what he did a few miles off 
 at Cana, then of his miracles in Jerusalem, then of his curing the 
 nobleman's son of Capernaum ; and now he is once more among 
 them, and the whole village is moved. The Sabbath-day comes 
 round. He had been in the habit all through these thirty years 
 of attending in the synagogue ; sitting there quietly and unobtru- 
 sively, taking part in the prayers and praises, listening to the 
 reading of the Law and of the Prophets, and to the explanations 
 of the passages which were read, with what kind and amount of 
 self-application none of all around him knew. But how will he 
 comport himself in the new character that he has assumed 1 The 
 synagogue is crowded with men among whom he has been brought 
 up, all curious to see and hear. The earlier part of the service 
 goes on as usual. The opening prayer is recited ; the opening 
 psalm is chanted ; the portion from the Law, from the Book of 
 Moses, is read by the ordinary minister ; the time has come for the 
 second reading that of some portion of the Prophets when Jesus 
 steps forth and stands in the reader's place. There is no challeng 
 ing of his right to do so. It is not a right belonging exclusively 
 to priest or Levite ; any Jew of any tribe might exercise it. But 
 there was a functionary in every synagogue regularly appointed to 
 the office. This functionary, in this instance, at once gives way, 
 and hands to Jesus the roll of the prophet out of which, according 
 to the calendar, the reading for the day is to be taken. It is the 
 roll of the prophet Isaiah. Jesus opens it, and whether it was 
 that the opening verses of the 61st chapter were those actually 
 appointed for that day's service, or whether it was that the roll 
 opened at random, and these verses were the first that presented 
 themselves, or that Jesus, from the whole book, purposely selected 
 the passage, he read as follows : " The Spirit of the Lord is upon 
 me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor ; 
 he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance
 
 THE SYNAGOGUE OF NAZARETH. 125 
 
 to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at 
 liberty them that are bruised ; to preach the acceptable year of the 
 Lord." And stopping there, in the middle of the sentence, he 
 closed the book, gave it to the minister, and sat down upon the 
 raised seat of the reader, taking the attitude usually assumed by 
 Jewish teachers. There was a breathless stillness. The eyes of 
 all that were in the synagogue were fastened on him. " This day," 
 said Jesus, " is this scripture fulfilled in your ears." 
 
 It was a scripture universally understood to be descriptive of 
 the coming Messiah, his office, and his work. Jesus gives no reason 
 for appropriating and applying it to himself; he offers nothing in 
 the shape of argument or evidence in favour of his being indeed 
 the Christ, the Anointed of the Holy Ghost. He contents himself 
 with the simple authoritative assertion of the fact. We have 
 indeed but the first sentence given that he spoke on this occasion. 
 What followed, however, we may well believe to have been an 
 exposition of the passage read, as containing an account of the true 
 character, ends, and objects of his mission as the Christ of God ; 
 the telling who the poor were to whom he brought good tidings, 
 who the bruised and the broken-hearted were whom he came to 
 heal, who the bound were that he came to liberate, who the blind 
 whose eyes he came to open, what that year was he came to usher 
 in the long year of grace which still runs on, in the course of 
 which there is acceptance for all of us with God, through Christ. 
 As Jesus spake of these things spake with such ease, such grace, 
 such dignity the first impression made upon the Nazarenes, his 
 old familiar friends, was that of astonishment and admiration. He 
 had got no other, no better education than that which the poorest 
 of them had received. He had attended none of the higher schools 
 in any of the larger towns, had sat at the feet of none of their chief 
 rabbis to be instructed in the law; yet no rabbi of the schools 
 could speak with greater fluency, greater authority, greater confi- 
 dence. Soon, however, as from the mere manner, they began to 
 turn their thoughts to the substance of this discourse, and began 
 to realise what the position really was which Jesus was assuming, 
 that it was nothing short of the very highest that ever any son 
 of man was to reach ; that it was as the Lord's anointed Christ 
 that he was speaking, and speaking to them as the poor, the blind, 
 the captives, to whom he was to render such services, the admir- 
 ation turns into envy. Who is he that is arrogating to himself all 
 this dignity, authority, and power 1 who is speaking to them as 
 so immeasurably his inferiors, as needing so much his help 1 Is 
 not this the son of honest, plain, old Joseph, whom we all so well 
 remember as our village carpenter ? His brethren and his sisters, 
 are they not here beside us in the synagogue, listening, apparently 
 with no great delight or approval, to this new strain in which their
 
 126 THE EAKLIER YEAHS. 
 
 brother has begun to speak 1 He the Messiah, the opener of our 
 eyes, the healer of our hearts, our deliverer from bondage I Before 
 he asks us to believe any such thing of him, let him show us some 
 sign from heaven ; do some of those miracles that they say he has 
 done elsewhere, particularly at Capernaum. If he wanted us, whc 
 have all known him so well from his childhood, to believe in him 
 as a prophet, he should have come to us first, convinced us first, 
 unfolded his credentials to us first, wrought his first miracles here 
 in Nazareth. Jealousy heightens the offence that envy had created, 
 and ere long the whole company in that synagogue is looking at 
 him askance. Jesus sees this, and turning from his former subject 
 of discourse, tells them that he sees and knows it, lays open their 
 hearts to them, puts the very words into their lips that they were 
 ready to utter, and proceeds to vindicate himself for not showing 
 any special sign to his fellow-townsmen, by quoting two instances 
 in which Elijah and Elisha, the two great workers of miracles 
 among the prophets, passed over all their fellow-countrymen to 
 show favour to the Sidonian widow and the Syrian officer. There 
 is nothing that men dislike more than that the evil and the bitter 
 things hidden in their breasts should be brought to light. It 
 aggravates this dislike when the discoverer, and revealer of their 
 thoughts, is the very person against whom the malignant sentiment 
 is cherished. Should he remain calm and unimpassioned, neither 
 taken by surprise nor betraying irritation, they are so much the 
 more incensed. So felt the Nazarenes under the address of our 
 Lord ; and when he proceeded to assume the mantle of Elijah and 
 Elisha, as if he were of the same order with these great prophets 
 of the olden time, it is more than they can any longer bear They 
 will be lectured no more in such a way by the son of the carpenter. 
 They rise, they rush upon him, they thrust him out of the village, 
 and on to the brow of a precipice over which they would have 
 hurled him ; but it pleased him to put forth that power, and to lay 
 upon them that spell which he laid upon the high-priest's band in 
 the garden of Gethsemane. They are hurrying him to the brow of 
 the hill ; he turns, he looks, the spell is on them, their hands drop 
 powerless by their sides ; he passes through the midst of them, they 
 offer no resistance, and before they recover themselves he is gone. 
 
 About two miles from Nazareth, there is a hill which shows, 
 upon the side facing the plain of Esdraelon, a long and steep 
 descent. The monks of the middle ages the determiners of most 
 of the sites of the holy places in Palestine fixed on this as the 
 precipice over which the angry Nazarenes designed to throw our 
 Saviour, and gave it the name of the Mount of Precipitation. The 
 very distance of this mount from the village goes far to disprove 
 the tradition regarding it. But though this distance had been less, 
 it could not have been the place, for it is distinctly stated by the
 
 THE SYNAGOGUE OF NAZARETH. 127 
 
 Evangelist that it was a brow of the hill on which the city was 
 built from which they intended to cast him. Modern travellers 
 are all agreed that it must have been from some part of the rocky 
 cliff which overhangs the oldest quarter of the present village of 
 Nazareth that Jesus was about to have been thrown. It seems 
 more likely that the Nazarenes should, in the phrensy of the 
 moment, have attempted to throw our Lord from a precipice quite 
 at hand, than that, acting on a deliberate purpose, they should have 
 spent some time, and climbed a hill in order to its execution. 
 
 But turning now from the locality and outward circumstances 
 of this event in our Saviour's life, let us try to enter into its 
 meaning and spirit. So far as we know, this was the first occasion 
 on which Jesus addressed an audience of his countrymen in the 
 synagogue on the Sabbath-day ; it would appear indeed to have 
 been the only one on which he took the duty of the reader as well 
 as that of the exhorter. It was a common enough thing for any 
 one, even a stranger, to be asked, when the proper service of the 
 synagogue was over, to address some words of instruction or en- 
 couragement to the audience. The Gospels tell us how frequently 
 Jesus made use of this opportunity ; and you may remember how 
 at Antioch in Pisidia, after the reading of the Law and the 
 Prophets, the rulers of the synagogue sent unto Paul and Barnabas, 
 saying, " Men and brethren, if ye have any word of exhortation 
 for the people, say on." The peculiarity of the incident now before 
 us lay in this, that Jesus first read the passage from the Prophets, 
 and then grounded directly upon it the address which he delivered. 
 In this respect we might regard it as the first sermon ever preached ; 
 the text chosen, and the discourse uttered by our Lord himself. 
 Had these Nazarenes, who, in their insatiate and zealous craving 
 after signs and wonders, wanted him only to do the same or greater 
 things than he had done in Capernaum, but known how highly 
 honoured, far above that of its being made a mere theatre foi the 
 exhibition of divine power, their synagogue was, in being the first 
 place on earth in which that instrument was employed which has 
 been so mighty through God to the pulling down of the stro.'ig- 
 holds of the ungodly, and the upbuilding of the Church, their 
 vanity might have been gratified ; but they slighted the privilege 
 thus enjoyed, and so lost the benefit. 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 FIRST SABBATH IN CAPERNAUM, AND FIRST CIRCUIT OF GALILEE 
 MATT. iv. 12-22, 23-25 j MAEK i. 21-39 ; LUKE iv. 42-44. 
 
 THE first eight months of our Lord's ministry were spent, as 
 we have seen, in Judea. By the sign from heaven, by the Baptist's
 
 128 THE EAELIER YEARS. 
 
 proclamation, by Christ's own words and deeds, he was presented to 
 the rulers and to the people as the Son of God, the Messiah. His 
 character was misunderstood ; his claims were rejected. At Jeru- 
 salem a plot against his life was formed ; it was no longer safe for 
 him to reside where the Jewish authorities had power. Jesus 
 retired to Galilee (John iv. 1-3). Besides the purpose of placing 
 himself beyond the reach of the Scribes and Pharisees of Jeru- 
 salem, another circumstance seems to have had its influence in 
 directing Christ's footsteps into Galilee. He heard that John was 
 cast into prison. The Baptist's work was over ; the labours of the 
 Forerunner were closed ; the ground was open for Jesus to occupy. 
 Hitherto, in his earlier Judean ministry, he had neither publicly 
 taught in the synagogues, nor openly and indiscriminately healed 
 the sick, nor called any other disciples to his side than those who 
 voluntarily and temporarily followed him. 1 We may safely say, 
 then, that, prior to his appearance in Galilee, he had taken no steps 
 either to proclaim the advent of the kingdom, or, by the selection 
 of a band of chosen adherents, to lay the foundation of that new 
 economy which was to take the place of the one which was now 
 waxing old, and was ready to vanish away. It looks as if, before 
 fully and openly entering on the task of providing a substitute 
 for that Judaic economy which his own kingdom was to overturn, 
 Jesus had gone up to Jerusalem, and given to the heads and repre- 
 sentatives of the Jewish commonwealth the choice of receiving or 
 rejecting him as their Messiah. It was not, at least, till after he 
 had been so rejected in Judea, that he began in Galilee to preach 
 the gospel of the kingdom (Mark i. 15), and to plant the first seeds 
 of that tree whose leaves were to be for the healing of the nations. 
 This helps to explain at once the marked difference between Christ's 
 course of conduct during the period which immediately succeeded 
 his baptism, which was passed in Judea, and the laborious months 
 in Galilee which followed, and the marked silence regarding the 
 former which is preserved by the first three Evangelists, who all 
 make our Lord's ministry begin in Galilee, and contain no allusion 
 to anything as happening between the temptation in the wilderness 
 and the opening of his ministry there. Nor do they allude to any 
 visits of Jesus to Jerusalem prior to those which he made after his 
 final departure from Galilee, and which preceded his crucifixion. 
 
 1 His disciples, indeed, in imitation of John's practice, had begun to baptize, but 
 as soon as " the Lord knew how the Pharisees had heard that Jesus had made and 
 baptized more disciples than John (though Jesus himself baptized not, but his dis- 
 ciples), he left Judea, and departed again into Galilee" (John iv. 1-3). It would 
 seem to have been a sudden impulse of zeal in their Master's cause which led those 
 first disciples to engage so eagerly in baptizing, a zeal which, instead of checking 
 or rebuking, Jesus dealt with by quietly cutting off the occasion for its display. By 
 his own removal to Galilee, an entirely new state of things was ushered in, and by 
 John's imprisonment his baptisms ceased ; nor do we read anywhere of a Galilean 
 baptism by the disciples of Jesus.
 
 FIRST SABBATH IN CAPERNAUM. 1 29 
 
 With them, up to that time, Galilee appears as the exclusive 
 theatre of our Lord's labours. It is to the supplemental Gospel 
 of St. John that we are indebted for all our knowledge of the 
 memorable incidents in Judea, which preceded the first preaching 
 in the synagogue of Nazareth. We can understand this singular 
 silence of the first three Evangelists, if we regard our Lord's 
 earlier appearance and residence in Judea as constituting rather 
 a preliminary dealing with the Jews, in the way of testing their 
 disposition and capacity to welcome him as their own last and 
 greatest prophet, than as forming an integral part of that work 
 whereby the foundations of the Christian church were laid. 
 
 Eejected by the chiefs of the people in the capital, Jesus comes 
 to Galilee. There, in the synagogue of that town in which he had 
 lived so many years, he first publicly proclaims his office and his 
 work, as the healer of the broken-hearted, the restorer of sight to 
 the blind, the deliverer of the captives, the preacher of the gospel 
 to the poor an office and a work which had nothing of confine- 
 ment in it, nothing restricting it to any one age or country. But 
 there, too, by his fellow-townsmen at Nazareth, as by the rulers of 
 the capital, he is rejected, and so he descends to the shores of the 
 Sea of Galilee. Walking by these shores, he sees first Andrew 
 and Peter casting a net into the sea. He says to them, " Follow 
 me, and I will make you fishers of men. Straightway they leave 
 all and follow him." A little farther on, another pair of brothers, 
 James and John, are in their boat mending their nets. He calls 
 them in the same way, and they leave their boat and their nets, 
 their father and the hired servants, and follow. He was not 
 speaking to strangers, to those previously ignorant or indisposed to 
 follow him. Andrew was one of the two disciples of John who 
 had heard the Baptist say, " Behold the Lamb of God," and who 
 had followed Jesus. The other of these two disciples was John. 
 Andrew had brought his brother Peter to Jesus ; and though it is 
 not said that John had done the same with his brother James, the 
 latter must already have been acquainted with Christ. Andrew, 
 Peter, and John had followed Jesus from Bethabara to Cana, and 
 had witnessed there the first of his miracles. They had been up at 
 Jerusalem, and seen the miracles which Jesus wrought at the first 
 Passover which he attended. They may have taken part in the 
 baptizing, may have been with Jesus at the well of Jacob. Mention 
 is made of disciples of Jesus being there with him, and who so 
 likely to be among them as those who first followed him from 
 Bethabara ? But they do not appear as yet to have attached 
 themselves permanently to his person, nor to have attended him 
 on his return from his second visit to the metropolis, nor to have 
 been with him at Nazareth. The stopping of the baptisms, the 
 imprisonment of John, the scattering of his disciples, may have 
 i
 
 130 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 thrown them into some doubt as to the intentions of the new 
 Teacher. For a time at least they had returned to their old occu- 
 pation as fishermen, and were busily employed at it when Jesus 
 met them ; but his voice fell upon ears that welcomed its sound, 
 his command upon spirits that were ready to obey. Not that they 
 understood as yet that the summons was one to relinquish finally 
 their earthly calling. The present was but a preliminary invitation 
 to follow Jesus, and chiefly by hearing what he said, and watching 
 what he did, to be instructed by him in the higher art of catching 
 men. It was not till weeks afterwards that they were solemnly set 
 apart as his apostles. 
 
 In the meantime, however, they accompanied him into Caper- 
 naum. The entrance of Jesus, attended by the two well-known 
 brothers, who, from the mention of hired servants belonging to 
 one of them, we may believe, ranked high among their craft, 
 was soon known throughout all the town. The inhabitants of 
 Capernaum had already heard enough about him to excite their 
 liveliest curiosity. That curiosity had the keenest edge put on it 
 by the manner in which the cure of the nobleman's child had been 
 effected. And now he is amongst them. It would be a crowded 
 synagogue on the Sabbath-day when he stood up there to preach 
 for the first time the gospel of the kingdom of God. Nothing of 
 what he said upon this occasion has been preserved. The impres- 
 sion and effect upon his auditors are alone recorded : " They were 
 astonished at his doctrine ; for he taught them as one having 
 authority, and not as the Scribes ;" " his word was with power" 
 (Mark i. 22 ; Luke iv. 32). The Scribes, the ordinary instructors 
 of the people, presented themselves simply as expositors of the 
 law, written and traditional, claiming no separate or independent 
 authority, content with simply discharging the office of commen- 
 tators, and resting their individual claims to respect on the manner 
 in which that office was fulfilled. But here is a teacher of quite a 
 new order, who busies himself with none of those difficult or dis- 
 puted questions about which the rabbis differed ; who speaks to 
 the people about a new kingdom the kingdom of God to be 
 set up among them, and that in a tone of earnestness, certainty, 
 authority, to which they were unaccustomed. What can this new 
 kingdom be, and what position in it can this Jesus of Nazareth 
 occupy ? 
 
 Of one thing they are speedily apprised, that it is a kingdom 
 opposed to that of Satan, intended to destroy it. For among them 
 was a man possessed with a devil, who, as Jesus stood speaking to 
 them, broke in upon his discourse, and, with a voice so loud as to 
 startle the whole synagogue, cried out, addressing himself to Jesus, 
 " Let us alone ; what have we to do with thee, thou Jesus of Naza- 
 reth ; art thou come to destroy us ? I know thee who thou art, the
 
 FIRST SABBATH IN CAPERNAUM. 131 
 
 Holy One of God." He speaks in the name of others, as repre- 
 senting the whole company of evil spirits, to whom, at that time, 
 here and there, it had been allowed to usurp the seat of will and 
 power in human breasts, and so to possess the men in whom they 
 dwelt as to strip them of their volition and conscious identity, and 
 to turn them into human demons. But how came this human 
 demon into the synagogue, and what prompted him to utter such 
 cries of horror and of spite ? Was this devil as much beside him- 
 self as the poor man in whom he dwelt ? Had the presence, the 
 look, the words of Jesus such a power over him that as the man 
 could not regulate or restrain his own actions, so neither could the 
 devil regulate or restrain his thoughts and words'] His exclamations 
 sound to our ear like the mad, involuntary, impotent outcries of the 
 vassals of a kingdom who feel that the reins of empire are passing 
 out of their hands, but who cannot give them up without telling 
 who the greater than they is who has come to dispossess them of 
 their power. 
 
 Whatever may be thought of the kind of pressure under which 
 the devil who possessed this man acted ; whether the testimony he 
 gave to our Lord's character be regarded as free and spontaneous, 
 intended rather to injure than to honour ; or whether it be regarded 
 as unwillingly drawn forth by close personal contact with the Holy 
 One, the testimony so given was not welcomed by Christ. It came 
 unsuitably from a quarter whence no witness should be borne to 
 him, nor was wished for, as it came unseasonably, when premature 
 revelations of his true character were not desired. In other 
 instances as well as this Jesus did not suffer the devils to speak, 
 " because they knew him," acting as to them on the same principle 
 on which he often cautioned those whom he healed and his own 
 disciples, not to make him known, seeking by such repression to 
 prevent any hurrying forward before its time of what he knew 
 would be the closing catastrophe of his career. But though 
 refused thus, and as it were rejected by our Lord, its first wild 
 impatient utterances all that it was permitted to give forth, this 
 voice is most striking to us now as a testimony from the demon- 
 world, through which a knowledge of who Jesus truly was seems 
 so rapidly to have circulated. The Prince of Darkness, in his 
 temptation of our Lord a year before, seems himself to have been 
 in some doubt, as he put the question so often, " If thou be the Son 
 of God." But no doubt was entertained by the devils who came, 
 as Luke tell us, " out of many, crying out and saying, Thou art 
 Christ, the Son of God " (Luke iv. 41 ). Some have thought that 
 those demoniacs whom Christ cured were lunatics, and nothing 
 more ; men whose deranged and disordered intellects were soothed 
 down into calmness and order by the gentle yet firm voice and look 
 and power of Christ. But what are we to make of the unique
 
 132 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 testimony that so many of them gave to Christ's Messiahship and 
 Sonship to God, and that at the very commencement of his ministry ? 
 Were lunatics the only ones who knew him ? or whence got they 
 such knowledge and such faith ? 
 
 Accepting, with whatever mystery the whole subject of demoniac 
 possession is clothed, the simple account of the Evangelists, it does 
 appear most wonderful, the quick intelligence, the wild alarm, the 
 terror-striking faith that then pervaded the demon-world, as if all 
 the spirits of hell who had been suffered to make human bodies 
 their habitation, grew pale at the very presence of Jesus, and could 
 not but cry out in the extremity of their despair. 
 
 " Hold thy peace," said Jesus to the devil in the synagogue, 
 "and come out of him." The man was seen to fall, torn as by 
 violent convulsions ; a loud, inarticulate, fiendish cry was heard to 
 issue from his lips -, 1 hale and unhurt, the devil gone, the man him- 
 self again, he rose to converse with those around, and to return to 
 his home and friends. Amazement beyond description seized at 
 once on all who saw or heard of what had happened. Men said to 
 one another, in the synagogue, on the streets, by the highways, 
 What thing is this, what a word is this ! for with authority he 
 commandeth even the unclean spirits and they do obey him. 
 And immediately (it could scarce well have been otherwise), the fame 
 of him went out into every place of the country, and spread abroad 
 throughout all the region round about Galilee. 2 Chiefly, however, 
 in Capernaum did the excitement prevail, begun by the cure of the 
 demoniac in the synagogue, quickened by another cure that followed 
 within an hour or two. The service of the synagogue closed before 
 the mid-day meal. At its close Jesus accepted an invitation to go 
 to the house of Simon and Andrew. These brothers, as we know, 
 were natives of Bethsaida, and had hitherto resided there. But 
 recently they had removed to Capernaum. Peter having married, 
 and perhaps taken up his abode in the house of his mother-in-law, 
 James and John were also of the invited guests. Jesus did not 
 know that the house he went to was one of sickness, and his 
 ignorance in this respect creates the belief that it was the first time 
 he had entered it. But soon he hears that the great fever (it is the 
 physician Luke who in this way describes it) has seized upon Simon's 
 wife's mother. They tell him of it ; he goes to, bends kindly over 
 her, takes her by the hand, rebukes the fever. The cure is instanta- 
 neous and complete. She rises, as if no disease had ever weakened 
 her, with glad and grateful spirit to wait upon Jesus and the rest. 
 And so within that home, kindly hands were provided, like those 
 of Martha at Bethany, to minister to the Savour's wants during 
 the busiest, most toilsome period of his life, when, in season and 
 out of season, early in the morning, and far on often in the night, 
 i Mark i. 36 ; Luke iv. 35. * Mark i. 27, 28 ; Luke iv. 36, 37.
 
 FIRST SABBATH IN CAPERNAUM. 133 
 
 he came and went, living longer under that roof of Peter's house at 
 Capernaum, than under any other that sheltered him after his pub- 
 lic ministry had begun. This cure, too, was noised abroad through 
 the city. Here was an opportunity not to be lost, for who could 
 tell but that next morning Jesus will be gone ? Though it was the 
 Sabbath, Jesus had not scrupled to eject the devil and rebuke the 
 fever ; but the people could not so easily get over their scruples. 
 They wait till the sun has set before they apply to this new 
 and strange physician. But meanwhile all that were diseased in 
 Capernaum, and all that were possessed were brought. All the city 
 has gathered together at the door of Peter's house. The sun goes 
 down, and Jesus steps out into that bustling, anxious crowd ; he 
 lays his hand on every one of the diseased, 1 and heals them, and 
 casts out all the spirits with his word. The stars would be shining 
 brightly in the heavens ere the busy blessed work was done, and 
 within a few hours a city which numbered many thousand inhabi- 
 tants saw disease of every kind banished from its borders. 
 
 After the excitement and fatigue of such a day, Jesus may lay 
 his head peacefully on his pillow, and take the rest that such labour 
 has earned. But long before the others while yet they are all 
 sleeping in Simon's house around him rising up a great while 
 before day, he goes out into a solitary place to pray. Was it on 
 his own account that Jesus thus retired 1 Was his spirit too much 
 under the distracting influence which such a scene of bustle and 
 excitement as he had passed through the day before, was fitted to 
 exert ? Did he feel the need to calm the inward tumult, by silent 
 and solitary communion with Heaven ? As we follow his footsteps, 
 let us be careful to notice and to remember in what circumstances 
 it was that Christ resorted to special, solitary, continued prayer. 
 But in leaving Capernaum, alone and so early, Jesus had in view the 
 state of others as well as his own. He was well aware how apt, in 
 his case, the office of the healer, the wonder-worker, was to over- 
 shadow that of the teacher, the preacher of the glad tidings ; how 
 ready the inhabitants of Capernaum already were to hail and honour 
 him in this one character, however little they might be disposed to 
 regard or obey him in the other. He had done enough of the one 
 kind of work, had got enough of that one kind of homage, there. 
 And so, when, after an eager search for him, he is found, and 
 Simon and the disciples tell him that all men were seeking for him, 
 and the people when they came up entreat him that he should not 
 depart from them, 2 Jesus says to the one, "Let us go into the 
 next town, that I preach there also ;" and to the other, " I must 
 preach the kingdom of God to other cities also, for therefore am 
 I sent." He did not, indeed, forsake the city that had treated 
 him so differently from his own Nazareth. He chose it as the place 
 1 Luke iv. 40. - Compare Mark i. 36, 38, and. Luke IT. 42, 43.
 
 134 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 of his most frequent residence, the centre of his manifold labours, 
 the scene of many of his most memorable discourses and miracles. 
 But now he must not rest on the favour which the healings of this 
 wonderful day have won for him. And for a time he left Caper- 
 naum, and " went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, 
 and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all manner 
 of sickness, and all manner of disease, among the people. And his 
 fame went throughout all Syria : and they brought unto him all 
 sick people that were taken with divers diseases and torments, and 
 those which were possessed with devils, and those which were lunatic, 
 and those that had the palsy ; and he healed them. And there 
 followed him great multitudes of people from Galilee, and from 
 Decapolis, and from Jerusalem, and from Judea, and from beyond 
 Jordan." 1 
 
 We read of nine departures from and returns to Capernaum in 
 the course of the eighteen months of our Lord's Galilean ministry ; 
 of three extensive tours through all the towns and villages of the 
 district as the one now described ; and of five or six more limited 
 ones. Had the three Evangelists not been so sparing in their notices 
 of time and place ; had they not often shown such entire disregard 
 to the mere order of time, in order to bring together incidents or 
 discourses which were alike in character ; could we have traced, as 
 we cannot do, the footsteps of our Saviour from place to place, 
 from month to month, as he set forth on these missionary rounds 
 through Galilee, made, let us remember, all on foot, we should have 
 had a year and a half before us of varied and almost unceasing toil, 
 the crowded activities of which would have filled us with wonder. 
 As it is, a general conception of how these months were spent is all 
 that we can reach. To give distinctness to that conception, let us 
 remember what, in extent of surface and in the character and 
 numbers of its population, that district of country was to which 
 these pedestrian journeys of our Saviour were confined. 
 
 Galilee, the most northern of the three divisions of Palestine, is 
 between fifty and sixty miles in length, and from thirty to forty in 
 breadth. A three-days' easy walk would take you from Nain, on 
 the south, to Csesarea Philippi in the north, which seem to have 
 been the limits in these directions of our Saviour's circuits. Less 
 than two days' travel will carry you from the shores of the Sea of 
 Galilee to the coasts of Tyre and Sidon. Galilee presented thus an 
 area somewhat larger than Lancashire, and somewhat smaller than 
 Yorkshire. So far, therefore, as the mere distances were concerned, 
 it would not take long not more than a week or two to travel 
 round and through it. But then, in the Saviour's days, it was more 
 densely populated than either of the English counties I have named. 
 Josephus, who knew it well, speaks of 204 towns and villages, the
 
 FIRST SABBATH IN CAPERNAUM. 135 
 
 smallest of them containing above 15,000 inhabitants. Making an 
 allowance for exaggeration, the population of the province must 
 have been about three millions, as crowded a population as any 
 manufacturing district in any of the western kingdoms of Europe 
 now presents. And this population was of a very mixed character. 
 If the majority were of Jewish descent, there were so many 
 Phoenicians, Syrians, Arabs, Greeks, and others mingled with them, 
 that we may be almost certain that Jesus never addressed any large 
 assembly in which there were not Gentiles as well as Jews. There 
 cannot be a greater mistake than to imagine that, in selecting 
 Capernaum, on the shores of the Lake of Gennesaret, as his head- 
 quarters, and Galilee as his chosen field of labour, Jesus was retiring 
 from the populous Judea to a remote and unfrequented region. In 
 those days there was much more life and bustle in Galilee than in 
 Judea. So far as both the numbers and character of its population 
 were concerned, it was a much better, more hopeful theatre for such 
 evangelistic labours as those of Jesus. The people, though no less 
 national in their spirit, were much less infected with ecclesiastical 
 prejudice. The seed had thus a better soil to fall upon. Though 
 a Roman governor was placed over them, the Scribes and Pharisees 
 had great power in Jerusalem, as they proved in effecting the 
 crucifixion. Herod Antipas, who ruled over Galilee, had none of 
 the jealousies of the Jewish Sanhedrim ; and, in point of fact, doea 
 Dot appear till the last to have taken much interest in, or in any way 
 to have interfered with the proceedings of Jesus. So long as he 
 confined himself to the work of a religious teacher, Herod had no 
 desire to meddle with his doings ; and even if he had, Jesus had 
 but to cross the Lake of Galilee to put himself beyond his power, 
 by placing himself under the protection of Philip, the gentlest and 
 most humane of the Herods. 
 
 Well adapted every way as Galilee was for our Lord's peculiar 
 work, the laying of the first foundations of the Christian faith, a 
 faith which was to spread over the whole earth, Capernaum was 
 equally fitted to be the centre whence his labours were to radiate. 
 Looked at, as you find it marked upon the map of Galilee, it does 
 not occupy anything like a central position. But looked at in 
 relation to the population and to the means of transit, a better 
 centre could not have been selected. Wherever its site was, it lay 
 on the north-western shore of the Sea of Galilee, close upon, if not 
 within, the plain of Gennesaret. 1 This plain, three miles long, 
 and two miles broad, was then dotted with villages, teeming with 
 population, and of the most exuberant fertility. " One may call 
 the place," says the Jewish historian, "the ambition of nature, 
 
 1 After visiting the ruins at Khan Minyeh and Tell Hum, the writer had no 
 hesitation in deciding in favour of the latter as more likely to have been the site of 
 Capernaum.
 
 136 THE EARLIER YEARS. 
 
 where it forces those plants that are naturally enemies to one 
 another, to agree together; it is a happy contention of the seasons, 
 as if every one of them laid claim to this country." While all 
 round its shores the Sea of Galilee saw towns and villages thronged 
 with an agricultural and manufacturing population, itself teemed 
 with a kind of wealth that gave large occupation to the fishermen. 
 How numerous the boats were that once skimmed its surface, and 
 how large the numbers employed as fishermen, may be gathered 
 from the fact, that in the wars with the Romans, two hundred small 
 vessels were once collected for the only naval action in which the 
 Jews ever engaged. Remembering that the Lake is only thirteen 
 miles long and five or six miles broad, it is not too much, perhaps, 
 to say that never did so small a sheet of water see so many keels 
 cutting its surface, or so many human habitations circling round 
 and shadowing its waves, as did the Sea of Galilee in the days of 
 Jesus Christ. 
 
 Now all is silent there ; lonely and most desolate. Till 1862 
 but a single boat floated upon its waters. On its shores, Tiberias 
 in ruins, and Magdala composed of a few wretched hovels, are all 
 that remain. You may ride round and round the empty beach, and, 
 these excepted, never meet a human being, nor pass a human 
 habitation. Capernaum, Chorazin, Bethsaida are gone. Here and 
 there you stumble over ruins, but none can tell you exactly what 
 they were. They knew not, those cities of the Lake, the day of 
 their visitation ; their names and their memory have perished.
 
 THE MINISTEY IN GALILEE. 
 
 I. THE TWO HEALINGS THE LEPEE AND THE PARALYTIC. 
 
 MATT. vm. 2-4; MABK i. 40-45, n. 1-12 ; LUKE v. 12-26. 
 
 IN describing our Lord's first circuit through Galilee, the 
 Evangelist tells us that " they brought unto him all sick people that 
 were taken with divers diseases and torments, and those which were 
 possessed with devils, and those which were lunatic, and those that 
 had the palsy; and he healed them." 1 How many and how varied 
 were the cures effected within the course of this first itineracy of our 
 Lord can only be conceived by remembering how numerous were the 
 towns and villages through which he passed, and how large the 
 population with which, one way or other, he was brought into 
 contact. 2 Remembering this, we may believe that within a week or 
 two after his first departure from Capernaum more healings were 
 effected than the whole put together, of which any specific record 
 has been preserved in the Four Gospels. 
 
 There was one form of disease, however, which is not noticed in 
 St. Matthew's compendious description a disease peculiar enough 
 in its own character, but to which an additional peculiarity attached 
 from the manner in which it was dealt with by the Mosaic law. 
 However infectious, however deadly, however incurable, no disease 
 but one was held to render its victim ceremonially unclean. Such 
 uncleanness was stamped by the law upon the leper alone. This 
 strange, creeping, spreading, loathsome, fatal disease appears to have 
 been selected as the one form of bodily affliction to stand, in the 
 legal impurity attached to it, and in the penalties visited on that 
 impurity, as a type of the deep, inward, pervading, corrupting, 
 destroying malady of sin. 
 
 Among the Jews the leper was excommunicated. Cut off from 
 the congregation of the people, he had to live apart, enjoying only 
 such society as those afflicted with the same disease could offer. He 
 Matt. iv. 24. 2 See ante, p. 134.
 
 138 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 had to bear upon liis person the emblems of sorrow and of death ; 
 had to wear the rent garments which those wore who were weeping 
 for the dead ; to shave his head and keep it bare as those must do 
 who had touched the dead himself the living dead, for whom those 
 emblems of mourning needed to be assumed. His face half covered, 
 he had to go about crying, " Unclean, unclean," to warn all others 
 off, lest they should come too near to him. 
 
 From what we know of the prevalence of this disease, it may be 
 believed that there were many lepers in Galilee when our Lord 
 made his first journey through it gathered here and there into 
 small and miserable communities. Even among these the tidings 
 of the wonderful cures that were being effected would circulate, for 
 the segregation was not so complete as to prevent all intercourse ; and 
 when these poor exiles from their fellows heard of many being healed 
 whose complaints were as much beyond all human remedy as theirs, 
 the hope might spring up in their hearts that the Great Healer's 
 powers extended even to their case. But which of them had faith 
 enough to make the trial to break through the legal fences imposed, 
 and go into any of the cities in which Jesus was, and throw himself 
 upon his sympathy for succour ? One such there was the first of 
 those so afflicted who ventured to approach the Lord ; and his case 
 on that account was selected for special record by all the three 
 Evangelists. He came to Jesus " when he was in a certain city." 1 
 He had never seen the Lord before, or seen him only at a distance, 
 among a crowd. He could have known or heard but little more 
 about him than what the voice of rumour had proclaimed. Yet so 
 soon as he recognises him, see with what reverence he kneels and 
 worships and falls on his face before him, 2 and hear how he salutes 
 and pleads, "Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean." Per- 
 haps Jesus had never seen a man prostrate himself in his presence 
 as this man did. Certainly, Jesus was never before addressed in 
 words so few and simple, yet so full of reverence, earnestness, faith, 
 submission. He called Jesus LORD. Was this the first time that 
 Jesus had been so addressed ? Sir, Eabbi, Master these were the 
 terms in which he had hitherto been ordinarily addressed. None 
 had spoken to him as this leper did. If, indeed, the miraculous 
 draught of fishes by which Peter had been finally summoned 
 away from his old occupation had already occurred, then it 
 would be from his lips that this title was first heard coming, when 
 he fell down at Jesus' feet exclaiming, "Depart from me, for I am 
 a sinful man, Lord." That, however, is uncertain; but though 
 it were true, how much had Simon to elevate his conception of 
 
 1 Had the name of that city been given it might have helped to trace the course 
 that Jesus was taking, but here, as in many other instances, the means of identifi- 
 cation are denied. * Luke v. ] 2.
 
 THE TWO HEALINGS THE LEPER AND THE PARALYTIC. 139 
 
 Christ's character, how little this leper ! One wonders, indeed, 
 how far he had got in his idea of who this Jesus this healer of 
 diseases was. All that we can know is that he chose the highest 
 title that he knew of, and bestowed it on him. " Lord, if thou 
 wilt, thou canst." No hesitation as to the power; no presumption 
 or dictation as to the will. Upon that free will, upon that almighty 
 power, he casts himself. " Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me 
 clean." Jesus instantly went forward went close to him put 
 forth his hand and touched him. His disciples hold back ; a strange 
 shuddering sensation passes through the hearts of the onlookers, 
 for, by the law of Moses, it was forbidden to touch a leper. He 
 who touched a leper himself became unclean. Yet at once, without 
 hesitation at the time without acting afterwards as if he had 
 contracted any defilement or required any purification Jesus lays 
 his hand upon one who was " full of leprosy," and he says to him, 
 " I will, be thou clean." "We lose a little of the power and majesty 
 of our Saviour's answer in our translation. Two words were spoken 
 (0eAo>, Ka6api(r6r}Ti), the answer, the echo to the prayer ; two of 
 the very words the man had used taken up and employed by Jesus 
 in framing his prompt and gracious reply. No petition that was 
 ever presented to Jesus met with a quicker, more complete, more 
 satisfactory response. If our Lord's conduct in this instance was 
 regulated by the principle which we know so often guided it in the 
 treatment he gave to those who came to him to be cured, great 
 must have been the faith which was met in such a way. The 
 readiness which Jesus had displayed to exert his power may partly 
 have been due to this being the first case of a leper's application to 
 him, and to his desire to show that no legal barrier would be allowed 
 by him to stand in the way of his stretching forth his hand to heal 
 all that were diseased. Yet, the manner and the speech of the 
 leper himself attest that he approached with no ordinary reverence, 
 and petitioned with no ordinary faith. And, according to his faith, 
 it was done unto him immediately. As soon as the words " I will, 
 be thou clean," had come from the Saviour's lips, "the leprosy 
 departed from him, and he was cleansed." 
 
 Did any further colloquy take place between the healed and 
 the Healer? When, quick as lightning, through the frame the 
 sensation passed of an entirely recovered health when he stood up 
 before the Lord, not a sign or symptom of the banished leprosy on 
 his person did no thanks burst from his grateful lips ? or did our 
 Lord say nothing to him about another healing which he was both 
 willing and able to effect 1 We are not to infer that nothing of 
 the kind occurred because nothing is recorded. The Evangelists 
 have preserved alone the fact that, whatever words may have passed 
 between them, Jesus was in haste to send the leper away, and in 
 doing so gave him strict command to tell no man, but to go instantly
 
 140 THE MINISTRY TN GALILEE. 
 
 and show himself to the priest, and offer the gifts that Moses 
 commanded the live birds and the cedar wood, and the scarlet and 
 hyssop, the means and instruments by which the purification of 
 one declared free of leprosy was to be effected, and, relieved from 
 the ban that had been laid upon him, he was to be reinstated in the 
 possession of all the common privileges of society and citizenship. 
 It is quite possible that, knowing the opposition which was already 
 kindling against him, of which we shall presently see tracer, Jesus 
 may have desired that, without throwing out any hint of what had 
 occurred which might precede him by the way and prejudice the 
 judge, this man should repair as quickly as possible to the priest 
 upon whom it devolved judicially to declare that he, so recently a 
 man full of leprosy, was now entirely free of the complaint. It 
 would be a testimony they could not well gainsay, if the fact of the 
 departure of the leprosy were attested by the acceptance of the 
 offerer's gifts and his re-admission into the congregation of Israel. 
 To prevent any possibility of this ratification of the reality of the 
 cure being refused, Jesus might have enjoined silence and as speedy 
 a resort as possible to the priest ; the silence in such circumstances 
 and with such a view prescribed, to last only till the desired end 
 was gained. It would seem, however, from the result, that a more 
 immediate object of the Saviour in laying this injunction upon the 
 leper was to prevent the influx of a still greater crowd than that 
 which was already oppressing him, and thus the hampering of his 
 movements, and the absorption of too much of his time in the mere 
 work of healing. For straightway, though charged to keep silence, 
 the man when he went from Jesus could not restrain himself, but 
 "began to publish it much, and to blaze abroad the matter, 
 insomuch that great multitudes came together to be healed of their 
 infirmities, and Jesus could no more openly enter into the city, but 
 was without in desert places, and withdrew himself into the 
 wilderness, and prayed." 1 
 
 It is as impossible to tell how long a time it took to make the 
 first round of the Galilean towns and villages, as it is to define the 
 line or circle along which Jesus moved. One high authority 2 con- 
 cludes that it must have occupied between two and three months : 
 another, 3 that it did not occupy more than four or five days. A 
 period of intermediate length would probably be nearer the truth 
 than either. On completing the circuit he returned to Capernaum, 
 to take up his abode again in Peter's house. No rest was given him. 
 The news of his return passed rapidly through the town, and straight- 
 way so many were gathered together " that there was no room to 
 receive them, no, not so much as about the door." "We must 
 remember here, in order to understand what followed, the form of 
 a Jewish house, and the materials of which its roof was ordinarily 
 i Mark i. 45 ; Luke v. 15, 16. 2 Greswell. Ellicott.
 
 THE TWO HEALINGS THE LEPER AND THE PARALYTIC. 141 
 
 composed. There is not now, and there never seems to have been, 
 much variety in the shape of a Syrian dwelling-house. Externally 
 they all present the one dull uniform appearance of so many cubes or 
 squares, seldom more than one storey high the outer walls show- 
 ing no windows, nor any opening on the level of the ground except 
 the door. On entering you pass through a lesser court, into which 
 alone strangers are admitted, and then into the inner uncovered 
 square into which the different apartments of the building open. 
 In one corner, either of the outer or inner court generally in the 
 latter there is a flight of steps conducting to the roof, a place of 
 frequent resort at all times, and in the hotter months of summer 
 turned into the sleeping-place of the household. The larger houses, 
 in which the wealthier inhabitants reside, are all separate from one 
 another. The lesser are often without any open court-yard, and 
 built close together, so that you could pass readily from roof to roof. 
 These roofs, always flat, are formed of bricks or tiles, or more gene- 
 rally of a compost of mud and straw, which a day's such rain as we 
 often have would entirely demolish. Whatever the size of the 
 houses be, or however they be situated relatively to each other, in 
 one way or other, either by a staircase within the court open, of 
 course, only to the family to which the house belongs or by a flight 
 of steps without which, when the houses are contiguous, may serve 
 many households as a common means of access the roof of each 
 dwelling is easily reached. We do not need to settle what size the 
 dwelling was in Capernaum where Jesus took up his abode ; we 
 have only to imagine it to be of the usual and invariable Syrian 
 type, to render the narrative intelligible. 
 
 A crowd assembles and fills the room of the house in which 
 Jesus sits and teaches. At first this crowd is not so dense but that 
 a single individual may pass through it, and in this way one and 
 another of the diseased did press through, and the power of the 
 Lord was there to heal them. But the crowd grew and thickened, 
 it overflowed the room, it filled the street before the door, till every 
 spot within reach of Christ's voice was occupied, and still there were 
 new comers pressing in to try and catch a word ; and to the work 
 of healing an effectual stop seems now to have been put. At this 
 stage four men appear, bearing a sick man on a litter. They reach 
 the crowd, they try to enter, they entreat, they 'expostulate ; the 
 thing is hopeless, that four men with such a burden ever shall get 
 through. Is the project to be given up, the great chance lost? 
 The bearers consult the man they carry. He is paralytic, cannot 
 move a limb, can do nothing for himself. But he is in full posses- 
 sion of his faculties, the spirit is entire within. It was his eagerness 
 to be healed, still more than their readiness to help him, that had 
 led these four men to lift him and carry him so far, and they are 
 ready still to do anything anything they can. Some one suggests
 
 142 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 who so likely as the paralytic himself ? that they might get upon 
 the roof, lift up so much of it as was required, and let down before 
 Christ the bed on which the patient lay ; a singular, an extreme 
 step to take, yet one to which men who were resolved to do any- 
 thing rather than lose the opportunity, might not refuse to have 
 recourse. 
 
 They all were strong in the belief that if only they could get at 
 Jesus the cure would be effected, but the paralytic himself had an 
 eager craving to get into the Saviour's presence, deeper than that 
 springing from the desire to have his bodily ailment removed. The 
 stroke that had taken the strength out of his body had quickened 
 conscience. He had recognised it as coming from the hand of God 
 it had awakened within him a sense of his great and manifold 
 bygone transgressions. His sins had taken hold of him, and the 
 burden was too heavy for him to bear. He hears of Jesus that he 
 had announced himself as the healer of the broken-hearted ; that 
 there is a Gospel, good tidings that he proclaims to the poor in 
 spirit. If ever a heart needed healing, a spirit needed comforting, 
 it is his. And now, shall he be so near to him whom he has been 
 so anxious to see, and yet have to go away disappointed, unrelieved 1 
 He either himself suggests, or, when suggested, he warmly approves, 
 the project of trying to let him down through the roof. The bearers 
 second his desires. They make the effort they succeed : noise- 
 lessly they lift the tiles gently they let down the bed, and before 
 Jesus, as he is speaking, the bed and its burden lie. 
 
 But now, before noticing how Jesus met this interruption of his 
 discourse, and dealt with the man who was so curiously obtruded 
 on his notice, let us look around a moment on the strangely consti- 
 tuted audience which Christ at this moment is addressing. Close 
 beside him are his disciples around him are many simple-minded, 
 simple-hearted men, drinking in with wonder words they scarce 
 half understand. But they are not all friendly listeners who are 
 there, for there are " Pharisees and doctors of the law sitting by," 
 some from Galilee, some from Judea, some even from Jerusalem. 
 The last what has brought them here 1 ? They come as spies 
 they come as emissaries from the men who reproved Jesus at Jeru- 
 salem for his healing of another paralytic at the pool of Bethesda, 
 on the Sabbath day, and who sought to slay him, " because he had 
 not only broken the Sabbath, but said also that God was his Father, 
 jaaking himself equal with God." Already these Pharisees counted 
 Jesus a blasphemer, whose life they were seeking only the fit 
 ground and occasion to cut off. And here are some of their 
 number wearing the mask, waiting and watching, little knowing 
 all the while that an eye is on them which follows every turn of 
 their thoughts, and sees into all the secret places of their hearts. 
 It is as one who thus thoroughly knew them, and would with his
 
 THE TWO HEALINGS THE LEPER AND THE PARALYTIC. 143 
 
 own hand throw a fresh stone of stumbling before their feet as 
 one who thoroughly knew also the poor, helpless, palsied penitent, 
 who lies on the bed before him, that Jesus now speaks and acts. 
 Meeting those pleading eyes that are fixed so importunately upon him, 
 without making any inquiries or waiting to have any petition pre- 
 sented, " Son," he says to the sick of the palsy, " be of good cheer, 
 thy sins be forgiven thee." He would not have addressed him thus 
 had he not known how greatly he needed to be cheered, how gladly 
 he would welcome the pardon, in what a suitable condition he was 
 to have that pardon" 1 bestowed. Let us believe then that, spoken 
 with nicest adaptation to the man's state and wants, Christ's words 
 were with power that as quickly and as thoroughly as the words, 
 "I will, be thou clean," banished the leprosy from the one man's 
 body, as quickly and as thoroughly these words banished the gloom 
 and despondency from this man's soul. Thus spoken to by one in 
 whom he had full confidence, he was of good cheer, and did assuredly 
 believe that his sins had been forgiven him. If it was so if his 
 faith in Jesus as his soul's deliverer was as simple and as strong as, 
 from the way in which Christ spoke, we presume it was then too 
 happy would he be at the moment when the blessedness of him 
 whose sins are forgiven, whose iniquity is covered, filled his heart, 
 to think of anything beside. He is silent at least, he is satisfied, he 
 makes no remonstrance, he proffers no request. There is nothing 
 going on within his breast that Jesus needs to drag forth to light, to 
 detect and to rebuke. Not so with the Scribes and Pharisees, upon 
 whom those words of Jesus have had a quite startling effect. They, 
 too, are silent ; nor, beyond the glances of wonder, horror, hate, 
 that they hastily and furtively exchange, do they give any outward 
 sign of what is passing in their hearts. But Jesus knows it all They 
 had been saying within themselves, " This man blasphemeth ;" they 
 had been reasoning in their hearts, to their own entire satisfaction 
 and to Christ's utter condemnation, saying, " Why doth this man 
 thus speak blasphemies ? who can forgive sins but God only ? ' 
 Notwithstanding all their self-assurance, they must have been a 
 little startled when, the thoughts of their hearts revealed, Jesus 
 said to them, " Why reason ye these things in your hearts ? 
 Whether is it easier to say to the sick of the palsy, Thy sins be 
 forgiven thee ; or to say, Arise, and take up thy bed, and walk ?" He 
 does not ask which was easier, to forgive sins or to cure a palsy, 
 but which was easier, to say the one or to say the other, for he 
 knew that they had been secretly thinking how easy it was for any 
 man to say to another, Thy sins be forgiven thee, but how impos- 
 sible it was for him to make good such a saying. " But that ye 
 may know," he added, " that the Son of man hath power on earth 
 to forgive sins (then saith he to the sick of the palsy), Arise and 
 take up thy bed, and go thy way into thine house." The man arose
 
 144 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 and departed to his own house healed in body, healed in spirit 
 glorifying God. The people saw it, and were amazed, and were 
 filled with awe ; and they said to one another, " We never saw it 
 on this fashion we have seen strange things to-day." And "they 
 glorified God which had given such power to men." The Scribes 
 and Pharisees saw it, and had palpable evidence of the superhuman 
 knowledge and superhuman power of Christ given to them had a 
 miracle wrought before their eyes in proof of Christ's possession of 
 a prerogative which they were right in thinking belonged to God 
 only, but they would not let anything convince them that the Son 
 of man had power on earth to forgive sins ; and it was not long, as 
 we shall see, ere new stumbling-blocks were thrown in their way, 
 over which they fell. 
 
 Our Saviour, in bodily presence, has now passed away from us. 
 He can touch us no more with his living finger; he banishes no 
 more our bodily diseases with a word ; but the leprosy of the heart 
 the spreading, pervading taints of ungodliness, selfishness, malig- 
 nity, impurity these it is his office still to cure ; these it is our duty 
 still to carry to him to have removed ; and if we go in the spirit of 
 him who said, " Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean," the 
 cleansing virtue will not be withheld. 
 
 The Son of man had power on earth to forgive sins ; he exercised 
 that power ; he absolved at once the penitent of Capernaum from 
 all his sins ; he caused that man to taste the joy of an immediate, 
 gracious, free, and full forgiveness. "What is to hinder our receiving 
 the same benefit enjoying the same blessing ? Has the Son of 
 man lost any of his power to forgive sins by his being no more upon 
 this earth, his having passed into the heavens 1 Is pardon a boon 
 that he no longer dispenses, that he holds now suspended over our 
 heads a thing to be hoped for but never to be had ? No, let us 
 believe that his mission on earth has not so failed in its great object ; 
 that he is as willing as he is able to say and do for each of us what 
 he said and did for the palsied man in Peter's house at Capernaum ; 
 that he waits but to see us penitent and broken-hearted, looking to 
 and trusting in him, to say in turn to each of us, " Son Daughter 
 be of good cheer, thy sins be forgiven thee.' 
 
 II. 
 
 THE CHARGE OF SABBATH-BREAKING . 
 
 MARK i. 1-31 ; JOHN v. 1-47 : MATT. xn. 1-14 : JOHN ix. 14 : LUKE XHI. 10-ir ; 
 xiv. 1-6. 
 
 IT was a common saying among the Jews, that whoever did any 
 work on the Sabbath-day, denied the work of the creation. The 
 saying was grounded on the fact that one principal end of the
 
 THE CHARGE OF SABBATH-BREAKING. 145 
 
 Sabbatic institute was, by its continued and faithful observance, to 
 preserve a knowledge of, and a faith in, the one living and true God 
 as the Creator of all things. As being a most explicit and expres- 
 sive embodiment in outward act and habit of the faith of the Jewish 
 people, that in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and the 
 sea and all that in them is, it was chosen by God as a fit and 
 appropriate sign of the peculiar relationship towards him into which 
 that people had been brought the peculiar standing which among 
 other nations it was to occupy. " Six days shalt thou labour, and 
 do all thy work : but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord 
 thy God : in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor 
 thy daughter, nor thy man-servant, nor thy maid-servant, nor thy 
 stranger that is within thy gates; that thy man-servant and thy 
 maid-servant may rest as well as thou. And remember that thou 
 wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and that the Lord thy God 
 brought thee out thence through a mighty hand and by a stretched- 
 out arm : therefore, the Lord thy God commanded thee to keep the 
 Sabbath day." 1 " Wherefore the children of Israel shall keep the 
 Sabbath, to observe the Sabbath throughout their generations, for 
 a perpetual covenant. It is a sign between me and the children of 
 Israel for ever." 2 "Moreover also I gave them my Sabbaths, to 
 be a sign between me and them, that they might know that I am 
 the Lord that sanctify them. Hallow my Sabbaths ; that ye may 
 know that I am the Lord your God." s 
 
 There was no rite, nor institution, not even circumcision, by 
 which the Jews were more conspicuously distinguished from sur- 
 rounding nations, and marked off as the worshippers of Jehovah, 
 the Creator of the ends of the earth. Their Sabbath-keeping was 
 a perpetual and visible token of the connection in which they stood 
 to God, and of the great mission which, under him, they were set 
 apart to discharge. But how was the Sabbath to be kept so as to 
 serve this end 1 Looking back here to the original statutes, and to 
 the earlier practice of the Jewish people, you will find that there 
 was but one positive injunction given : the cessation from all 
 manner of work The rest enjoined, however, could not be the rest 
 of total and absolute inactivity. The work from which they were 
 to cease could not be every doing of the human hand. Obviously 
 it was the work of men's ordinary occupation or trade, the work 
 by which the hours of common labour were filled by those engaged 
 therein. There is, indeed, one prohibition, the only one, in which 
 there is a specification of the kind of work to be desisted from, 
 which would seem to point to a narrower interpretation of the 
 original command. When Moses had gathered all the congregation 
 of Israel together at the base of Sinai, and the people were about 
 to enter on the construction of the ark and the tabernacle, knowing 
 1 Deut. v. 13-15. 2 Exod. xxxi. 16, 17. 3 Ezek. xx. 12, 20. 
 
 K
 
 146 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 with what hearty enthusiasm they were inspired, he prefaced his 
 instructions as to the manner in which they should carry on the 
 work, by saying, " Six days shall work be done, but on the seventh 
 day there shall be to you a holy day, a Sabbath of rest to the Lord ; 
 ye shall kindle no fire throughout your habitations on the Sabbath 
 day." They did not need to be told to kindle no fire for any 
 ordinary culinary purposes. A double portion of the manna fell 
 upon the day preceding the Sabbath, and they were to seethe and 
 bake the whole of it, so that no preparation of food on the Sabbath 
 was required. Issued under such peculiar circumstances, it seems 
 not unreasonable to believe that the particular object of the Mosaic 
 injunction was to check the ardour of those who might otherwise 
 have been tempted to carry on the mouldings and the castings in 
 gold and silver on the Sabbath as on other days : not that the Jews 
 of all after generations were prohibited by Divine command from 
 having a fire burning in their dwellings, for whatever purpose 
 kindled, on the Sabbath-day. 
 
 When we turn from what was prohibited to what was enjoined, 
 we find a blank. One or two specific injunctions were indeed laid 
 upon the priests. The daily sacrifices were to be doubled, and the 
 shew-bread baked upon the Sabbath was to be renewed. That 
 there was no Sabbatism in the Temple became in this way a proverb. 
 But for the people at large there were no minute instructions as to 
 how the day was to be spent. It could not have been made 
 imperative on them to assemble for public worship on that day, for 
 during the times of the Jewish theocracy there was no place but 
 one the Temple for such worship, and the meeting there each 
 seventh day was impossible. It was not till after the captivity that 
 synagogues were erected all over the land, in which weekly assem- 
 blages for worship did take place; but that was done, not in 
 obedience to any Divine command. It would seem, indeed, to have 
 been the practice of the Jews, from the beginning, to gather round their 
 prophets on the Sabbath-days, and to avail themselves of such means 
 of religious instruction as they could command. Parents took advan- 
 tage of the rest to teach the law unto their children. But there 
 were no peculiar religious observances prescribed. The day was 
 spent in rest, in thankfulness, in gladness ; spent to a great extent 
 as the festival days of other countries were spent. Dressed in 
 their best attire, indulging in better fare, it was to feasting rather 
 than to fasting that the Sabbath was devoted. But, as the faith of 
 the people grew weak, and their allegiance to their Divine Sovereign 
 faltered, they grew neglectful of the Sabbath, and began to profane 
 the day by breaking in upon that rest from all the ordinary occupa- 
 tions of life, which should have been observed. Thus it was that, 
 among other distinctive marks of their peculiarity as a consecrated 
 people, the only worshippers of the Great Creator, this one became
 
 THE CHARGE OF SABBATH-BREAKING. 147 
 
 *bscured and well-nigh obliterated. In the latest years of the 
 Hebrew commonwealth prophet after prophet was raised up to 
 testify against those defections from the faith, among which that 
 of neglecting and profaning the Sabbath occupied a conspicuous 
 place. After the captivity, on the restoration of the Jews to their 
 own land, the same lax habits prevailed. " In those days," says 
 Nehemiah, " saw I in Judah some treading wine-presses on the 
 Sabbath, and bringing in sheaves, and lading asses ; as also wine, 
 grapes, and figs, and all manner of burdens, which they brought 
 into Jerusalem on the Sabbath-day : and I testified against them 
 in the day wherein they sold victuals." l Nehemiah did more than 
 testify. Alert and decisive in all his movements, he had the gates 
 of Jerusalem shut when it began to be dark before the Sabbath, 
 and kept them shut till the Sabbath was over. It is in the light 
 of his sayings and doings that we are to interpret the utterance 
 from the lips of Jeremiah : " Thus saith the Lord : Take heed to 
 yourselves, and bear no burden on the Sabbath-day, nor bring it in 
 by the gates of Jerusalem ; neither carry forth a burden out of 
 your houses on the Sabbath-day, neither do ye any work, but 
 hallow ye the Sabbath-day, as I commanded your fathers." 2 
 
 A singular change came over the spirit and habits of the Jewish 
 people after the restoration from the Babylonian captivity. Pre- 
 viously, in the days of the kings and prophets, they were ever 
 and anon showing a tendency to idolatry; subsequently no such 
 tendency appears. Previously they had been neglectful of many of 
 the distinctive rites and ceremonies of their faith ; subsequently 
 they became strict and punctilious in their observance of them. 
 Great national calamities the persecution under the successors of 
 Alexander the Great, the wars of the Maccabees, the aggression of 
 the Eomans, the ascent into power of the Idumean family of the 
 Herods, the establishment of the schools of the Eabbis all conspired 
 to intensify the national pride and religious bigotry of the Jews ; 
 who, as they had nothing but the old laws and traditions to cling 
 to, clung to them with all the more tenacious grasp. The sect 
 of the Pharisees arose, and carried the popular sympathy along 
 with it. Everything regarded as purely and peculiarly Judaic was 
 exaggerated. Punctilious observance of the old ritual was the one 
 great merit compensating for all defects ; whilst around the simpler 
 statute-law of Moses there arose an oral or traditional law, growing 
 continually in bulk and overshadowing the primitive Mosaic 
 institute. It had been a less evil had the original enactments of that 
 institute continued to be rightly and liberally interpreted. Instead 
 of this, the narrowest and most rigid interpretation was the only 
 one allowed ; and upon each statute, as so interpreted, additions and 
 explanations were heaped, of such a character as to turn more and 
 1 Neh. xiii. 15. * Jer. xvii. 21-
 
 148 THE MINISTKY IN GALILEE. 
 
 more the keeping of them into a mere matter of external routine 
 and outward performance. So fared it with the old, broad, and 
 benignant law as to the Sabbath. Its primary injunction, " Thou 
 shalt do no manner of work," was falsely held as aimed at all kinds 
 of work whatever ; no less than thirty-nine kinds or classes of work 
 being specified as involved in the prohibition. It was ruled thus 
 that grass should not be trodden on the Sabbath, for the bruising 
 of it was a species of harvest work ; that shoes with nails should 
 . not be worn, as that was the carrying a burden. To what absurd 
 excesses such a spirit of interpretation led may be gathered from 
 the single instance of its being actually laid down in the Mishna 
 that a tailor must not go out with his needle near dusk on the eve 
 of the Sabbath, lest he should forget and carry it with him on the 
 Sabbath. In all this there was not only a wrong rendering of the 
 Mosaic precept, but beyond, and much worse than that, there was 
 the erection of a false standard of duty, a false test of piety the 
 elevation of the outward, the positive, the ceremonial, over the 
 inward, the moral, the spiritual ; the putting of the letter that killeth 
 above the spirit which maketh alive. 
 
 Now let us see how, born and brought up among a people filled 
 with such prejudices, Jesus regulated his conduct. He knew that 
 healing the diseased on the Sabbath-day would be regarded as a 
 breach of the Divine law, would shock the Pharisees, and run counter 
 to the convictions of the great mass of the community. Did he 
 abstain from effecting cures upon that day ? He might easily have 
 done so, as no applications were made to him. Much as they 
 desired to have the benefit conferred, the people shrank from 
 bringing their diseased to be cured on the holy day. Jesus had 
 only to meet their prejudices by doing nothing. But he did not 
 choose to be thus silent and acquiescent. No less than seven 
 miracles are recorded as wrought by him on the Sabbath-day, some 
 of them among the most conspicuous and memorable in his 
 ministry : 1. The cure of the paralytic on the occasion of his second 
 visit to Jerusalem. 2. The cure of the demoniac in the synagogue 
 of Capernaum, when opening his ministry in Galilee. 3. The cure 
 of Peter's wife's mother, the same afternoon, in the same city. 
 4. The cure of the man with a withered hand, a few Sabbaths after- 
 wards, in the same city. 5. The cure of the man born blind, who 
 sat begging in the porch of the Temple at Jerusalem. 6. The cure 
 of a woman who had the spirit of infirmity for eighteen years. 
 7. The cure of the man with a dropsy who happened to be present 
 at a feast given on a Sabbath-day in the house of a chief publican, 
 an invitation to which Jesus had accepted. Not one of these was 
 effected in answer to any application made. They were all 
 spontaneous, done of Christ's own free will and motion. Nor was 
 there, in regard to most of them, any urgency, requiring that the
 
 THE CHAEGE OF SABBATH-BREAKING. 149 
 
 healing should have been done that day, if done at all. Jesus might 
 have chosen another day rather than the Sabbath to walk through 
 the crowded porches of Bethesda. The impotent man had lain too 
 long there to make a day earlier or a day later of much moment to 
 him. It was the same with the blind beggar of Jerusalem ; and 
 these were the two instances of cures upon the Sabbath-day which 
 drew most public notice and were attended with the most important 
 results. But Jesus was not content with simply relieving the 
 sufferers on these occasions. He did himself, or he bade his patients 
 do, what he was well aware would attract the eye and draw down 
 upon it the condemnation of the priesthood. How easy had it been 
 for him at Bethesda to have cured the man in passing, and told him 
 to lie quietly there till the next day, so that no one should have 
 known anything of the cure. But he told him to take up his bed 
 and carry it through the streets, obtruding thus on the eye of the 
 spectators an act which seemed to be an open and flagrant breach 
 of the command delivered by Jeremiah, "Thus saith the Lord: 
 Take heed to yourselves, and bear no burden on the Sabbath-day." 1 
 In curing the man born blind he spat on the ground and made clay 
 of the spittle, and anointed the eyes of the man with the ointment, 
 and said unto him, Go wash in the pool of Siloam ; both which 
 acts, the making and applying of the ointment, and the washing in 
 the sacred fountain, were deemed to be desecrations of the Sabbath. 
 It thus appears that he not only voluntarily selected the Sabbath 
 as the day for performing the cures, but wrought them in such a 
 way, or accompanied with such directions, as forced them into 
 notice, and involved others as well as himself in what was considered 
 a crime of the deepest dye involving in fact the penalty of death. 
 The paralytic of the porches and the blind beggar of the way- 
 side could both indeed plead in their justification the command of 
 their healer, and Jesus took upon himself the full responsibilities of 
 their acts. In meeting the first challenge of his conduct as a 
 Sabbath-breaker, Christ was content, as appears from the narrative 
 in the fifth chapter of St. John's Gospel, to rest his defence on his 
 Sonship to the Father a sonship that might seem to entitle him 
 to claim and exercise a liberty of action to which no other might 
 legitimately aspire. But, putting that Sonship aside, had Christ's 
 act in healing, and the man's act in carrying his bed, been violations 
 of the Sabbath law ? This question was left unsettled by our Lord's 
 first defence of himself against the accusation of the Pharisees. It 
 served to bring the matter out, not as one of Christ's peculiar 
 character, position, and rights, but as one having reference simply 
 to the true interpretation of the existing law, when it was an act 
 of the disciples on which the charge of Sabbath-breaking was 
 founded. One Sabbath-day he and his disciples were walking 
 i Jer. xvii. 21.
 
 150 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 through some corn-fields in which the grain was already white unto 
 the harvest. The disciples being an-hungered, began to pluck the 
 ears of corn, to rub them in their hands, and eat. In doing so, 
 there was no violation by them, as there would be with us, of the 
 rights of property. The old Jewish law ran thus : " When thou 
 comest into the standing corn of thy neighbour, then thou mayest 
 pluck the ears with thine hand ; but thou shalt not move a sickle 
 unto thy neighbour's standing corn." 1 The law and practice of 
 Palestine continue to be this day what they were so many thousand 
 years ago. There was nothing wrong in what the disciples of Jesus 
 did. But it was done upon the Sabbath-day, which was thought 
 to be unlawful. And there were men who were watching dogging 
 the steps of Jesus and his disciples, perhaps to see whether in their 
 walk they would exceed the distance to which a Sabbath-day's 
 journey had been restricted. So soon as those lynx-eyed men 
 observe what the disciples were doing, they inform the Pharisees, 
 who go to Jesus and say, " Behold, thy disciples do that which is 
 not lawful to do upon the Sabbath-day." They were only expressing 
 the popular belief which they had helped to form. It had come to 
 be generally believed that plucking and rubbing in the hand ears of 
 corn was work that the Sabbath law condemned. Jesus threw a 
 shield of defence over the act of his disciples by referring to the 
 conduct of David, esteemed to be a model of Jewish piety. Once 
 when he and his men were an-hungered, he had not scrupled to 
 break the rules, to violate the sanctity of the Holy Place. We may 
 believe that it was on a Sabbath-day he did so. Doubly appropriate, 
 therefore, was the reference to it ; but it was not essential to Christ's 
 argument that the act was done upon the Sabbath-day. What 
 Christ mainly desired by his allusion to the case of David, was to 
 establish the principle that the pressure of hunger vindicated the 
 setting aside for the time of the strictest even of the Temple regu- 
 lations. But these regulations, and the whole Temple-service which 
 they sustained, were held to be of such superior importance to the 
 Sabbatic law, that when both could not be kept, the latter had to 
 give way. A vast amount of what elsewhere would have been 
 accounted as Sabbath-breaking went on every Sabbath-day in the 
 Temple. If the Temple, then, carried it over the Sabbath, and 
 hunger carried it over the Temple, as free of fault as David and his 
 men were so free of fault were Christ's disciples. To whatever 
 their hunger was due, it had come upon them owing to their 
 connection with him ; and if in Jerusalem the Temple towered above 
 the Sabbath and threw its protection over its servants engaged in 
 its work, here in the fields of Galilee was one greater than the 
 Temple, throwing his protection over his disciples as they followed 
 him. They, too, must be acquitted. 
 
 i Deut. xxiii. 25.
 
 THE CHARGE OF SABBATH-BREAKING. 151 
 
 But it is not enough that the act of his disciples be in this way 
 vindicated. Our Lord seizes the opportunity to let the Pharisees 
 know that they had mistaken the spirit and object of the ceremonial 
 law, and particularly of the Sabbatic institute. "But if ye had 
 nown," he added, " what this meaneth, I will have mercy and 
 not sacrifice, ye would not have condemned the guiltless." Jesuf 
 quotes here from the Book of Hosea l a saying which more than 
 once he repeated. It was not a solitary one. Much to the same 
 effect were the words which the first of the Prophets addressed to 
 the first of the Kings : " Hath the Lord as great delight in burnt- 
 offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? 
 Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat 
 of rams." 2 The wisest of the Kings responds to the words of 
 Samuel in the proverb, "To do justice and judgment is more 
 acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice." 3 Isaiah and Jeremiah put 
 words of the same import into Jehovah's lips : " I delight not, 
 saith the Lord, in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he-goats. 
 Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings 
 from before mine eyes ; cease to do evil ; learn to do well." " Thus 
 saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel : I spake not unto your 
 fathers, nor commanded them in the day that I brought them out 
 of the land of Egypt, concerning burnt- offerings or sacrifices ; but 
 this thing commanded I them, Obey my voice, and I will be your 
 God, and ye shall be my people ; and walk ye in all the ways that 
 I have commanded you, that it may be well unto you." 4 There is 
 something singularly impressive in hearing such emphatic testimonies 
 to the comparative worthlessness of sacrifices and offerings, of all 
 merely ritualistic observances issuing from the heart of the old 
 Jewish economy ; spoken at the very time when all those statutes 
 and ordinances of the Lord were in full force, that define so minutely, 
 and prescribe so peremptorily the formalities of Jewish worship. 
 
 Jesus, in quoting one of these testimonies, and applying it to the 
 case of his disciples' conduct, puts Sabbath-keeping, so far as it 
 consisted merely in abstaining from this or that kind of work, in 
 the same category as sacrifice, regarding it as part of that forma] 
 and external mode of honouring and serving the Supreme which 
 ought never to stand in the way of any work of need or of bene- 
 volence. Had the Pharisees but listened to the voice of their own 
 prophets, they would have understood this ; but, deaf to that voice, 
 they had drawn tighter and tighter the bonds of the required 
 Sabbatic service, ever narrowing the field of what was allowable on 
 the seventh day, till they had laid a yoke upon men's shoulders too 
 heavy for them to bear. From this yoke, at all hazard to himself, 
 Jesus will relieve his countrymen, proclaiming in their ears the 
 great and pregnant truth, " The Sabbath was made for man, and 
 1 Hos. vi. 6. 21 Scim. rv. 22. 3 Prov. xxi. 3. * Isa. i. 11, 16 ; Jcr. vii. 21, 23.
 
 /52 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 not man for the Sabbath." The Sabbath is but a means to an end ; 
 that end is, man's present comfort, his spiritual and eternal good. 
 Wherever, therefore, the keeping of the Sabbath in the way 
 prescribed, instead of promoting would frustrate that end, it was 
 more honoured in the breach than in the observance. It was never 
 to be regarded as in itself an end. Apart from the physical, social, 
 moral, and religious benefits to be thereby realised, there was no 
 merit in painfully doing this one thing, or rigorously abstaining 
 from that other. The Sabbath was made to serve man, but man 
 was not made to serve or to be a slave to the Sabbath. And just 
 because it was an institution which, when rightly used, is so 
 eminently fitted to minister to man's present and eternal good, 
 the Son of man, who came not to be ministered unto but to minister, 
 as Head of our humanity, to render to it the greatest of all services, 
 and to take all other servants of it under his care and keeping, 
 would show himself to be Lord also of the Sabbath. 
 
 It was in this character that Jesus acted on the Sabbath which 
 so closely followed the incident of the walk in the corn-fields. In 
 some unnamed synagogue he sat and taught. A man whose right 
 hand was withered stood before him. Had he been brought there 
 to serve the purposes of these watchful enemies who wished, not 
 simply to have his own acts to bring up against him (for these, as 
 the acts of a prophet, might be regarded as privileged), but to get 
 from him a distinct categorical reply to the question, whether it 
 was lawful for any man who had the power of healing to exert it on 
 the Sabbath-day 1 So soon at least as they saw his eye fastened 
 upon the man with the withered hand, and before he did anything, 
 they interpose their question, " Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath 
 days?" The question is met by an appeal to their own practice : 
 " What man shall there be among you that shall have one sheep, 
 and if it fall into a pit on the Sabbath-day, will he not lay hold on 
 it and lift it out ? How much then is a man better than a sheep ? 
 Wherefore it is lawful to do well on the Sabbath-days." But they 
 shall not only have its lawfulness asserted, they shall see the good 
 done before their eyes. Jesus bids the man with the withered hand 
 stand forth. But ere he cures him he turns to the Scribes and 
 Pharisees and puts in his turn a question cutting deep into their 
 deceitful hearts : " Is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath-days," 
 as I am doing "or to do evil 1 ?" as ye do in suspecting and 
 maligning me; "to save life," as I do "or to kill," as ye are 
 doing who are already meditating my death ? There is no answer 
 to this question. They stand speechless before him, but unconvinced 
 and unrelenting. 
 
 "And Jesus looked round about on them with anger." The 
 meek, and the gentle, and the patient one ! What was it that filled 
 his breast with such a glow of indignation, that it broke out in this
 
 THE CHARGE OF SABBATH-BREAKING. 153 
 
 unwonted look of anger 1 It was the sight of men who, laying 
 hold of one of his Father's most merciful institutes that which for 
 man and beast, and the whole labouring creation, provided a day 
 of returning rest, amid whose quiet the reflecting spirit of man 
 might rise to the contemplation of its higher ends and its eternal 
 destiny instead of looking at the primary command to keep holy 
 each seventh day, as it stood enshrined among those precepts which 
 enjoined a supreme love to God, and a corresponding love to man, 
 and allowing this one positive and external institute to receive its 
 interpretation from those immutable moral laws among which it was 
 interposed, had exalted it into a place of isolation and false impor- 
 tance, attaching a specific virtue to the bare outward keeping of the 
 letter, magnifying to the uttermost the minutest acts of bodily 
 service; finding therein the materials which the spirit of self- 
 righteousness employed for its own low and sordid purposes, an 
 instrument which it would have used for defrauding the poor and 
 the needy and the diseased of that help which the hand of charity 
 was ready to render; such was the source of that anger with 
 which Jesus looked round about on the Scribes and Pharisees. 
 
 But soon his eye, full of the expression of anger as it rests on 
 them, becomes as full of pity as it rests on the man who still stands 
 expectant before him. Jesus says to him, " Stretch forth thine 
 hand." One can fancy the man replying, Which hand is it that 
 you bid me thus stretch forth ? Is it this one that hangs lifeless by 
 my side ? Oh, if I but saw its wrinkled flesh filled up, did I but 
 feel restored the power that once was in it, too gladly would I do 
 your bidding ; but mock me not by telling me to stretch forth a 
 hand from which you see, and I feel, all power is gone. Had the 
 man thought so, spoken so, felt so, he might have carried his 
 withered hand with him to the grave. But he did not so think, or 
 feel, or act. He is spoken to by one of whom he believes that he 
 can give the strength to execute the command he issues. It is in 
 that faith he acts, and, paradoxical as it may seem, let us say, that 
 if in that faith he had not made the effort, he never would have 
 got the strength ; and yet if he had not got the strength he never 
 could have made the effort. And is it not thus that the Divine 
 Eedeemer still addresses us ? Stretch forth thy withered heart to 
 love thy withered hand to serve such is his command. Fixing 
 an eye of faith on him, who has already fixed his eye of love on 
 us, let us make the effort, and in the very making of the effort we 
 shall get the strength.
 
 154 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 III. 
 
 THE CALLING TO THE APOSTOLATE OF ST. PETER, ST. ANDREW, 
 
 ST. JAMES, ST. JOHN, AND ST. MATTHEW. 
 LUKE v. 1-11 ; MATT. tv. 18-22, ix. 9-17 ; MARK i. 16-20, n. 14-22 ; LUKE v. 27-39. 
 
 EXTRAORDINARY success naturally excites exaggerated hopes. A 
 sudden blaze of prosperity has blinded the strongest human eye. 
 Nor can you point to any great enterprise, signally successful at its 
 outset, of which you will not find it true that those engaged in it 
 were, for a short time at least, seduced into exorbitant expectations. 
 If ever any success might have operated in this way, it was that 
 which attended the close of the first year of our Lord's ministry. 
 The whole population of Galilee, a community of from two to three 
 millions, stirred to its depths, the excitement spreading all around, 
 reaching eastward beyond the Jordan, westward to the coasts of 
 Tyre and Sidon, southward to the hill country of Judea. It is no 
 longer, as in the days that followed the baptism by the banks of 
 the Jordan, an obscure Nazarene travelling with a few friends who 
 had attached themselves to his person, it is the great Worker of 
 miracles, the Healer of all diseases, the Caster-out of devils, sur- 
 rounded and pressed in upon so closely by admiring and enthusiastic 
 crowds, that to get a few quiet hours he had to steal them from 
 sleep to spend them in the mountain solitudes. It is no longer in 
 the synagogue and on the Sabbath-days alone that audiences are to 
 be found ; everywhere and at all times assemblages, often too large 
 for his addressing them, are ready to hang upon his lips. But you 
 search in vain through all the wonderful excitement and popularity 
 which followed our Lord in his first circuit through Galilee, for the 
 slightest evidence that any false or exaggerated expectations were 
 cherished. The specious appearances that then surrounded Him 
 never dazzled nor deceived his eye. He knew from the beginning 
 how soon the sudden fervours of the first great commotion would 
 subside how soon the tide that swelled so high would ebb away. 
 He knew that had he left to themselves those among whom he 
 lived and laboured, had he done nothing to bind some of them to 
 himself by ties closer and stronger than any they naturally or spon- 
 taneously would have formed, he would at the close have been left 
 alone. And therefore it was that at the very time when his popu- 
 larity was at the highest, he took the first step towards binding to 
 himself twelve chosen men in links which, besides all the pains that 
 he took himself to forge and fasten them, needed the welding forces 
 of the day of Pentecost to make them strong enough to bind them 
 everlastingly to him.
 
 THE CALLING TO THE APOSTOLATE. 155 
 
 To these twelve men, an office, secondary only to the one he 
 himself discharged, was to be assigned. They were always to be 
 with him, the spectators and reporters of all he said, and did, and 
 suffered. They were to share and multiply his labours, to protect 
 and relieve him from the pressure to which he was exposed. For 
 a short season he was to send them from his side, to teach and to 
 work miracles as he did himself, that a short fore-trial might be 
 made of the work in which they were afterwards to be engaged. 
 After his death they were to be the witnesses of the Resurrection, the 
 expounders of that Gospel which needed the great decease to be 
 accomplished ere in its full measure it could be proclaimed. By 
 their hands the foundations of the Church were to be laid. Let 
 us note, then, the first steps in their calling to this high office. 
 
 On his return from the Temptation, by the banks of the Jordan, 
 and on their way thence to Galilee, five men Andrew, John, 
 Peter, Philip, and Nathanael had temporarily attached themselves 
 to Jesus. Of these, only one Philip had been called by our Lord 
 himself to follow him. The others were attracted by what they heard 
 about him, or saw in him. At first, however, it was but a loose and 
 uncertain bond that united them to Jesus. All the five were present, 
 we may believe, at the marriage feast at Cana, and may have gone up 
 with him to Jerusalem, to the first Passover which he attended after 
 his baptism. But they did not remain in constant attendance 
 upon his person After his first circuit of Galilee, when his fame was 
 at its height, three of them had returned to their ordinary occupa- 
 tion as fishermen. With them a fourth became associated. As 
 Andrew had brought his brother Peter to Jesus, we may imagine that 
 the same service had been rendered by John to his brother James ; 
 so that all the four were already well known to Christ, had enjoyed 
 much familiar intercourse with him, and had appeared often openly 
 as his followers. Perhaps it was the common bond of discipleship 
 to him which in the course of the year had drawn them into closer 
 union with one another. Peter and Andrew had previously resided 
 at Bethsaida, a town at the north-eastern extremity of the lake, but 
 they had now removed to Capernaum, had entered into partnership 
 with the two sons of Zebedee, and had been plying their craft 
 together on the lake, when all the four were pointedly and specially 
 summoned in a way they never before had been to follow the Lord. 
 
 The difficulties that many have felt in harmonising the narra- 
 tives in the fourth chapter of St. Matthew and first chapter of St. 
 Mark, with that in the fifth chapter of St. Luke, have led them to 
 believe that two such summonses were given; that on the first 
 occasion the one referred to by the two former the four had 
 answered the appeal by an immediate throwing up of their occupa- 
 tion by the lake side, but that they had again, and not long after- 
 wards, resumed it, requiring a still more impressive instrumentality
 
 156 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 finally to sever the bonds. We are inclined rather to believe that 
 all which the three Evangelists relate occurred in the course of the 
 same morning, and that it happened somewhat in this manner : 
 
 The day had dawned. From his solitary place of rest and prayer, 
 somewhere among the neighbouring hills, Jesus had come down to 
 the quiet beach as the first light of the morning struck across the 
 placid bosom of the lake. The unproductive toil of the night was 
 nearly over for the fishermen. Out a little distance upon the \vaters, 
 Peter and Andrew had cast in their net for the last time as Jesus 
 approached the shore. But his progress was interrupted by the 
 crowds hurrying out of Capernaum, so soon as it was known that 
 he was there. Through these crowds stopping occasionally to 
 address a few words to them Jesus made his way to one or 
 other of those small creeks or inlets, still to be seen there, where 
 a boat could ride a few feet from the shore, and the people, seated 
 on either side and before the speaker, could listen quietly to one 
 addressing them from the boat. Here, in this creek two boats wero 
 drawn up, the property of the four the two pairs of brothers 
 already spoken of. The fishermen had gone out of them, and were 
 mending their nets ; not so far away, however, but that one of them, 
 Peter, noticing the Lord's approach, had returned. Entering into 
 his boat, Jesus asked Peter to thrust out a little from the land ; and 
 when this was done, he sat down and taught the people out of the 
 boat. The teaching over, Jesus turned to Peter, and said to him, 
 " Launch out into the deep, and let down your nets for a draught " 
 a singular command to come from one who knew so little might 
 be supposed to care so little about the fisherman's craft. Still it 
 came so decidedly from one whom Peter had already learned to 
 address as Master, that, with a few words of explanation, indicative 
 of the smallness of his hope, he prepares to comply with it. 
 "Master," he says, "we have toiled all the night, and have taken 
 nothing ; nevertheless at thy word I will let down the net." He 
 calls his brother, and launches out lets down the net. At once 
 such a multitude of fishes is enclosed, that the boat begins to fill 
 the net to break. Excited by what they had seen, James and John 
 had by this time launched their boat, and Peter beckons them to come 
 and help. They come, but all the help they can give is scarce suffi- 
 cient. Both boats are filled, and almost sinking as they get ashore. 
 
 Peter had already seen Jesus do wonderful things turn water 
 into wine, eject the devil from the demoniac, raise his own wife's 
 mother from the fever-bed ; but somehow this wonder came home 
 to him as none of them had done wrought in his own vessel, with 
 his own net, in the way of his own calling, after his own fruitless 
 toil. Never had the impression of a Divine Power at work in his 
 immediate presence taken such a hold of him. Never had the 
 sense of his being in close contact with One in whom such power
 
 THE CALLING TO THE APOSTOLATE. 157 
 
 resided come so upon his spirit. Astonishment, fear, humiliation 
 the impression, not of his weakness only, but of his sinfulness oi 
 his unworthiness to stand in such a presence fill and overwhelm 
 his open, ardent, impressible spirit. He falls at Jesus' knees, as he 
 sat there in the boat, quietly watching all the stir and bustle of the 
 fishermen ; and he gives vent to the feeling that for a moment is 
 uppermost, as he exclaims, " Depart from me, for I am a sinful 
 man, Lord !" And ever still, when the first clear and over- 
 powering revelation is made to any man of an Almighty Being 
 compassing his path, besetting him before and behind, laying his 
 hand upon him, ever when the first true and real contact takes 
 place of the human spirit with the living God as the Being with 
 whom we have so closely and constantly to do, will something like 
 the same effect be realised. So was it with him who said, " I have 
 heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee ; 
 wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes." So was 
 it with him who said, "Woe is me ! for I am a man of unclean 
 lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips : for mine 
 3yes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts." 
 
 " Depart from me." Nothing could have surprised Peter more 
 than the Lord's taking him at his word then and for ever after turn- 
 ing his back upon him. No man then living would have felt such a 
 forsaking more. Wishing to express how unfit he felt himself for 
 such a presence, Peter, with his wonted rashness, had said more 
 than he really meant. He asks Christ to go, yet he clings to him. 
 " I am a sinful man, Lord." Jesus knows that better than Peter 
 does. Peter will know it better when the Lord looks at him in 
 the judgment-hall, and he goes out to weep over his denials. But 
 Jesus knows, also, that it is because he is so sinful a man he must 
 not be forsaken. And though he is so sinful a man, yet still he 
 may be chosen to stand in closest relationship to his Master. 
 " Fear not," said Jesus to him ; " from henceforth thou shalt catch 
 men." 
 
 The words of direction, assurance, promise, addressed in the first 
 instance to Peter alone, were soon repeated to his three associates. 
 The shore was reached, the boats hauled up, the fish disposed of, 
 James and John had carried the broken nets away to a little 
 distance to mend them, when first to the one pair of brothers, and 
 then to the other, Jesus said, "Follow me, and I will make you 
 fishers of men." And immediately they left boats and nets, and 
 two of them their father, and forsook all, and followed him. We 
 may think it was not much that they had to leave, but it was their 
 all ; and the promptness and entireness of their relinquishment of 
 it shows what power over them the Saviour had already got what 
 a readiness for service and for sacrifice was already in them. And 
 these were the four men who ever after stood most closely
 
 158 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 associated with Jesus the four who stand at the head of every 
 list of the twelve Apostles. 
 
 It was not indeed till some time after this that, along with the 
 other eight, they were set apart to the peculiar office of the 
 Apostolate. This calling of them away from their former avoca- 
 tions, this attaching of them permanently to his person, was a 
 marked step toward their instalment in that position. It was the 
 same with Matthew, the publican. The high-road from Damascus 
 southward to Judea and Egypt ran from the slopes of Mount 
 Hermon down to the northern extremity of the Sea of Galilee, and 
 for a short distance skirted along the north-western shore of the 
 lake, passing through Capernaum. On the side of this road, close 
 to the lake, stood the booth in which Matthew sat levying the toll 
 on the passengers and their goods. He was one of a hated and 
 degraded class. The payment of the taxes exacted by the foreign- 
 ers under whose rule they were, irritated to the last degree the 
 Jews, who regarded it as a visible sign and token of their bondage. 
 The strong feeling thus excited spent itself on all who had anything 
 to do with the collection of these taxes. No Jew who desired to 
 stand well with his fellow-countrymen would be a tax-gatherer. 
 The office was commonly held by foreigners, or by those who cared 
 but little for a purely Jewish reputation. Matthew was a Jew, yet 
 he had become a publican, and now he is sitting at the receipt of 
 custom as Jesus passed by. We know nothing of his personal 
 character or previous habits. Considering that a year at least had 
 passed since Jesus had first appeared as a public teacher in Galilee 
 that so prominent a part of his ministry had been conducted in 
 the very neighbourhood in which Matthew lived it may be 
 regarded as a violent supposition that there had been no previous 
 acquaintance and intercourse between him and our Lord. It would 
 be more in keeping with Christ's conduct in other instances to 
 imagine that, so far as his occupation had permitted, Matthew had 
 already appeared as a follower of the new teacher, had shown him- 
 self to have been favourably affected towards him. However it 
 was, Jesus saw in him a man who, under right teaching and train- 
 ing, would be well suited for the high office he intended to confer 
 upon him ; and so, despite of the invidious office he now held, 
 Jesus stopped as he passed by said, "Follow me;" and "he left 
 all, rose up, and followed him," throwing up thus a lucrative 
 engagement, and casting in his lot with the small but growing 
 band which Jesus was forming. 
 
 So soon as it was known that a publican had not only been 
 seen in the following of Jesus which might have occurred and 
 occasioned no remark but that Jesus had actually selected a 
 publican and invited him to become one of his immediate attend- 
 ants, a great commotion among the Scribes and Pharisees arose
 
 THE CALLING TO THE APOSTOLATE. 159 
 
 It was a public scandal, an offence against all propriety, that one 
 pretending to be a religious guide of the people one preaching the 
 Kingdom of God should call a publican to his side, and take him 
 into his confidence. Bad enough that he should himself be seen 
 breaking the Sabbath and encouraging his disciples to do so like- 
 wise, but to pass by all the respectable inhabitants of Capernaum 
 so many of whom were conspicuous for the strictness of their 
 observance of all the Jewish ordinances, and to confer such a 
 mark of favour upon a man with whom none of them would 
 associate what was to be thought of such an act ? But the worst 
 had not yet come. Either instantly upon his throwing up his 
 office, or a few days thereafter, this Matthew makes a feast a 
 farewell one, it would seem to which a number of his old friends 
 and associates were invited, and there Jesus and his disciples were 
 to be seen sitting among the other guests. The Pharisees could 
 not stand this. They did not venture, indeed, to go and openly 
 reproach Christ personally with it. They were smarting too 
 keenly under the recent rebuke they had got from him to have 
 courage to do so, but they go to his disciples, and they say to them, 
 "Whyeateth your Master with publicans and sinners?" Jesus 
 does not leave it to the disciples to reply. As in so many other 
 instances, he takes the matter into his own hands, and, half in 
 irony, half in earnest, he says to them, " They that be whole need 
 not a physician, but they that be sick." They thought themselves 
 the hale and healthy ; they spake of these publicans and sinners as 
 corrupt and diseased ; why, then, blame him if he, as the great 
 Physician, went where his services were most required ? It was 
 sinners, not the righteous, that he came to call to repentance. If 
 they needed no repentance, why blame him if he went to call those 
 whose ears were open to his entreaties 1 But were they, indeed, 
 so much better than those whom they despised ? The difference 
 between them was far more an outward, a ceremonial, than an 
 inward, a moral, a spiritual one. Many of these poor publicans 
 and sinners excommunicated though they might be very care 
 less about religious rites were men of simpler, truer, more honest 
 natures, kindlier in their dispositions, and in a sense, too, more 
 devout, than many of these pretentious pietists. " Go," said Jesus 
 to those who imagined themselves to be righteous and despised 
 others "Go, and learn what that meaneth : I will have mercy and 
 not sacrifice" mercy rather than sacrifice if the two be put in com- 
 parison ; mercy alone, and no sacrifice, if the two are put in opposi- 
 tion mercy among publicans and sinners rather than sacrifice or any 
 amount of ceremonial observances among Scribes and Pharisees. 
 
 But now another class interferes, to make common cause with the 
 Pharisees. Some of the disciples of John the Baptist had early seen 
 the superiority of Jesus, and at their master's own instance had
 
 160 THE MINISTEY IN GALILEE. 
 
 enrolled themselves among his followers. But others stood aloof, 
 having more in them of the old Judaic spirit attracted as much 
 by the ascetic habits of the Baptist as by anything about him 
 recognising in the fasts that he kept, the prayers that he himself 
 offered and taught his disciples to offer, a return to a still purer and 
 stricter piety than even that which the Pharisees practised. It was 
 a strange and repulsive thing to such, at the very hour when their 
 master was cast into prison and they were mourning and fasting 
 more than usual on this account, to see Jesus and his disciples 
 going about eating and drinking nay, accepting invitations to 
 festive entertainments in publicans' houses. St. Matthew tells us 
 that these disciples of John went at once to Jesus with their com- 
 plaint. St. Mark completes the picture by informing us that the 
 Pharisees joined with them in the complaint. Nothing more likely 
 than that when the one saw how differently the discipleship of Jesus 
 was developing itself from what they had expected, they should rather 
 fall back upon the austerity of Pharisaism, with its frequent 
 fastings and many prescribed exercises of devotion nothing more 
 natural than that the Pharisees should seize upon the occasion and 
 ally themselves with the followers of the Baptist, to aim thereby a 
 fresh blow at Christ's authority and influence over the people. 
 Christ's answer meets both sets of complainers. " And Jesus said 
 unto them, Can the children of the bridechamber mourn, as long as 
 the bridegroom is with them ? but the days will come, when the 
 bridegroom shall be taken from them, and then shall they fast." 1 
 In the last testimony that the Baptist had borne to Jesus had he 
 not said, " He that hath the bride is the bridegroom ; but the friend 
 of the bridegroom, which standeth and heareth him, rejoiceth 
 greatly because of the bridegroom's voice " ? The position that John 
 had thus claimed for himself, those disciples against whom the 
 complaint was lodged were now occupying. They were the friends 
 of the bridegroom standing and hearing and rejoicing was it a 
 time for them to mourn and to fast 1 The days were to come when 
 the bridegroom should be taken away from them, then should they 
 fast the fasting flowing spontaneously, unbidden, from the grief. 
 There is no general command here prescribing fasting, but simply 
 a prophecy, referring to a peculiar and brief period in the history 
 of the Lord's disciples ; a prophecy, however, rich in the intimation 
 it conveys, that all external acts and exercises, such as that of 
 fasting, should spring naturally out of some pure and deep emotion 
 of the heart seeking for itself an appropriate expression. 
 
 And now two short parables are added by our Lord : the first we 
 
 may regard as peculiarly applicable to the disciples of John, the 
 
 other to the Pharisees. " No man putteth a piece of new cloth 
 
 unto an old garment, for that which is put in to fill it up taketh 
 
 1 Matt. ix. 15.
 
 THE CALLING TO THE APOSTOLATE. 161 
 
 from the garment, and the rent is made worse." : No man would 
 take a piece of new, raw cloth, which would not keep its form after- 
 wards, which, when wet, would shrink, and sew it into the rent of 
 an old garment ; for ere long, when the new piece put in contracted, 
 it would tear itself away from the old, and the rent would be made 
 worse. And let not the disciples of the Baptist think that this new 
 piece of their master's asceticism, with its new fastings and new 
 prayers, was to be sewed, as they seemed to wish to do, into the 
 old, worn-out, rent garment of Pharisaism. To try that, would be 
 to try to unite what could not lastingly be conjoined ; instead of 
 closing up the rent, it would be to make it wider than ever. 
 " Neither do men put new wine into old bottles : else the bottles 
 break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish : but they 
 put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved." 2 No man 
 taketh old, dry, withered skin bottles, such as then were used, and 
 filleth them with new wine ; for the new wine would ferment, 
 expand, and the bottles be burst, and the wine spilled and lost. 
 And let not the Pharisees think that the new wine of the kingdom, 
 the fresh spirit of love to God and man, which Jesus came to breathe 
 into regenerated humanity, could be safely poured into their old 
 bottles into those forms and ceremonies of worship, dry as dust, 
 and brittle as the thinnest and most withered piece of leather. No, 
 there must be new bottles for the new wine, bottles that will yield 
 to the pressure from within, and expand as the fermenting liquid 
 which they contain expanded. And such new bottles as were thus 
 required Jesus was finding not in priestly men, chained up from 
 childhood within priestly habits not in those fixed and rigid 
 Levitical institutions which the long years that had been draining 
 them of their vitality had been stiffening into an immovable 
 inflexibility: but in these fishermen, these publicans natural, 
 homely, unlearned men, open to imbibe his spirit in all its richness 
 and expansiveness ; and in those simple forms and institutions of 
 Christianity, which, cramped by no formal and immutable injunc- 
 tions, were to be left free to take such new outward shapes as the 
 indwelling spirit might mould. 
 
 IV. 
 
 THE SEKMON ON THE MOUNT. 
 MATT. v. vi. vn. ; LUKE vi. 20-49. 
 
 THE traveller from Jerusalem gets his first sight of the Sea of 
 
 Galilee from the top of Mount Tabor. It is but a small corner of 
 
 the lake that he sees, lying miles away, deep sunk among the hills. 
 
 Descending from the height whence this first glimpse of the lake 
 
 i Matt. ix. 18. 2 Matt. ix. 17.
 
 162 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 is got, the road to Tiberias leads over an elevated undulating plateau, 
 the one marked feature of which is a curious double-peaked hill, 
 rising about fifty or sixty feet above the general level of the 
 surrounding table-land, and sloping down on its eastern side into 
 the plain of Gennesaret. From the two prominences it presents 
 this hill is called the Horns of Hattin, Hattin being a village at 
 its base. It overlooks the lake and the plain. You see Capernaum 
 from its summit, lying across the valley about seven miles off. As 
 seen again from Capernaum and the plain, it appears as the highest 
 and loneliest elevation that rises upon that side of the lake. It 
 would naturally be spoken of by the inhabitants of Capernaum and 
 its neighbourhood, even as St. Matthew speaks of it, as the mountain. 
 It would naturally be the place to which any one seeking for 
 solitude would retire. When somewhere in its neighbourhood there 
 came around our Lord " a great multitude of people out of all Judea 
 and Jerusalem, and from the sea- coast of Tyre and Sidon, and from 
 Galilee and Decapolis, and from Idumea, and from beyond Jordan," 1 
 and when, seeking relief from the pressure, it is said that he went 
 up into a mountain, no one so likely to be the one referred to by 
 the Evangelist as the Horns of Hattin, to which, as the supposed 
 place of their utterance, the name of the Mount of the Beatitudes 
 has for ages been given. 
 
 The night upon this mountain was spent by Christ in prayer 
 alone perhaps upon the higher summit, the disciples slumbering be- 
 low. At dawn he called them to him, and out of them he chose the 
 twelve, and ordained them "that they might be with him, and that 
 he might send them forth to preach." But on what principle was 
 the selection made ? in what manner was the ordination effected ? 
 It may be presumed that some regard was had to the personal 
 qualifications of those whom the Lord chose for this high office. 
 We know indeed too little of any but two or three of the twelve to 
 trace the special fitness of the human instrument for the work given 
 it to do. Of all but one, however, we may believe that such fitness 
 did exist. But how came that one to be numbered with the rest ? 
 It is possible that Judas may have done much to obtrude himself, 
 or that others may have done much to obtrude him upon the notice 
 of the Saviour. We read of one who, with great professions of 
 attachment, volunteered to become a disciple, saying to Jesus, 
 " Master, I will follow thee whithersoever thou goest ; " whom Jesus 
 neither rejected nor welcomed, meeting his declaration of adherence 
 with the ominous words, " The foxes have holes, and the birds of 
 the air have nests, but the Son of man hath not where to lay his 
 head." If, as some have thought, the man who came forward in 
 this way and pressed himself into the discipleship were Judas if 
 he was a man of acknowledged ability and considerable influence, 
 i Lukevi. 17 ; Mark iii. 8; Matt. iv. 25.
 
 THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT. 163 
 
 whom no one at the time had the slightest reason to suspect, who 
 was welcomed by all the other disciples, and commended by them 
 to their Master as a most desirable associate if the rejection of 
 such a man in such circumstances would have seemed to be an act 
 of caprice without known or apparent reason, this might serve 
 perhaps in some slight degree to explain to us how Judas came at 
 first to be numbered with the twelve. Many will feel as if there 
 were something like profanity in any conjecture of this kind, and 
 all will be satisfied simply to accept the fact that Jesus chose those 
 twelve men, and yet that one of them was a deviL 
 
 Was it by simple designation to the office without any form or 
 ceremony 1 or was it by laying of Christ's hand solemnly on the 
 head of each, then gathering the circle round him and offering up 
 a consecration prayer, that the apostles were set apart ? We can 
 not tell. It is surely singular, however, that the manner of the ordi- 
 nation of the apostles by our Lord himself, in like manner as the 
 ordination of the first presbyters or bishops of the Church by the 
 apostles, should have been left unnoticed and undescribed. 
 
 The ordination over, Jesus descended to a level spot, either 
 between the two summits or lying at their base. 1 The day had now 
 advanced, and the great multitude that had followed him, apprised 
 of his place of retreat, poured in upon him, bringing their diseased 
 along with them. He stood for a time healing all who were brought 
 to him. Retreating then again to the mountain-side, he sat down. 
 His disciples seated themselves immediately around him, and the 
 great multitude stood or sat upon the level ground below. 
 
 Such were the circumstances under which the Sermon on the 
 Mount was delivered. It may have been the first discourse of the 
 kind which St. Matthew had heard ; all the more natural, therefore, 
 that he should have been directed to preserve so full a record of it. 
 We have no authority for saying that it was actually the first formal 
 and lengthened address delivered by our Lord. Many other longer 
 or shorter discourses, to smaller or larger audiences, may Jesus have 
 spoken during this period of his ministry. But this was the one 
 selected by divine wisdom to be presented as a specimen or sample 
 of our Lord's teaching, as addressed to mixed Galilean audiences in 
 the earlier stages of his ministry. There was a change in his mode 
 of teaching afterwards, even hi Galilee, as there was a marked 
 difference between all his discourses there, and those addressed to 
 very different audiences in Jerusalem. Here upon the mount he 
 had a vast concourse of people of all castes and from all quarters 
 before him. Nearest to him were his own disciples. To them his 
 words were in the first instance spoken, but they were meant to 
 reach the consciences and hearts of the motley crowd that lay 
 beyond. 
 
 i Luke vi. 17.
 
 164 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 Now, if there was one sentiment spread more widely than 
 another throughout this crowd, it was the vague yet ardent expecta- 
 tion, beating then in almost every Jewish breast, of some great 
 national deliverance of the near approach of a new kingdom the 
 kingdom of God. With what a delicate hand not openly and 
 rudely rebuking, yet laying the axe withal at its very roots was 
 this deep national prejudice now treated by our Lord ! What could 
 have run more directly counter to the earthly ambitious hopes, swall- 
 ing up within the hearts of those around him 1 what could have served 
 more effectually to check them, than the very first words which 
 Jesus uttered 1 " Blessed are the poor in spirit : for theirs is the 
 kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn : for they shall 
 be comforted. Blessed are the meek : for they shall inherit the 
 earth. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteous- 
 ness : for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful : for they 
 shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart : for they shall 
 see God. Blessed are the peacemakers : for they shall be called the 
 children of God. Blessed are they which are persecuted for right- 
 eousness' sake : for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are 
 ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all 
 manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Kejoice, and be 
 exceeding glad : for great is your reward in heaven : for so perse- 
 cuted they the prophets that were before you." How different the 
 kind of blessedness thus described from that which his hearers had 
 been hungering and thirsting after! How different the kind of 
 kingdom thus described from that which they had been expecting 
 he should set up ! 
 
 But while the multitude were cherishing false ideas and expec- 
 tations about his kingdom, many were cherishing false ideas and 
 fears about Christ himself that equally required to be removed. 
 They had noticed in his teaching the absence of any reference to 
 many of those religious services that they so punctiliously per- 
 formed, some disregard of them in his own practice and in that of 
 his disciples. This man, they began to say, is an enemy to Moses. 
 He is aiming at nothing short of a subversion of the old, the heaven- 
 given law. Jesus must proclaim how untrue the accusation was. 
 "Think not," he said, " that I am come to destroy the law, or the 
 prophets : I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say 
 unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in 
 no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled." But in what did the 
 true fulfilment of the Mosaic law consist 1 It was a vast and com- 
 plicated code, embracing a body of laws for a peculiar people, 
 existing at a particular period, and organised for a special purpose ; 
 subject, therefore, to all the limitations and exhibiting all the 
 adaptations to existing circumstances which, in proportion to the 
 wisdom with which it is framed, all such legislation must display.
 
 THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT. 165 
 
 It had in it commands of a purely ethical and religious character, 
 conveyed in more general and abstract forms ; and it had in it a 
 large apparatus of positive enactments and ordinances chiefly meant 
 to symbolise the truths and facts of the Christian dispensation. 
 It was not throughout an expression of God's absolute will, perfect, 
 immutable, meant to be of permanent and universal obligation. 
 Part of it, perfectly adapted to its design, was inherently imperfect ; 
 part of it as necessarily transitory. When the time came that the 
 Jewish nation should either cease to exist or cease to have its old 
 functions to discharge, and when all its types and ceremonies had 
 their true meaning expressed and their ends accomplished then 
 out of this complicated law there would come to be extracted that 
 which was absolutely perfect and universally obligatory. Jesus 
 knew that at his advent that time had come, and assuming the 
 very place and exercising the very prerogative of the Divine Legis- 
 lator of the Jews, he begins in this Sermon on the Mount to 
 execute this task. He treats the old Jewish practice of divorce as 
 imperfect, being adapted to a single nation at a particular stage of 
 its moral training, and lays down the original and perfect law of 
 the marriage relationship. In like manner he deals with the lex 
 talionis the rule of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, 
 and with the law and custom as to oaths. But it is especially in 
 his treatment of those commandments about whose permanent 
 obligation there was and could be no doubt, that the novelty and 
 value of his teaching displayed itself. These were negative and 
 prohibitory in their form : Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not 
 commit adultery, etc. etc. They had been looked at in the letter 
 rather than in the spirit. They had been regarded simply as pro- 
 hibitions of certain outward acts or crimes. Abstinence from the 
 forbidden deeds had been taken as a keeping of the Divine com- 
 mands. Obedience had thus come to be looked upon as a thing of 
 outward constraint or mechanical conformity, its merit lying in the 
 force of the constraint, the exactness of the conformity. It was 
 thus that the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees consisted 
 mainly in a stiff and formal adherence to the letter of the precept, 
 to the neglect often, and sometimes to the contradiction of its spirit. 
 This fatal error Christ exposes, taking up commandment after com- 
 mandment, unfolding the spirituality and extent of the requirement, 
 showing how it reached not simply or mainly to the regulation of 
 the outward conduct, but primarily and above all things to the 
 state of the heart ; that murder lay in embryo in an angry feeling, 
 that adultery lurked in a licentious look, that it was not alone when 
 the name of God was vainly used that irreverence might be 
 exhibited and profane swearing practised, that the old Jewish rule 
 of retaliation was no rule for the regulation of the affections or the 
 guidance of the conduct in a pure and perfect state, that from the
 
 166 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 heart every sentiment of malice or revenge must be banished, and 
 in the conduct the evil done to us by another remain unresented, 
 unavenged, the enemy to be loved, the persecutor to be prayed for ; 
 and all this done that we might be merciful as our Father that is 
 in heaven is merciful, perfect as he is perfect, children of him who 
 maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth 
 his rain on the just and on the unjust. 
 
 Too much of the almsgiving and the fasting and the praying 
 that he saw practised around him was done to be seen of men 
 prompted by no other motive, was nothing but hypocrisy, utterly 
 offensive to his Father in heaven. Concealed and unostentatious let 
 the givings and the fastings be, short and simple and secret the 
 prayers of those who would be his disciples and true children of his 
 Father, whom seeing in secret he would in due time openly reward. 
 
 Let all be done as unto him with an undivided allegiance, for 
 no man can serve two masters ; and with an unbounded trust, for, 
 having such a Father, why should there be any over-carefulness for 
 earthly things those things that He knows we have need of, or 
 any undue concern about a future which is not ours but his? 
 Why so anxious about food and raiment ? It is God who sustains 
 the life of the body ; you must trust him for that the greater 
 thing, then why distrust him for the less ? Behold the fowls of 
 the air ; consider the lilies of the field ; look at the grass that grows 
 beneath your feet. Not theirs, as yours, the capacity for trust and 
 toil and foresight. A worthless fleeting existence theirs as com- 
 pared with yours ; yet see how they are not only cared for but 
 lavishly adorned. " Take, therefore, no thought for the morrow : 
 for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Suffi- 
 cient unto the day is the evil thereof. But seek ye first the king- 
 dom of God, and his righteousness ; and all these things shall be 
 added unto you." 
 
 Conscious of your own far shortcomings from that perfect confi- 
 dence you should cherish that constant service you should be 
 rendering, be not severe in criticising or condemning others. Judge 
 not, that ye be not judged. " Why beholdest thou the mote that is 
 in thy brother's eye, and considerest not the beam that is in thine 
 own eye 1 Thou hypocrite ; first cast out the beam out of thine 
 own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out 
 of thy brother's eye." 
 
 ' It may be very difficult to be all, to do all that I am now telling 
 you you ought to be and to do ; but is there not an open and 
 effectual way for having every felt spiritual want relieved 1 " Ask 
 and it shall be given you, seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall 
 be opened unto you." Ye, being evilj know how to give good gifts 
 unto your children ; how much more shall your Father which is in 
 heaven give good things to them that ask him 1 '
 
 THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT. 167 
 
 Drawing from the exhaustless fountain of grace and strength 
 that in him is opened to you, fear not to adopt this as the one 
 comprehensive rule of your whole bearing and conduct toward 
 others. " All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to 
 you, do ye even so to them : for this is the law and the prophets." 
 
 Before the days of Christ there was a great Jewish teacher, 
 Hillel. An inquirer once came to him asking the strange question : 
 " Can you teach one the whole law during the time that I am able 
 to stand on one foot?" "Yes," said Hillel, "it is contained in 
 this one rule : Whatsoever ye would not wish that your neighbour 
 should do to you, do it not to him." This and other sayings of 
 preceding Eabbis have been quoted with a view of detracting 
 somewhat from the originality of the moral teaching of Christ. 
 Yet even here, while the resemblance between the lessons taught 
 is so marked, one grand difference may be discerned a difference 
 that runs through so large a part of the Saviour's precepts as com- 
 pared with those of all other moral legislators. He translates the 
 negative into the positive. With him it is not be not, do not ; 
 but, be and do. In few instances are any specific rules of conduct 
 laid down. To plant the right spirit and motive in the heart, out 
 of which all true morality proceeds, is the great object He aims at. 
 Look up to God, he says to us, as indeed your Father ever living, 
 ever loving, patiently bearing with you, largely providing for you, will- 
 ing to forgive you. Walk humbly, meekly, trustingly before him. 
 Commit your way to him, cast all your care on him, seek all your 
 supplies from him, render all your returns to him. Look upon all 
 your fellow-men as children of the same father, members of the same 
 family. Love each other, and live together as brethren, bearing 
 yourselves towards all around you patiently, forgivingly, generously, 
 hopefully. The gate thus opened is strait, the way is narrow, but it 
 is the only one that leadeth unto life. And finally, remember that 
 it is practice, not profession, that can alone conduct you along the 
 path to the throne in heaven. Hear then, and do, that ye may be 
 like the wise man who built his house upon a rock, " and the rain 
 descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon 
 that house, and it fell not, for it was founded upon a rock." 
 
 Such is a rapid, imperfect sketch of the Sermon on the Mount, 
 regarded mainly from a historical point of view, in its bearings 
 upon the audience to which it was originally addressed. The 
 people who first heard it, we are told, were astonished at its 
 doctrine. Well they might. It was so different from what they 
 had been accustomed to. No laboured argument, no profound 
 discussion, no doubtful disputation, no nice distinctions, no scheme 
 of doctrines formally and elaborately propounded, no exact routine 
 of religious services prescribed. It dealt with the simplest, plainest 
 moral and religious truths and duties ; and did this in the simplest,
 
 168 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 plainest manner; directly, familiarly, colloquially a freshness 
 about it like that of the morning breeze which played over the 
 mountain-side. The thing, however, that seems to have struck the 
 listeners most, was the calm, unhesitating, authoritative tone in 
 which the whole was uttered. "They were astonished at his 
 doctrine : for he taught them as one having authority, and not as 
 the Scribes." Here is One who comes forth from none of the great 
 schools, who has sat at the feet of none of the great masters, 
 who uses no book language, who appeals to no authority but his 
 own a young untaught Nazarene ; and yet he takes it upon him 
 to pronounce with the utmost confidence as to who the truly 
 blessed are, and reckons among them those who were to be railed 
 at and persecuted for his sake. Here is One who does not shrink 
 from taking into his hands the law and the prophets, acting not 
 simply as their expositor the clearer of them from all false 
 traditional interpretations. He is bold enough to say that he came 
 to fulfil them ; in one remarkable instance, at least that of the 
 law which permitted divorce speaking as the original lawgiver 
 was alone entitled to do, declaring that the time for this permis- 
 sion had now ceased, and that henceforth such divorces as Moses 
 had tolerated were not to be allowed. Here is One who speaks of 
 God as one who fully knew, and had a right to declare, how his 
 children were to act so as to please him ; whom he would forgive, 
 whom he would reward, upon whom he would bestow his gifts. 
 Here is One who, though seated on that Galilean mountain, with 
 nothing to distinguish him from the humble fishermen around him, 
 speaks of a day on which he should be seated on the throne of 
 universal judgment, to whom many should say, "Lord, Lord, have 
 we not prophesied in thy name ? and in thy name have cast out 
 devils 1 and in thy name done many wonderful works 1 " to whom 
 he was to reply, "I never knew you: depart from me, ye that 
 work iniquity." 
 
 In consequence of the simplicity, purity, and elevation of the 
 moral precepts which it contains, and still more, perhaps, because 
 of none of the peculiar doctrines as to the person, character, office, 
 and work of Christ as the Mediator being found in it, this Sermon 
 on the Mount has been greedily seized upon and highly extolled 
 by many as the true epitome of Christianity as Christ's own 
 gospel coming from his own lips. But it is far less difficult for us 
 to discern the reasons why the truths of the incarnation and the 
 propitiatory sacrifice were not at this time and to that audience 
 alluded to or dwelt upon by Jesus, than it is for any who would 
 reduce him to the level of a mere moral legislator to account for 
 the position which, even when enunciating the simplest moral 
 precepts, he assumed for the tone of authority in which he speaks. 
 Dimly, indeed, through this Sermon on the Mount does the Jesus
 
 RAISING OF THE WIDOW'S SON. 169 
 
 of the Cross appear, but the Jesus of the Throne is here, and once 
 that we have learned from other after-teachings of himself and his 
 Apostles to know, and love, and trust in him as our great High 
 Priest, who has bought us with his blood, it will be the habit and 
 delight of every true and faithful follower of his to take up and 
 dwell upon that wonderful discourse, in which, more clearly and 
 fully than in any other words of human speech, the very spirit and 
 essence of a humble child-like faith in God, and the lofty ideal of a 
 perfect, a heavenly morality, is unfolded and enforced. 
 
 V. 
 
 THE RAISING OF THE WIDOW'S SON AND THE 
 
 RULER'S DAUGHTER. 
 
 LUKE vn. 11-17 ; nil. 41-56 ; MATT. ix. 18-26 ; MARK v. 22-43. 
 
 THE multitude that listened to the Sermon on the Mount 
 followed Jesus from the hill-side into Capernaum, thronging round 
 the house into which he entered, and pressing their sick so urgently 
 on his notice that he " could not so much as eat bread." A mode 
 of life like this, out all night upon the mountain top, teaching, 
 walking, working all day long without food or rest, so affected 
 the minds of his immediate relatives when they heard of it that 
 they " went out to lay hold of him, for they said, He is beside 
 himself." Failing in their endeavours, they left him to pursue his 
 eccentric course. 
 
 It was in the course of the busy day which followed the 
 delivery of the Sermon on the Mount that the centurion's servant 
 was healed, and the opportunity was thereby given to Jesus to 
 hold up to the eyes of the people an example of such faith as he 
 had not found no, not in Israel. On the following day he left 
 Capernaum. " Many of his disciples and much people" went with 
 him. They had a long day's walk over the hills of Galilee, skirting 
 the base of Tabor, and descending into the valley of Esdraelon. 
 The sun was sinking in the west, away behind the ridge of Carmel, 
 and was gilding with his evening beams the slopes of little Hermon, 
 as Jesus and the band which followed him approached the village 
 of Nain. This village is now a confused heap of the rudest Syrian 
 huts, unenclosed, with no ruins of ancient buildings, nor any 
 antiquities around, save the tombs in the rock upon the hill-side, 
 where for ages they have buried the dead. And yet it stands next 
 to Nazareth and Bethlehem and Bethany in the sacred interest 
 attached to it. We are so sure of its identity, it is so small, so 
 isolated, having nothing but the one wonderful incident to mark its 
 history, that the Saviour's living presence was almost as vividly
 
 1 70 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 realised by us when entering it as when we sat by the side of Jacob's 
 well. We stood at the end of the village which looks northward 
 towards Galilee, and tried to recall the scene. Jesus and his train 
 of followers have crossed the plain, and are drawing near to the 
 village. Another company moves slowly and sadly out of its gate 
 and meets them. It is a funeral procession ; a large one, for all the 
 villagers have come forth, but there is no mark or token that it is 
 the funeral of one who had been rich or in any way distinguished. 
 The bier is of the plainest, and there follows it as chief mourner a 
 solitary woman, clad in humblest guise. Jesus has none beside 
 him as he stops and looks, to tell him who this woman is who 
 the dead for whom she mourns. He does not need the informa 
 tion ; he knows her history ; he knows her grief better than any 
 inhabitant of Nain. To his eye it is a becoming and beautiful thing 
 that grief like hers should have such homage paid to it, should have 
 drawn the whole village out after her by the pure force of sympathy. 
 Her claim, indeed, upon that sympathy is strong. This is not the 
 first bier she has followed. She had wept for another before she 
 wept for him whom they are now carrying to the grave. She is a 
 widow weeping now behind the bier of her only son. Bereft of 
 every earthly stay she walks, a picture of perfect desolation. 
 
 " And when the Lord saw her he had compassion on her." As 
 soon as his eye rests on her his heart fills full of pity. "Was this 
 the first funeral he had ever met in the way-side along with his 
 disciples? Was this the first mourner he had ever noticed go 
 weeping thus behind the dead? It may not have been so; yet 
 never perhaps before had he seen a poor lone widowed mother shed 
 such bitter tears over the death of an only son. The sight moves 
 him at least to do what he had never done before. He goes up to 
 the woman, and says to her " Weep not" Wrapped up in her 
 consuming grief, how surprised she must have been at being accosted 
 in such a way at such a time. Does this stranger mean to mock 
 her, to deal rudely with her in her grief ? In any other she might 
 have been ready to repel and resent the unseasonable intrusion 
 the strange unreasonable speech; but there is something in the 
 loving, pitying eye that looks at her as she glances at him timidly 
 through her tears something of hope, of promise, of assurance in 
 the gentle yet authoritative tones of his voice that quenches all 
 disposition to repel or resent. But why does Christ first say to her 
 Weep not ? Does he not know what he is about to do ? Does 
 he not know that within a few minutes that will be done by him 
 which, without any bidding on his part, will dry up all her tears f < 
 He does ; but he cannot go forward to his great act without yielding 
 to the impulse of pity ; dropping into the ear of the mourner not 
 as a cold word of command, fitted only to give needless pain, but as 
 a spontaneous expression of his warm personal compassion the
 
 HEALING OF THE WOMAN WITH AN ISSUE OF BLOOD. 171 
 
 words, "Weep not." Such a preface to the miracle speaks to us as 
 plainly of the tenderness of Christ's sympathy as the miracle itself 
 proclaims the infinitude of his power. 
 
 " And he came and touched the bier, and they that bore him 
 stood still." And all stand as still as the bearers ; the two groups, 
 the one from Capernaum and the other from Nain, lost in wonder as 
 to what is to happen next. All eyes turn upon Jesus. His turn 
 upon the bier. The silence is broken by the simple majestic words, 
 " Young man, I say unto thee, Arise." The young man rises, looks 
 about with wonder, begins to speak. Jesus takes him by the hand, 
 lifts him from the bier, delivers him to his mother. The deed of 
 mercy is done, and nothing more is told, but that a great fear came 
 upon all. "And they glorified God, saying, A great prophet is 
 risen up among us; and, God hath visited his people. And this 
 rumour of him went forth throughout all Judea, and throughout 
 all the region round about." 
 
 It was a few days or weeks before or after this incident (for the 
 date is uncertain) that one of the rulers of the synagogue at Caper- 
 naum, Jairus by name, came to Jesus as he sat at meat in the house 
 of Levi, and " cast himself at his feet, and worshipped him, and 
 besought him greatly, saying, My little daughter lieth at the point 
 of death ; come and lay thy hands upon her, that she may be healed, 
 and she shall live." Jesus arose at once and went with Jairus ; 
 so did his disciples, and so did much people ; the very promptness 
 of Christ's compliance with the ruler's request stimulating their 
 curiosity. The distance could not have been great from the house 
 of Levi to that of Jairus, and might speedily have been traversed, 
 but the crowd that thronged around Jesus by the way somewhat 
 impeded the movement. It gave, however, to one poor woman 
 the opportunity she had long been seeking. Twelve long years 
 she had been a sufferer, her illness one that made her very touch 
 pollution. All she had she had spent upon physicians. It seemed 
 rather to have aggravated her complaint. Seeing or hearing about 
 Jesus, a belief in the healing virtue that lay in him had taken 
 possession of her mind. Her timidity, her sense of shame, kept 
 her from going openly to him, telling him of her malady, and 
 asking him to exert his power on her behalf. But if she could 
 in any way unseen get at him, if she could but touch his clothes, 
 she felt that she should be made whole. And now he goes through 
 this great crowd. It is the very occasion she has been seeking for, 
 and she seizes it: gets behind him, presses through the people, 
 and touches the hem of his outer garment She is instantly healed, 
 but as instantly arrested. The touch has scarce been given, the 
 healing scarce effected, when Jesus turns round and says, " Who 
 touched my clothes ?" They all deny the deed. Peter expostulates 
 with his Master. "The multitude," he says, "throng thee and
 
 172 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 press thee, and sayest thou, Who touched me?" Jesus knows as 
 well as Peter that many had been near enough for their and his 
 garments to have come into contact ; but he knows, too, as Peter 
 knew not, that there had been a touch with a distinct, deliberate 
 purpose, altogether different from that of a mere random contact, 
 a touch that had drawn virtue out of him. Who gave it? His 
 eye looked round to see, is already resting on the woman, who, 
 seeing that she is not hid, fearing and trembling, yet glad and grate- 
 ful, throws herself on her knees before him, and getting the better of 
 all her womanly feelings, declares unto him " before all the people 
 for what cause she had touched him, and how she was healed 
 immediately." 
 
 Had Jesus been displeased at being touched ? Had he grudged 
 in any way that the virtue had in such a way been extracted? 
 Was it to detect and rebuke a culprit that he had challenged the 
 multitude ? No : it was because he knew how very strong was this 
 woman's faith, a faith sufficient to draw out at once in fullest 
 measure the healing efficacy, and yet a faith that had in it a super- 
 stitious element, the fancy that in some magical mysterious way 
 contact of any kind established between her and Christ would cure 
 her. If he allowed her to go away undetected, the healing niched, 
 as it were, unconsciously from the healer, this fancy might be con- 
 firmed, the superstitious element in her faith enhanced. Therefore 
 it was that he would not suffer the secrecy. He would meet and 
 answer the faith which under the heavy pressure and in despair of 
 all other help had thrown itself somewhat blindly yet confidingly 
 upon his aid. But he will not allow her to depart without letting 
 her know how wrong and how needless it had been in her to attempt 
 concealment, without letting her and all around her know what 
 was the kind of touch that she had given which had established the 
 right connection between her and him, and opened the way for the 
 remedy reaching the disease. " And he said unto her, Daughter, 
 be of good comfort; thy faith hath made thee whole, go in peace." 
 
 There is not one of all our Saviour's many miracles of healing 
 fuller of comfort and encouragement. For if his mode of dealing 
 with our spiritual diseases be shadowed out in the modes of the 
 bodily cures that he effected, whenever we grow sad or despondent 
 as we think how much of fear, or shame, or error, or weakness, or 
 superstition mingles with the faith we cherish, then let us remember 
 that if only the depth and inveteracy of the spiritual disease be 
 felt, if with or without a long trial of them we have been led to 
 despair of all other physicians of the soul, and to look alone to 
 Jesus Christ, he who accepted this woman's faith with all its weak- 
 ening and defiling ingredients, will not cast us off. A timid 
 trembling touch of him, be it only the touch of humility and trust, 
 will still bring forth that healing virtue which wraps itself up in
 
 RAISING OF THE RULER'S DAUGHTER. 1 73 
 
 no guarded seclusion, but delights to pour itself freely out into 
 every open and empty receptacle that is brought to it. 
 
 The stoppage by the way, however brief, must have been some- 
 what trying to Jairus, but he showed no impatience. There was 
 a short delay, but with it a new proof of Christ's power well fitted 
 to fortify his faith. But just as the healed woman is sent away, 
 the messenger arrives, who says, " Thy daughter is dead, why 
 troublest thou the Master any further?" The words were perhaps 
 not meant for the ear of Christ, yet it caught them up, and the 
 moment it did so, knowing and feeling to what a strain the faith of 
 Jairus was exposed, and how much he needed to be assured and 
 comforted, " as soon as Jesus heard the word that was spoken, he 
 saith to the ruler of the synagogue, Be not afraid, only believe." 
 Jairus hears the reassuring words, and, heedless of the suggestion 
 made, follows Jesus as before. 
 
 At last the house of the dead is reached. Jesus suffers none of 
 his followers to enter with him save Peter, James, and John, the 
 three privileged apostles who were with him on the mount of his 
 transfiguration and in the garden of his agony, the three chosen 
 witnesses of the highest exercise of his power, the fullest display 
 of his glory, the greatest depth of his sorrow. The first apartment 
 of the ruler's house is occupied with those who fill it with a perfect 
 tumult of bemoaning sounds. It was the custom to hire such 
 mourners on these occasions, the more numerous, the more 
 vehement, the higher the station of the family. The outward 
 demonstration of grief that they here make is excessive, but there 
 is no heart in all the sound and show, no true utterance of any real 
 sorrow. As at discord at once with his own feeling and with his 
 formed purpose, Jesus rebukes the wailers, and says to them, " Give 
 place ; why make ye this ado ? the damsel is not dead, but sleepeth." 
 Not dead? Can they, the hired officials, not tell the difference 
 between sleep and death ? Who is he that speaks to them so 
 slightingly, so authoritatively taking it on him, stranger though he 
 be, to stop their lamentations? They "laugh him to scorn:" this 
 real laughter still more incongruous with his presence and his pur- 
 pose than the feigned grief. With Jairus to second him, Jesus puts 
 all the people out, takes "the father and the mother of the damsel, 
 and them that were with him, and entereth in where the damsel 
 was lying." He takes the dead child by the hand, simply says, 
 Talitha cumi damsel, arise ! and she rises, weak as from a bed of 
 illness, yet with all the seeds of the mortal malady which had laid 
 her low banished from her frame. Having directed that some food 
 should be given her, Jesus straitly charged the parents that they 
 should tell no man ; an injunction, let us believe, that they did 
 their best to keep, and yet St. Matthew tells us "the fame thereof 
 went abroad into all that land."
 
 174 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 It is difficult to understand why it was that Jesus laid such a 
 stringent injunction of secrecy upon the parents in this instance. 
 Had the widow's son not been raised from the dead about the same 
 time, and in circumstances of the utmost publicity, we might have 
 imagined that there was a desire on the part of Christ to throw, for 
 a time at least, a veil over this particular form of the manifestation 
 of his power. But though that other miracle had not been wrought, 
 had this one stood alone, how could it be hidden ? There were too 
 many that had seen the damsel die, or mourned over her when 
 dead, to allow of any concealment. As we think of the difficulty, 
 we might almost say impossibility of such concealment, the thought 
 occurs (and other instances in which the same command was given 
 by Christ may in the same way be explained) that it was not so 
 much with any desire or intention to secure secrecy that the order 
 was issued, as to prevent those who had the closest personal inter- 
 est in the miracle being the first or the loudest in noising it abroad. 
 
 There does not seem to have been any previous acquaintance 
 between Christ and the widow of Nain. It may be doubted 
 whether she had ever seen Jesus till she met him as she was going 
 out to bury her son. We do not read of Jesus ever being in Nain 
 but on that one occasion. It lay beyond the line of those circuits 
 of Galilee which he was in the habit of making. We are not sur- 
 prised, therefore, at noticing that his interference there was volun- 
 tary, without any solicitation or hope entertained beforehand on 
 the part of the mourner. It was different with Jairus at Capernaum. 
 He was a well-known man, living in the town which Jesus had 
 chosen as his head-quarters in Galilee. In all likelihood he was 
 one of the rulers of the Jews who formed the deputation that a 
 short time before had waited on Jesus to ask his aid on behalf of 
 the Eoman centurion. It was quite natural that, when his " one 
 only daughter" lay a-dying, he should apply on her account to 
 Christ. But there may have been in his character and connections 
 something of which we are ignorant, which made it undesirable 
 that he should be forward in proclaiming what had happened in 
 his house. 
 
 It was a case of recovery from the dead, about which there might 
 be some cavilling. The child could have been but a short time dead ; 
 long enough, indeed, to establish the certainty of the event, yet not so 
 long as to hinder any one from saying that it was literally and not 
 figuratively true, " She is not dead, but sleepeth." In this respect 
 we notice a difference, a progression in the three instances of rais- 
 ing from the dead recorded by the Evangelists that of Jairus's 
 daughter, of the widow's son, and of Lazarus. It is not distinctly 
 said to be so ; but we presume that these were the only three cases 
 in which the dead were restored to life by Christ. The one was 
 soon after death, the other immediately before burial, the third
 
 THE THREE RAISINGS FROM THE DEAD. 1 75 
 
 after the dead man had lain four days in the grave the variety of 
 the period after death at which the restoration was in each case 
 effected not, perhaps, without a purpose. For these three great 
 miracles stand, in one respect, at the head of all our Lord's works 
 of wonder. They were the highest instances of the forth-putting 
 of his divine almighty power. With respect to many of his other 
 works questions might be raised as to the nature or extent of the 
 power required for their performance, but none as to these. Life 
 in all its forms, from the highest to the lowest, is that mysterious 
 thing which, when once destroyed, none but the Creator the great 
 Life-giver can restore. Were a dead man actually revivified before 
 our eyes, we could not doubt that the power of the Omnipotent had 
 gone forth to do it. In no case did Jesus Christ so conspicuously 
 and undoubtedly show himself to be clothed with that power as 
 when he raised the dead. The power, indeed, by which he wrought 
 such miracles might not have been naturally his own. It might 
 have been a delegated power, given him for the time, not perma- 
 nently belonging to him. He might have raised the dead as Elijah 
 raised the son of the widow at Zarephath, as Elisha did the son of 
 the Shunamite. Had it been so, we should have had some evidence 
 thereof some appeal on the part of the mere human agent to the 
 great Being whose power was for the moment lent and exercised. 
 It was with trouble and with pain, after much and earnest prayer, 
 that Elijah and Elisha, the only raisers of the dead in all the 
 preceding ages, had succeeded. No one who saw or heard them 
 could have imagined that they claimed any natural or inherent 
 power of their own over the dead to call them back to life. They 
 would themselves have counted it as the greatest insult to Jehovah 
 to do so. How is it in this respect with Jesus Christ ? Stand 
 beside him as he calls the dead to life. Look at the manner of his 
 acting, listen to the words that he employs. Is it as a servant, 
 the delegate of another, that he speaks and acts ? Is it with any 
 consciousness on his part, felt or exhibited, that he was rising above 
 the level at which he ordinarily stood, that he was then doing some- 
 thing which he had been specially commissioned and supernaturally 
 qualified to accomplish ? Surely there is nothing more remarkable 
 about these raisings from the dead by Jesus Christ than the simple, 
 easy, unostentatious way in which they were effected. "Young man, 
 I say unto thee, Arise " " Maid, arise " " Lazarus, come forth." 
 He speaks thus to the dead, and they hear and live. It is in the 
 style of him who said, Let there be light, and there was light It 
 is the Lord of the living and of the dead whose voice penetrates 
 the unseen world, and summons the departed spirit to resume its 
 mortal tenement. 
 
 But if, as to the power he wields, Jesus never presents himself to 
 our eye in a diviner, never does he show himself in a more human
 
 176 THE MINISTEY IN GALILEE. 
 
 aspect than in these raisings from the dead. Can we overlook the 
 fact that they were those of the only son of a widowed mother, the 
 only daughter, if not the only child, of two fond parents, the only 
 brother of two affectionate sisters of those whose loss in their 
 respective homesteads would be so deeply felt, of those whose 
 restoration quickened so acute a grief into such an ecstatic joy? 
 And in each case there was something quite singular in the tender- 
 ness of our Lord's conduct towards the mourners. He knew before- 
 hand how speedily the anxiety that he witnessed would be relieved, 
 all the sorrow chased away ; but the " weep not " to the mother 
 before he touched the bier, the "fear not, only believe," to the 
 agitated father, the tears that fell before the grave of Lazarus, what 
 a testimony do they bear to the exquisite susceptibility of the 
 Saviour's spirit to the quickness, the fulness, the liveliness of his 
 sympathy with human grief. It is even then, when he is most 
 divine, that he is most human when he lifts himself the highest 
 above our level that he links himself the closest to us as a true 
 brother of our humanity. Such power to help, such readiness and 
 capacity to sympathise, meet but in one Being. 
 
 VI. 
 
 THE EMBASSY OF THE BAPTIST THE GREAT INVITATION. 
 
 OUR Lord's public ministry in Galilee began at the time that 
 John had been cast into prison, and had now continued for more 
 than half-a-year. There was much in this ministry which those 
 disciples of the Baptist who kept aloof from Jesus could not com- 
 prehend. There was the entire absence of that ascetic rigour and 
 stern denunciation of all iniquity, by which their master's character 
 and teaching had been distinguished. There were no fastings, no 
 prescribed repeated prayers, there was the call of a publican to be 
 an apostle, there was the eating and drinking with publicans and 
 sinners. All this appeared to them not only different from, but 
 inconsistent with, the idea of that kingdom, of whose advent their 
 master had announced himself as the herald. Some of them carried 
 their doubts and difficulties to John himself in the prison. Hear- 
 ing from them of the works of Christ, the Baptist sent two of their 
 number to Jesus, and bade them put to him the question, "Art 
 thou he that should come, or do we look for another 1 " As coming 
 from John himself, and meant for his personal satisfaction, the ques- 
 tion certainly would imply that some temporary misgiving had crept 
 into the Baptist's mind. It is somewhat difficult to believe, after 
 the revelations made to him, after what he had seen and heard at
 
 THE EMBASSY OF THE BAPTIST. 177 
 
 the baptism, after his own repeated public proclamations of it that 
 his faith in the Messiahship of Jesus had been shaken. His long 
 and unexpected imprisonment, however, must have severely tried 
 his faith. To such a man, from infancy a child of the desert, who 
 had roamed with such free footstep through the wilderness of 
 Engedi, who, when the time came for his manifestation to Israel, 
 had but exchanged the freedom of his mountain solitudes for those 
 liberties of speech and action he took with his fellow-countrymen, 
 the months of his imprisonment must have moved slowly and 
 drearily along, turning even his strength into weakness. The chilly 
 damp of being hurried unexpectedly from Herod's presence and his 
 former open active life into the cheerless, idle solitude of the prison, 
 fell all the chillier upon his heart on his coming to know that Jesus 
 had been apprised of his imprisonment, and that yet no message of 
 sympathy had been sent, that no movement for his deliverance was 
 made. His notions of the coming kingdom may not have been 
 different from those entertained at the time by the apostles and 
 other followers of Christ. Perhaps he fancied that at the setting- 
 up of this kingdom all injustice, and oppression, and spiritual 
 wickedness in high places was to be done away, the axe to be laid 
 at their root, the fan to be so used as thoroughly to purge the 
 threshing-floor. Perhaps, in rebuking Herod as he did, he thought 
 that it was but a first blow dealt at that which the mightier than 
 he who was to come after him was wholly to destroy. And when, 
 instead of his expectations being fulfilled, he was left unvisited, 
 uncheered, unhelped; and he heard of the course which Jesus was pur- 
 suing, gathering crowds indeed around him, but carefully abstaining 
 from announcing himself as the Messiah, or doing anything towards 
 the erection of a new kingdom, in some season of disquietude and 
 despondency, perplexed and a little impatient, sharing their feelings, 
 and in the hope of at once relieving their doubts and removing his 
 own misgivings, he sent two of his disciples to put to him a question 
 which might be the means of drawing from Jesus a public declara- 
 tion of his Messiahship, and of inducing him openly to inaugurate 
 the new kingdom. 1 
 
 The messengers arrived and delivered their message at a very 
 opportune conjuncture. " In the same hour he cured many of their 
 infirmities and plagues, and of evil spirits; and unto many that 
 were blind he gave sight." 2 Jesus kept John's messengers for a 
 season near him instead of answering them, going on with his 
 
 1 Many think that it was for the sake of his disciples, and for their sakes alone, 
 that the Baptist sent themxm this errand, not that he had any doubts himself, but 
 that he knew they had. It is altogether likely that he had some regard to their 
 establishment in a true faith in Christ. The question, however, put into their lips 
 comes too directly from himself, and the answer is directed too plainly and pointedly 
 to him, to allow us to shut out the idea of personal relief and satisfaction being 
 contemplated. 2 Luke vii. 21. 
 
 M
 
 178 THE MINISTEY IN GALILEE. 
 
 healing work He then turned to them and said, " Go your way, 
 and tell John what things ye have seen and heard ; how that the 
 blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the 
 dead are raised, to the poor the gospel is preached." It is not 
 simply to the miracles as displays of superhuman power that Jesus 
 appeals ; it is to their kind and character, as peculiarly and pro- 
 phetically Messianic. Jesus had, hitherto, refrained from assuming 
 the title of the Messiah, or announcing himself as such. John by 
 his messengers urges him to do so. Christ contents himself with 
 simply pointing to such works done by him as the Baptist could not 
 fail to recognise as a fulfilment of those prophecies of Isaiah, in 
 which the days and doings of the Messiah were described. Nor can 
 we fail to notice that, side by side with the greatest of the miracles, 
 reserved as the closing crowning testimony to the Messiahship, is 
 the fact that to the poor the gospel was preached ; to the poor as 
 well as to rich, to no favoured people, class, or section of mankind, 
 to all in that universal character which all sustain as sinful, respon- 
 sible, immortal. The words that Jesus added, " And blessed is he, 
 whosoever shall not be offended in me," may have carried with them 
 a special allusion to the Baptist, while proclaiming the blessedness 
 of the man who was not offended at the patience and gentleness of 
 Jesus, his readiness to wait and to suffer, to invite and encourage, 
 rather than to denounce and to punish. 
 
 Having given them what seemed a sufficient answer, Jesus sent 
 John's messengers away. He had something more, however, to say 
 to the people that was not for the Baptist's ear ; which must not be 
 said till the messengers were gone. What they had just seen and 
 heard was fitted to create an unfavourable impression, as if the faith, 
 or fortitude, or patience of John had utterly given way. Eager to 
 shield the character of his forerunner, Jesus turned to the multitude 
 and said to them conceming John, "What went ye out into the wilder- 
 ness to see 1 A reed shaken by the wind? " a man bowing, and bend- 
 ing as the reed does before every passing breeze, a man fickle of pur- 
 pose, changeable in faith, believing at Bethabara, disbelieving now 
 at Machserus 1 Not such a man is John ; rock-like, not reed-like 
 such as he was in the wilderness, such is he in Herod's keep. 
 " What went ye out to see ? A man clothed in soft raiment ? " 
 caring for the comforts and luxuries of life, or a man who, all 
 negligent as he had been of these before, feels now the hair-cloth to be 
 too hard a garment, and would fain exchange it for a softer one 1 
 Not such a man is John. The wearers and lovers of soft raiment 
 you will find in palaces, not in prisons. John cares as little for 
 such raiment now as when of his own free will he chose the hair- 
 cloth as his garment. " But what went ye out to see ? A prophet 1 
 Yea, I say unto you, and more than a prophet." The only one 
 among all the prophets whose course and office were themselves the
 
 THE EMBASSY OF THE BAPTIST. 179 
 
 subjects of prophecy ; whose birth, like that of his Great Master, 
 an angel was commissioned to announce; his predecessors seeing 
 but from afar across the breadth of intervening centuries, he, .the 
 friend of the bridegroom, standing by the bridegroom's side, his 
 office such towards Christ as to elevate him to a height above any 
 ever reached before, yet this kind of greatness, one springing from 
 position and office, as local, external, temporary, not once to be 
 mentioned alongside of that other kind of greatness which is moral, 
 spiritual, intrinsic, eternal. " For this is he of whom it is written, 
 Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy 
 way before thee. Verily I say unto you, Among them that are born of 
 women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist ; notwith- 
 standing he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he." 
 
 More than one public testimony had been borne by John to 
 Jesus. Jesus answers these by the witness he thus bears to John. 
 But as he thinks of himself in conjunction with the Baptist, the 
 strange and inconsistent treatment that they respectively had met 
 with from the men of that generation presents itself to his thoughts. 1 
 It is but seldom that anything like criticism or complaint touching 
 those around him comes from the lips of Jesus. All the more 
 interesting is the glance that he here casts, the judgment that he 
 here pronounces, upon the men of his own age and nation. 
 Addressed by two different voices, speaking in two different tones, 
 they had turned a deaf ear to both. The rigour of the law came 
 to them in the message of the Baptist ; they took offence at it. The 
 gentleness and love of the Gospel came to them in the message of 
 Jesus ; they took equal offence at it ; justifying in either case their 
 conduct by fixing on something in the character or lives of each of 
 the two messengers which they turned into matter of complaint 
 and accusation ; guilty of great unfairness in doing so, exhibiting 
 the grossest inconsistency, charging opposite excesses upon John 
 and upon Jesus, saying of the one that he was too austere and ascetic, 
 that he had a devil saying of the other that he was too free and 
 social, that he was a gluttonous man and a wine-bibber, the friend 
 of publicans and sinners. Had it been any other two of Heaven's 
 chosen messengers that they had to deal with, they might have had 
 less difficulty in fixing on some irregularity or eccentricity of 
 conduct out of which to fashion the shelter they sought to construct. 
 But that even with them they tried this expedient, and imagined 
 that they had succeeded, only shows to what lengths that principle 
 or tendency of our nature will go which seeks to mix up the claims 
 of religion with the character of its advocates. 
 
 But now the Saviour's thoughts pass onward from the contem- 
 plation of that folly and inconsistency which a familiar similitude 
 borrowed from the market-place may expose, to dwell more pro- 
 i Matt. xi. 16-19.
 
 180 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 foundly upon the conduct of those cities wherein most of his mighty 
 works were done. In endeavouring to follow and fathom from this 
 point onwards the train of our Lord's reflections, as recorded by 
 the Evangelist, we enter a region remote and very elevated. " Woe 
 unto thee, Chorazin ! woe unto thee, Bethsaida ! for if the mighty 
 works which were done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, 
 they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes." " And 
 thou, Capernaum, which art exalted unto heaven, shalt be brought 
 down to hell ; for if the mighty works which have been done in 
 thee had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this 
 day." Who is he who announces so confidently what certain 
 communities would have done had they been placed in other 
 circumstances than those in which they actually stood, and what 
 altered outward destiny would have followed the different course 
 pursued ? " It shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon and for 
 the land of Sodom at the day of judgment than for you." Who is 
 he who anticipates the verdicts of eternity, pronouncing so confi- 
 dently upon the greater and the lesser guilt, fore-announcing the 
 lighter and the heavier doom ? 
 
 But now, before the eye of the man Christ Jesus, there spreads 
 out a section of the great mystery that hangs over this world's 
 spiritual history. Here are men these inhabitants of Chorazin, 
 Bethsaida, and Capernaum involved in ah 1 the greater guilt, 
 incurring all the heavier doom, in consequence of the presence of 
 Jesus in the midst of them. There were men those inhabitants 
 of Sodom, and Tyre, and Sidon, who, had they lived in an after- 
 age and enjoyed the privileges bestowed upon the others, would 
 have repented and shared in all the blessings of the heavenly 
 kingdom. How many questions, as we stand in front of facts like 
 these, press upon our thoughts and rise to our trembling lips 
 questions touching the principles and procedure of the Divine 
 government as affecting the future and eternal destinies of our race 
 questions we cannot answer, that it pains and perplexes us to the 
 uttermost even to entertain 1 It is in this very region that there 
 comes one of the greatest trials of our faith. Was there no trial of 
 the like kind for the man Christ Jesus, as he, too, stood gazing 
 down into these depths 1 In what way or to what extent the 
 human spirit of our Lord lay open to that burden and pressure 
 which a contemplation of the sins and sufferings here and hereafter 
 of so many of our fellow-creatures brings down upon every thoughtful 
 spirit that has any of the tenderness of humanity in it, it is not for 
 us to determine. But that he who was tempted in all things like 
 as we are did at this time feel something of this burden and 
 pressure, seems clear from the attitude into which he immediately 
 throws himself. "At that time" when thought was hovering 
 over this dark and awful region Jesus lifted up his eyes to heaven.
 
 THE GREAT INVITATION. 181 
 
 Some light has broken in upon that darkness from above, drawing 
 his eyes upwards to its source. Some voice from above has spoken, 
 that comes, as his own came upon the troubled waters of the lake, 
 to still the inward agitation of his thoughts. " Jesus answered and 
 said, Father, Lord of heaven and earth !" Infinitely wise, 
 infinitely merciful, infinitely loving Father, thou art Lord of heaven 
 and earth. The past has all been ordered the future will be all 
 arranged, by thee, and in thy character and purposes and providence 
 over all as at once the Father and the Judge, the solution lies of all 
 that to created eyes may seem obscure. " I thank thee . . . that 
 thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast 
 revealed them unto babes." Why are the things that belong to 
 their eternal peace hidden from some and revealed to others, hidden 
 from so many, revealed to comparatively so few? One beam of 
 light falls upon the darkness here, and for it the thanks are given. 
 
 It is not an arbitrary distinction, drawn by a capricious hand 
 that loves to show its power. The fate of Sodom, Tyre, and Sidon 
 was not one that it was impossible for them to have evaded, that 
 nothing could have turned aside. They might have repented, and 
 had they repented, the ruin had not come. A thick cloud, charged 
 with bolts of vengeance, hung over Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Caper- 
 naum because of their unbelief. All over the land it was but one 
 of a family or two of a city, who had welcomed the Saviour and his 
 message. The right interpretation of all this was not given by 
 saying that it was by a divine decree that had no regard to the 
 character and conduct of each, that the eyes of some were blinded 
 and the eyes of others opened to the heavenly light. It was from 
 the wise and prudent, who thought themselves so much wiser or 
 better than others, whose pride it was that blinded them, that the 
 gospel was hidden. It was to the babes, to the humble, the meek, 
 the teachable, that it had been revealed. And it is not so much 
 for the hiding it from the one as for the revealing it to the other 
 that Jesus here gave thanks. On two after-occasions of his life he 
 had each of the two alternatives the hiding and the revealing, 
 separately and exclusively before him, and the difference of the 
 emotions felt and expressed by him marked the difference of their 
 effects upon his mind and heart. Would we know what impression 
 the revealing made, let us plant ourselves by his side as the seventy 
 return from their brief but successful mission, and tell him of the 
 results ; when without a shadow on his joy, he rejoices in spirit, 
 and repeats in words the very thanksgiving that he now offered. 
 Would we know what impression the hiding made, let us plant 
 ourselves beside him as he beheld the city and wept over it, 
 exclaiming, " Jerusalem, Jerusalem ! if thou hadst known, even 
 thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy 
 peace ! but now they are hid from thine eyes."
 
 182 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 But is it a full solution of the mystery that those left in dark- 
 ness have themselves, by their wilfulness, and pride, and carnality, 
 created a medium through which the heavenly light cannot pass ? 
 Why is it, if the spirits of all men are equally and absolutely 
 beneath the control of the Creator, that any are suffered to remain 
 in such condition? There is no answer to such a question, for, 
 take up the great enigma of the doings of God and the destinies of 
 man at what end you may, approach it from what quarter you please, 
 adopt whatever method of solution you may prefer, make your way 
 through the difficulties that beset you as far as you can, sooner or 
 later you reach the point where explanation fails, and where there 
 is nothing left for us but to join with him who said, " Even so, 
 Father, for so it seemed good in thy sight." 
 
 The occasion now before us may have been the first in which 
 Jesus was seen and heard in the act of prayer. The stopping of the 
 current of his address to them by the offering up of a short and 
 solemn thanksgiving to his Father in heaven must have made a 
 deep impression on the multitude. It was singularly fitted to excite 
 wonder and awe, and to lead them to inquire what the peculiar 
 relationship was in which Jesus stood to the Great Being whom he 
 so addressed. Was it not as one reading their thoughts and 
 graciously condescending to unfold so much of the mystery of his 
 Sonship to the Father, that Jesus went on to say, " All things are 
 delivered unto me of my Father : and no man knoweth the Son, 
 but the Father, . . . and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal 
 him " ? The Baptist, in his closing testimony to Jesus, had declared, 
 "The Father loveth the Son, and hath given all things into his 
 hand." Jesus now takes up and appropriates this testimony. With 
 special reference, we may believe, to the things hidden and revealed 
 of which he had been speaking, he says : All things all those 
 things concerning man's relationship to God, and his condition here 
 and hereafter, have not simply been revealed, but been delivered to 
 me, handed over for adjustment, for discovery to and bestowal 
 upon men ; and chiefly that of the true knowledge of God. Inti- 
 mate and complete is the mutual knowledge which the Father and 
 the Son have of one another, a knowledge in kind and in degree 
 incommunicable. It is the Father alone who knoweth who the Son 
 is ; the Son alone who knoweth who the Father is. " As the Father 
 knoweth me," said Jesus, " even so know I the Father." l Finite 
 may measure finite, like comprehend its like, man know what is in 
 man, but here it is Infinite embracing Infinite f the Divine Son and 
 the Divine Father compassing and fathoming the Divine Nature, 
 and the Divine attributes belonging equally to both. 
 
 And yet there is a knowledge of the Father to which man may 
 reach, yet reach only by receiving it through the Son. Had we 
 i John z. IB.
 
 THE GREAT INVITATION. 183 
 
 been told simply that no man knoweth the Father but the Son, nor 
 the Son but the Father, \ve should not have known to which of the 
 two we were to look for any such acquaintance with either or both 
 as our finite minds are capable of attaining ; but when Jesus says 
 "no man knoweth the Father but the Son, and he to whomsoever 
 the Son will reveal him," he announces himself to us as the sole 
 revealer of the Father; this no small or secondary part of his 
 gracious office, to make God clearly known to us as our Father 
 which is in heaven. To some obscure and partial knowledge of the 
 Supreme Being as Creator, Upholder, Sovereign, Governor, we may 
 attain without help of this revelation of him by Christ ; but if we 
 would know him in his living personality, know him as a God not 
 afar oif but near at hand, know him in all the richness and fulness 
 of his mercy and love, know him as a pitying, forgiving, protecting, 
 providing, comforting, reconciled Father, we must get at that 
 knowledge through Christ, we must see him as the Son reveals him. 
 No man knoweth thus the Father, but he to whomsoever the Son 
 will reveal him. 
 
 But who is he to whom this revelation of the Father is offered ? 
 Let the broad unrestricted invitation with which the statement of 
 the Saviour is immediately succeeded supply the answer : " Come 
 unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you 
 rest." This invitation loses half its meaning, taken out of the 
 connection in which it was spoken. We understand and appreciate 
 the fulness and richness of its significance only by looking upon it 
 as grounded on and flowing out of what Christ had the moment 
 before been saying. At first sight it might seem as if there was 
 something like confinement and contraction in the preceding utter- 
 ances of Jesus. He claims all things as committed to him. Other- 
 wise than through him nothing can come to us. He tells us that 
 for all true knowledge of the Father we must be indebted exclus- 
 ively to him. As to our knowing and receiving, does this not seem 
 to narrow the channel of their conveyance ? Yes, as this channel 
 lies outside our earth, spanning the mysterious distance between it 
 and heaven; but watch as this channel touches the earth and 
 spreads out its waters on every side, then see how all narrowness 
 and contraction disappear. " All things are delivered unto me of 
 my Father." But why so delivered, why put so exclusively into 
 his hand ? Simply and solely that they might so easily, so freely, 
 so fully come into ours. For us to go elsewhere than to him, to 
 expect that otherwise than through him we are to receive anything, 
 is to resist and repudiate this ordinance of the Father. But he has 
 all, he holds all as the Treasurer of the kingdom, the Steward of the 
 Divine mercies, the sinner's divinely constituted Trustee, and he 
 has all and holds all under the condition that there shall be the 
 freest, most unrestricted, most gracious dispensing of all the treasures
 
 184 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 committed to his custody, that whoever asks shall get, that no 
 needy one shall ever come to him and be sent unrelieved away. 
 " No man knoweth the Father but he to whomsoever the Son will 
 reveal him." But does he niggardly withhold that revelation, or 
 restrict it to a few ? No ; wide as the world is, of all who seek to 
 know the Father that knowing him they may have peace, so wide 
 is the unlimited invitation spread. In many a sublime attractive 
 position do we see Jesus standing while executing his gracious office 
 here on earth in none loftier or more divine than when placing 
 himself in the centre of the wide circle of humanity, and, looking 
 round upon the millions of our race, labourers to weariness, with 
 this or that other burden pressing them to the earth, with the full 
 consciousness of one who has the power to relieve all who come, 
 he says : " Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, 
 and I will give you rest." 
 
 VII. 
 
 THE WOMAN WHO WAS A SINNER. 
 LUKE viz. 36-50. 
 
 COMING as it does in the narrative of St. Luke (the only evan- 
 gelist who records it) immediately after that discourse which closed 
 with the invitation, "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are 
 heavy laden, and I will give you rest," how natural the thought 
 that, in what is told us about the woman who was a sinner, we 
 have one instance perhaps the first that followed its delivery of 
 that invitation 'being accepted, of one wearied and heavy laden 
 coming to Jesus, and entering into the promised rest. Multitudes 
 had already come to him to get their bodily ailments cured : she 
 may have been the first who came under the pressure of a purely 
 spiritual impulse grieving, desiring, hoping, loving, to get all and 
 more than all she sought. 
 
 Jesus has accepted the invitation of a Pharisee, and reclines, 
 leaning upon his left arm, his head towards the table, his unsand- 
 alled feet stretched outwards. Through the crowd of guests, and 
 servants, and spectators, a woman well known in the city for the 
 profligate life she had been leading, glides nearer and nearer, till 
 she stands behind him. As she stands she weeps. The tears fall 
 thickly upon his feet. She has nothing else with which to do it, 
 so she stoops and wipes the tears away with her loose dishevelled 
 hair. She gently grasps the feet of Jesus to kiss them, and now 
 she remembers the box she had brought, in hope, perhaps, to find 
 some fitting opportunity of pouring its contents upon his head \ but 
 she can make no nearer approach, and so she sheds the precious 
 perfumed ointment on those feet which she had washed with her
 
 THE WOMAN WHO WAS A SINNER. 185 
 
 tears, wiped with the hairs of her head, and covered with the kisses 
 of her lips. 
 
 What has brought this woman here 1 what moves her to act in 
 this way to Jesus? Somewhere, somehow Jesus had recently 
 crossed her path. She had heard his calls to repentance, his offers 
 of forgiveness, his promises of peace and rest. The arrow had 
 entered into her soul She stood ashamed and confounded. Her 
 iniquities took hold of her so that she was not able to look up, yet 
 deep within her heart new hopes were rising, dimly before her eye 
 new prospects dawned. All the penitence she experienced, all 
 the new desires, expectations, resolutions, that were filling her 
 breast she owed to him to the gentle and loving yet resolute and 
 truthful spirit in which Jesus had spoken. She had looked at him, 
 had listened to him, had followed him as he opened those arms of 
 his mercy so widely, and invited all to come to him. And what he 
 so fully offered the peace of forgiveness, the blessedness of meek- 
 ness and lowliness, of poverty of spirit, purity of heart these are 
 what she now, above all things, desired to have. Believing that 
 she can get them alone from him, an irresistible attraction draws 
 her to him. Jewish women were wont to honour, by one or other 
 mark of favour shown, the Rabbi or teacher to whom they felt most 
 attached or indebted. But what shall she render unto One who has 
 already quickened her to a new life of hope and love ? She hears 
 of his going to dine with the Pharisee. Too well she knows how 
 this man and his guests will look upon her, what an act of effron- 
 tery on her part it will appear that she should obtrude her presence 
 into such a dwelling at such a time. But faith makes her bold, 
 love triumphs over fear. She presses in and on, till at last she 
 finds herself bending over the feet of Jesus, with the costliest thing 
 she has, the alabaster box of ointment, in her hand. As she stands 
 behind that form, as she stoops to embrace those feet, all the thought- 
 lessness, the recklessness, the unrestrained self-indulgence of bypast 
 years, the ties she had broken, the injuries she had done, the 
 reproaches she had incurred, the sins that she had committed, flash 
 upon her memory. Who is she, that she should come so near and 
 touch so familiarly the pure and holy Jesus 1 She cannot meet his 
 eye, she does not press herself upon his notice. But is he not the 
 meek and compassionate, as well as the pure and the holy One? 
 While others had frowned upon her, avoided her, discarded her, 
 treated her as an outcast, had he not shown a deep and tender 
 interest in her, a yearning over her to take her in his hand and 
 lead her back to the paths of purity and peace ? It was this kindly 
 treatment that had broken down all power to resist upon her part, 
 which had given him such a hold of her, which had brought her to 
 the house of the Pharisee to see him, which had drawn her so close 
 to him. But the very thought of all the love and pity that he had
 
 186 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 shown to her and to all sinners open afresh the fountains of shame 
 and self-reproach, and the tears of a true and deep repentance flow 
 forth ; not the tears of bare self-condemnation a stinging remorse 
 goading the spirit to despair. Along with a true sense of her sin 
 there is an apprehension of the Divine mercy that mercy revealed 
 to her in Jesus. She sorrows not over her sins as one who has no 
 hope : a trust in Christ's readiness and power to pardon and to save 
 her has already entered into her heart. The very sense, however, 
 of his exceeding graciousness quickens the sense of her exceeding 
 sinfulness. The faith and hope to which she has been begotten 
 intensify her penitence, and that penitence intensifies her love ; so 
 that as we look upon her first standing silently weeping, then 
 bending down and bathing those feet with her tears, then clasping 
 and kissing them and pouring the rich ointment over them she 
 presents herself to our eye as the most striking picture of a loving, 
 humble penitent at the feet of Jesus which the Gospels present. 
 
 It was with a very different sentiment from that with which we 
 are disposed to look at her that she was looked at by the Pharisee 
 who presided at the feast. He had noticed her entrance, watched 
 her movements, seen that, though not turning round to speak to 
 her, Jesus was not unconscious of her presence, was permitting her 
 to wash and wipe and anoint his feet For the woman he has 
 nothing but indignation and contempt. He thinks only of what 
 she had been, not of what she is ; and his only wonder as to her is, 
 how she could have presumed to enter here and act as she has been 
 doing. But he wonders, also, at Jesus. He cannot be the prophet 
 that so many take him to be, or he would have known what kind of 
 woman this was ; for he could not have known that and yet allowed 
 himself to be defiled with her touch. Whatever respect he had 
 been prepared to show to Jesus begins to suffer loss, as he sees him 
 allowing such familiarities to be practised by such hands. Not that 
 this respect had ever been very spiritual or very profound. The 
 omissions that our Lord notices notices not so much in the way 
 of complaint as for the purpose of bringing out the contrast between 
 the treatment given by the two Simon and the woman would 
 seem rather to imply that he had not been careful to show any par- 
 ticular regard to his guest. Perhaps he thought that he was paying 
 such a compliment to Jesus in inviting him to his house that he 
 need be the less attentive to the courtesies of his reception. It was 
 a rare thing for a man like him a Pharisee to do such a thing. 
 Simon, however, was not one of the strict and rigid, the religious 
 devotees of his order ; he was more a moralist than a pietist ; and 
 seeing much in Jesus to approve, and even admire, he was quite 
 ready to ask him to his house, in the hope, perhaps, that in the easy 
 freedom of social intercourse he might test the pretensions of this 
 new teacher and see further than others into his true character and
 
 THE WOMAN WHO WAS A SINNER. 187 
 
 claims. One mark or token of his order is deeply stamped upon 
 this Simon pride, a pride, it may have been, a little different 
 from that of the Pharisee whom Jesus represents in the parable as 
 praising himself before God for his fasting twice in the week and 
 giving tithes of all that he possessed, yet quite akin to his in com- 
 paring himself with and despising others. He, too, might have 
 stood and prayed thus with himself : God, I thank thee that I am 
 not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or as this 
 woman here. Anything like contact, concert, familiar intercourse 
 with such a low, abandoned woman, no man who had any proper 
 self-respect, he thinks, could practise or endure. And now that he 
 sees Jesus consenting to be touched and handled by her, his only 
 explanation of it is that he cannot know what kind of woman she is. 
 "Now when the Pharisee which had bidden him saw it, he spake 
 within himself, saying, This man, if he were a prophet, would have 
 known who and what manner of woman this is that toucheth him." 1 
 
 In thinking and feeling so, he entirely overlooks the change 
 that had taken place the evidence of which appeared in the very 
 manner of the woman's present conduct, and above all the nature 
 and strength of the tie which that change created between her and 
 Jesus. It was to lift him out of this deep abyss of pride, and if 
 possible to show him how much closer, deeper, tenderer a relation- 
 ship it was in which this penitent stood to him, than that in which 
 he, Simon, stood, that Jesus stated the case of the two debtors. 
 " And Jesus answering said unto him, Simon, I have somewhat to 
 say unto thee. And he saith, Master, say on. There was a certain 
 creditor which had two debtors : the one owed five hundred pence, 
 and the other fifty. And when they had nothing to pay, he frankly 
 forgave them both. Tell me, therefore, which of them will love 
 him most ] Simon answered and said, I suppose that he to whom 
 he forgave most. And he said unto him, Thou hast rightly judged." 
 
 As little as David saw the drift of Nathan's parable of the little 
 ewe lamb, so little did Simon at first perceive the drift of the one 
 now addressed to himself, and so he promptly answers, I suppose 
 that it would be he to whom he forgave most. Out of his own 
 mouth he stands convicted. It would be straining the short parable 
 in this! instance spoken by our Lord if we took it as strictly and 
 literally representing the relative positions before God in which 
 Simon and the woman stood, or as intimating that both had been 
 actually forgiven, the one as much more than the other as five 
 hundred exceeds fifty pence. It is not so much the amount actually 
 owed as that known and felt by the debtors to be owing, and their 
 conscious inability to meet in any way the payment, that supplies 
 the groundwork of our Lord's application of the supposititious case. 
 " And he turned to the woman, and said unto Simon, Seest thou 
 1 Luke vii. 39.
 
 188 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 this woman ? I entered into thine house, thou gavest me no water 
 for my feet : but she hath washed my feet with tears, and wiped 
 them with the hairs of her head. Thou gavest me no kiss : but 
 this woman since the time I came in hath not ceased to kiss my 
 feet. My head with oil thou didst not anoint: but this woman 
 hath anointed my feet with ointment. Wherefore I say unto thee, 
 Her sins, which are many, are forgiven ; for she loved much : but 
 to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little." Thou hast been 
 watching, Simon, all that this woman has been doing, but what is 
 the true explanation of her conduct, the explanation that vindicates 
 at once her conduct to me and my conduct to her ? Why is it that 
 she has been showing me marks of respect, and strong personal 
 attachment contrasting so with those that you have shown, or rather 
 have omitted to show? She has done so, because she loves so 
 much ; and she loves so much, because she has been so much for- 
 given. It is but little compared with her that you feel you owe, 
 but little that you can be forgiven ; but little, therefore, that you 
 love. In speaking to him thus, how forbearingly, how leniently 
 did the Lord deal with Simon; how much more leniently and 
 forbearingly we may be apt to think than he had deserved, or than 
 his case warranted. But it was so in every case with our Divine 
 Master, ever seeking the good of those he dealt with striving by 
 the gentle insinuations of his grace to win his way into their 
 consciences and hearts, rather than by full display of all their guilt 
 or stern denunciation of it. If in this instance he was successful, if 
 Simon's eyes were opened to discern in the two debtors himself and 
 the woman, and in the creditor to whom all their debts were due 
 none other than He who was sitting at his table, what a wonderful 
 revolution in his estimate of Jesus must have taken place ! for 
 nothing in this whole narrative strikes so much as the simple, 
 natural, easy, unostentatious manner in which Jesus assumes to 
 himself the position of that Being to whom all spiritual debts are 
 owing, and by whom they are forgiven. 
 
 " Her sins," said Jesus of the woman to Simon, " which are 
 many, are forgiven, for she loved much." So to interpret this 
 saying of the Saviour as to make the loving the ground of the forgive- 
 ness would be to contradict both the letter and spirit of the preceding 
 parable, in which the love is represented as flowing out of the 
 forgiveness, and not the forgiveness as flowing out of the love. 
 Jesus points to the love not as the spring but as the evidence of the 
 forgiveness to the strength of the one as indicating the extent of 
 the other. 
 
 When Christ said so emphatically to the Pharisee, "Simon, 
 I have somewhat to say to thee," the attention of the woman must 
 have been for the moment diverted from her own case, directed to 
 the colloquy that followed, the more so as it seemed at first to have
 
 THE WOMAN WHO WAS A SINNER. 189 
 
 no reference to her. But when He turned, and looking on her for 
 the first time, said, "Seest thou this woman 1" into what a strange 
 tumult of emotion must she have been thrown, all eyes on her the 
 contrast between her attentions and love to Jesus and those of 
 Simon drawn out in particular after particular by our Lord himself, 
 all closed by her hearing him declare, " Wherefore I say unto thee, 
 Her sins, which are many, are forgiven." The desire, the hope of 
 pardon, had already dawned upon her heart. She had trusted in 
 the Divine mercy as revealed to her in Jesus, and already experi- 
 enced the relief and comfort this trust was fitted to impart. Her 
 faith, however, was yet imperfect, her sense, her assurance of 
 forgiveness not relieved from uncertainty and doubt ; but now from 
 the lips of the Lord Himself she hears the fact announced that her 
 sins had been forgiven, and as if that were not enough as if He 
 would do everything that word of his could do, to seal the assurance 
 on her heart Jesus turns to her and says, " Thy sins are forgiven." 
 Fear takes wings and flies away, doubt can find no more room 
 within, the sins without number of all her bygone life, rush out of 
 sight into the depths of that sea into which Jesus casts them. Not 
 ceasing to be penitent, more penitent than ever, the bowed-down 
 spirit is lifted up as the full blessedness enters and possesses it, of 
 one whose transgression is all forgiven, whose sin is altogether 
 covered. 
 
 " Thy sins are forgiven thee." Was it in wonder and with an awe 
 like that of men who feel themselves in the presence of One in 
 whom the most peculiar prerogative of the Divinity resided, or was 
 it in hatred and with contempt of him as an arrogant, presumptuous 
 blasphemer, that those around the table began to say to themselves, 
 "Who is this that forgiveth sins also?" Whatever their state of 
 mind was as to himself, Jesus does not lay it bare, nor stop to expose 
 or correct it. But there was one mistake that they might make as 
 to the forgiveness he had pronounced. They might imagine it to 
 have been capriciously or arbitrarily dispensed ; they might fail to 
 trace its connection with the spiritual condition of her upon whom 
 it was bestowed ; if not dissevering it from its source in him, they 
 might dissociate it from its channel, the faith in him which she had 
 cherished. Even she herself, after what had been said, might be 
 disposed to attach the forgiveness to the love, rather than the love 
 to the forgiveness, overlooking the common root of both in that 
 faith which brought her to Jesus, and taught her to cast her confi- 
 dence alone and undividedly on him. Therefore his last word, as 
 he dismisses her is, " Thy faith hath saved thee ; go in peace." In 
 peace she goes, silently as she had entered; not a single word 
 throughout escaping from her lips, her heart at first too full of 
 humiliation, grief, and shame, now too full of joy and gratitude. 
 In peace she goes, light for ever after on her heart the reproach that
 
 190 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 man might cast upon her the Christ-given peace the keeper of her 
 mind and heart. She goes to hide herself from our view, her name 
 and all her after-history unknown. The faith and traditions of 
 Western Christendom have indeed identified her with Mary of 
 Magdala, and assigned to her a place among those women who 
 ministered to the Lord of their substance, who were admitted to 
 close and familiar intercourse with him in Galilee, and who were 
 privileged to be the last attendants on the cross and first visitors of 
 the sepulchre. We will not presume to say how far the former life 
 of the penitent woman would have interfered with her occupying 
 such a position ; we will not allude to the difficulty that will occur 
 as you try to imagine what substance she could have had, or whence 
 derived, out of which she could minister to Jesus. Neither shall 
 we dwell upon the fact that out of Mary of Magdala seven devils 
 had been cast, a possession not necessarily implying any former 
 criminality of life, yet apparently quite inconsistent with the kind 
 of life that this woman had been leading. 'Enough, that when 
 Mary, called Magdalene, is first mentioned, as she is in the opening 
 verses of the next chapter in St. Luke's Gospel, she is introduced 
 as a new person, not amid scenes then, nor at any time thereafter, 
 that in any way connect her with the woman that had been a sinner. 
 It is true that, whilst there is the absence of all evidence in favour 
 of their identification, there is the absence also of evidence sufficient 
 positively to disprove it. In these circumstances it may be grateful 
 to many to trace in the narrative now before us, the earlier history 
 of one so loved, and honoured afterwards by Jesus, as was Mary of 
 Magdala. Much more grateful we own to us is the belief that this 
 penitent, whose broken heart was so tenderly upbound having got 
 the healing from his gentle loving hands from that notoriety into 
 which her sin had raised her, retired voluntarily into an obscurity 
 so deep that her name and her dwelling-place, and all her after- 
 story, lie hidden from our sight. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 THE COLLISION WITH THE PHARISEES THE FIRST PARABLES 
 THE STILLING OF THE TEMPEST THE DEMONIAC OF GADARA. 
 
 MATT. xn. 22-50 ; xm. ; vni. 23-34 ; MARK m. 22-30 ; iv. ; v. 1-20 ; 
 LUKE .xi. 14-54 ; vni. 22-39. 
 
 OUR Lord's second circuit through Galilee, if not more extensive, 
 was more public and formal than the first. He was now con- 
 stantly attended by the twelve men whom he had chosen out of 
 the general company of his followers, while certain women, Mary,
 
 THE COLLISION WITH THE PHAEISEES. 191 
 
 Joanna, Susanna, and many others, some of them of good position, 
 waited on him, ministering to him of their substance. The crowds 
 that gathered round him wherever he went ; the wonder, joy, and 
 gratitude with which his miracles, particularly those recent ones of 
 raising the dead, were hailed ; the impression Ms discourses had 
 created, and the steps that he had now obviously taken towards 
 organising a distinct body of disciples, fanned into an open flame 
 the long-smouldering fire of Pharisaic opposition. The Pharisees 
 of Galilee may not at first have been as quick and deep in their 
 resentment as were their brethren of Jerusalem, neither had they 
 the same kind of instruments in their hands to employ against him. 
 But their resentment grew as the profound discord between the 
 whole teaching and life of Jesus and their own more fully developed 
 itself, and it was zealously fostered by a deputation that came down 
 from the capital. It had already once and again broken out, as 
 when they had charged him with being a Sabbath-breaker and a 
 blasphemer. On these occasions Jesus had satisfied himself with 
 rebuking on the spot the men by whom the charges had been pre- 
 ferred. But he had not yet broken with the Pharisees as a party, 
 nor denounced them either privately to his disciples or publicly to 
 the multitude. But now, at the close of his second circuit through 
 Galilee, after nearly a year's labour bestowed upon that province, 
 the collision came, and the whole manner of his speech and action 
 towards them was changed. 
 
 Early in the forenoon of one of his longest and most laborious 
 days in Capernaum, there was brought to him one possessed with a 
 devil, blind and dumb. Blindness and dumbness, whether spring- 
 ing from original organic defect or induced by disease, he had often 
 before cured. But here, underlying both, was the deeper spiritual 
 malady of possession. Jesus cast the devil out, and the immediate 
 effect of the dispossession was the recovery of the powers of speech 
 and vision. There must have been something peculiar in the case. 
 Perhaps it lay in this, that whereas dumbness in all ordinary cases 
 springs either from congenital deafness or from some defect in the 
 organs of speech, it was due here to neither of these causes. The 
 man could hear as well as others, and once he had spoken as well 
 as they. But from the time the devil entered he had been tongue- 
 tied, had tried to speak but could not. A new and horrible kind 
 of dumbness had come upon him, the closing of his lips by an in- 
 ward constraint that, struggle as he might, he could not overcome. 
 St. Luke speaks only of the dumbness, as if in it more than in the 
 blindness lay the peculiarity of the case. 1 St. Matthew records 
 another instance of the ejection of a devil from one who was dumb, 
 in which the same effect followed ; the dumb speaking as soon as 
 the devil was cast out. 2 It is at least very remarkable that it was 
 i Luke xi. 14. * Matt. ix. 33.
 
 192 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 in connection with this class of cases only that the double result 
 appeared, of an extraordinary commotion among the people and an 
 extraordinary allegation put forward by the Pharisees. 
 
 The casting out of devils had been one of the earliest and most 
 common of our Lord's miracles ; always carefully distinguished by 
 the Evangelists from the healing of ordinary diseases ; awakening 
 generally not more wonder, perhaps not so much, as some of the 
 bodily cures. If the testimony of Josephus is to be credited, de- 
 moniac possession was common at this period, and exorcism by the 
 Jews themselves not unfrequent. But when a dumb devil was cast 
 out, and instantly the man began to speak, we are told that in 
 one instance " the multitudes marvelled, saying, It was never so 
 seen in Israel j" 1 and in another, " All the people were amazed, and 
 said, Is not this the Son of David I" 2 Here for the first time was an 
 open expression of an incipient faith in Jesus as the Messiah, who 
 was known and spoken of all over Judea as the Son of David. 
 Whatever his words and actions might have implied, Jesus had 
 never taken this title to himself never claimed to be the Messiah ; 
 but now the people of themselves begin to think that it must be so 
 that by none other than he could works like these be done. The 
 man whose character the Pharisees had been attempting to malign, 
 whose influence with the people they had been doing their utmost 
 to undermine, is not only hailed as a teacher sent from God, but as 
 a prophet, nay, more than a prophet, the very Son of David. What 
 is to be said and done 1 The facts of the case they do not, they 
 cannot, deny. That the man's dumbness had been nothing but a 
 common dumbness, that there had been no evil spirit in him to be 
 cast out of him, they do not venture to suggest. Those ingenious 
 Scribes that have come down from Jerusalem can see but one way- 
 out of the difficulty. They do not hesitate to suggest it, nor their 
 friends beside them to adopt it; and so they go about the crowd 
 that is standing lost in wonder, saying contemptuously, " This fellow 
 doth not cast out devils but by Beelzebub, the prince of the devils." 
 A wine-bibber, a gluttonous man, a friend of publicans and sinners, 
 a Sabbath-breaker, a blasphemer, they had called him, but here is 
 the last and vilest thing that calumny can say of him that he is 
 in league with Satan, and that it is to his connection with the devil, 
 and to that alone, that he owes all his wisdom and his power. How 
 does Jesus meet this calumny ? How does he speak of and to the 
 men who were guilty of forging and circulating it? They were 
 busy among the crowd secretly propagating the slander, but they 
 must not think that he was unconscious or careless of what they 
 were saying of him. He calls them unto him, 3 and they come. His 
 accusers and he stand forth before the assembled multitude, fairly 
 confronted. First, in the simplest, plainest manner, obviously for 
 * Matt. ix. 33. 2 Matt. xii. 23. Mark iii. 23.
 
 THE COLLISION WITH THE PHARISEES. 193 
 
 the sake of convincing any of the simple-minded people who might 
 be ready to adopt this new solution of the secret of his power, he 
 exposes its foolishness and injustice. There was, he assumes, a 
 prince of the devils, who had a kingdom of his own, opposed to the 
 kingdom of God. That kingdom of darkness might admit of much 
 internal discord, but in one thing it was and must ever be united 
 in its antagonism to the kingdom of light. No more than any 
 other kingdom, or city, or house, could it stand, were it, in that 
 respect, divided against itself. Yet it was such kind of division 
 that these Pharisees were attributing to it. Their own sons under- 
 took to cast out devils : was it by Beelzebub that they did it 1 If 
 not, why cast the imputation of doing so upon him ? None but a 
 strong one could enter the house of the human spirit, as the devil 
 was seen to enter it in these cases of possession. It must be a 
 stronger than he who binds him, and casts him forth, and strips 
 him of all his spoils. This was what they had just seen Jesus do ; 
 and if he, by the mighty power of God, had done so, then no doubt 
 the kingdom was come unto them come in his person, his teaching, 
 his work. He Jesus stood now the visible head and representa- 
 tive of the kingdom, in the midst of them. To come to him was 
 to enter that kingdom to be with him was to be on the side of 
 that kingdom ; and such was its nature, such the claims he made, 
 that there could be no neutrality, no middle ground to be occupied. 
 He that was not with him was against him ; he that gathered not 
 with him was scattering abroad. Much there was in the spirit and 
 conduct of many then before him whom the application of this test 
 must bring in as guilty ; but let them know that all manner of sin 
 and blasphemy might be forgiven. In ignorance and unbelief they 
 might speak against the Son of man, and yet not put themselves 
 beyond the pale of mercy; but in presence of that Divine spirit 
 and power in which he spake and acted, not only to ignore it, but 
 to misrepresent and malign it, as these Pharisees had done, was to 
 enter upon a path of wilful, perverse resistance to the Spirit of God, 
 which, if pursued, would land the men who took and followed it in 
 a guilt for which there would be no forgiveness, either here or here- 
 after ; no forgiveness, not because any kind or degree of guilt could 
 exhaust the Divine mercy or exceed its power, but because the 
 pursuers of such a path, sooner or later, would reach such a state 
 of mind, and heart, and habit, that all chance or hope of their ever 
 being disposed to fulfil, or capable of fulfilling, those conditions 
 upon which alone mercy is or can be dispensed, would vanish away. 
 The blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, which never hath for- 
 giveness, lies not in any single word or deed. Jesus, though not 
 obscurely hinting that in the foul calumny that had been uttered 
 there lay the elements of the unpardonable offence, does not dis- 
 tinctly say that the men before him never would or could be forgiven
 
 194 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 for uttering it. His words are words of warning rather than of 
 judgment. A monstrous accusation had been made, one in which, 
 if the men who made it persevered, they would be displaying 
 thereby the very temper and spirit of such blasphemy against the 
 Holy Ghost as never would be forgiven. It was out of an evil 
 heart that the evil word had been spoken. It was by a corrupt 
 tree that this corrupt fruit had been borne, and the heart would 
 get worse, the tree more rotten, unless now made better. Such 
 bitter words of ungodly malice and despite as the Pharisees had 
 spoken, were but outward indices of the state of things within. 
 Yet such good signs were words in general, that "Verily," said 
 Jesus, " I say unto you, ... By thy words thou shalt be justified, 
 and by thy words thou shalt be condemned." 
 
 The men whom Jesus 'thus publicly rebuked characterising 
 them as a generation of vipers for the moment were silenced. 
 Some of their party, however, now interposed. Jesus had unequivo- 
 cally asserted that his works had been wrought by none other than 
 the mighty power of God. Let him prove this as Moses, Joshua, 
 Samuel, Elijah had done. The works themselves were not enough 
 to do this. The popular belief was that demons and false gods 
 could work signs on earth. It was the true God only who could 
 give signs from heaven. Such a sign they had asked Christ to show. 1 
 " The people gathered thick together," we are told, to hear Christ's 
 answer ; but, as at other times when the same demand was made, 
 our Lord would point to no other sign than that of the most 
 remarkable foreshadowing in Old Testament times of his own 
 resurrection from the dead. This allusion to the extraordinary 
 incident in the history of Jonas was doubly unsatisfactory to- his 
 hearers. It was no sign from above, but rather one from below. 
 It was a sign of that of which they had as yet no conception in 
 which they had no faith it carried with it to them no additional 
 or confirmatory evidence. No other sign, however, was to be given 
 to a generation which was acting worse than the heathen inhabitants 
 of Nineveh, the Gentile queen of the south ; a greater than Jonas, 
 a greater than Solomon, was among them, yet they despised his 
 wisdom and would not repent at his call A brighter light than 
 had ever dawned upon them was now shining nay, was set up 
 conspicuously for them to behold it; but there must be an eye 
 within to see, as well as a light without to look at, before any true 
 illumination can take place. And if that eye be evil be in any 
 way incapacitated for true discernment, whatever the external 
 effulgence be, the body remains full of darkness. Even such a 
 darkness was now settling over a people who were going to present 
 but too sad a type of what was sometimes seen in cases of demoniac 
 possession, when an unclean spirit, for a time cast out, returned 
 i Luke ix. 16.
 
 THE COLLISION WITH THE PHARISEES. 195 
 
 rith seven other spirits more wicked than itself. From amongst 
 lie Jewish people, from and' after the Babylonish captivity, the 
 Id demon of idolatry had been ejected. For a time the house had 
 swept and garnished, but now a sevenfold worse infatuation 
 was coming upon this generation, to drive it on to a deadlier 
 catastrophe. 
 
 The exciting intelligence that in the presence of a vast multi- 
 tude Jesus had been accused by the Pharisees of being nothing else 
 than an emissary and ally of the devil; that, not satisfied with 
 defending himself against the charge, he had in turn become their 
 accuser, and broken out into the most open and unrestrained 
 denunciation of their whole order \ that the feud which for months 
 past had been secretly gathering strength had ended at last in an 
 open rupture, was carried to the house in which Mary and the 
 Lord's brothers were dwelling. A fatal thing it seems to them for 
 him to have plunged into such a deadly strife with the most power- 
 ful party in the country. They will try what they can to draw him 
 out of it. They hasten to the spot and find the crowd so large, the 
 press so great, that they cannot get near him. They send their 
 message in to him. "Behold !" says one who is standing next to 
 Jesus, "thy mother and thy brethren stand without, desiring to 
 speak with thee." A mother who if fond enough was yet so fearful, 
 who once before had tried to dictate to him, and had been checked 
 at Cana ; brethren, who thought that he was beside himself, none 
 of whom as yet believed on him what right had they to interrupt 
 him at his work to move him from his purpose ? " Who is my 
 mother?" said he to the man who conveyed to him the message, 
 "and who are my brethren?" Then pausing, looking "round 
 about on them which sat about him," stretching forth his hands 
 towards his disciples "Behold!" he exclaimed, "my mother and 
 my brethren ! For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which 
 is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother." A 
 woman in the crowd, who has been standing lost in a mere human 
 admiration of him, hears his mother spoken of, and cannot in the 
 fulness of her womanly emotion but call her blessed : " Yea, rather 
 blessed," said Jesus to her, " are they that hear the word of God, 
 and keep it." 
 
 So, when in the very heart of his mission-work on earth they 
 spake to him about the closest human ties, his nearest earthly 
 relatives close as these were, and willing as he was in their own 
 mode and sphere to acknowledge them, so resolutely did Jesus wave 
 them aside, so sublimely did he rise above them, setting himself 
 forth as the elder brother of that whole family in heaven and earth 
 named by his name, and who are followers in the footsteps of him 
 who came not to do his own will but the will of him that sent him. 
 The earthly and the heavenly bonds, the common and the Christian
 
 196 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 ties, do not always coincide, neither are they always in harmony. 
 If ever they interfere if mother, or brother, or sister, or dearest 
 friend should once tempt us away from him in nearness to whom 
 standeth our eternal life then let us remember the scene in Caper- 
 naum, and ask our Lord to give us of his own spirit, here as every 
 where to follow him. 
 
 Jesus did not go out to his mother and brethren when they sent 
 for him, did not go even to their house when fatigue and exhaustion 
 called for a brief repose. He rather accepted the invitation of a 
 Pharisee to take a hurried repast in a neighbouring dwelling, the 
 multitude waiting meanwhile for him without. In haste to resume 
 his work, and knowing withal that it was no friendly company he 
 was asked to join, Jesus went in and sat down at once, neglecting 
 the customary ablutions. The host and his friends were not slow 
 to notice the neglect, nor was he less slow to notice the sentence 
 against him they were passing in their hearts. The men around 
 him here were part of that very band whose vile imputation of 
 confederacy with Satan had already released his lips from all 
 restraint, and called for and vindicated his addressing them as he 
 had done. Nor does he alter now his tone. "We may not, indeed, 
 believe that all which St. Luke, in the latter half of the eleventh 
 chapter of his Gospel, records as spoken by him the woe after woe 
 pronounced upon the Pharisees and the lawyers was uttered 
 in-doors, as soon as he had seated himself at the table. Knowing 
 how usual a thing it is with the three Synoptical Evangelists to 
 bring together into one discourse sentences that were uttered at 
 different times and on different occasions, we are inclined rather to 
 believe that the greater part of it was spoken after the hasty meal 
 was over, and Jesus stood once more the centre of a vast concourse, 
 with Scribes and Pharisees urging him vehemently, and provoking 
 him to speak many things, lying in wait for him to catch something 
 out of his mouth, that they might accuse him. 1 They got this out 
 of his mouth, that here in Galilee a year and more before that 
 memorable day, the last of his public ministry, when he stood within 
 the Temple and closed the exciting controversies with those terrible 
 denunciations which St. Matthew has preserved to us in the twenty- 
 third chapter of his Gospel, in briefer and more compendious terms, 
 the very woes that were then rolled over the heads of the Pharisees 
 of Jerusalem, were rolled over theirs in Capernaum. A new phase 
 of our Saviour's character very different from that which we had 
 before us in his treatment of the penitent sinner thus reveals itself 
 to our view ; his firmness, his courage, his outspokenness, the depth 
 of his indignant recoil from, the sternness of his unmitigated con- 
 demnation of, the inconsistencies, the hypocrisies, the haughtiness, 
 the cruelty, the tyranny of the Scribes and Pharisees. He had a 
 1 Luke xi. 53, 54.
 
 THE FIRST PARABLES. 197 
 
 right to speak and act towards them which none but he could have. 
 He was their omniscient judge, he knew that in hating him they 
 were hating his Father also, that the spirit of persecution which 
 they displayed sprang from a deeper source than mere personal 
 animosity to him as a man. As no other can ever occupy the same 
 position towards his fellow-men as that in which Jesus stood, so to 
 no other can his conduct here be a guide or precedent. One thing 
 only remains for us to do : to try to enter as thoroughly as we can 
 into the entire harmony that there was between all the love, and 
 pity, and gentleness, and compassion that he showed towards the 
 ignorant, the erring, the sinful who manifested the least openness 
 to conviction, the least disposition to repent and believe, and that 
 profound and, as we may call it, awful antipathy which he displayed 
 to those who, built up in their spiritual pride, under the very cloak 
 of a pretentious pietism, indulged some of the meanest and most 
 malignant passions of our nature, wilfully shutting their eyes to the 
 light of heaven that was shining in the midst of them, and plunging 
 on in the darkness towards nothing short of spoken and acted 
 blasphemy against the Holy Ghost. 
 
 But if the forenoon of this long and busy day at Capernaum 
 was rendered remarkable by the change of attitude which Jesus 
 assumed towards the Pharisees, its afternoon was rendered equally 
 if not still more remarkable by the change of method in addressing 
 the multitude. More than half of the term allotted to his ministry 
 in Galilee had now expired. The temper of the community towards 
 him had been fairly tried. The result was sufficiently manifest. 
 Here beside him was a small band of followers ignorant yet will- 
 ing to be taught ; weak in faith but strong in personal attachment. 
 There against him was a powerful and numerous band, socially, 
 politically, religiously the leaders of the people. Between the two 
 lay the bulk of the common people greatly excited by his miracles, 
 listening with wonder and half approval to his words, siding with 
 him rather than against him in his conflict with the Pharisees. 
 With them, if we looked only at external indications, we should 
 say that he was generally and highly popular. But it was popula- 
 rity of a kind that Jesus had no wish to gain, as he had no purpose 
 to which to turn it. Behind all the show of outward attachment 
 he saw that there was but little discernment of his true character, 
 but little disposition to receive and honour him as the Redeemer of 
 mankind, but little capacity to understand the more secret things 
 of that spiritual kingdom which it was his office to establish and 
 extend. And as he had altered his conduct towards his secret 
 enemies by dragging out their opposition to the light and openly 
 denouncing them, so now he alters his conduct toward his professed 
 friends, by clothing his higher instructions to them in a new and 
 peculiar garb. As he left the house in which the hasty mid-day
 
 198 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 meal was taken, the crowd gathered round him increased in 
 numbers, a keener edge put upon its curiosity by what had just 
 occurred. 
 
 Followed by this crowd, he goes down to the lake-side ; finds the 
 press of the people round about him oppressive and inconvenient, 
 sees a boat lying in close to the beach, enters it, sits down, and 
 separated from them by a little strip of water addresses the mul- 
 titude that lines the shore. He speaks about a sower, and how 
 it fared with the seed he sowed : " some of it fell by the wayside, 
 and some upon stony places, and some among thorns, and some upon 
 good soil." He speaks about a field in which good seed was sown 
 by day but tares by night, and how both grew up, and some would 
 have them separated; but the householder to whom the field 
 belonged would not hear of it, but would have both grow together 
 till the harvest. He speaks of a man casting seed into his ground, 
 and finding that by night and by day, whether he slept or woke, 
 was watching and tending, or doing nothing about it, that seed 
 secretly grew up, he knew not how : he speaks of the least of seeds 
 growing up into the tallest of herbs ; of the leaven working in the 
 three measures of meal till the whole was leavened ; and he tells his 
 hearers that the kingdom of heaven is like unto each of the things 
 that he describes. His hearers are all greatly interested, for it is 
 about plain, familiar things of the house, the garden, the field, 
 that he speaks ; and yet a strange expression of mingled surprise 
 and perplexity sits upon every countenance. The disciples within 
 the boat share these sentiments equally with the people upon the 
 shore. 
 
 Nothing seems easier than to understand these little stories 
 of common life ; but why has Jesus told them 1 What from his lips 
 can they mean? What has the kingdom of heaven to do with 
 them ? Teaching by parables was a common way of instruction 
 with the Jewish Kabbis. But it had not been in the first instance 
 adopted by Christ ; they had not as yet heard a single parable from 
 his lips ; and now he uses nothing else parable follows parable, as 
 if that were the only instrument of the teacher that Jesus cared to 
 use. And besides the entire novelty of his employment of the 
 parabolic method, there is that haze, that thick obscurity, which 
 covers the real meaning of the parables he utters. The disciples 
 take the first opportunity that offers itself of speaking to him 
 privately, and putting to him the question : " Why speakest thou 
 to them in parables 1" a question which they would have never put 
 but for the circumstance that they had never before known him 
 employ this kind of discourse. Now mark the answer to the 
 question. " Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of 
 the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given. For whosoever 
 hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance ;
 
 THE FIRST PARABLES. 1 99 
 
 but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that 
 he hath. Therefore speak I to them in parables : because they 
 seeing see not ; and hearing they hear not, neither do they under- 
 stand. And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, 
 By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand ; and seeing ye 
 shall see, and shall not perceive : for this people's heart is waxed 
 gross ; and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have 
 closed ; lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear 
 with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should 
 be converted, and I should heal them." 1 
 
 It was partly then for the purpose of concealment that, upon 
 this occasion, these parables were spoken. Those before whose eyes 
 this veil was drawn had already been tried with a different land of 
 speech. Most important truths had been announced to them in 
 the simplest and plainest language, but they had shut their minds 
 and hearts against him. And now, as a righteous judgment upon 
 them for having acted thus, these mysteries of the kingdom, which 
 might have been presented to them in another and more transparent 
 guise, are folded up in the concealing drapery of these parables. 
 Speaking generally, parables are meant to make things plainer, not 
 more obscure ; and of many of our Lord's, parables, such as those of 
 the good Samaritan, the unjust judge, the Pharisee and the publi- 
 can, it is true that neither by those who first heard them uttered, 
 nor by any who have read them since, has there been the slightest 
 doubt or uncertainty as to their meaning. But there is another 
 and a larger class of the parables of Christ to which this description 
 does not apply, which were not understood by those to whom they 
 were first addressed, which may still be misunderstood, which, 
 instead of being homely tales illustrative of the simplest moral and 
 religious truths, the simplest moral and religious duties, are figur- 
 ative descriptions, prophetic allegories, in which the true nature of 
 Christ's spiritual kingdom, the manner of its establishment and 
 extension, and all its after varied fortunes, are portrayed. It was 
 to this class that the parables just spoken by our Saviour belonged. 
 And there was mercy as well as judgment in their employment. 
 Behind their concealing drapery bright lights were burning, the 
 very darkness thrown around intended to stimulate the eye to a 
 keener, steadier gaze. As his disciples had dealt with the instruc- 
 tions that had previously come from his lips differently from those 
 who seeing saw not, hearing would not understand, so now Jesus 
 deals differently with them as to the parables. They appear to have 
 been at first as much in the dark as to their meaning as was the 
 general audience on the shore. But they were willing, even anxious, 
 to be taught. When the cloud came down on the teachings of 
 their Master, and these dark sayings were uttered, they longed to 
 i Matt. xiii. 1-15.
 
 200 THE MINISTEY IN GALILEE. 
 
 enter into that cloud to gaze upon the light which burned within. 
 They came seeking, and they found ; knocking, and the door was 
 opened to them. To them it was given to know the mysteries of 
 the kingdom, but to the others, uncaring for it, unprepared for it, 
 and unworthy of it as they were, it was not given. By a private 
 and full explanation of the two first and leading parables, those of 
 the Sower, and the Tares and the Wheat, Jesus put into his 
 disciples' hands the key to all the eight parables that he delivered ; 
 taught them to see therein the first plantation! of the Church ' the 
 field,' the world ' the good seed,' the Word of God ; the entrance 
 and the allowed continued presence of obstruction and opposition, 
 the silent and secret growth of God's empire over human hearts ; 
 the small enlarging into the great; its pervasive, transforming 
 power; its preciousness, whether found after diligent search, or 
 coming into the possessor's hands almost at unawares ; the end of 
 all in the gathering out of that spiritual kingdom of the Lord of all 
 that should offend. 
 
 Five parables appear to have been addressed by Jesus to the 
 multitude from the boat, their delivery broken by the private 
 explanation to the disciples of the parable of the Sower. Landing, 
 and sending the multitude away, Jesus entered into the house. 
 There the disciples again applied to him, and he declared unto them 
 the parable of the Tares. Thereafter the three shorter parables of 
 the Treasure, the Pearl, and the Net were spoken to the disciples 
 by themselves. The long, laborious day was now nearly over, and 
 in the dwelling which served to him as a home while in Caper- 
 naum, he might have sought and found repose. Again, however, 
 we see him by the lake-side, again under the pressure of the 
 multitudes. Seeking rest and seeing no hope of it for him in 
 Capernaum, Jesus said, "Let us pass over unto the other side." 
 That other eastern side of the Lake of Galilee offered a singular 
 contrast to the western one. Its wild and lonely hills, thinly 
 peopled by a race, the majority of whom were Gentiles, were 
 seldom visited by the inhabitants of the plain of Gennesaret. Now- 
 a-days both sides of the lake are desert ; yet still there is but little 
 intercourse between them. Few travellers venture to traverse the 
 eastern shore ; fewer venture far into the regions which lie behind, 
 which are now occupied wholly by an Arab population. As offer- 
 ing to him in some one or other of the deep valleys which cleave 
 its hills and run down into the sea, a shady and secure retreat for 
 a day or two from the bustle and fatigue of his life in Galilee, 
 Jesus proposes a passage across the lake. All is soon ready ; and 
 they hurriedly embark, taking Jesus in " even as he was," with no 
 preparation for the voyage. It was, however, but a short sail of 
 six or eight miles. Night falls on them by the way, and with the 
 night one of those torrible hurricanes by which a lake which lies so
 
 THE STILLIKG OF THE TEMPEST. 201 
 
 low, and is bounded on all sides by hills, is visited at times. The 
 tempest smote the waters, the waves ran high and smote the little 
 bark. She reeled and swayed, and at each lurch took in more and 
 more water till she was nearly filled, and once filled, with the next 
 wave that rolls into her she must sink. They were practised hands 
 that navigated this boat, who knew well the lake in all its moods ; 
 not open to unreasonable fear, but now fear comes upon them, and 
 they are ready to give up all hope. Where all this while is he at 
 whose bidding they had embarked 1 They had been too busy for 
 the time with the urgent work required by the sudden squall, to 
 think of him ; the mantle of the night's thick darkness may have 
 hidden him from their view. But now in their extremity they 
 seek for him, and find him " in the hinder part of the ship, asleep 
 on a pillow." Unbroken by all the noise of winds and waves 
 without, and all the tumult of those toiling hands within, how quiet 
 and deep must that rest of the wearied one have been ! They have 
 some difficulty in awaking him, and they do it somewhat roughly. 
 "Master! Master!" they cry to him, "save us! We perish! 
 Carest thou not that we perish ?" With a word of rebuke for their 
 great fear and little faith, Jesus rises, and speaking to the boister- 
 ous elements as one might speak to a boisterous child, he says to 
 the winds and the waves, " Peace, be still !" Nature owns at once 
 the sovereignty of the Lord. The winds cease their blowing the 
 waves subside instantly there is a great calm. Those who had 
 sought and roused the sleeping Saviour fall back into their former 
 places, resume their former work ; at the measured stroke of their 
 oars the little vessel glides silently over the placid waters. All 
 quiet now, where but a few minutes before all was tumult ; few 
 words are spoken during the rest of the voyage, the rowers only 
 whispering to each other as they rowed, " What manner of man is 
 this, that even the winds and the waves obey him !" 
 
 Jesus lying this moment under the weakness of exhausted 
 strength, rising the next in all the might of manifested omnipo- 
 tence : in close proximity, in quick succession, the humanity and 
 the divinity that were in him exhibited themselves. Though 
 suddenly roused to see himself in a position quite new to him, and 
 evidently of great peril, Jesus has no fear. His first thought is not 
 of the danger, his first word is not to the tempest, his first care is 
 not for the safety of the body, it is for the state of the spirit of 
 those who wake him from his slumbers ; nor is it until he has 
 rebuked their fears that he removes the cause, but then he does so, 
 and does it effectually, by the word of his power. And so long as 
 the life we are living shall be thought and spoken of as a voyage, 
 so long shall this night scene on the lake of Galilee supply the 
 imagery by which many a passage in the history of the Church, 
 and many in the history of the individual believer, shall be illus-
 
 202 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 trated. Sleeping or waking, let Christ be in the vessel and it is 
 safe. The tempest may come, our faith be small, our fear be great, 
 but still if in our fear we have so much faith as to cry to him to 
 save us, still in the hour of our greatest need will he arise to our 
 help, and though he may have to blame us for not cherishing a 
 livelier trust and making an earlier application, he will not suffer 
 the winds or the waves to overwhelm us. 
 
 The storm is past, the night is over, the morning dawns, the 
 opposite coast of the Gadarenes is reached. Here, then, in these 
 lonely places there will be some rest for Jesus, some secure repose 1 
 Not yet, not instantly. Soon as he lands, immediately, from some 
 neighbouring place of graves there comes forth a wild and frenzied 
 man, a man possessed by many devils ; for a long time so possessed, 
 exceeding fierce so that no man could tame him. They had bound 
 him with fetters and with chains: the fetters he had plucked 
 asunder, the chains had been broken by him. Flying from the 
 haunts of men, flinging off all his garments, the naked howling 
 maniac lies day and night among the tombs, crying and cutting 
 himself with stones ; so fiercely assaulting all who approached him 
 that no man might pass by that way. From his lair among the 
 graves the devil-haunted madman rushes upon Jesus. His neigh- 
 bours had all fled terrified before him. This stranger who has just 
 landed flies not, but tranquilly contemplates his approach. He 
 who had so lately brought the great calm down into the bosom of 
 the troubled lake, is about now to infuse a greater calm into this 
 troubled spirit. The voice that an hour or two before had said to 
 the winds and the waves, "Peace, be still," has already spoken, 
 while yet the poor demoniac is afar off, to the possessing devil that 
 was within, and said, "Come out of him, thou unclean spirit." If 
 underneath that dark and terrible tyranny of the indwelling demons 
 there still survived within the man some spark of his native 
 independence, some glimmering consciousness of what he once had 
 been and might be again, were but those usurpers of his spirit 
 quieted ; if something of the old man still were there, crouching, 
 groaning, travailing beneath the intolerable pressure that drove him 
 into madness what a new and strange sensation must have entered 
 this region of his consciousness when the devils which had been 
 rioting within him, claiming and using him as all then- own, heard 
 that word of Jesus, and in their terror began to cry out, as in the 
 presence of one their acknowledged Superior and Lord ! What a 
 new light of hope must have come into that wild and haggard eye 
 as it gazed upon that mysterious being, hailed by the devils as the 
 Son of the Most High God ! His relief, indeed, was not immediate ; 
 the devils did not at once depart. There was a short and singular 
 colloquy between Christ and them. They beseech, they adjure 
 him not to torment them before the time, not to send them down
 
 THE DEMONIAC OF GADARA. 203 
 
 at once into the abyss, or if he were determined to give liberty to 
 their human captive, then not to drive them from the neighbour- 
 hood, which, perhaps, was their only earthly allotted haunt, but to 
 suffer them to enter into a neighbouring herd of swine. The 
 permission was given. They entered into the swine how we know 
 not, operating upon them how and with what intent we know not. 
 All we have before us is the fact, that the whole herd ran violently 
 down a steep place into the sea, and perished in the waters. What 
 became of the devils then ? As the dumb beasts went down into 
 the waters, did they go down into a darker, deeper depth, to be 
 kept there in chains and darkness to the judgment of the great 
 day ? It is not said that the devils purposely destroyed the swine. 
 It no doubt was their entrance and the frenzy into which that 
 entrance drove the animals, that made them plunge headlong into 
 the lake. But who shall tell us whether in their reckless and 
 intense love of mischief the foul spirits did not here outwit them- 
 selves, creating an impulse that they could not curb, destroying the 
 new habitation they had chosen, and by their own inconsistent and 
 suicidal acts bringing down upon themselves the very fate from 
 which they had prayed to be delivered ? We know far too little of 
 the world of spirits to affirm or to deny here ; far too little for us 
 either mockingly to reject the whole as an idle tale, or presumingly 
 to speculate as if the mysteries of the great kingdom of darkness 
 stood revealed. It is true, indeed, that whatever was the design or 
 anticipation of the devils in entering into the swine, the result must 
 have been known to Jesus. Knowing then, beforehand, how great 
 the destruction here of property and animal life would be, why was 
 the permission given ] We shall answer that question when any 
 man will tell us how many swine one human spirit is worth why 
 devils were permitted to enter anywhere or do any mischief upon 
 this earth why such large and successive losses of human and 
 bestial life are ever suffered, the agencies producing which are as 
 much under the control of the Creator as these devils were under 
 that of Christ To take up the one single instance in which you 
 can connect the loss of life, not directly with the personal agency 
 but evidently with the permission of the Saviour, and to take 
 exception to that, while the mystery of the large sufferance of sin 
 and misery in this world lies spread out everywhere before and 
 around us, is it not unreasonable and unfair ? We do not deny 
 that there is a difficulty here. We are not offering any explana- 
 tion of this difficulty that we consider to be satisfactory. We are 
 only pleading, first, that in such ignorance as ours is, and with a 
 thousand times greater difficulties everywhere besetting our faith 
 in God, this single difficulty should throw no impediment in the 
 way of our faith in Jesus Christ. 
 
 The keepers of the herd, who had waited to see the issue, went
 
 204 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 and told in the adjoining village and in the country round about all 
 that had happened. At the tidings the whole population of the 
 neighbourhood came out to meet Jesus. They found him, with the 
 man who had been possessed with devils, in the manner they all 
 knew so well, sitting at his feet already clothed, in his right mind, 
 all traces of the possession, save the marks of the bonds and of the 
 fetters, gone. They were alarmed, annoyed, offended at what hac 1 
 happened. There was a mystery about the man, who had such 
 power over the world of spirits, and used it in such a way, that 
 repelled rather than attracted them. They might have thought 
 and felt differently had they looked aright at their poor afflicted 
 brother, upon whom such a happy change had been wrought. But 
 they thought more of the swine that had perished than of the man 
 that had been saved; and they besought Jesus to depart out of 
 their coasts. He did not need to have the entreaty addressed to 
 him a second time ; he complied at once prepared immediately to 
 re-embark, and we do not read that he ever returned to that region 
 again they never had another opportunity of seeing and hearing 
 him. 
 
 Christ heard and at once complied with the request of the 
 Gadarenes. But there was another petition presented to him at the 
 same time, with which he did not comply. From the moment that he 
 had been healed, the demoniac had never left his side never thought 
 of parting from him never desired to return to home, or friends, or 
 kindred. A bond stronger than all others bound him to his deliverer. 
 When he saw Jesus make the movement to depart, he accompanied 
 him to the shore ; he went with him to the boat. And as he fell 
 there at his feet, we can almost fancy him taking up Euth's words, 
 and saying, "Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from 
 following after thee : for whither thou goest, I will go ; and where 
 thou lodgest, I will lodge ; thy people shall be my people, and thy 
 God my God." He is ready he is anxious to forsake all and 
 follow Jesus, but he is not permitted. " Go home to thine own 
 house and to thy friends," said Jesus to him, " and tell them how 
 great things the Lord hath done for thee, and hath had compassion 
 on thee." It was to a heathen home to friends that knew little 
 about the Lord, and cared little for such knowledge, to whom he 
 was to go. No small trial to be torn thus from the Saviour's side, 
 to go and reside daily among those who had sent that Saviour 
 away from them. But he did it did more even than he was told 
 to do ; not in his own house alone, nor among his own friends 
 alone, but throughout the whole Gentile district of Decapolis he 
 published abroad the great things that Jesus had done for him. 
 Better for the man himself too long accustomed to dwell alone, 
 taking a tincture of the solitary places in which he dwelt into his 
 own spiri t, to mix thus freely and widely with his fellow-men ; and
 
 THE DEMONIAC OF GADARA. 205 
 
 better undoubtedly it was for those among whom he lived acting 
 as the representative of him whom in person they had rejected, but 
 who seem to have lent a more willing ear to the man of their own 
 district and kindred, for we are told that as he spake of Jesus, "all 
 men did marvel," and some, let us hope, did believe. 
 
 Let one closing glance be given at the strange picture which 
 this passage in our Saviour's life presents. It abounds in lights 
 and shadows, in striking contrasts the meanest selfishness con- 
 fronted with the purest, noblest love. Reckless frenzy, abject 
 terror, profound attention, devoted attachment, rapidly succeed 
 each other in him who, brought into closest union with the highest 
 and the lowest of the powers of the spiritual world, presents to us 
 a condensed epitome of the great conflict between good and evil 
 between Christ and Satan in the domain of the human spirit. 
 Undoubtedly it stands the most remarkable instance of disposses- 
 sion in the gospel narrative, revealing to us at once the depth of 
 that degradation to which our poor humanity may sink, and the 
 height of that elevation to which, through the power and infinite 
 compassion of the Saviour, it may be raised. Was it for the pur- 
 pose of teaching us more manifestly that Jesus came to destroy the 
 works of the devil, that in that age of His appearance devils were 
 permitted to exercise such strange dominion over men ? Was it 
 to bring into visible and personal collision the heads of the two 
 opposite spiritual communities The Prince of Light and the 
 Prince of Darkness and to make more visible to all men the 
 supremacy of the one over the other 1 Was it that as the Sun of 
 Righteousness rose in one quarter of the heavens, upon the opposite 
 a cloud of unwonted blackness and darkness was allowed to gather, 
 that with all the greater brightness there might shine forth the 
 bow of promise for our race ? Whatever be the explanation, the 
 fact lies before us that demoniacal possessions did then take place, 
 and were not continued. 
 
 IX. 
 
 THE MISSION OF THE TWELVE 
 MATT. ix. 35-38 ; x. ; MARK vi. 7-30 ; LUKE ix. 1-9. 
 
 JESUS returned across the lake from Gadara to resume his 
 labours in Galilee. The circuit through its southern towns and 
 villages on which he now embarked was the last he was to make. 
 He looked on the multitudes that gathered round him with a 
 singular compassion. Spiritually to his eye they were as sheep 
 scattered abroad, who when he left them would be without a 
 shepherd. " The harvest," said he to his disciples, " truly is
 
 206 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 plenteous, but the labourers are few. Pray ye therefore the Lord 
 of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers unto his harvest." 
 But was he not himself the Lord of the harvest, and had he no 
 labourers to send forth ? 
 
 Labourers sufficiently numerous, sufficiently trained, there were 
 not ; but there were those twelve men whom he had chosen, who 
 had for many months been continually by his side. He can send 
 them ; not permanently, for as yet they were comparatively un- 
 qualified for the work. Besides, to separate them finally from 
 himself would be to disqualify them for the office which they 
 afterwards were to exercise, of being the reporters of his chief 
 sayings, the witnesses of all the leading actions of his life. But he 
 can send them on a brief preliminary experimental tour, one happy 
 effect of which would be, that the townsmen and villagers of 
 Galilee shall have one more opportunity afforded them of hearing 
 the gospel of the kingdom announced. The hitherto close com- 
 panionship of the twelve with Jesus may have presented to Jewish 
 eyes nothing so extraordinary as to attract much notice and remark. 
 Their great teachers had their favourite pupils, whom they kept 
 continually beside them, and whose services of kindness to them 
 they gratefully received and acknowledged. It was something 
 new, indeed, to see a teacher acting as Jesus did setting up no 
 school in any one separate locality, confining himself to no one 
 place and to no set times or methods ; discoursing about the king- 
 dom, week-day and Sabbath-day alike, publicly in the synagogue, 
 privately at the supper-table, on road-side and lake-side, from the 
 bow of the boat and the brow of the mountain. And always close 
 to him these twelve men are seen who had forsaken their former 
 occupations, and had now attached themselves permanently to his 
 person, ministering to his comfort, imbibing his instructions, form- 
 ing an innermost circle of discipleship, within which Jesus was 
 often seen to retire, and to which the mysteries of the kingdom 
 were revealed as there was ability to receive them. 
 
 But now a still more singular spectacle is presented. Jesus 
 takes the twelve, and dividing them into pairs, sends them away 
 from him two and two ; delivering to them, as he sends them forth, 
 the address contained in the tenth chapter of the Gospel of St. 
 Matthew. A few minute instructions were first given as to the 
 special missionary tour on which they were despatched. It was to 
 be confined strictly to Galilee to the narrow district that they had 
 already frequently traversed in their Master's company. But he 
 personally was not to be the burden of their message. They were 
 not to announce his advent as the Messiah. He had not done so 
 himself, and their preaching was not to go beyond his own. They 
 were simply to proclaim the advent of the kingdom, leaving the 
 works and words of Jesus to point out the place in that kingdom
 
 THE MISSION OF THE TWELVE. 207 
 
 which he occupied. The power of working miracles they were for 
 the time to enjoy, but they were not to use it, as they might easily 
 have done, for any selfish or mercenary purpose. As freely as they 
 got, they were to give. They were to be absent but a few days. 
 They were going, not among strangers or enemies, but among 
 friends and brethren. The more easily and expeditiously they got 
 through their work the better. Unprovided and unencumbered, 
 they were to cast themselves at once upon the hospitality of those 
 they visited. " Nor was there in this," says Dr. Thomson, " any de- 
 parture from the simple manners of the country. At this day the 
 farmer sets out on excursions quite as extensive without a para in 
 his purse, and the modern Moslem prophet of Tarshlha thus sends 
 forth his apostles over this identical region. Neither do they 
 encumber themselves with two coats. They are accustomed to 
 sleep in the garments they wear during the day ; and in this climate 
 such plain people experience therefrom no inconvenience. They 
 wear coarse shoes, answering to the sandal of the ancients, but 
 never carry two pairs ; and, although the staff is the invariable 
 companion of all wayfarers, they are content with one." 1 The 
 directions given to the Apostles were proper to a short and hasty 
 journey, such as the one now before them. On entering any town 
 or village, their first inquiry was to be for the susceptible, the well- 
 disposed, about whom, after the excitement consequent upon Christ's 
 former visits, some information might easily be obtained. They 
 were to salute the house in which such resided, to enter it, and, if 
 well received, were to remain in it, not going from house to house, 
 wasting their time in multiplied or prolonged formalities and 
 salutations by the way. Wherever rejected, they were to shake off 
 the dust of their feet against that house or city ; and to create a 
 profound impression of the importance of the errand on which they 
 were despatched, Jesus closes the first part of his address to them 
 by saying, " Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for 
 the land of Sodom and Gomorrah, in the day of judgment than for 
 that city." 
 
 Hitherto, all that he had said had direct reference to the short 
 and rapid journey that lay immediately before them. But limited 
 as it was, the task now committed to them carried in it the germ, 
 the type, of that larger apostolic work for which, by the gift of the 
 Spirit, they were to be qualified, and in which, for so many years 
 after their Master's death, they were to be engaged. And so, after 
 speaking of the one, Jesus passes on to the other, the nearer and 
 narrower mission sinking out of sight as his eye rests on the further 
 and broader mission that lay before them. In the one, the nearer, 
 there was to be no opposition or persecution ; in the other, a fiery 
 
 1 The Land and the Book, p. 346. In St. Matthew's Gospel it is said they were 
 not to take staves ; in Mark, that they were to take one, i.e. one only.
 
 208 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 trial was in store for the faithful. The one, the nearer, was to be 
 confined to the lost sheep of the house of Israel ; in the other, they 
 were to come into collision with the kings and governors of the 
 Gentiles. It is of this second period of the persecution on the 
 one hand, and the gifts of the qualifying Spirit on the other, by 
 which it should be distinguished that Jesus speaks in the passage 
 embraced in the verses from the 16th to the 23d. The second 
 division of the address closes, as the first does, by a " Verily I say 
 unto you," the fact thus solemnly affirmed pointing, in the de- 
 struction of Jerusalem, to the close of that period over which 
 Christ's prophetic eye was now ranging : " Verily I say unto you, 
 Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel, till the Son of 
 man be come." 
 
 But now the whole earthly mission of the twelve presents itself 
 to the Saviour's eye but as the preface and prelude to that continuous 
 abiding work of witnessing for him upon this earth to which each 
 separate disciple of the cross is called. Dropping, therefore, all 
 directions and allusions referring exclusively to the Apostles and to 
 apostolic times, Jesus, in the closing and larger portion of the 
 address, from the 24th to the 42d verse, speaks generally of all true 
 discipleship to himself upon this earth : foretelling its fortunes, 
 describing its character, its duties, its encouragements, and its 
 rewards. 
 
 Jesus would hold out no false hopes would have no one become 
 his upon any false expectations. Misconception, misrepresentation, 
 ill-treatment of one kind or other his true and faithful followers 
 must be prepared to meet, to meet without surprise, without 
 complaint, without resentment. The disciple need not hope to be 
 above his Master, the servant above his Lord. " If they have called 
 the master of the house Beelzebub, how much more them of his 
 household ? " But why should the covert slander, the calumny 
 whispered in secret, be dreaded, when the day was coming when all 
 that is covered shall be revealed, all that is hid shall be made 
 known 1 With his disciples there should be no concealment of any 
 kind. He came to found no secret society, linked by hidden bonds, 
 depository of inner mysteries. True, there were things that he 
 addressed alone to the Apostles' ear in private, but the secrecy and 
 reserve so practised by him was meant to be temporary, to be 
 transient. " What I tell you thus in darkness, that speak ye in the 
 light : and what ye hear in the ear, that preach ye upon the house- 
 tops." The doing so may imperil life, the life of the body: but 
 what of that 1 " Fear not them which kill the body, but are not 
 able to kill the soul : but rather fear him which is able to destroy 
 both soul and body in hell." But even the life of the body shall 
 be watched over, not suffered needlessly to perish. Not a single 
 sparrow, though worth but half a farthing, falls to the ground
 
 THE MISSION OF THE TWELVE. 209 
 
 without God's knowledge, not a hair of your head but is numbered 
 by Him. "Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many 
 sparrows." The head whose very hairs are numbered by him, your 
 Father will not see lightly or uselessly cut off. Leave your fate 
 then in his hands, and whatever that may be, be open, be honest, 
 be full, be fearless in the testimony ye bear, for " Whosoever shall 
 confess me before men, him will I confess before my Father which 
 is in heaven. But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I 
 deny before my Father which is in heaven." Times of outward 
 persecution may not last, but think not that on this earth there 
 shall ever be perfect peace. "I came not to send peace, but a 
 sword," a sword which, though it drop out of the open hand of the 
 persecutor, shall not want other hands to take it up and wield it 
 differently. " I am come to set a man at variance against his father, 
 and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against 
 her mother-in-law, and a man's foes shall be they of his own house- 
 hold." . And to no severer trial shall my followers be subject, than 
 when it is not force but affection, the affection of the nearest and 
 dearest on earth, that would draw them away from me, or tempt 
 them to be unfaithful to my cause. 
 
 But above all other claims is the one I make on the love of all 
 who choose me as their Saviour and their Lord. I must be first in 
 their affections : the throne of their heart must be mine ; no rival 
 permitted to sit by my side. It is not that I am selfishly exactive 
 of affection ; it is not that I am jealous of other love ; it is not 
 that I wish or ask that you should love others less in order to love 
 me more : but it is, that what I am to you, what I have done for 
 you, what from this time forth and for evermore I am prepared to 
 be to and to do for you, gives me such a priority and precedence in 
 the claim I make, " that he that loveth father and mother more 
 than me is not worthy of me, and he that loveth son or daughter 
 more than me, is not worthy of me." A bitter thing it may be to 
 crucify some inordinate earthly desire or affection in order to give 
 me, or to keep me in, that place of supremacy which is the only one I 
 possibly or consistently can occupy. But he that taketh not up the 
 cross for me, even as I have taken up the cross for him ; he that 
 will not deny himself, and in the exercise of that self-denial take 
 up his cross daily and follow me ; " he is not worthy of me, he 
 cannot be my disciple." For this is one of the fixed unalterable 
 conditions of that spiritual economy under which you and all men 
 live, that he who maketh the pursuits and the pleasures of the 
 present scene of things the aim of his being ; he who by any manner 
 or form of self-gratification seeks to gain his life shall lose it, shall 
 fail at the last even in the very thing upon which he has set his 
 heart Whereas he who for my sake shall give himself to the 
 mortifying of every evil affection of his nature, to the crucifying of 
 o
 
 210 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 the flesh with the affections and lusts thereof, he shall find the life 
 he seems to lose ; out of the death of the lower shall spring the 
 higher, the eternal life of the spirit. And let all of every degree, 
 whether they be Apostles or Prophets, or simple disciples, or the 
 least of these my little ones, be animated, be elevated throughout 
 that strife with self and sin, the world and the devil, to which in 
 Christ they are called, by remembering what a dignified position 
 they occupy, whose representatives they are. " He that receiveth 
 you receiveth me; he that receiveth me receiveth him that sent 
 me." And if it be in the name or the character of a prophet that 
 any one receives you, he, the receiver, shall have a prophet's reward; 
 or if in the name simply of a righteous man that any one receive 
 you, he, the receiver, shall have a righteous man's reward ; nay more, 
 if it be to any of the least of my little ones that a cup only of cold 
 water be given in the name of a disciple, he, the giver, shall in nowise 
 lose his reward. For so it is, and ever shall be, not simply by 
 great men going out upon great embassies and speaking words of 
 power to gathered multitudes, or by great assemblies propounding 
 or enforcing great and solemn truths, that the kingdom of Jesus 
 Christ is advanced, but by all, the high and low, and rich and poor, 
 and weak and strong, who bear his name, looking upon themselves 
 as his missionaries here on earth, sent by him even as he was sent 
 by his Father ; sent, that they may be to one another what he has 
 been to them, seeking each other's good, willing to communicate, 
 giving and in giving receiving, receiving and in receiving imparting, 
 each doing a little in one way or other to commend to others that 
 Saviour in whom is all his trust, these littles making up that vast 
 and ever multiplying agency by which the empire of the Eedeemer 
 over human spirits is being continually enlarged. 
 
 Can any one read over and even partially enter into the mean- 
 ing of those words which Jesus spake to his Apostles when sending 
 them for the first time from his side a season when there was so 
 little material out of which any rational conjecture could be formed 
 as to his future or theirs, or the future of any school or sect, or 
 institution that He and they might found, and not be convinced 
 that open as day lay all that future to him who here, as elsewhere 
 in so many of his most important discourses, sets forth in a series 
 of perspectives mixing with and melting into each other the 
 whole history of his Church in all its trials and conflicts from the 
 beginning even to the end ? But a greater than a Prophet is here 
 one who speaks of men being hated, persecuted, scourged, and 
 put to death for his name's sake, as if there were nothing in any 
 wise unreasonable or unnatural in it ; one who would have all men 
 come to him, and who asks of all who come, love, obedience, and 
 sacrifice, such as but one Being has a right to ask, even he who has 
 redeemed us to God by his blood, whose right over all we are and
 
 THE MISSION OF THE SEVENTY. 211 
 
 have and can do is supreme, unchallengeable, unchangeable ; whose, 
 by every tie, we are, and whom, by the mightiest of obligations, 
 we are bound to love and serve. 
 
 The sight must have been a very extraordinary one, of the 
 Apostles setting off two by two from their Master's side, passing 
 with such eagerness and haste through the towns and villages, 
 preaching and working miracles. To hear one man preach as Jesus 
 did, to see one man confirm his word by doing such wonderful 
 works, filled the whole community with wonder. To what a higher 
 pitch must that wonder have been raised when they saw others 
 commissioned by him, endowed by him, not only preaching as he 
 did, but healing, too, all manner of disease ! True, the circle was 
 a small one to whom such special powers were delegated ; but half a 
 year or so afterwards, as if to teach that it was not to the twelve 
 alone to those holding the high office of the apostolate that 
 Jesus was prepared to grant such a commission, he sent out a band 
 of seventy men, embracing, we are inclined to believe, almost the 
 entire body of his professed disciples in the north who were of the 
 age and had the strength to execute such a task ; addressing them 
 in almost the same terms, imposing on them the same duties, and 
 clothing them with the same prerogatives, clearly manifesting by his 
 employment of so large a number of his ordinary disciples that it 
 was not his purpose that the dissemination of the knowledge of his 
 name should be confined to any one small and peculiarly endowed 
 body of men. 
 
 It appears from the statement of St. Matthew that when Jesus 
 " had made an end of commanding his twelve disciples, he departed 
 thence to teach and to preach in their cities," continuing thus his 
 own personal labours in the absence of the twelve. How long they 
 remained apart, in the absence of all definite notes of time, can 
 only be a matter of conjecture. A few days would carry the apostles 
 over all the ground they had to traverse, and they would not loiter 
 by the way. Ere very long they were all united once more at 
 Capernaum. Tidings met them there of a very sad event which 
 had just occurred, we know not exactly where, but if Josephus is 
 to be trusted, it was in the remotest region of that district over 
 which Herod Antipas ruled. It is very singular that though Herod 
 governed Galilee, and built and generally resided at Tiberias, a 
 town upon the lake-side a few miles south of the plain of Gennesaret, 
 he had never met with Jesus ; had done nothing to interrupt his 
 labours, though these were making so great a sensation all over the 
 country ; had never, apparently, till about this time even heard of 
 him or of his works. It has not unreasonably been conjectured 
 that soon after throwing John the Baptist into prison he had been 
 absent on one of his journeys to Rome during those very months in 
 which our Lord's Galilean ministry was most openly and actively
 
 212 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 conducted. Even, however, had this not been the case as we 
 never read of Jesus visiting Tiberias we can readily enough 
 imagine that Herod might have been living there all the time, too 
 much engaged with other things to heed much what, if at all spoken 
 of in his presence, would be spoken of contemptuously as a new 
 Jewish religious ferment that was spreading among the people. 
 The public tranquillity was not threatened ; and, that preser r ed, 
 they might have as many such religious excitements among them 
 as they liked. Though fully cognisant of the nature and progress 
 of the Baptist's ministry, he had done nothing to stop it. It was 
 not on any public or political grounds, but purely and solely on a 
 personal one, that he had cast John into prison. At first he had 
 listened to him gladly, and done many things at his bidding, but 
 the Baptist had been bold enough to tell him that it was not lawful 
 for him to have his brother's wife, and brave enough at all hazards 
 to keep by what he said. He would neither modify nor retract. 
 Herod's anger was kindled against him, and was well nursed and 
 kept warm by Herodias. She would have made short work with 
 the impudent intermeddler. But Herod feared the people, and so 
 contented himself with casting him into that prison in which he lay 
 so many long and weary months. While lying there alone and 
 inactive, he had sent, as we have seen, two of his disciples to Jesus 
 to ask him, " Art thou he that should come, or look we for another 1 " 
 It was after all but an indirect and ambiguous reply that they 
 had brought back enough, and more than enough, to meet any 
 transient doubt as to Christ's character and office which in any 
 quarter might have arisen, but carrying with it no reference to the 
 Baptist's personal estate embodying no message of sympathy 
 holding out no prospect of relief. All that was left to John was 
 to cling to the hope that his long imprisonment must be near its end. 
 Herod might relent or Jesus might interpose somehow or other 
 the deliverance would come. And it did come at last, but not as 
 John had looked for it. It came in the form of that grim 
 executioner, who, breaking in upon his solitude, and flashing before 
 his eyes the instrument of death, bade him bow his head at once to 
 the fatal stroke. Short warning this : was no explanation to be 
 given ? no interview with Herod allowed ? Not a day nor an hour 
 for preparation given ? No. The king's order was for instant 
 execution. The damsel was waiting for the head, and the mother 
 waiting for the damsel. How did the Baptist bear himself at that 
 trying moment ? There were no crowds to witness this martyr's 
 death ; not one there to tell us afterwards how he looked, or what he 
 said. Alone, he had to gird his spirit up to meet his doom. A 
 moment or two, spent we know not how, and the death-blow fell. 
 
 It is said that when death comes suddenly upon a man, when, 
 this moment in full possession of his faculties, he knows that next
 
 DEATH OF JOHN THE BAPTIST. 213 
 
 moment is to be his last within that moment there flashes often 
 upon the memory the whole scenery of a bygone life. If such a 
 vision of the past rose up before the Baptist's eye, what a strange 
 mysterious thing might that life of his on earth have seemed, 
 how like a failure, how seemingly abortive ! Thirty long years of 
 preparation ; then a brief and wonderful success, brimful of promise ; 
 that success suddenly arrested; all means and opportunities of 
 active service plucked out of his hand. Then the idle months in 
 prison, and then the felon's death ! Mysterious, inexplicable as 
 such a life might look to the eye of sense, how looked it to the eye 
 of God ? Many flattering things have been said of men when they 
 were living ; many false and fulsome epitaphs have been graven on 
 their tombs ; but the lips that never flattered have said of John, 
 that of those that have been born of women there hath not arisen 
 a greater ; his greatness mainly due to his peculiar connection with 
 Christ, but not unsupported by his personal character, for he is one 
 of the few prominent figures in the sacred page upon which not a 
 single stain is seen to rest. And though they buried him in some 
 obscure grave to which none went on pilgrimage, yet for that tomb 
 the pen that never traced a line of falsehood has written the brief 
 but pregnant epitaph: "John fulfilled his course." Terminating 
 so abruptly at such an early stage, with largo capacity for work, and 
 plenty of work to do, shall we not say of this man that his life was 
 unseasonably and prematurely cut off? No ; his earthly task was 
 done : he had a certain work assigned him here, and it was finished. 
 Nor could a higher eulogium have been pronounced over his grave 
 than this, that he had fulfilled the course assigned to him by 
 Providence. Let the testimony thus borne to him convince us that 
 there is a special and narrow sphere which God has marked out 
 for each of us on earth. To be wise to know what that sphere is, 
 to accept it, and keep to it, and be content with it diligently, 
 perseveringly, thankfully, submissively, to do its work and bear its 
 burdens, is one of our first duties a duty which in its discharge 
 will minister one of our simplest and purest joys. 
 
 The bloody head was grasped by the executioner and carried 
 into the king's presence, and given to the damsel ; and she carried 
 it to her mother. The sense of sated vengeance may for the 
 moment have filled the heart of Herodias with a grim and devilish 
 joy ; but those pale lips those fixed and glazed eyes that livid 
 countenance upon whose rigid features the shadow of its living 
 sternness is still resting, she cannot look long at them ; she waves 
 the ghastly object from her sight, to be borne away, and laid we 
 know not where. 
 
 The headless body had been left upon the prison floor. So 
 soon as they hear of what has happened, some of John's disciples 
 come and lift it up and bear it out sadly to burial ; and that last
 
 214 THE MINISTEY IN GALILEE. 
 
 office done, in their desolation and helplessness they followed the 
 instinct of that new faith which their Master's teaching had inspired 
 they went and told Jesus. They did what in all our sorrows we 
 should do : they went and told him who can most fully sympathise, 
 and who alone can thoroughly and abidingly comfort and sustain. 
 
 THE FEEDING OF THE FIVE THOUSAND, AND THE 
 
 WALKING UPON THE WATER. 
 MATT. xiv. 13-33 ; MARK vi. 30-52 ; LUKE ix. 10-17 ; JOHN vi. 1-21. 
 
 HEROD first heard of Jesus immediately after the Baptist's death. 
 While some said that this Jesus now so much spoken of was Elias, 
 or one of the Prophets, there were others about the Tetrarch who 
 suggested that he was John risen from the dead. Herod had little 
 real faith, but that did not prevent his lying open enough to super- 
 stitious fancies. He was ill at ease about what he had done on his 
 birthday feast haunted by fears that he could not shake off. The 
 suggestion about Jesus fell in with these fears, and helped in a way 
 to soothe them. And so, after some perplexity and doubt, at last 
 he adopted it, and proclaimed it to be his own conviction, saying 
 to his servants, as if with a somewhat lightened conscience, "This 
 is John, whom I beheaded : he is risen from the dead : and, there- 
 fore, mighty works do show forth themselves in him" John had 
 done no mighty works so long as Herod knew him, but now, in 
 this new estate, he had risen to a higher level, to which he, Herod, 
 had helped to elevate him he would like to see him in the new 
 garb. 
 
 The disciples of John, who came and told Jesus of their master's 
 death, had to tell him, also, of the strange credulity and curiosity 
 of Herod. We are left to imagine the impression their report 
 created. It came at the very time when the twelve had returned 
 from their short and separate excursions, and when, as the fruit of 
 the divided and multiplied agency that had been exerted, so many 
 were coming and going out and in among the re-assembled band, 
 that "they had no leisure," we are told, "so much as to eat." 1 
 For himself and for them, Jesus desired now a little quiet and 
 seclusion. For himself that he might ponder over a death pro- 
 phetic of his own, the occurrence of which made, as we shall see, 
 an epoch in his ministry. For them that they might have some 
 respite from accumulated fatigue and toil. His own purpose fixed, 
 he invited them to join him in its execution, saying to them, " Come 
 i Mark vi. 21.
 
 THE FEEDING OF THE FIVE THOUSAND. 215 
 
 ye yourselves into a desert place and rest a while." Such a desert 
 place as would afford the seclusion that they sought, they had not 
 to go far to find. Over-against Capernaum, across the lake, in the 
 district running up northward to Bethsaida, are plenty of lonely 
 enough places to choose among. They take boat to row across. 
 The wind blows fresh from the north-west ; for shelter, they hug 
 the shore. Their departure had been watched by the crowd, and 
 now, when they see how close to the land they keep, and how slow 
 the progress is they make, a great multitude out of all the cities 
 embracing, in all likelihood, many of those companies which had 
 gathered to go up to the Passover run on foot along the shore. 
 A less than two hours' walk carries them to Bethsaida, at the 
 northern extremity of the lake. There they cross the Jordan, and 
 enter upon that large and uninhabited plain that slopes down to 
 the lake, on its north-eastern shores. Another hour or so carries 
 them to the spot at which Christ and his Apostles land, where 
 many, having outstripped the boat, are ready to receive them, and 
 where more and more still come, bearing their sick along with 
 them. It was somewhat of a trial to have the purpose of the 
 voyage apparently thus baffled, the seclusion sought after thus 
 violated ; but if felt at all, it sat light upon a heart which, turning 
 away from the thought of self, was filled with compassion for those 
 who were " as sheep not having a shepherd." Retiring to a neigh- 
 bouring mountain, Jesus sits down and teaches, and heals ; and so 
 the hours of the afternoon pass by. 
 
 But now another kind of solicitude seizes on the disciples. 
 They may not have been as patient of the defeat of their Master's 
 purpose as he was himself. They may have grudged to see the 
 hours that he had destined to repose broken in upon and so fully 
 occupied. True, they had little to do themselves but listen, and 
 wait, and watch. The crowd grew, however; stream followed 
 stream, and poured itself out upon the mountain side. The day 
 declined ; the evening shadows lengthened ; yet, as if never satisfied, 
 that vast company still clung to Jesus, and made no movement to 
 depart. The disciples grew anxious. They came at last to Jesus, 
 and said, " This is a desert place, and the time is now past : send 
 the multitude away, that they may go into the country round 
 about, and into the villages, and lodge, and buy bread for them- 
 selves, for they have nothing to eat." " They need not depart," 
 said Jesus ; " give you to them to eat." Turning to Philip, a 
 native of Bethsaida, one well acquainted with the adjoining district, 
 Jesus saith in an inquiring tone, "Whence shall we buy bread, 
 that these may eat ? " Philip runs his eye over the great assem- 
 blage, and making a rough estimate of what would be required, he 
 answered, " Two hundred penny-worth of bread would not be 
 sufficient for them, that every one might get a little ; shall we go
 
 216 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 and buy as much ?" Jesus asked how much food they had among 
 themselves, without needing to go and make any further purchase. 
 Andrew, another native of Bethsaida, who had been scrutinising 
 the crowd, discovering some old acquaintances, said, " There is a 
 lad here, who has five barley loaves and two small fishes ; but 
 what are they among so many ?" " Bring them to me," said Jesus. 
 They brought them. "Make the men," he said, "sit down by 
 fifties in a company" an order indicative of our Lord's design 
 that there might be no confusion, and that the attention of all 
 might be directed to what he was about to do. The season was 
 favourable it was the full spring-tide of the year ; the place was 
 convenient much green grass covering the broad and gentle slope 
 that stretched away from the base of the mountain. The marshal- 
 ling of five thousand men, besides women and children, into such 
 an orderly array, must have taken some time. The people, how- 
 ever, quietly consented to be so arranged, and company after com- 
 Cy sat down, till the whole were seated in the presence of the 
 d, who all the while has stood in silence watching the operation 
 with that scanty stock of provisions in his hand. All eyes are now 
 upon him. He begins to speak ; he prays ; he blesses the five 
 loaves and the two fishes, breaks them, divides them among the 
 twelve, and directs them to go and distribute them among the 
 others. 
 
 And now, among those thousands sitting there and ranged so 
 that all can see what is going on the mystery of their feeding 
 begins to show itself. There were one hundred companies of fifty, 
 besides the women and children. In each Apostle's hand, as he 
 takes his portion from the hand of Jesus, there is not more than 
 would meet one man's need. Yet, as the distribution by the twelve 
 begins, there is enough to give what looks like a sufficient portion 
 to each of the hundred men who sits at the head of his company. 
 He gets it, and, little enough as it seems for himself, he is told to 
 divide it, and give the half of it to his neighbour, to be dealt with 
 in like fashion. Each man in the ranks, as he begins to break, 
 finds that the half that he got at first grows into a whole in the 
 very act of dividing and bestowing ; the small initial supply grows 
 and multiplies in the transmission from hand to hand. All eat 
 all are satisfied. " Gather up," said Jesus, as he saw some unused 
 food lying scattered upon the ground, " the fragments that remain, 
 that nothing be lost." They do ; and while one basket could hold 
 the five loaves and the two fishes, it now takes twelve to hold these 
 fragments. 
 
 Of the nature and purpose of this great miracle, we shall have 
 something to say hereafter. Meanwhile, let us notice its immediate 
 effect. One of its singularities, as compared with other miracles of 
 our Lord, was this : that such a vast multitude were all at once not
 
 THE FEEDING OF THE FIVE THOUSAND. .217 
 
 only spectators of it, but participators of its benefits. Seven or 
 eight thousand hungry men, women, and children sit down upon 
 a hill-side, and there before their eyes, for an hour or two full 
 leisure given them to contemplate and reflect the spectacle goes 
 on, of a few loaves and fishes, under Christ's blessing, and by some 
 mysterious acting of his great power, expanding in their hands till 
 they are all more than satisfied. Each sees the wonder, and shares 
 in the result. It is not like a miracle, however great, wrought 
 instantly upon a single man. Such a miracle the same number of 
 men, women, and children might see, indeed, but could not all see 
 as each saw this. The impression here of a very marvellous exhi- 
 bition of the Divine power, so near akin to that of creative energy, 
 was one so broadly, so evenly, so slowly, and so deeply made, that 
 it looks to us just what we might have expected when the thousands 
 rise from their seats, when all is over, and say one to another, what 
 they had never got the length of saying previously, " This is of a 
 truth that Prophet that should come into the world." No longer 
 any doubt or vagueness in their faith no longer a question with 
 them which prophet or what kind of prophet he was. He is none 
 other than their Messiah, their Prince. He who can do that which 
 they have just seen him do, what could be beyond his power ? He 
 may not himself be willing to come forward, assert his right, exert 
 his power but they will do it for him they will do it now ; they 
 will take him at once, and force him to be their king. Jesus sees 
 the incipient action of that leaven which, if allowed to work, would 
 lead on to some act of violence. He sees that the leaven of earth- 
 liness and mere Jewish pride and ambition has entered even among 
 the twelve, who, as they see and hear what is going on, appear not 
 unwilling to take part with the multitude. It is time for him to 
 interfere and prevent any such catastrophe. He calls the twelve 
 to him, and directs them to embark immediately, to go alone and 
 leave him there, to row back to Capernaum, where, in the course of 
 the night or the next morning, he might join them. A strange 
 and unwelcome proposal for why should they be parted, and 
 where was their master to go, or what was he to do, in the long 
 hours of that lowering night that was coming down in darkness and 
 storm upon the hills and lake ? They remonstrate ; but with a per- 
 emptoriness and decision, the very rarity of which gave it all the 
 greater power, he overrules their remonstrances, and constrains 
 them to get into the boat and leave him behind. Turning to the 
 multitude, whose plot about taking and making him a king, taken 
 up by his twelve chief followers, this transaction had interrupted, 
 he dismisses them in such a way, with such words of power, that 
 they at once disperse. 
 
 And now he is alone. Alone he goes up into a mountain alone 
 he prays there. The darkness deepens ; the tempest rises ; mid-
 
 218 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 night comes with its gusts and gloom. There somewhere on that 
 mountain, sheltered or exposed there, for five or six hours, till 
 the fourth watch of the night, till after dawn Jesus holds his 
 secret and close fellowship with Heaven. Into the privacies of those 
 secluded hours of his devotion we presume not to intrude. But if, 
 as we shall presently see was actually the case, this threatened out- 
 break of a blinded popular impulse in his favour the attempt thus 
 made, and for the moment thwarted, to take him by force and 
 make him a king created a marked crisis in the history of our 
 Lord's dealings with the multitudes, as well as of their disposition 
 and conduct towards him, this night of lonely prayer is to be put 
 alongside of the other instances in which, upon important emer- 
 gencies, our Saviour had recourse to privacy and prayer, teaching us, 
 by his great example, where our refuge and our strength in all like 
 circumstances are to be found. 
 
 Meanwhile it has fared ill with the disciples on the lake. Two 
 or three hours' hearty labour at the oar might have carried them 
 over to Capernaum. But the adverse tempest is too strong for 
 them. The whole night long they toil among the waves, against 
 the wind. The day had dawned, a dim light from the east was 
 spreading over the water ; they had rowed about five-and-twenty 
 or thirty furlongs were rather more than half-way across the lake 
 when, treading on the troubled waves, as on a level, solid pavement, 
 a figure is seen approaching, drawing nearer and nearer to the boat. 
 Their toil is changed to terror the vigorous hand relaxes its grasp 
 the oars stand still in the air or are but feebly plied the boat 
 rocks heavily a cry of terror comes from the frightened crew 
 they think it is a spirit. He made as though he would have passed 
 them by they cry out the more. For though so like their Master 
 as they now see the form to be, yet if he go past them in silence, it 
 cannot be other than his ghost. But now he turns, and, dispelling 
 at once all doubt and fear, he says, " Be of good cheer ; it is I, 
 be not afraid." He is but a few yards from the boat, when, leaping 
 at once as was no strange thing with him from one extreme to 
 the other, Peter says, " Lord, if it be thou " or rather, for we 
 cannot think that he had any doubt as to Christ's identity 
 " Since it is thou, let me come unto thee on the water." Why not 
 wait till Jesus comes into the boat ? Because he is so pleased, so 
 proud to see his Master tread with such victorious footstep the rest- 
 less devouring deep ; because he wants to share the triumph of the 
 deed to walk side by side, before his brothers, with Jesus, though 
 it be but a step or two. 
 
 He gets the permission he makes the attempt is at first 
 successful. So long as he keeps his eye on Jesus so long as that 
 faith with prompted the proposal, that sense of dependence in 
 which i he first step out of the boat and down upon the deep was
 
 THE WALKING UPON THE WATER. 219 
 
 taken, remain unshaken all goes well. But he has scarce moved 
 off from the boat when he looks away from Christ, and out over 
 the tempestuous sea. The wind is not more boisterous the waves 
 are not higher or rougher than they were the moment before but 
 he was not thinking of them then. He was looking at he was 
 thinking of he was hanging upon his Master then. Now he 
 looks at thinks only of wind and wave. His faith begins to 
 fail fearing, he begins to sink sinking, he fixes his eye afresh 
 and most earnestly on Jesus. The eye affecting the heart, re- 
 kindling faith in the very bosom of despair, he cries out, " Lord, 
 save me." It was the cry of weakness of wild alarm, yet it had 
 in it one grain of gold. It was a cry to Jesus as to the only one 
 that now could help some true faith mingling now with all the fear. 
 
 The help so sought for came at once. "Immediately Jesus 
 stretched forth his hand and caught him, and said unto him, thou 
 of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt ? " At the grasp of that 
 helping hand at the rebuke of that chiding voice, let us believe 
 that faith came back into Peter's breast, and that not borne up or 
 dragged through the waters, but, walking by his Master's side he 
 made his way back to the little vessel where his comrades were, 
 to take his place among them a wiser and humbler man. As soon 
 as Jesus and he had entered the vessel, we are told that the wind 
 not only ceased, but that " immediately the ship was at the land 
 whither they went." Of those who were in the ship that night 
 some were exceedingly, but stupidly amazed, their hearts hardened 
 untouched by the multiplied miracles l of the last twelve hours, 
 others came and worshipped Jesus, saying " Of a truth thou art 
 the Son of God" one of the first instances in which this great 
 title, of which we shall have so much to say hereafter, was applied 
 to him. 
 
 We may divide the miracles of our Saviour into two classes : 
 1. Those wrought in or upon nature. 2. Those wrought in or upon 
 man. Of the thirty-three miracles, of which some detailed account 
 is given us in the Gospels, nine belong to the former and twenty- 
 four to the latter class. But this gives no true idea of the mere 
 numerical ratio of the one kind of miracles to the other. It is but 
 a very few of the many thousand cases of healing on the part of 
 Jesus, of which any record has been preserved ; whilst it seems pro- 
 bable that all the instances have been recounted in which there was 
 any intervention with the laws or processes of the material universe. 
 It is remarkable at least, that of the small number of this class a 
 repetition of the same miracle is twice recorded that of the multi- 
 plying of bread and of an extraordinary draught of fishes. Looking 
 broadly at these two classes of miracles, it might appear like a 
 discriminating difference between them that the one, the miracles 
 i Mark vL 61, 52.
 
 220 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 on nature, were more works of power, the miracles on man more 
 works of love. And admitting for the moment the existence of 
 some ground for this distinction, it pleases us to think what a vast 
 preponderance Christ's works of love had over his works of power. 
 But it is only to a very limited extent that we are disposed to admit 
 the truth of this distinction. We know of no miracle of our Lord 
 that was a mere miracle of power a mere display of his omnipo- 
 tence a mere sign wrought to prove that he was almighty. Every 
 miracle of our Saviour carried with it a lesson of wisdom gave an 
 exhibition of his character was a type in some lower sphere of his 
 working as the Eedeemer of our souls. In a far more intimate 
 sense than any of them was an outward proof of his Divine autho- 
 rity, they were all instances, or illustrations in more shadowy or 
 more substantial form, of the remedial dispensations of his mercy 
 and grace in and upon the sinful children of men wrought by him, 
 and recorded now for us far more to teach us what, as our Saviour, 
 he is what he has already done, and what he is prepared to do for 
 us spiritually than to put into our hands evidence of the divinity 
 of his mission. 
 
 Let us take the two miracles that we have now before us, both 
 of which belong to the first and smaller class the miracles on 
 nature. Had it been the purpose of our Lord to make a mere 
 display of his omnipotence in the feeding of five thousand men, one 
 can readily imagine of its being done in a far more visible and 
 striking style than the one chosen. He could have had the men, 
 women, and children go and gather up the stones of the desert or 
 of the lake-side, and as they did so could have turned each stone 
 into bread. Or he could have brought forth the five loaves, and in 
 presence of all the people have multiplied them into five thousand 
 by a wave of his hand by a word of his power. He chose rather, 
 here as elsewhere might we not say as everywhere ? to veil the 
 workings of his omnipotence to hide, as it were, the working of 
 his hand and power, mingling it with that of human hands and 
 common earthly elements. How much more it was our Lord's 
 design to convey a lesson of instruction than to give a display of his 
 almightiness, we shall better be able to judge when we have before 
 us his own discourse, illustrative of this very miracle, delivered on 
 the following day. We shall then see how apt, and singular, and 
 recondite a symbolism of what he spiritually is to all true believers 
 lay wrapped up in his blessing, and breaking, and dividing the bread. 
 
 But further still, was not the agency of all his ministering 
 servants, of all his true disciples, most truly, vividly, picturesquely 
 represented in what happened upon that mountain side 1 " Give 
 ye them to eat : " such were Christ's words to his apostles, as he 
 handed to each of them his portion of the five loaves and the two 
 fishes. Take and break and give to one another : such were the
 
 THE WALKING UPON THE WATER. 221 
 
 apostles' words to the multitude. And as each took and broke, the 
 half that he kept for himself grew within the hand that broke it, 
 as did in turn the other half he handed to his neighbour. Such 
 was the rule and method of the distribution and multiplication of 
 the bread given to the thousands on the desert place of Bethsaida. 
 Such is the rule and method of the distribution and multiplication 
 of the bread of life. 
 
 Let us gladly and gratefully accept the lesson that the miracle 
 conveys. Let us believe, and act upon the belief, that the readier 
 we are to distribute of that bread to others, the fuller and the richer 
 shall be our own supply that we do not lose but gain by giving 
 here that there is that scattereth here and yet increaseth. From 
 hand to hand let the life-giving bread be passed till all the hungry 
 and the perishing get their portion till all eat and are satisfied. 
 
 Or look again at the other miracle that of walking upon the 
 water. It was indeed a miracle of power, but one also of pity too, 
 and love. He came in the morning watch, far more to relieve from 
 toil and protect from danger his worn-out and exposed disciples, 
 than merely to show that the sovereignty over nature was in his 
 hands. Nor did he let that coming pass without an incident 
 pregnant with spiritual instruction to us also ; for is there not much 
 in each of us of Peter's weakness ? We may not have his first 
 courage or faith for there was much of both in the stepping out 
 of the boat ; or we may not share in his impetuousness and over- 
 confidence ; and so we may not throw ourselves among the waves 
 and winds. But often nevertheless they are around us ; and too 
 apt are we, when so it happens with us, to look at them to think 
 of our difficulties and our trials and our temptations, till, Christ 
 forgotten and out of sight, we begin to sink, happy only if in our 
 sinking we turn to him, and his hand be stretched out to save us. 
 In his extremity, it was not Peter's laying hold of Christ, it was 
 Christ's laying hold of him that bore him up. And in our 
 extremity it is not our hold of Jesus, but his of us, on which our 
 trust resteth. Our hand is weak, but his is strong ; ours so readily 
 relaxes too often lets go its hold ; but his none can pluck out of 
 it, and none that are in it can perish. 
 
 XI. 
 
 THE DISCOURSE IN THE SYNAGOGUE OF CAPERNAUM. 
 JOHN VL 22-71. 
 
 WHEN, after a single day's absence on the other side of the lake, 
 Jesus and his disciples returned to the land of Gennesaret, so soon 
 as they were come out of the ship, " straightway," we are told, 
 " they knew him, and ran through that whole region round about,
 
 222 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 and sent out into all that country, and brought to him all that were 
 diseased, and began to carry about in beds those that were sick ; 
 and whithersoever he entered, into villages, or cities, or country, they 
 laid the sick in the streets, and besought him that they might 
 touch if it were but the border of his garment : and as many as 
 touched him were made whole." 1 
 
 Never before had there appeared to be so great and so lively an 
 interest in his teaching, or so large a measure of faith in his healing 
 
 Eower. But behind this show of things Jesus saw that there was 
 ttle or no readiness to receive him in his highest character and 
 office. Some were prepared to acknowledge him as Elias, or one of 
 the prophets ; some, like Herod, to hail him as the Baptist risen 
 from the dead ; others, like the multitude on the lake-side, to take 
 him by force and make him a king ; but the notions of all alike 
 concerning him and his mission were narrow, natural, earthly, 
 selfish, unspirituaL It is at this very culminating point of his 
 wonderful apparent popularity, that Jesus begins to speak and act 
 as if the hope were gone of other and higher notions of himself and 
 of the kingdom of God being entertained by the nation at large. 
 Hitherto he had spoken much about that kingdom, and but little 
 about himself ; leaving his place therein to be inferred from what 
 he said and did. He had spoken much about the dispositions that 
 were to be cultivated, the duties that were to be done, the trials 
 that were to be borne, the blessedness that was to be enjoyed by 
 those admitted into the kingdom of which earlier teaching St. 
 Matthew had preserved a full and perfect specimen in the Sermon 
 on the Mount ; but he had said little or nothing of the one living 
 central spring of light and life and holiness and joy within that 
 kingdom, giving to it its being, character, and strength. In plainer 
 or in clearer guise he had proclaimed to the multitude those outer 
 things of the kingdom whose setting forth should have allured them 
 into it ; but its inner things had either been kept back from sight, 
 or presented in forms draped around with a thick mantle of obscurity. 
 He had never once hinted at his own approaching death as needful to 
 its establishment, as laying, in fact, the foundation upon which it 
 was to rest ; nor had he spoken of the singular ties by which all its 
 subjects were to be united personally to him, and to which their 
 entrance and standing and privileges within the kingdom were to 
 be wholly due. Now, however, for the first time in public, he 
 alludes to his death, in such a way indeed as few if any of his 
 hearers could then understand, yet one that assigned to it its true 
 place in the economy of our redemption. Now for the first time in 
 public he speaks openly and most emphatically of what he is and 
 must be to all who are saved ; proclaiming a supreme attachment 
 to himself, an entire and exclusive dependence on himself, a vital 
 i Matt. xiv. 35 ; Mark vi. 54-56.
 
 THE DISCOURSE IN THE SYNAGOGUE OF CAPERNAUM. 223 
 
 incorporating union with himself, to be the primary and essential 
 characteristic of all true subjects of that kingdom which he came 
 down from heaven to set up on earth. From this time he gives up 
 apparently the project of gaining new adherents ; withdraws from the 
 crowds, forsakes the more populous districts of Galilee, devotes 
 himself to his disciples, retires with them to remote parts of the 
 country, discourses with them about his approaching decease, 
 unfolding as he had not done before, both publicly and privately, 
 the profounder mysteries of his person and of his work 
 
 To the discourse recorded by St. John in the sixth chapter of his 
 Gospel, the special interest attaches that it marks this transition 
 point in the teachings and actings of our Lord. The great body of 
 those miraculously fed upon the five loaves and the two fishes dis- 
 persed at the command of Christ, and sought their homes or new 
 camping grounds. A number, however, still lingered near the spot 
 where the miracle had been performed. They had seen the apostles 
 go off without Jesus. They had noticed that the boat they sailed 
 in was the only one that had left the shore. They expected to meet 
 Christ again next morning ; but, though they sought for him every- 
 where around, they could not find him. He must have taken some 
 means to follow and rejoin his disciples, though what these were 
 they cannot fancy. In the course of the forenoon some boats come 
 over from Tiberias, of which they take advantage to recross the 
 lake. After searching for him in the land of Gennesaret they find 
 him at last in the synagogue of Capernaum. The edge of their 
 wonder still fresh, they say to him, "Kabbi, when earnest thou 
 hither?" a mere idle question of curiosity, to which he gives no 
 answer. A far weightier question for them than any as to the time 
 or the manner in which Jesus had got here was, why were they so 
 eagerly following him ? This question he will help them to answer. 
 "Verily, verily," is our Lord's reply, "ye seek me, not because ye 
 saw the miracles, but because ye did eat of the loaves and were 
 filled." The miracle of the preceding evening had introduced a new 
 element of attractive power. The multitudes who had previously 
 followed Jesus to get their sick healed, and to see the wonders that 
 he did, were now tempted to follow him in the hope of having that 
 miracle repeated their hunger again relieved. Sad in heart as he 
 contrasted their eagerness in this direction with their apathy in 
 another, Jesus said to them, "Labour not for the meat which 
 perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life, 
 which the Son of man shall give you ; for him hath God the Father 
 sealed." A dim yet somewhat true idea of what Christ means 
 dawns upon the minds of his hearers. Accepting his rebuke, per- 
 ceiving that he points to something required of them in order to 
 promote their higher and eternal interests ; knowing no other way 
 in which this could be done than by rendering some service to God,
 
 224 THE MINISTEY IN GALILEE. 
 
 but altogether failing to notice the allusion to the Son of man and 
 what they were to get from him, "What shall we do," they say, 
 " that we may work the works of God 1 " tell us what these works 
 are with which God will be most pleased, by the doing of which we 
 may attain the everlasting life. "This," said Jesus, "is the work 
 of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent." It is not by 
 many works, nor indeed, strictly speaking, by anything looked at 
 as mere work, that you are to gain that end. There is one thing 
 here which primarily, and above all others, you are called to do : to 
 believe on him whom the Father hath sent unto you ; to believe on 
 me : not simply to credit what I say, but to put your supreme, 
 undivided trust in me as the procurer and dispenser of that kind of 
 food by which alone your souls can be nourished up into the life 
 everlasting. It was a large and very peculiar demand on Christ's 
 part, to put believing on himself before and above all other things 
 required. Struck with its singularity, they say unto him, "What 
 sign showest thou, that we may see and believe thee 1 what dost 
 thou work ]" If thou art really what thou apparently claimest to 
 be greater than all that have gone before thee, greater even than 
 Moses show us some sign; not one like those already shown, 
 which, wonderful as they have been, have been but signs on earth ; 
 show us one from heaven like that of Moses, " when our fathers did 
 eat manna in the desert, as it is written, He gave them bread from 
 heaven to eat." " You ask me " such in effect is our Lord's reply 
 "to prove my superiority to Moses by doing something greater 
 than he ever did ; you point to that supply of the manna as one of 
 the greatest of his miracles. But in doing so you make a twofold 
 mistake. It was not Moses that gave that bread from heaven. It 
 came from a higher than he from him who is my Father, and who 
 giveth still the true bread from heaven ; not such bread as the manna 
 which was distilled as the dew in the lower atmosphere of the earth, 
 which did not give life, but only sustained it, and that only for a 
 limited time and a limited number. The true ' bread of God is that 1 
 which cometh down from heaven, and giveth life unto the world.'" 
 Hitherto, Jesus had been speaking of a food or bread which he 
 and his Father were ready to impart ; describing it as superior to 
 the manna, inasmuch as it came from a higher region and discharged 
 a higher office, supplying the wants, not of a nation, but of the 
 world ; yet still speaking of it as if it were a separate outward thing. 
 Imagining that it was something external, that eye could see, or 
 hand could handle, or mouth could taste, to which such wonderful 
 qualities belonged, with a greater earnestness and reverence than 
 they had yet shown, his hearers say to him, " Evermore give us this 
 bread." The time has come to drop that form of speech which 
 Jesus hitherto has used ; to cease speaking abstractedly or figura- 
 1 Not "he," as in the Authorised Version.
 
 THE DISCOURSE IN THE SYNAGOGUE OF CAPERNAUM. 225 
 
 tively about a food or bread, to tell them plainly and directly, so 
 that there could be no longer any misunderstanding, who and what 
 the meat was which endureth unto everlasting life. " Then said he 
 unto them, I am the bread of life : he that cometh to me shall never 
 hunger, and he that believeth on me shall never thirst." I am not 
 simply the procurer or the dispenser of this bread, I am more I 
 am the bread. If you would have it, you must not only come to 
 me for it, but take me as it. And if you do so if you come to me 
 and believe on me you shall find in me that which will fully and 
 abidingly meet and satisfy all the imvard wants and cravings of 
 your spiritual nature, all the hunger and the thirst of the soul. Bring 
 these to me, and it shall not be as when you try to quench or 
 satisfy them elsewhere with earthly things, the appetite growing 
 ever the more urgent while the things it feeds on become ever 
 less capable of gratifying. Bring the hunger and the thirst of your 
 soul to me, and they shall be filled. But ye will not do so, ye have 
 not done so. " Ye have seen me, and believe not." It may look 
 thus as if my mission had failed, as if few or none would come 
 to me that they might have life; but this is my comfort in the 
 midst of all the present and prevailing unbelief, that, " all that the 
 Father giveth me shall come to me," their coming to me is as sure 
 as their donation to me by the Father. But as sure also as is his 
 fixed purpose is this fixed fact, " Him that cometh to me I will in 
 no wise cast out;" for I came down from heaven on no separate or 
 random errand of my own, to throw myself with unfixed purposes 
 amid unforeseen events, to mould them to unknown or uncertain 
 issues. I came " not to do mine own will, but the will of him that 
 sent me ;" and that will of his I carry out in rejecting none that 
 come to me, in throwing my arms wide open to welcome every one 
 who feels himself dying of a hunger of the heart that he cannot get 
 satisfied, in taking him and caring for him, and providing for him, 
 not letting him perish no part of him perish, not even that which 
 is naturally perishable ; but taking it also into my charge to change 
 at last the corruptible into the incorruptible, the natural into the 
 spiritual, redeeming and restoring the entire man, clothing him with 
 the garment meet for a blessed and glorious immortality ; for " this 
 is the Father's will which hath sent me, that of all which he hath 
 given me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the 
 last day." Let me say it once again, that no man may think there 
 lies any obstacle to his salvation in a pre-formed purpose or decree 
 of my Father, that all may know how free their access to me is, 
 and how sure and full and enduring the life is that they shall find 
 in me. " And this is the will of him that sent me, that every one 
 that seeth the Son and believeth on him may have everlasting life; 
 and I will raise him up at the last day." l 
 
 1 Compare John vi. 39 and 40. 
 P
 
 226 THE MINISTKY IN GALILEE. 
 
 Overlooking all the momentous truths, all the gracious assur- 
 ances and promises that these words of Jesus conveyed, his hearers 
 fix upon a single declaration that he had made. Ignorant of the 
 great mystery of his birth, they murmur among themselves, saying, 
 " Is not this Jesus the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we 
 know 1 How is it, then, that he saith, I came down from heaven ? " 
 Jesus does not answer these two questions, any more than he had 
 answered the question they had put to him at first as to how he had 
 got to Capernaum. He sees and accepts the offence that had been 
 taken, the prejudice that had been created, and he does nothing to 
 remove it. He enters into no' explanation of the saying that he 
 had come down from heaven; but he will tell these murmurers 
 and objectors still more plainly than he has yet done why it is 
 that they stand at such a distance and look so askance upon him. 
 " Murmur not among yourselves." Hope not by any such questions 
 as you are putting to one another to solve the difficulties that can 
 so easily be raised about this or that particular saying of mine. 
 What you want is not a solution of such difficulties, which are, after 
 all, the fruits and not the causes of your unbelief. The root of that 
 unbelief lies deeper than where you would place it. It lies in the 
 whole frame and habit of your heart and life. The bent of your 
 nature is away from me. You want the desires, the affections, the 
 aims, the motives which would create within you the appetite and 
 relish for that bread which comes down from heaven. You want 
 that inward secret drawing of the heart which also cometh from 
 heaven, for "no man can come to me except the Father draw him" 
 a drawing this, however, that if sought will never be withheld ; 
 if imparted, will prevail, for "it is written in the prophets, And 
 they shall be all taught of God. Every man, therefore, that hath 
 heard and learned of the Father cometh unto me." Not that you 
 are to imagine that you can go to him as you can go to me, that 
 you can see him without seeing me, can hear him without hearing 
 me. " Not that any man hath seen the Father, save he which is of 
 God, he hath seen the Father." It is in seeing me that you see the 
 Father. It is in hearing me that you hear the Father. It is 
 through me that the drawing of the Father cometh. Open eye and 
 ear then, look unto me, hear, and your soul shall live. " Verily, 
 verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me hath everlasting 
 life." He hath it now, he hath it in me. " I am that bread of life." 
 A very different kind of bread from that of which you boast as once 
 given of old through Moses. " Your fathers did eat manna in the 
 wilderness, and are dead." The manna had no life in itself. If 
 not instantly used, it corrupted and perished. It had power to 
 sustain life for a time, but none to ward off death. The bread from 
 heaven is life-giving and death-destroying. "This is the bread 
 which cometh down from heaven, that a man may eat thereof and
 
 THE DISCOURSE IN THE SYNAGOGUE OF CAPERNAUM. 227 
 
 not die. I am the living bread ; if any man eat of this bread he 
 shall live for ever, and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which 
 I will give for the life of the world." 
 
 However puzzled about the expression of his coming down from 
 heaven, Christ's hearers might readily enough have understood him 
 as taking occasion from the recent miracle to represent himself, the 
 truths he taught, and the pattern life he led, as being for the soul 
 of man what the bread is for his body. But this change of the 
 bread into flesh, or rather, this identifying of the two, this speaking 
 of his own flesh as yet to be given for the life of the world, and 
 when so given to be the bread of which so much had been already 
 said, startles and perplexes them more than ever. Not simply 
 murmuring, but striving among themselves, they say, "How can 
 this man give us his flesh to eat 1 " a question quite akin to that 
 which Mcodemus put when he said, " How can a man be born again 
 when he is old?" And treated by Jesus in like manner, by a 
 repetition, in a still more stringent form, of the statement to which 
 exception had been taken : " Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except 
 ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no 
 life in you." To speak of eating his flesh was sufficiently revolting 
 to those who understood him literally ; but to Jewish ears, to those 
 who had been so positively prohibited from all use of blood as food, 
 how inexplicable, how almost impious, must the speaking of drink- 
 ing his blood have been ! Indifferent to the effect, our Lord goes on 
 to repeat and reiterate : " Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my 
 blood hath eternal life ; and I will raise him up at the last day. 
 For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He 
 that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I 
 in him. As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the 
 Father : so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me." 
 
 Such, as I have attempted in the way of paraphrase to bring 
 them out to view, were the most salient points in our Lord's address, 
 and such the links by which they were united. Among all our 
 Lord's discourses in Galilee this one stands by itself distinguished 
 from all the others by the manner in which Christ speaks of him- 
 self. Nowhere else do you find him so entirely dropping all reserve 
 as to his own position, character, services, and claims. Let him be 
 the Eternal Son of the Father who veiled the glories of Divinity, 
 and assumed the garb of mortal flesh that he might serve and suffer 
 and die for us men and our redemption, then all that he here 
 asserts, requires, and promises appears simple, natural, appropriate. 
 Let the great truths ol the Incarnation and Atonement be rejected, 
 then how shall this discourse be shielded from the charges of 
 egotism and arrogance ? But Christ's manner of speaking to the 
 people is here as unprecedented as the way of speaking about him- 
 self. Here also there is the absence of all reserve. Instead of
 
 228 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 avoiding what he knew would repel, he seems rather to have 
 obtruded it : answering no questions, giving no explanations, 
 modifying no statements; unsparingly exposing the selfishness, 
 ungodliness, unbelief of his auditors. The strong impression is 
 created that by bringing forth the most hidden mysteries of the 
 kingdom and clothing these in forms fitted to give offence, it was 
 his purpose to test and sift, not the rude mass of his Galilean 
 hearers only, but the circle of his own discipleship. Such at least 
 was its effect ; for " many of his disciples, when they heard this, 
 said, This is a hard saying; who can hear it?" Jesus does not 
 treat their murmuring exactly as he had that of the Jews ; turning 
 to them, he says, " Doth this about my coming down from heaven 
 offend you ?" but " what and if ye shall see the Son of man ascend 
 up where he was before 1" Doth this about eating my flesh and 
 drinking my blood offend you 1 " It is the spirit that quickeneth," 
 the mere flesh without the spirit profiteth nothing, hath no life- 
 giving power. It is by no external act whatever, by no outward 
 ordinance or service, that you are to attain to the life everlasting. 
 It is by hearing, believing, spiritually coming to me, spiritually 
 feeding upon me, that this is to be reached. " The words that I 
 speak unto you, they are the spirit and they are the life." Still I 
 know, for I must speak as plainly to you as to the multitude, " that 
 there are some of you that believe not. Therefore said I unto you, 
 that no man can come unto me, except it were given unto him of 
 my Father." To have hard things said, and then to have the 
 incredulity they generated exposed in such a way and attributed to 
 such a cause, was what many could not bear ; and so from that 
 time many of his disciples went back and walked no more with 
 him. With infinite sadness, such a sorrow as he only could feel, 
 his eye and heart follow them as they go away ; but he lets them 
 go quietly and without further remonstrance ; then, turning to the 
 twelve, he says, " Will ye also go away 1" " Lord," is Peter's 
 prompt reply, " to whom shall we go ? Thou hast the words of 
 eternal life." What Jesus thought of this confession we shall see, 
 when not long afterwards it was repeated. Now he makes no 
 comment upon it ; but as one upon whose mind the last impression 
 of the day was that of sadness over so many who were alienated 
 from him, he closes the interview by saying, " Have not I chosen 
 you twelve, and one of you is a devil ?" 
 
 Such were its immediate original results. What would be the 
 effect of a first hearing or first reading of this discourse now ? We 
 cannot well answer the question; we have read and heard it so 
 often, its phrases are so familiar to our ears, the key to its darkest 
 sayings is in our hands. Nevertheless, are there not many to 
 whom some of its expressions wear a hard and repulsive aspect, 
 are felt, though they would scarcely acknowledge this to themselves,
 
 PHARISAIC TRADITIONS. 229 
 
 as overstrained and exaggerated? It is not possible indeed to 
 understand, much less to sympathise with and appreciate, the ful- 
 ness and richness of meaning involved in many of these expres- 
 sions, unless we look to our Lord's death as the great propitiation 
 for our sins, and have had some experience of the closeness, the 
 tenderness, the blessedness of that mystic bond which incorporates 
 each living member of the spiritual body with Christ the living 
 head. Had Jesus spoken of himself, simply and alone as the bread 
 of life, it had been possible to have understood him as setting forth 
 his instructions and his example as furnishing the best kind of 
 nutriment for the highest part of our nature. Even so strong a 
 phrase as his flesh being the bread might have been interpreted as 
 an allusion to his assumption of our nature, and to the benefits 
 flowing directly from the Incarnation. But when he speaks of his 
 flesh being given for the life of the world, when he speaks of the 
 drinking of his blood as well as of the eating of his flesh, pro- 
 nounces them to be the source at first and the support afterwards of 
 a life that cannot die, and that shall draw after it resurrection of 
 the body, it is impossible to put any rational construction upon 
 phrases like these other than that which sees in them a reference 
 to our Lord's atoning death as the spring and fountain of the new 
 spiritual life to which through him all true believers are begotten. 
 
 XII. 
 
 PHARISAIC TRADITIONS THE SYROPHCENICIAN WOMAN. 
 MATT. xv. 1-28 ; MARK vn. 1-30. 
 
 THE Pharisaic party was well organised, watchful, and intoler- 
 ant. Its chief seat was in the capital, but it kept up an active 
 correspondence with, and had its spies in, all the provinces. Its 
 bitter hostility, aiming at nothing short of his death, which had 
 driven Jesus from Jerusalem, tracked his footsteps all through his 
 Galilean ministry. At an early period of that ministry, Pharisees 
 from Jerusalem are seen obtruding themselves upon him, and now 
 as it draws near its close another company of envoys from the 
 capital appear. They come down after the Passover, inflamed by 
 the reports carried up to the Feast of the open rupture .that had 
 taken place between Christ and their brethren in Galilee. They 
 come to find out something to condemn, and they have not long to 
 wait. Watching the conduct of Christ and his disciples, they 
 notice what they think can be turned into a weighty accusation 
 against him before the people. Seizing upon some opportunity when 
 a considerable audience was present, they say to Jesus, " Why do 
 thy disciples transgress the traditions of the elders ? for they wash
 
 230 THE MINISTEY IN GALILEE. 
 
 not their hands when they eat bread." The oral or traditional 
 law, with its multiplied precepts and manifold observances which 
 had grown up around the written code, had come to be regarded as 
 of equal, nay, in some respects, of superior importance. It was the 
 wine, the rulers said, while the other was but the water. The 
 acknowledgment of its authority forming the peculiar distinctive 
 badge of Pharisaism, such a weight was attached to its observance 
 that breaches of it were looked upon as greater sins than breaches 
 of the written law. Among these was that of eating with unwashed 
 hands. What with Persians, Greeks, and Romans, was but a social 
 custom the neglect of which was only a social offence, had been 
 raised among the Jews by the traditions of the elders into a religious 
 duty, the neglect of which was an offence against God. And so 
 strict were they in the observance of the duty, that we read of a 
 Jew of the Pharisaic type who being imprisoned and put on a short 
 allowance of water, chose rather to die than not to apply part of 
 what was given to the washing of his hands before eating. We 
 can have now but an imperfect conception of how great the sin was 
 then thought to be with which those Pharisees from Jerusalem 
 charged publicly our Lord's disciples, aiming their real blow at him 
 by whose precept and example they had been taught to act as they 
 had done. " Why do thy disciples transgress the traditions of the 
 elders? for they wash not their hands when they eat bread." No 
 explanation is given no defence of his disciples is entered on. Our 
 Lord has ceased to deal with such questioners as being other than 
 malignant enemies. He answers their question only by another 
 "Why do ye transgress the commandment of God by your tradi- 
 tions?" And as they had specified an instance in which the tradi- 
 tions of the elders had been violated by his disciples, he in turn 
 specifies an instance in which they, by their traditions, had nullified 
 a commandment of God. No human duty was of clearer or more 
 stringent obligation than that by which a child was bound to honour, 
 love, and help his father and his mother. The command enforcing 
 the duty stood conspicuously enshrined among the precepts of the 
 Decalogue. But the elders in their traditions had found out a way 
 of reading it by which the selfishness, or the covetousness, or the 
 ill-will of a child might not only find room for exercise, but might 
 cloak that exercise under a religious garb. All that one who, from 
 any evil motive, desired to evade the obligation of assisting his 
 parents had to do, was to say Corban over that property on which 
 his parents might be supposed to have a claim, to declare it to be 
 consecrated bound over to the Lord, and he was free. Father or 
 mother might no longer ask or hope for anything at his hands. The 
 property might still be his. He might enjoy the life use of it ; but 
 the vow that destined it to God must come in before every other 
 claim. So it was that these traditionalists among the Jews of old
 
 PHARISAIC TRADITIONS. 231 
 
 quenched the instincts of nature, gave place to evil passions, and 
 broke one of the first and plainest of the Divine commands, all 
 under a pretence of piety. Nor has the spirit by which they were 
 animated in doing so ceased to operate; nor have we far to go 
 before an exact parallel can be found to the Jewish Corban practice, 
 in the conduct of those who, passing by the nearest relatives, whose 
 very poverty supplies one of the reasons why they are overlooked, 
 bequeath to charitable or religious purposes the money that they 
 cannot carry with them to the grave. Neither charity nor piety, 
 however broad and pretentious the aspects they take, the services 
 that they may seem to render, can ever excuse such a trampling 
 under foot of the primary ties of nature, and the moral duties 
 connected with them. And upon all those hospitals, and colleges, 
 and churches that have been erected and endowed by funds unnatu- 
 rally and improperly alienated from near and needy relatives, we 
 can but see that old Jewish word Corban engraved, and beneath it 
 the condemning sentence of our Lord " Thus have ye made the 
 commandment of God of none effect." 
 
 No further answer will our Lord give to the Pharisees than this 
 severe retort. But first to the multitude, and afterwards to his 
 disciples, he will say a word or two of that wherein all real defile- 
 ment consists not in the outward, but in the inward ; its source 
 and seat within, and not without. In the evil affections, desires, 
 and passions of the heart, in these and what comes out of them 
 pollution lies; not in eating with unwashed hands; nor in the 
 violation of any mere external conventional traditional usage. 
 
 Jesus had rolled back upon the Pharisees a weightier charge 
 than they had brought against his disciples. He had not hesitated 
 openly to denounce them to the people as hypocrites, applying to 
 them the words of the Prophet, " This people draweth nigh unto 
 me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips ; but their 
 heart is far from me." They were offended at being spoken to in 
 such a way. Shunning any further outbreak of their wrath, seek- 
 ing elsewhere now the rest and the seclusion that he had sought in 
 vain on the eastern side of the lake, Jesus retired to the borders of 
 Tyre and Sidon. He went there not to teach nor to heal, but to 
 enjoy a few days' quiet and repose in the lonely hilly region which 
 looks down upon the two ancient Phoenician cities. But he could 
 not be hid. The rumour of his arrival in the neighbourhood passed 
 over the borders of the Holy Land. It reached a poor afflicted 
 mother a widow, it may have been whose little daughter was 
 suffering under the frightful malady of possession. This woman, 
 we are told, was a Greek, a Syrophcenician by nation a Canaanite. 
 Phoenician was the general name given to a race whose colonies 
 were widely spread in very ancient times. One division of this 
 race occupied the country from which they were driven out by the
 
 232 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 Israelites ; and as that country bordered on Syria, they were called 
 Syrophcenicians by the Greeks and Komans. It was to this tribe 
 that the woman belonged. She was a daughter of that corrupt 
 stock whom the Jews were commissioned to exterminate. But, 
 besides being by nation a Canaanite, she was a Greek ; this word 
 describing not her country, but her creed. She was a heathen, an 
 idolatress all such, of whatever country, being then called Greeks 
 by the Jews. Such, then, by birth, by pedigree, by religious filth 
 and profession was this woman, the first and only Gentile a 
 Canaanite besides who made a direct personal appeal for help to 
 Christ. The only case of a like kind that meets us in the Galilean 
 ministry was that of the Eoman centurion. But he was half a Jew. 
 Moreover, living among Jews, he had his case presented to Jesus 
 by the rulers of the Jews, who had the plea to offer on his behalf, 
 that he loved their nation, and had built them a synagogue. Here, 
 however, is a Gentile, living among Gentiles, who has no Jewish 
 friends to intercede for her, no services rendered to the Jewish 
 people to point to. It is a pure and simple case of one belonging 
 to the great world of heathendom coming to Jesus. How is she 
 received ? Her case, as she presents it to his notice, is of the very 
 kind that we should have said he would be quickest to sympathise 
 with and relieve. Meeting him by the way, she cries out, in all the 
 eagerness of passionate entreaty, " Have mercy upon me, Lord, 
 thou son of David; my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil." 
 Jesus had opened willingly his ear to the nobleman of Capernaum 
 pleading for his son ; to Jai'rus pleading for his daughter ; the very 
 sight of the widow of Nain weeping over the bier of her only son 
 had moved him, unasked, to interfere. Here is another parent 
 interceding for a child. And that child's condition is one of the 
 most pitiable in the tender years of girlhood visited with the most 
 frightful of all maladies, in one of the worst of its forms, grievously 
 tormented with a devil ! Such a mother, in the agony of such a 
 grief, crying out to him to have compassion upon her, and upon her 
 poor afflicted child, will surely not have long to wait. But he hears 
 as though he heard not. He answers her not a word. The kindest 
 of men are not always equally open-eared, open-hearted, or open- 
 handed to the tale of sorrow. Take them at some unlucky moment, 
 and a cool or a rough reception may await the most clamant of 
 appeals. Has anything like this happened to our Lord 1 Has his 
 spirit been fretted with that late contention with the Pharisees, 
 wearied and worn with the kind of reception his own had given 
 him, so that ear, and heart, and hand are all, for the time, shut up 
 against this new and unexpected appeal of the stranger 1 It cannot 
 be. Liable as he was to all common human frailties, our Lord was 
 subject to no such moral infirmity as that. Disappointment, chagrin, 
 disgust never operated upon him as they do so frequently on us,
 
 THE SYROPHCENICIAN WOMAN. 233 
 
 never quenched the benevolence of his nature, nor laid it even 
 momentarily asleep. We must look elsewhere for the solution of 
 the mystery of the silence for mystery it was. The disciples 
 noticed it with wonder. Their Master had never acted so since 
 they had joined him, had never treated another as he is treating the 
 Canaanite. But though her cry be thus received, making appar- 
 ently no impression, moving him to no response, she follows, she 
 repeats her cry ; continues crying, till half in real pity for her and 
 half with the selfish wish to be rid of her importunity, the disciples 
 came to him, saying, "Send her away, for she crieth after us," not 
 that they wanted her to be summarily dismissed, her request un- 
 granted. Christ's answer to this application shows that he did not 
 understand it in that sense ; that he took it as expressive of their 
 wish that he should do what she desired and then dismiss her. 
 
 A rare thing this in the history of our Saviour, that he should 
 even seem to be less tender in his sympathy for the afflicted than 
 his disciples were ; that he should need to be importuned by them 
 to deed of charity. But all is rare here ; rare his silence, rare 
 their entreaty, and rare too the next step or stage of the incident. 
 Still heedless of the woman neither looking at her, nor speaking 
 to her, nor apparently feeling for her Jesus answers his disciples by 
 saying to them, " I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house 
 of Israel." He gives this as his reason for paying no attention 
 to this Gentile's request. And it is so quietly and calmly said that 
 it looks like the expression of a firm and settled purpose. The 
 poor suitor hears it. Does it not at once and for ever quench all 
 hope within her breast ? His silence might have been due to the 
 absorption of his thoughts with other things. It might be difficult 
 to win the attention or fix it on one who had so little claim on his 
 regard. But now she knows that he has heard, has thought of her, 
 but wilfully, deliberately, as it would seem, has waved her suit 
 aside. Child of a doomed rejected race, well mightest thou have 
 taken the Saviour's words as a final sentence, cutting off all hope, 
 sending thee back without relief to thy miserable home, to nurse 
 thy frenzied child in the arms of a dull despair. But there was in 
 thee a depth of affection for that poor child of thine, and a tenacity 
 of purpose that will not let thee give up the case till effort after 
 effort be made. There is in thee, more than this, a keenness 
 of intelligence, a quickness to discern, that, adverse as it looked, an 
 absolute refusal did not lie wrapped up in the Saviour's utterance. 
 He is not sent to any but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, 
 but does that bind him to reject the stray sheep of another fold, if 
 perchance it may flee to him for succour t He comes as a servant, 
 with instructions to confine his personal ministry to the children of 
 a favoured race. But is he not a son too as well as a servant ? Are 
 his instructions so binding that in no case he may go by a hand's-
 
 234 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 breadth beyond their line, when so going may serve to further the 
 great objects of his earthly mission ? She will try at least whether 
 she cannot persuade him to do so. Undauntedly she follows him 
 into the house into which she sees that he has entered, casts herself 
 at his feet, and says, "Lord, help me!" Before, she had called 
 him Son of David, had given him the title that, from intercourse 
 with Jewish neighbours, she knew belonged to him as the promised 
 Messiah. But now she drops this title. As the Son of David, he 
 was not sent but to the Jews. She calls him, as she worships, by 
 the wider name, that carries no restriction in it, gently intimating 
 that as sovereign Lord of all, he might rise above his commission, 
 and go beyond the letter of the instructions he had received. Lord, 
 she says, as she looks up, adoringly, beseechingly Lord, help me. 
 She has got him at last to fix his eye upon her. "Will he, can he 
 refuse to help ? Jesus looks and says, " Let the children first be 
 filled. It is not meet to take the children's meat, and to cast it to 
 dogs." Last and worse repulse. Bad enough to be told that she 
 lay without the limits of his commission ; but worse to be numbered 
 with the dogs. Yet still she falters not. She accepts at once the 
 reality, the justice, the propriety of the distinction drawn. In the 
 one household there were the children of the family, there were 
 also the dogs, and it was right that they should be fed at different 
 tunes on different food.. In the great human household differences 
 of a like kind existed ; there were the favoured sons of Abraham ; 
 there were the outcast children of Ham and Japhet. She neither 
 disputes the fact nor quarrels with those arrangements of Divine 
 Providence under which a different treatment had been given to 
 them, she takes the lowly place that Christ has given her among 
 the outcast tribes among the dogs ! But have not the dogs and 
 the children all one master ? Do they not dwell all beneath one 
 roof 1 May not even the dogs look for some little kindnesses at 
 their master's hands ? The finest and the choicest of the food it is 
 right that the children should have, but are there no fragments for 
 them ? " Truth, Lord," she says, venturing in the boldness of her 
 ardent faith to take up the image that Jesus had used or had 
 suggested, and to construct out of it an argument, as it were, against 
 himself " Truth, Lord ; yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall 
 from their masters' table." 
 
 " Truth, Lord, but thou art the Master ; and there dwells in 
 thee such a kind and loving heart, that I will not believe, no, not 
 though thine own words and deeds may seem to declare it, that 
 the meanest creature in thy household will be overlooked or unpro- 
 vided for. Truth, Lord, I am not a child, and I ask not, expect 
 not, deserve not a child's favour at thine hands. I am but as a dog 
 before thee, and it is no part of the children's food, it is but a crumb 
 from thy richly furnished table that I crave ; and what but such
 
 THE SYEOPHCENICIAN WOMAN. 235 
 
 among all the rich and varied blessings that thou hast come to 
 lavish upon thine own what but such would be the having mercy 
 upon the like of me, and healing my poor afflicted child?" The 
 Saviour's end is gained. It was a peculiar case, and Christ had met 
 it in a peculiar fashion. He was about, still more distinctly and 
 conspicuously than he had done in the case of the Roman officer, by 
 act and deed of his own hand, to unfold the mystery that had been 
 hid for ages, that the Gentiles should be fellow-heirs with the Jews 
 of the great spiritual inheritance of his purchase. In doing so he 
 desired to make it patent upon what ground and principle the 
 door of entrance was to be thrown open. Here was a Canaanitish 
 woman applying to him for help. The curing of her daughter was 
 to be the token that however limited for the time his own personal 
 ministry was to be, it was not to be fixedly and for ever exclusive 
 in its character confined alone to Jews. Here was a Canaanitish 
 woman about to be numbered with those on whose behalf his Divine 
 power went forth to heal. To vindicate her admission within the 
 sphere of his gracious operations, it was to be made manifest that 
 she too, by faith, was a daughter of faithful Abraham. Therefore 
 it was that her faith was subjected to such repeated trial, that 
 impediment after impediment was thrown before it, that it might 
 be thoroughly tested, and come forth from the ordeal shining in the 
 lustre of the fullest and brightest manifestations. 
 
 " O woman," said Jesus to her, when the trial was over and the 
 triumph complete, " woman, great is thy faith !" Many things 
 beside had there been to commend in her, her strong maternal 
 love, her earnestness, her importunity, her perseverance, her deep 
 humility. Over all these the Saviour passes, or rather he traces 
 them all up to their common root, her faith in him, her trust under 
 all discouragements in front of all difficulties in opposition even 
 to his own words and acts ; her trust in his good- will to her, in his 
 disposition to pity and to help. This is what he commends, admires. 
 Two instances only are recorded in which Jesus passed such an 
 approving judgment, and looked with such admiring regard upon 
 the faith of those who came to him ; and it is remarkable that they 
 are those of the two Gentiles the Koman Centurion and the Syro- 
 phcenician woman. "Verily," said he of the one, "I have not 
 found so great faith; no, not in Israel!" "Woman," said he to 
 the other, "great is thy faith !" Great faith was needed in those 
 who were the first to force the barrier that ages had thrown up 
 between Jew and Gentile, and great faith in these instances waa 
 displayed. Of the two, however, that of the purely Gentile woman 
 was the highest in its character and the noblest in its achievements. 
 The Koman's faith was in the unlimitedness of Christ's power 
 a power he believed so great that even as he said to his soldiers 
 " Go !" and they went ; " Come !" and they came ; " Do this 1" and
 
 236 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 they did it, so could Jesus say to disease, and lil'e, and death; 
 curing at a distance! saving, by the simple word of his power! 
 The faith of the Canaanite was not simply in the unlimited extent 
 of Christ's power. His power she never for a moment doubted. 
 He had no reason to say to her, Believest thou that I am able to do 
 thisl But his willingness he himself gave her some reason to doubt. 
 Thousands placed as she was would have doubted, thousands tried 
 as she was would have failed. Which of us has a faith in Jesus of 
 which we are quite sure that it would come through such a conflict 
 unscathed ? In her it never seems for a moment to have faltered. 
 In spite of his mysterious, unexampled silence, of the'explanation 
 given of the silence that appeared to exclude, beneath the sentence 
 that assigned her a place among the dogs, her faith lived on, with 
 a power in it to penetrate the folds of that dark mantle which the 
 Lord for a short season drew around him to know and see that 
 behind the assumed veil of coldness, silence, indifference, repulse, 
 reproach, there beat the willing, loving heart, upon whose boundless 
 benevolence she casts herself, trusting and not being afraid. This 
 was her confidence, that there was more love to her in his heart 
 than the outward conduct of Jesus might seem to indicate. It was 
 this confidence which sustained her from first to last. It was this 
 confidence which carried her over all the obstructions thrown suc- 
 cessively before her. It was this confidence which sharpened her 
 wit, and gave her courage to snatch out of Christ's own hand the 
 weapon by which her last and greatest victory was won. It was 
 this confidence in him, in spite of all adverse appearances, which 
 pleased the Lord so much, for he likes, as we all do, to be trusted 
 in, and which drew from him the unwonted expression at once of 
 approval and of admiration, " woman, great is thy faith !" It is 
 the same kind of simple trust in Jesus that we all need ; and in us 
 too, if we but had it in like degree, it would accomplish like blessed 
 results. What the silence and the sentences of Jesus were to that 
 entreating woman, crying after Jesus to have her poor child cured, 
 his ways and his dealings, in providence and in grace, are to us 
 crying after him for the healing of our own or others' spiritual 
 maladies. We cry, but he answers not a word ; we entreat, but he 
 turns upon us a frowning countenance ; when he speaks, his words 
 seem to cut us off from comfort and from help. But deal as he 
 may with us, hide himself as he may, speak roughly as he may, let 
 us still believe that there exists in the heart of our Redeemer a 
 love to us, upon which we can at all times cast ourselves in full 
 unbounded trust. 
 
 " Woman, great is thy faith : be it unto thee even as thou wilt 
 And her daughter was made whole from that very hour."
 
 THE CIRCUIT THROUGH DECAPOLIS. 237 
 
 XIII. 
 
 THE CIRCUIT THROUGH DECAPOLIS. 
 MATT. xv. 29-39 ; xvi. 1-12 ; MARK TIL 31-37 ; Tin. 1-26. 
 
 WE have now to follow Jesus through one of the most singular 
 of his journey ings. His work in Galilee was done, but some days 
 still were left ere he set his face to go up to Jerusalem. These 
 days were devoted to a circuit which carried him in a semicircle 
 round the western, northern, and eastern boundaries of Galilee, 
 keeping him outside the jurisdiction of Herod, and beyond the 
 reach of the Jewish hierarchy. He was seeking for rest, seclusion, 
 security, and he found them where neither the mistaken attach- 
 ment of his friends, nor the hate of his enemies in Galilee, were 
 likely to follow him. First he travelled over the hilly country that 
 lies to the north-west of the Sea of Tiberias. There, as he was 
 passing out of the Galilean territory, he met the Syrophoenician 
 woman, and by the manner of his treatment of her revealed at 
 once the simplicity, humility, tenacity of her faith, and the wide 
 embrace of his own love and power. Crossing the boundary-line 
 that divided Palestine from Phoenicia, passing the ancient city of 
 Tyre, he proceeded northward towards Sidon, getting a glimpse 
 there it may have been a first and last one of a country in which 
 some of the most ancient forms of heathenism still subsisted, in the 
 worship of Baal and Astarte. Then, turning eastward, he crossed 
 the southern ridge of Lebanon, descended into the valley of the 
 Leontes, skirted the base of the snow-capped Hermon, and some- 
 where not far from the sources of the Jordan, entered Decapolis. 
 This was the name given to a large and undefined region which lay 
 around ten cities, to which peculiar privileges were granted by the 
 Romans after their conquest of Syria. All of these, with a single 
 exception, lay to the east and south-east of the Sea of Galilee. At 
 length he came upon that sea, touching it somewhere along its 
 eastern shore, not far, it may have been, from the place where he 
 once before, crossing from Capernaum, had landed for a few hours, 
 and where he cured the demoniac of Gadara. At the entreaty of 
 the multitude Jesus had then instantly retired, not suffering the 
 man upon whom the cure had been wrought to accompany him, 
 but directing him to go and tell to his family and friends what had 
 happened. " And he departed," we are told, " and began to 
 publish in Decapolis how great things Jesus had done for him; 
 and all did marvel." The rumour of that miracle was still fresh, 
 the wonder it had excited had not died away, when, coming 
 through the midst of the coast of Decapolis, Jesus sat down upon 
 one of the mountains that overlook the lake. The community
 
 238 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 through which he had been moving was more than half heathenish, 
 the Jewish faith and worship having but little hold eastward of 
 the river and the lake. Christ's appearance for the first time 
 among this rude and essentially Gentile population, and the readi- 
 ness with which he healed the deaf man that had an impediment 
 in his speech, produced the very effect which in such circumstances 
 might have been anticipated. "Great multitudes came to him, 
 having with them those that were lame, blind, dumb, maimed, and 
 many others," eagerly but somewhat roughly casting them down at 
 the feet of Jesus ; wondering as at an altogether new sight, beyond 
 measure astonished when they saw the dumb made to speak, and 
 the blind to see, and the lame to walk, and glorifying, not any of 
 their own idols, but glorifying the God of Israel, in whose name 
 and by whose power these great works were done. 1 
 
 Three days they crowded in upon Jesus, till about four thousand 
 men, beside women and children, were around him on the mountain 
 side. Many of them had come from a distance, and the food that 
 they had brought with them was exhausted. That they might not 
 go fasting away from him, to faint, it might be, on the road, Jesus 
 repeated the miracle he had once wrought before, on the same side 
 of the lake, but at a different season of the year, and for an 
 entirely different sort of people. Among the coincidences and 
 the differences in the narratives which the Evangelists have given 
 of these two miraculous feedings of the multitudes, there is one 
 not preserved in our English version. After the five thousand 
 were fed with the five loaves and the two fishes, the disciples, we 
 are told, took up twelve baskets full of fragments. After the 
 four thousand were fed with the seven loaves and the few small 
 fishes, seven baskets full of fragments were gathered. In the Greek 
 tongue there are two different words, describing two vessels of 
 different size and structure, both of which, without any mark of 
 distinction between them, our translators of the Bible have rendered 
 into the English word "basket." It is one of these words which 
 invariably and exclusively is used in describing the first miracle, 
 and the other which is as invariably and exclusively used in 
 describing the second. The employment in the two cases of two 
 different kinds of vessel has thus been distinctly marked and pre- 
 served as one of the slighter circumstantial peculiarities by which 
 the two events were distinguished from one another. 
 
 The multitude having been fed and sent away, Jesus took ship 
 and sailed across the lake, landing on its western shores between 
 Tiberias and Capernaum. He had scarcely reappeared in the 
 neighbourhood in which most of his wonderful works had been 
 wrought, when, once again, in their old spirit of contemptuous 
 challenge, the Pharisees demand that he would show them a sign 
 i Matthew xv. 80, 31.
 
 THE CIRCUIT THROUGH DECAPOLIS. 239 
 
 from heaven. Now, however, for the first time, the Sadducees 
 appear by their side, leaguing themselves with the Pharisees in a 
 joint rejection of Christ in slighting all that he had already said 
 and done in counting it insufficient to substantiate any claim on 
 his part to be their Messiah, and in demanding the exhibition of 
 some great wonder in the heavens, such as, misreading some of the 
 ancient prophecies, they falsely thought should precede Christ's 
 advent. Saddened and vexed, with a word of stern rebuke to the 
 men who stood tempting him, and a deep sigh heaved over the 
 whole village to which they belonged, Jesus abruptly departed, 
 embarking in such haste that the disciples forgot to furnish them- 
 selves with more than a single loaf. As they landed on the other 
 side, Jesus charged them to beware of the leaven of the Phari- 
 sees and Sadducees. The pitiful simplicity which they displayed 
 in failing to see what Jesus meant, and in imagining that 
 because he had used the word " leaven," it must be their having 
 failed to bring bread enough with them that he was pointing at, 
 stirred the gentle spirit of their Master, and led him to administer 
 a more than ordinarily severe rebuke, the main weight of which was 
 laid, not upon their stupidity in not understanding him, but in their 
 want of trust, their forgetting how the many thousands had been 
 provided for in the desert and on the mountain-side. 
 
 At Bethsaida, to which place Jesus went on his way to Csesarea 
 Philippi, they brought a blind man to him, and besought him to 
 touch him. This case and that of the deaf and stammering man 
 brought to him in Decapolis, have many points of resemblance. In 
 both, those who brought the diseased to Jesus prescribed to him 
 the mode of cure. They besought him to lay his hand upon them, 
 or to touch them. Was it for the very purpose of reproving and 
 counteracting the prejudice which connected the cure with a certain 
 kind of manipulation on the part of the curer, that Jesus in both 
 instances went so far out of his usual course, varying the manner 
 of his action so singularly, that out of all his miracles of healing 
 these two stand distinguished by the unique mode of their perform- 
 ance? This at least is certain, that had Jesus in any instance 
 observed one settled and uniform method of healing, the spirit of 
 formalism and superstition which lies so deep in our nature would 
 have seized upon it, and linked it inseparably with the divine virtue 
 that went out of him, confounding the channel with the thing that 
 the channel conveyed. More and more as we ponder the life of our 
 Bedeemer, dwelling particularly on those parts of it such as his in- 
 stitution of the sacraments in which food might have been furnished 
 upon which the spirit of formalism might have fed, more and more 
 do we wonder at the pains evidently taken to give to that strong 
 tendency of our nature as little material as possible to fasten on. 
 
 Besides, however, any intention of the kind thus alluded to, the
 
 240 THE MINISTEY IN GALILEE. 
 
 variations in our Lord's outward modes of healing may have had 
 special adaptation to the state of the individuals dealt with, and 
 may have been meant to symbolise the great corresponding diversity 
 that there is in those spiritual healings of which the bodily ones 
 were undoubtedly intended to be types. Let us imagine that the 
 deaf stammerer of Decapolis was a man whose spiritual defects were 
 as complicated as his physical ones ; whose hard unclean heart it 
 was singularly difficult to reach and to renew ; who required repeated 
 efforts to be made, and a varied instrumentality to be employed, 
 before he yielded to the power of the truth, or was brought under 
 its benignant sway. Then see with what picturesque fidelity and 
 appropriateness the slowness and difficulty of the one kind of healing 
 was shadowed forth in the other. Jesus took him aside from the 
 multitude, went away with him alone into some quiet and secluded 
 place. The very isolation the standing thus alone face to face, 
 was of itself fitted to arrest, to concentrate the man's thoughts upon 
 what was about to happen. Then Jesus put his fingers into his 
 ears, as if by this very action he meant to indicate the need there 
 was of an operation which should remove the obstruction, and that 
 his was the hand to do it. Then with a like intent he touched the 
 man's dry and withered tongue with fingers moistened with his 
 own spittle. Then he looked up to heaven and sighed the sigh 
 unheard but the look upward, and the emotion which it conveyed, 
 not lost upon the man. Then after all these preliminaries, in course 
 of which we may believe, that whatever of incredulity or whatever 
 of unbelief there may have lain within was being gradually subdued, 
 at last he said Ephphaiha, and the ears were opened and the tongue 
 was loosed. 
 
 Two things here were peculiar, the sigh and the preserving the 
 old Aramaic word which Jesus used. Never in any other instance 
 but in this, when Jesus was about to heal, did a sigh escape from 
 his lips. What drew it forth here 1 It may have been that as he 
 drew the man aside and confronted him alone, the sorrowful 
 spectacle that he presented became to the quick sympathies of Jesus 
 suddenly and broadly suggestive of all the ills that flesh is heir to, 
 and that it was over them collectively that the sigh was heaved. 
 Such interpretation of its meaning leaves unexplained why it was 
 this case, and it alone, which acted in such a manner upon the 
 sympathies of the Eedeemer. But the sigh may have had a deeper 
 source. If this were indeed a man whose soul was difficult of reach 
 and cure, he may have presented himself to Jesus as the type and 
 emblem of those obstinate cases of spiritual malady, some of which 
 would so long resist the great remedy that he came to the earth to 
 furnish. 
 
 After the sigh came the utterance Ephphatha, a word belonging 
 to that dialect of the old Hebrew language called the Aramaic, or
 
 THE CIRCUIT THROUGH DECAPOLIS. 241 
 
 Syro-Chaldaic, which was then current in Judea. But if that was 
 the language which Christ ordinarily used in which, for example, 
 the Sermon on the Mount was spoken why was it that in this and 
 one or two other instances, and in these alone, the exact words 
 which Christ employed are preserved in the evangelic record ? It 
 cannot be the peculiarity or solemnity of the occasion, or the parti- 
 cular emphasis with which they were spoken, that entitled them to 
 be selected and preserved, for we can point to many other occasions 
 in which, had Jesus used Aramaic words, they should have had as 
 good, indeed a better claim to have been preserved. The true 
 explanation of this matter seems to be that it was only upon a few 
 rare occasions that Jesus did employ the old vernacular tongue 
 and that he ordinarily spoke in Greek It has recently, and as I 
 think conclusively, been established by a great variety of proof, that 
 in the days of our Saviour, the Jews knew and spoke two languages ; 
 all the grown-up educated population using the Greek as well as the 
 Aramaic tongue. The Greek predominated in the schools, was 
 employed almost exclusively in written documents and by public 
 speakers. It was in this language that Jesus addressed the crowds 
 in the courts of the temple at Jerusalem, and the multitudes on the 
 hill-sides of Galilee. We have, therefore, in our Greek New Testa- 
 ment the very words before us which came from the lips of our 
 Eedeemer, more sacred, surely, than if they had been translated 
 from the Aramaic, however faithful the rendering. Assuming that 
 Greek was the language ordinarily employed by our Saviour, it 
 would very naturally occur that occasionally he reverted to the old 
 dialect, and that when he did so the words that he used should 
 have been preserved and interpreted. Thus, for instance, in the 
 house of Jairus, Jesus was in the home of a strictly Jewish family, 
 in which the old language would be used in all domestic intercourse, 
 the little daughter who lay dead there having not yet learned 
 perhaps the newly imported tongue. " How beautifully accordant 
 then with the character of him whose heart was tenderness itself, 
 that as he leant over the lifeless form of the maiden, and breathed 
 that life-giving whisper into her ear, it should have been in the 
 loved and familiar accents of the mother tongue, saying, ' Talitha 
 cumi ! ' Although dead and insensible the moment before the 
 words were uttered, yet ere the sound of them passed away there 
 was life and sensibility within her. Does not every reader therefore 
 perceive the thoughtful tenderness of the act, and a most sufficient 
 reason why it was in Hebrew and not in Greek that our Lord now 
 addressed her ? And do we not also discover a cause why the fact 
 of his having done so should be especially noticed by the Evangelist ? 
 Are we not thus furnished with a new and affecting example of our 
 Saviour's graciousness 1 And do we not feel that St. Mark, the 
 most minutely descriptive of all the Evangelists, deserves our 
 Q
 
 242 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 gratitude for having taken pains to record it ? Softly and sweetly 
 must the tones of that loving voice, speaking in the language of her 
 childhood, have fallen upon the sleeping spirit of the maiden, and 
 by words of tenderness, no less than words of power, was she thus 
 recalled to life and happiness." 1 
 
 It was perhaps still more natural that Jesus, in addressing the 
 deaf stammerer of Decapolis, should have used an Aramaic word. 
 He was a rude mountaineer. The vernacular was perhaps the onl} 
 language of which he had any knowledge. At any rate, it was the 
 one to which he had been the most accustomed. It could have 
 been solely with a regard to the man himself that Jesus employed 
 the particular term Ephpliatha. He meant him to hear and under- 
 stand it. And it was heard, we believe, and understood ; for this 
 was not a case in which the faculty of hearing and speaking had 
 never existed or been exercised. So soon as the physical impedi- 
 ments were removed, the man could speak as he had spoken before 
 the loss of hearing had been incurred. When, after all the other 
 signs of the coming cure had been given, the emphatic word was at 
 last pronounced, how wise, how gracious was it that that word the 
 first heard after so many years should have been one of his well- 
 known, well-loved mother-tongue ! 
 
 But let us turn now for a moment to the cure of the blind man 
 at Bethsaida. Here, too, we may believe that there was something 
 special in the spiritual condition ;of the man meant to be typified 
 by the manner of his cure. In the taking of him by the hand, the 
 leading out of the town, the spitting upon his eyes, and putting his 
 hands upon him, Jesus may have had the same objects in view 
 which he had in acting in a similar manner with the deaf man at 
 Decapolis, and the man born blind in Jerusalem ; but there was a 
 singularity that marks this case off from all the others. It is the 
 only instance of progress in a cure by half and half, of an inter- 
 mediate stage in the first instance reached. Jesus asked him if he 
 saw aught. He looked up and said that he saw men as trees, walk- 
 ing. He saw them knew them to be men noticed and described 
 their motion ; but they were shapeless to his eye looked rather 
 like trees than men. It is this circumstance which leads us to 
 believe that he had not been blind from birth. To endow a man 
 born blind with the full powers of vision requires a double miracle 
 one upon the bodily organ, restoring to it its powers ; one upon 
 the mind, conferring upon it the faculty that in the years of infancy 
 a long education is required to impart. A youth who had been 
 blind from birth was couched by Cheselden ; but at first and for 
 some time he could not distinguish one object from another, how- 
 ever different in shape or size. He had to be told what the things 
 were, with whose forms he had been familiar from feeling, ami 
 
 i See Roberts' Discussions on t/ie Gospels, pp. 89, 90.
 
 THE CIRCUIT THROUGH DECAPOLIS. 243 
 
 slowly learned to recognise them. And slowly was it that we all 
 in our earliest days learned how to use the eye, and turn it into the 
 instrument of detecting the forms and the magnitudes and the 
 distances of the objects by which we were surrounded. But here 
 unless, indeed, we believe that there was a double miracle so 
 soon as the man got the full power of bodily vision, he knew how 
 to use it, having learnt that art before. It pleased the Saviour, 
 however, to convey again its lost powers to the organ of the eye 
 step by step. There is at first a confusion of the outward forms of 
 things arising from some visional defect. That defect removed, all 
 was clear ; and the subject of this miracle rejoiced in the exercise 
 of a long-unused and almost-forgotten faculty. It stands a solitary 
 kind of cure in the bodily healings of our Lord ; but that of which 
 it is the type is by no means so rare. Eather, the rare thing is 
 when anything like full power of spiritual perception is at once 
 bestowed. It is but slowly here that the lost power comes back 
 that the eye opens to a true discernment of the things of that great 
 spiritual world of which we form a part sees them in their exact 
 forms, in their relative magnitudes, distances, proportions. Even 
 after the inward eye has been purged of all those films which limit 
 and obscure its sight, a long, a careful, a painstaking education is 
 required to train it, as our bodily one in infancy was trained. Nor 
 let us wonder if along the many stages of which this education is 
 made up, we often make singular discoveries of how blind we were 
 before to what afterwards seems clear as day, or that the operations 
 are often painful by which a truer, and a deeper, and a wider 
 spiritual discernment is attained. It is the blessed office of our 
 Saviour at once to restore to the inward eye its power, and to teach 
 us how to use it. Into his hands let us ever be putting ourselves ; 
 and let us quietly and gratefully submit to that discipline by which 
 our training in the exercise of all our spiritual faculties is carried 
 
 XIV. 
 
 THE APOSTOLIC CONFESSION AT C^ESAREA-PHILIPPI. 
 MATT. xvi. 13-19. 
 
 IN the mythology of the Greeks the worship of Pan their 
 silvan deity was always associated with shady cave or woody 
 grotto. The first Grecian settlers in Northern Syria lighted there 
 upon a spot singularly suited for such a worship a cave at the 
 southern base of Mount Hermon, and at the north-eastern extremity 
 of the valley of the Jordan. This cave lay immediately behind a 
 raised yet retired nook or hollow among the hills, and immediately 
 beneath a conical height of more than 1000 feet, rising between
 
 244 THE MINISTKY IN GALILEE. 
 
 two of those deep ravines which run up into the great mountain s 
 upon the summit of which height there now stand the noblest ruins 
 that the whole country around exhibits, equal in extent, if not in 
 grandeur, to those of Heidelberg the ruins of the Saracen Castle 
 of Zubeibeh. Immediately beneath the entrance into this cave 
 along a breadth of more than 100 feet there gush forth from 
 among the stones a thousand bubbling rills of water, coming from 
 some hidden fountain-head, and from their long dark subterranean 
 journey springing all joyously together into the light of day, form- 
 ing at once by their union a stream which is one of the chief heads 
 or sources of the Jordan. This lively and full-born stream does 
 instantly a stream's best eastern work clothes its birthplace with 
 exuberant fertility, shadowing it with the foliage of the ilex and 
 the olive ; covering its green swards with flowers of every name, 
 turning it into such a scene that, lost in admiration, Miss Martineau 
 declares that out of Poussin's pictures, she never saw anything in 
 the least like it, while Dr. Stanley calls it a Syrian Tivoli. 
 
 This chosen spot the first Grecian settlers seized upon and 
 consecrated, making the cave Pan's sanctuary, cutting niches for the 
 nymphs out of the solid rock which forms the face of the mountain- 
 side ; which niches the statues that once occupied them gone 
 are still to be seen there ; and called the place Panias, from the 
 name of the deity there worshipped. The Eomans when they came 
 did not overturn this worship, but they added a new one. Eeturning 
 to this beautiful nook, from having escorted Caesar Augustus to the 
 sea, Herod the Great erected a fine temple of white marble to his 
 great patron. One of his sons, Herod Philip, in whose territory, 
 as Tetrarch of Iturea and Trachonitis, it was included, extended and 
 embellished the town which had grown up near the old cavern 
 sanctuary. Thinking to change its name, he called it Csesarea- 
 Philippi, in honour of the Eoman Emperor, with his own name 
 added, to distinguish it from the Csesarea of the sea-coast. This 
 new name it bore for a few generations, but the old one revived 
 again, and still belongs to it under the Arabic form of Banias. 
 
 It was to this Banias, or Csesarea-Philippi, that our Lord 
 proceeded, passing through Bethsaida, and up along the eastern 
 banks of the Jordan. In that circuit already described he may have 
 visited it, and the attractions of the place may have drawn him 
 back, or this may have been his first and only visit. It can scarcely 
 be believed that he came into the few scattered villages which lay 
 around, and the remains of which are still visible, without entering 
 Csesarea-Philippi itself. His presence there, out of Judea, in a 
 district covered with tokens of heathen worship, his standing before 
 that cave, bis gazing upon those buildings, those niches, those 
 inscriptions, now in ruins and defaced, but then telling, in their 
 freshness, of idolatries still in living power, carries Jesus further
 
 THE APOSTOLIC CONFESSION AT C^SAREA-PHILIPPI. 245 
 
 away from Judaism, and brings him into nearer outward contact 
 with Gentile worship than any other position in which we see him 
 in the Gospel narrative. It were presumptuous in us, where no 
 clew is given, to imagine what the thoughts and intents of the 
 Saviour were ; yet when we find him going so far out of his way, 
 choosing this singular district as the place of his temporary sojourn 
 after all his public labours in Galilee were over ; when we reflect 
 further that now a new stage of his ministry was entered on, and 
 that henceforth from teaching the multitudes he withdrew, and 
 gathering his disciples around him in private, began to speak to 
 them as he had never done before, it is impossible to refrain from 
 cherishing the idea that, surrounded now by the emblems of various 
 faiths and worships, types of the motley forms of superstition that 
 had spread all over the earth, the thoughts of the Redeemer took 
 within their wide embrace that world whose faith and worship he 
 had come to purify, and that he had, in fact, purposely chosen, as 
 in harmony with this epoch of his life, and the purposes he was 
 about to execute, the unique, secluded, romantic district of Csesarea- 
 PhilippL 
 
 He was wandering in one of its lonely roads with his disciples, 
 his sole companions, when he left them for a little while to engage 
 in solitary prayer, 1 to commit himself and his great work, as it was 
 passing into a new stage, to his Father in heaven. On rejoining 
 them, he put to them the question, "Whom do men say that I the 
 Son of man am ?" He knew it already, but for a further purpose 
 he would fain have from their lips what the gross result of those 
 two years' toil and teaching was what the ideas were about himself, 
 his person, character, and office, which his fellow-countrymen now 
 generally entertained. They told him more than one of them taking 
 part in the reply that some said that he was John the Baptist ; 
 some that he was Elias ; some Jeremiah ; some, without determining 
 which, that he was one of the prophets. His own immediate followers 
 may have got somewhat further in their conceptions. Listening to 
 and believing in, though not fully understanding, the testimony of the 
 Baptist, Andrew might say to his own brother Simon, " We have 
 found the Messias, which is, being interpreted, the Christ;" and 
 Nathanael, remembering what the voice from heaven at the baptism 
 had been reported as declaring, might exclaim, " Rabbi, thou art 
 the Son of God : thou art the King of Israel" Here and there, by 
 dumb and blind men, and Syrophoenician women, he might be 
 hailed as the Son of David, or the Son of God. On the first 
 impulse of their wonder at all being miraculously fed, five thousand 
 men might be ready in the moment to say of him, that he was the 
 prophet that should come into the world. But these were the 
 exceptions, exceptions so rare, that they seemed not to his disciples 
 Luke ix. 18.
 
 246 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 worthy of account. Amid all the variety of impressions made upon 
 them by the discourses and works of our Lord, the great mass of 
 the people in Judea and in Galilee regarded Jesus as the Messiah's 
 forerunner, or one of his heralds, not as the Messiah himself. It 
 was the popular belief of the period, that prior to the Messiah's advent 
 one or other of the prophets was to rise again from the dead. This 
 Jesus might be he. The Pharisees had not succeeded in shaking 
 the public confidence in him as a pure and holy man, well worthy 
 to be counted as a prophet. But they had prevailed in scattering 
 the first impressions that the Baptist's ministry and his own words 
 and deeds had created, that he was indeed the Christ. And now 
 from the lips of his own followers Jesus hears what was so well 
 fitted to try their faith and their Master's patience, that scarcely 
 anywhere over all the land was there any recognition of the 
 Messiahship of Jesus. 
 
 On getting their answer, no word of reproach or complaint 
 escapes the Saviour's lips. It was not indeed on his own account, 
 it was on theirs, that his first question had been put. He follows 
 it with the second and more pointed one : " But whom say ye that 
 I am?" Peter, the ever-ready answerer, replies, "Thou art the 
 Christ, the Son of the living God." Peter had believed, from the 
 beginning of his connection with him, that Jesus was the Christ ; 
 a faith which had the great and acknowledged authority of the 
 Baptist to rest on, and which was borne up by the hope that the 
 whole nation would speedily accept him as such. But in the 
 Baptist's death, that authority has been violently shaken, and the 
 outward and expected support has utterly given way. Many of the 
 Lord's disciples have forsaken him, and looking all around, Peter 
 can find few now who so believe. Yet, amid all the prevailing 
 unbelief in and rejection of his Master, Peter's faith has been 
 gaining and not losing strength. Like the inhabitants of Sychar, 
 he believed not because of what any one had told him, but upon 
 the ground of what he himself had seen and heard and known of 
 Jesus. ' " Thou art the Christ" Such the Baptist said thou wert 
 such, though thou hast never expressly put forth the claim such 
 thy words and works have been ever asserting thee to be and such 
 thou truly art.' Thus it is that in his good confession Peter suffers 
 not the fickle faith and low conceptions of the multitude to affect 
 him. Though he and his few companions stand alone, with the 
 whole community against them, for himself and for them he will 
 speak out and say, " Thou art " not any one of those prophets, 
 however honourable the name he bears " Thou art the very Christ 
 himself the Messiah promised to our fathers." 
 
 But still another step, in taking which Peter not only confronts 
 the existing state of popular belief as to who Jesus is, but he goes 
 far on in advance of the existing Jewish faith as to who and what
 
 THE APOSTOLIC CONFESSION AT C^SAREA-PHILIPPI. 247 
 
 their Messiah was to be. " Thou art the Christ, the Son of the 
 living God." We know from sufficient testimony that the Jews 
 universally imagined that their Messiah was to be but a man 
 distinguished for his virtues and exalted in his office, but still a man. 
 There has dawned on Peter's mind the idea that Jesus the Christ is 
 something more something higher. The voice from heaven had 
 called him the Son of God ; Satan and his host had taken up and 
 repeated the epithet. What that title fully meant we may not, 
 cannot, think that Peter now, or till long afterwards, understood ; 
 but that it indicated some mysterious indwelling of the Divinity 
 some mysterious link between Jesus and the Father which raised 
 him high above the level of our ordinary humanity, even when 
 endowed with all prophetic gifts he was beginning to comprehend. 
 Obscure though his conceptions were, there stood embodied in his 
 great confession a testimony to the mingled humanity and divinity 
 of Jesus. In the faith which thus expressed itself Jesus saw the 
 germ of all that living faith by which true believers of every age 
 were to be animated that faith the cherishing of which within its 
 bosom was to form the very life and strength of the community, 
 the Church, which he was to gather out from among the nations 
 the fruit of God's own work within human souls. Seeing this, and 
 being so far satisfied rejoicing in the assurance that whatever other 
 men might think or say of him, there were even now some human 
 spirits within which he had got a hold, that nothing could shake, 
 against which nothing would prevail he turns to Peter and he says, 
 " Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona." Simon Bar-jona ! the very 
 way in which he named him preparing us for words of weighty 
 import being about to be addressed to him. Simon Bar-jona, 
 blessed art thou ! I know not if Jesus Christ ever pronounced such 
 a special individual blessing on any other single man ; and when 
 we hear one of our race called blessed by him who knows so well 
 wherein the best and highest happiness of our nature consists, our 
 ear opens wide to catch the reason given for such a benediction 
 being pronounced. "Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona, for flesh 
 and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is 
 in heaven." ' Thine own eye hath not seen it, thine own ear hath 
 not heard it it hath not come to thee by any ordinary channel from 
 without it is not due alone to an exercise of thine own spirit 
 within. Faint though the light be that has gleamed in upon thy 
 soul, and lighted up thy faith faint as the feeblest glimmer of the 
 morn it is a light from heaven, a dawn giving promise of a bright 
 and cloudless day. It hath come to thee as a revelation from the 
 great Father of Spirits to thy spirit, Simon Bar-jona ; and therefore a 
 blessed man art thou ! ' And blessed still in the Saviour's judgment 
 blessed beyond all that this world has in it of blessedness to bestow 
 is he upon whose darkened mind and heart the faintest rays of
 
 248 THE MINISTKY IN GALILEE. 
 
 that same heavenly light have shone the God who commanded 
 the light to shine out of the darkness, shining in upon his soul, 
 giving him the light of the true knowledge of God in Christ his 
 Saviour ! 
 
 " And I say also unto thee " ' Thou hast said to me, " Thou art 
 the Christ," and hast shown that thou knowest what is the true 
 meaning of the word, so now say I unto thee, "Thou art Peter;" 
 the name of my own giving, the fitness of whose application to thee 
 thou art even now justifying in thy prompt and bold confession, in 
 thy full and resolute faith, in thy firm and immovable adhesion to 
 me, despite of all that men think and say of me. Thou art a true 
 Petros a living stone built upon me, the true Petra, the living and 
 eternal rock the only sure foundation in which you and all may 
 build their trust and hopes. And upon thee, as such a stone, 
 resting on such a rock, as having so genuine and strong a faith in 
 me as Son of man and Son of God, I will build my Church. Because 
 of this thine early, full, and heaven-implanted faith, thou shalt be 
 honoured as one of the first foundation-stones on which my Church 
 shall be erected. That Church shall be the congregation of men 
 who share thy faith who all are Peters like thyself all living 
 stones built upon me as the chief corner-stone ; and in a sense, too, 
 built upon thee ; on prophets and apostles as laid by me and on me, 
 to form the basis of the great spiritual edifice the Temple of the 
 Church.' 
 
 But if the Church was to consist of those who believed in Jesus 
 as Peter did, where was the promise that it should number many 
 within its embrace ? What the security that it should have any 
 firm or lasting hold 1 Was Jesus not at this moment a wanderer 
 despised and rejected driven forth from among his own sur 
 rounded in this place of his voluntary exile among the Gentiles by 
 a few poor fishermen ? Where was the earthly hope that the circle 
 of true believers in him should widen ? What the prospect that if 
 it did, it could hold its ground against all the gathered enmity that 
 was rising to pour itself out against it ? Calmly, out of the midst of 
 all these unpropitious and unpromising appearances, the words issue 
 from the lips of Jesus, " I will build my church, and the gates of 
 hell shall not prevail against it." The history of eighteen centuries 
 has confirmed the truth of the saying. So long has this society of 
 Christian men existed ; and though it has done much to provoke 
 hostility, and been often very unmindful of the spirit and will of 
 him whose name it bears, yet all that power and policy, the wiliest 
 intrigues and the fiercest persecution could do against it, have been 
 done in vain. 
 
 This is the first occasion on which Jesus used that word the 
 Church ; and he named it in his own lifetime but once again. He 
 did everything to lay the true and only foundation of that Church ;
 
 THE APOSTOLIC CONFESSION AT C^SAREA-PHILIPPI. 249 
 
 but he did almost nothing with his own hand to erect or organise 
 it. Apart from his selecting twelve men to be his personal 
 associates, his institution of the office of the apostolate, which there 
 are but few who regard as an integral and perpetual part of the 
 Church's organisation apart from that, and his appointment of the 
 two sacraments, Jesus may be said to have done nothing towards 
 the incorporation of those attached to him into an external institute. 
 Even here, when he goes to address a few words of encouragement 
 to Peter, upon whom so important services in this department were 
 to devolve, he speaks not of the present but of the future : " I will 
 give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven." '"When that 
 time comes at which, on the great days of Pentecost, the first 
 admissions into my Church by baptism shall take place, then know 
 that the keys of my kingdom are in thine hand, and that thou 
 mayest use them in the full assurance that thou art not acting 
 without a due warrant.' Keys are the badges of authority and 
 power and trust, bestowed as the symbols of their office on ministers 
 or ambassadors, secretaries or treasurers of kingdoms ; on whom the 
 duty lies of admitting to, or excluding from, the privileges and 
 benefits of the commonwealth, disposing or withdrawing the royal 
 bounties and favour. Such keys in a manner appropriate to the 
 kind of commonwealth the Church is Jesus here commits to Peter, 
 as one of the first and greatest of its office-bearers. In the use of 
 any such authority and power as had been given him within the 
 Church in admitting to or excluding from its privileges in taking 
 his part in the baptism of the three thousand on the day of Pentecost 
 in condemning Ananias and Sapphira in censuring Simon Magus 
 in opening the door to take in the Gentile converts, and presiding 
 at the baptisms in the household of Cornelius Peter might be 
 weighed down by the sense of the feebleness of the instrument he 
 was using, the smallness of the effects that it could produce. To 
 comfort and encourage him in the use of the keys when they came 
 to be employed by him, Jesus adds, "Whatsoever thou shalt bind 
 on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose 
 on earth shall be loosed in heaven." Act but in the right spirit 
 follow out the directions given let the law of truth and love but 
 regulate your doings and you may rest assured that doings of 
 yours on earth shall be approved and ratified in heaven. So far, 
 and no farther, as it seems to us, do the words of our Saviour, as 
 addressed to Peter, go. 
 
 All that is said here to Peter was said twice afterwards by 
 Christ to all the twelve and to all the Church. You have but to 
 turn to the 18th chapter of St. Matthew, and read there from the 
 18th to the 19th verse, and to the Gospel of St. John, and read 
 there in the 20th chapter, from the 19th to the 23d verse, to be 
 fully satisfied that, put what interpretation you may upon the
 
 250 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 words spoken at Csesarea-Philippi to St. Peter, they conveyed to 
 him no power or privilege beyond that which Jesus conferred upon 
 the entire college of the apostles, and in its collective capacity upon 
 the Church. 
 
 XV. 
 
 THE REBUKE OF ST. PETER. 
 MATT. xvi. 21-28 ; MARK vni. 31-38 ; ix. 1 ; LUKE n. 22-27. 
 
 JESUS had tested the faith of the Apostles. Their reply to his 
 pointed interrogation, " But whom say ye that I am ?" was so far 
 satisfactory. They had not been influenced either by the hostility 
 of the Pharisees, or the low and unworthy imaginations of the 
 people. They were ready to acknowledge the Messiahship of their 
 Master, such as they understood it to be, and had risen even to 
 some dim conception of his divinity. They were all ready to adopt 
 the declaration of their spokesman as the expression of their faith, 
 "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." 
 
 But in this faith of theirs there was one great and fatal defect. 
 Neither they, nor any of their countrymen of that age, had 
 associated with the advent of their Messiah any idea of humiliation, 
 rejection, suffering unto death. Obscure he might be in his first 
 appearances, and difficult of recognition ; obstacles of various kinds 
 might be thrown in his path, over which he might have laboriously 
 to climb ; but sooner or later the discovery of who and what he 
 was would burst upon the people and by general acclaim he would 
 be exalted to his destined lordship over Israel. One, coming unto 
 his own, and by his own received not ; asking not, and getting not, 
 any honour from men ; walking in lowliness all his days ; a man of 
 many and deeply-hidden griefs, misunderstood by the great mass of 
 the people, despised and rejected by their rulers, taken, at last, 
 to be judged and condemned as a deceiver of the people, a vilifier 
 of Moses, a blasphemer against God ; crucified, at last, as a male- 
 factor it had never entered into their thoughts that such a one 
 could be their Messiah. He might suffer somewhat, perhaps, at 
 the hands of his own and Israel's enemies ; possibly he might have 
 to submit to death, the common lot of all men : but that he should 
 suffer at the hands of the very people over whom he came to reign, 
 and that by their hands he should be put to death no throne 
 erected, and no kingdom won this was not only alien from, it was 
 utterly contradictory to, their conceptions and their belief. Yet all 
 this was true ; and from their earlier and false ideas the disciples 
 had to be weaned. Jesus did this gradually. At first, during all 
 his previous converse with them while engaged in his public labours
 
 THE REBUKE OF ST. PETER. 251 
 
 in Judea and Galilee, he had carefully abstained from saying any- 
 thing about his approaching sufferings and death. Not that these 
 were either unforeseen or forgotten by him. When alone in the 
 midnight interview with Nicodemus, he could speak plainly of his 
 being lifted up upon the cross as the brazen serpent had been upon 
 the pole in the wilderness, that whosoever looked upon him believ- 
 ingly might be saved. To the people of Judea and Galilee he 
 could drop hints, which, however obscure to his hearers, tell us of 
 a full knowledge and foresight on his part of all that awaited him. 
 He could point to his body as to the temple, which, though 
 destroyed, in three days he should raise up again. He could tell 
 his Galilean audience the sign that was to be given to that genera- 
 tion that as Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale's 
 belly, the Son of man should be three days and three nights in the 
 heart of the earth. But never till now, in any of his private con- 
 versations with his disciples, had he alluded to this topic. He had 
 allowed them to take off the natural and full impression which his 
 teaching and miracle-working, and the whole tenor of his life and 
 conversation, was fitted to make upon open, honest, devout-minded 
 men. Their knowledge of him, their faith in him, he had left to 
 grow, till now as represented in the confession of St. Peter it 
 seemed strong enough to bear some pressure. They might now be 
 told what it had been out of time to tell them earlier. And if 
 they were to be told at all beforehand of the dark and tragic close, 
 it would seem to be the very best and most fitting occasion to 
 begin, at least, to make the disclosure to them now, when our Lord 
 himself, ceasing from his public ministry, had sought these few 
 days' quiet in the neighbourhood of Csesarea-Philippi, that his own 
 thoughts might be turned to all that awaited him when he went up 
 to Jerusalem. " From that time forth began Jesus to show unto 
 his disciples how he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many 
 things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, 
 and be raised again the third day." A few days after this, as they 
 descended from the Mount of Transfiguration, Jesus charged Peter 
 and James and John, saying, " Tell the vision to no man till the 
 Son of man be risen from the dead." A few days later, while they 
 were still in Galilee, passing through it so privately that it evidenced 
 a desire that no man should know it, 1 Jesus said to his disciples, 
 " Let these sayings sink down into your hearts, for the Son of man 
 shall be betrayed into the hands of men, and they shall kill him, 
 and the third day he shall be raised again." After the raising of 
 Lazarus there was a brief retreat to Persea, till the time of the last 
 Passover drew on. There was something very peculiar in the 
 whole manner and bearing of our Lord when, leaving this retreat, 
 he set forth on his final journey to Jerusalem. He stepped forth 
 
 i Mark ix. 30.
 
 252 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 before his disciples, " and they were amazed, and as they followed 
 they were afraid." It was while they were on the way thus going 
 up to Jerusalem that he took the twelve apart, and said to them, 
 " Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, and all things that are written by 
 the prophets concerning the Son of man shall be accomplished ; for 
 he shall be betrayed unto the chief priests and unto the scribes, 
 and they shall condemn him to death, and shall deliver him to the 
 Gentiles, and they shall mock, and shall scourge, and shall spit 
 upon, and shall crucify him, and the third day he shall rise again." 1 
 It thus appears that four times at least before the event thrice in 
 Galilee and once in Persea Jesus foretold with growing minute- 
 ness of detail his passion and death ; specifying the place Jerusa- 
 lem ; the time the approaching Passover ; the agents the chief 
 priests, scribes, and Gentiles ; the course of procedure his betrayal 
 into the hands of the Jewish authorities, his delivery by them into 
 the hands of the Gentiles; the manner of his death crucifixion 
 under a judicial sentence ; some of the accompanying circumstances 
 the scourging, the mocking, the spitting. Any one placed in the 
 position of Jesus seeing the rising tide of bitter enmity, and 
 knowing the goal at which it aimed might have conjectured that 
 nothing short of the death of their victim would appease the wrath 
 of his enemies. But what mere human foresight could have fore- 
 told, at Csesarea-Philippi, that Herod would not anticipate the 
 sacerdotal party, and seize upon Jesus on his way through Galilee, 
 and crown the Baptist's murder by that of his successor ? What 
 mere human foresight could have foretold that after so many pre- 
 vious attempts and failures, the one at the next Passover season 
 would succeed ; that Jesus would not perish, as Stephen did, in a 
 tumultuous outbreak ; that all the formalities of a trial and con 
 demnation would be gone through, and death by crucifixion be the 
 result 1 Nor will it help to furnish us with any natural explanation 
 of these foretellings of his sufferings and death by Jesus, to say 
 that he gathered them from the prophecies of the Old Testament, 
 with which we know him to have been familiar, and to which, 
 indeed, even in these foretellings, he pointed ; for, much as those 
 prophecies did convey, they fell far short of that particularity 
 which characterises the sayings of our Lord. Eeceiving the account 
 of the Evangelists as genuine and true, we are shut up to the con- 
 clusion that in regard to his passion and death Jesus manifested 
 beforehand a foreknowledge proper only to him who knows all ends 
 from their beginnings ; and that still more was this the case as to 
 his resurrection, which he predicted still oftener, and could not 
 have predicted in plainer or less ambiguous terms. 
 
 It may for a moment appear strange that the disciples were so 
 taken by surprise when the death and the resurrection of their 
 i Matt. xx. 17-19 ; Mark x. 32-34 ; Luke xviii. 31-34.
 
 HE REBUKE OF ST. PETER. 253 
 
 Master actually took place. How could this be, we are apt to ask 
 ourselves, after such distinct and unambiguous declarations as those 
 which we have quoted ? Let us remember, however, that the same 
 authority which instructs us that these predictions were uttered, 
 informs us that they were not understood by those to whom they 
 were in the first instance addressed. "They understood not the 
 saying, and it was hid from them, and they feared to ask him." 1 
 " And they kept that saying with themselves, questioning one with 
 another what the rising from the dead should mean." 2 The words 
 of Jesus were in themselves easy enough to understand ; but was it 
 figuratively or literally they were to be taken ? We can scarcely 
 judge aright of the perplexity into which so unexpected an announce- 
 ment must have thrown the disciples at this stage of their acquain- 
 tance with Christ, nor understand how natural it was that they 
 should explain them away. We so often see them, with other and 
 less difficult subjects, taking what he meant literally as if it were 
 figuratively spoken, and what he meant figuratively as if it were to 
 be literally understood that it takes the edge off our wonder that 
 in this instance the disciples should have hesitated how to take the 
 words that they had heard. The expression, " rising from the dead," 
 the one that appears to have perplexed them the most, appears to 
 us one of the simplest. Yet, when we put ourselves exactly in their 
 position, we begin to see that they had more ground for then* per- 
 plexity than is at first apparent. A raising from the dead was what 
 they had themselves witnessed. In the general resurrection of the 
 dead they believed. There was nothing, therefore, creating any 
 difficulty in the way of their understanding the mere literal signifi- 
 cation of the phrase rising from the dead. But the resurrection 
 of Jesus what could it mean ? It could not be his sharing in the 
 general resurrection of all the dead that he was speaking of. But 
 was he to die and to rise and to remain risen ? or to die and to rise 
 and to die again 1 He could raise others from the dead, but if he 
 were to die, who was to raise him ? Need we be surprised if, with 
 their notions of who and what their Messiah was to be, the disciples 
 should at times have believed that it was of some spiritual death 
 and resurrection some sinking into the grave and rising again of 
 his cause and kingdom that Jesus spoke ? 
 
 At first, indeed, and before any time for reflecting upon it is 
 given, St Peter seizes upon the natural meaning of the words that 
 he had heard, and interprets them generally as predicting suffering 
 and death to his Master, and, offended at the very thought of a 
 future so different from the one that they all had anticipated, in the 
 heat of his surprise and indignation, buoyed up, no doubt, by the 
 praise that had just been bestowed upon him, he forgets himself so 
 far as actually to lay hold by arm or garment of our Lord, and in 
 i Luke ix. 45. 2 Mark ix. 10-
 
 254 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 the spirit of a patron, or protector, he begins to rebuke him, saying, 
 "Be it far from thee, Lord : this shall not be unto thee." Kindli- 
 ness in the act and speech ; a strong interest in Christ's mere per- 
 sonal welfare but ignorance and presumption too ; forgetfulness of 
 the distance that separated him from Jesus, and a profound insensi- 
 bility to the higher spiritual designs which the sufferings and death 
 of Jesus were to be the means of accomplishing. Now let us mark 
 the manner in which this interference is regarded and treated by 
 Christ. He turns about he looses himself from the too familiar 
 hold he looks on his disciples as if craving their special notice of 
 what he was about to say and do and by that look having engaged 
 their fixed regard, he says to Peter, "Get thee behind me, Satan : 
 thou art an offence to me." What was the secret of the quickness, 
 the sharpness, the stern severity of this rebuke ? "Why was it that, 
 for the moment, the Apostle disappeared as it were from the 
 Saviour's view, and Satan, the arch-tempter, took his place ? Why 
 was it that the very word which our Lord had applied to Satan in 
 the last and greatest of the temptations of the wilderness, is here 
 used again, as if the great tempter had reappeared and renewed his 
 solicitation ? It was because he found the feet of Peter had actu- 
 ally stepped upon the very ground that Satan, in his great tempta 
 tion of our Saviour, had occupied. Take all the kingdoms of the 
 world (such had been the bribe held out) take them now save 
 thyself all the toil, the agony let the cup pass from thee step 
 into the throne without touching or tasting the bitterness of the 
 cross. Promptly, indignantly, was this temptation repelled in the 
 wilderness ; and when it reappears in the language of his Apostle, 
 "Be it far from thee: this shall not be unto thee" when once 
 again he is tempted to shrink from the sufferings and the death in 
 store for him as promptly and as indignantly is it again repelled, 
 Peter being regarded as personating Satan in making it, and 
 addressed even as the great tempter had been. 
 
 What a difference between the two sayings, uttered within a 
 few minutes of each other! "Blessed art thou, Simon, Bar-jona: 
 for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father 
 which is in heaven." " Get thee behind me, Satan : thou art an 
 offence" or, as the word means, thou art a stumbling-stone, a 
 rock of offence " unto me." Can it be the same man to whom 
 words of such different import are addressed ? Yes, the same man 
 in two quickly succeeding states. Now (to the eye which seeth in 
 secret) he appears as one whose mind the Father hath enlightened, 
 now as one whose heart Satan has filled and occupied ; now the 
 object of praise and blessing, now of censure and pungent rebuke. 
 And does not this changing Peter, with those two opposite sides of 
 his character turned so rapidly to Christ, stand a type and emblem 
 of our weak humanity ? of the ductile nature that is iu the best of
 
 THE REBUKE OF ST. PETER. 255 
 
 the followers of our Lord ? of the quick transitions that so often 
 take place within us ? our souls now shone upon by the light from 
 Heaven, now lit up with fires of another kindling? What lessons 
 of humility and charity do such experiences in the history of the 
 best of men inculcate ! 
 
 Peter must have been greatly surprised when, shaken off by 
 Jesus, he was spoken to as if he were the arch-fiend himself. 
 Unconscious of anything but kindly feelings to his Master, he would 
 be at a loss at first to know what sinful, satanic element there had 
 been in the sentiments he had been cherishing the words that he 
 had used. It might at once occur to him that he had been too 
 familiar had used too much liberty with him whom he had just 
 acknowledged to be the Christ, the Son of the living God. But it 
 could surely not be simply and solely because of his being offended 
 at the freedom taken, that Jesus had spoken to him as he did. 
 Some light may have been thrown upon the matter, even to Peter's 
 apprehension at the time by our Lord's own explanatory words, 
 " Get thee behind me, Satan : for thou savourest not the things that 
 be of God, but the things that be of men." There were two ways 
 of looking upon those sufferings and death, of which, now for the 
 first time, Jesus had begun to speak the selfish, earthly, human 
 one, and the spiritual, the divine. Peter was thinking of them 
 solely under the one aspect, thinking of them in their bearing alone 
 upon the personal comfort, the outward estate and condition, of his 
 Lord. He would have Jesus avoid them. He himself would stand 
 between them and his Master, and not suffer them to come upon 
 him ; inflicting, as he imagined they would do, such great discredit 
 and dishonour upon his name and cause. But he knew not, or 
 forgot, that it was for this end that Jesus came into the world, to 
 suffer and die for sinners ; that the cup could not pass from him, 
 the cross could not be avoided, without prophecies being left unful- 
 filled, purposes of God left unaccomplished, the sin of man left 
 unatoued for, the salvation of mankind left unsecured. He knew 
 not, or forgot, that he was bringing to bear upon the humanity of 
 our Lord one of the strongest and subtlest of all the trials to which 
 it was to be exposed, when in prospect of that untold weight of 
 sorrow which was to be laid upon it in the garden and upon the 
 cross, the instincts of nature taught it to shrink therefrom, to desire 
 and to pray for exemption. It was the quick and tender sense our 
 Lord had of the peculiarity and force of this temptation, rather than 
 his sense of the singularity and depth of Peter's sinfulness, which 
 prompted and pointed his reproof. At the same time he desired 
 to let Peter know that the way of looking at things, in which he 
 had been indulging, had in it that earthly, carnal element which 
 condemned it in his sight. Nay, more ; he would seize upon the 
 opportunity now presented to proclaim once more, as he had so
 
 256 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 often done, that not in his own case alone, but in the case of all his 
 true and faithful followers, suffering, self-denial, self-sacrifice, must 
 be undergone. 
 
 XVI. 
 
 THE TRANSFIGURATION. 
 MATT. xvu. 1-13 ; MARK ix. 2-13 ; LUKE ix. 28-36. 
 
 Six days elapsed after our Lord's first foretelling of his ap- 
 proaching death. These days were spent in the region of Csesarea- 
 Philippi, and appear to have passed without the occurrence of any 
 noticeable event : days, however, they undoubtedly would be of 
 great perplexity and sadness to the disciples. They had so far 
 modified their first beliefs and expectations, that they were ready 
 to cleave to their Master in the midst of prevalent misconception 
 and enmity. But this new and strange announcement that he must 
 go up to Jerusalem, not only to be rejected of the elders and chief 
 priests and scribes, but to be put to death and raised again the 
 third day, has disturbed their faith, and filled their hearts with 
 sorrowful anxieties a disturbance and anxiety chiefly, we may 
 believe, experienced by those three of the twelve already admitted 
 by Jesus to more intimate fellowship and confidence. The six days 
 over, bringing no relief, Jesus takes these three "up into a high 
 mountain apart." 
 
 Standing upon the height which overlooks Caesarea-Philippi, I 
 looked around upon the towering ridges which great Hermon, the 
 Sheikh of the Mountains, as the Arabs call it, projects into the 
 plain. Full of the thought that one of these summits on which I 
 gazed had in all probability witnessed the Transfiguration, I had 
 fixed upon one of them which, from its peculiar position, form, and 
 elevation, might aptly be spoken of as a " high mountain apart," 
 when casting my eye casually down along its sides as they sloped 
 into the valley, the remains of three ancient villages appeared dot- 
 ting the base. I remembered how instantly on the descent from the 
 mountain Jesus had found himself in the midst of his disciples and 
 of the multitude, and was pleased at observing that the mountain-top 
 I had fixed upon met all the requirements of the Gospel narrative. 
 If that were, indeed, the mountain-top up to which Jesus went, he 
 never stood so high above the level of the familiar lake, nor did his 
 eye ever sweep so broadly the hills of Galilee. Whichever the 
 mountain was, the shades of evening were falling as Jesus climbed 
 its sides. He loved, we know, the stillness of the night, the soli- 
 tude of the mountain. He sought them for the purposes of devotion 
 in the loneliness, the calmness, the elevation, finding something
 
 THE TRANSFIGURATION. 257 
 
 in harmony with prayer. Generally, however, on such occasions he 
 was alone. He either sent his disciples away, or managed to 
 separate himself from their society. Now, however, as anticipating 
 what was about to happen, he takes with him Peter and James and 
 John, the destined witnesses of his humiliation and agony in the 
 garden. The sun sinks in the west beneath the waters of the 
 Great Sea as the top of the mountain is reached. Night begins to 
 draw its mantle round them, wrapping in obscurity the world 
 below. Jesus begins to pray. The three who rest a little space 
 away from him would join in his devotions, but wearied with the 
 ascent, less capable of resisting the coming-on] of night and the 
 pressure of fatigue, their eyes grow heavy till they close in sleep 
 the last sight they rest on, that sombre figure of their Master ; the 
 last sound on their listening ear, the gentle murmur of his ascending 
 prayers. From this sleep they waken, not at the gentle touch of 
 the morning light, not to look down upon the plain below, seen 
 under the beams of the rising day: with stroke of awakening 
 power, a bright, effulgent radiance has fallen upon their eyelids, and 
 as they lift them up, while all is dark below, the mountain-top is 
 crowned with light, and there before them now there are three 
 forms : their Master " the fashion of his countenance altered " 
 his face shining as the sun lit up, not alone, as the face of Moses 
 once was, by the lingering reflection of the outward glory upon 
 which it had gazed, but illumined from within, as if the hidden 
 glory were bursting through the fleshy veil and kindling it into 
 radiance as it passed his raiment shining, bright as the glistening 
 snow that lay far above them upon the highest top of Hermon 
 exceeding white so as no fuller on earth could whiten them ; and 
 beside him, appearing, too, in glory, yet in glory not like his 
 dimmer and less radiant their forms, their attitudes, their words 
 all showing that they came to wait on him and do him homage 
 Moses the Lawgiver, and Elijah the Reformer or Eestorer of the 
 Jewish theocracy. Whence came they 1 In what form did they 
 now appear ? How came Peter and James and John at once to 
 recognise them ? They came from the world of the dead, the 
 region that departed spirits occupy. Elijah did not need to borrow 
 for this occasion his old human form. He had carried that with 
 him in the chariot of fire the corruptible then changed into the 
 incorruptible the mortal having then put on immortality; and 
 now in that transfigured body he stands beside the transfigured 
 form of Jesus. Moses had died, indeed, and was once buried ; but 
 no man knew where nor how, nor can any man now tell us in what 
 bodily or material shape it was that he now appeared, nor what 
 there was if anything about the external appearance either of him 
 or of Elijah which helped the apostles to the recognition. In some 
 way unknown the recognition came. It was given them to know 
 R
 
 258 THE MINISTEY IN GALILEE. 
 
 who these two shining strangers were. It was given them to listen 
 to and so far to understand the converse they were holding with 
 Jesus as to know that they were speaking to him about the decease 
 he was to accomplish at Jerusalem. But it was not given to them 
 either immediately or any time thereafter to report, perhaps even 
 to remember, the words they heard. We must remain content with 
 knowing nothing more about that conversation which, whether 
 we think of the occasion, or the speakers, or the subject-matter, 
 appears to us as the subHmest ever held on earth than generally 
 what its topic was. But of what great moment even that informa- 
 tion is we shall presently have to speak. Their mysterious dis- 
 course with Jesus over, Moses and Elias make a movement to retire. 
 Peter will not let them go will detain them if he can. He might 
 not have broken in upon his Master while engaged in converse with 
 them, but now that they seem about to withdraw, in the fulness of 
 his ecstatic delight, with a strong wish to detain the strangers, a 
 dim sense that they were in an exposed and shelterless place, and a 
 very vain imagination that the affording of some better protection 
 might perhaps induce them to stay, and that if they did they might, 
 all take up their permanent dwelling here together, he cannot but 
 exclaim, " Master, it is good for us to be here : and let us make 
 three tabernacles [three arbours or forest tents of the boughs of the 
 neighbouring trees] ; one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for 
 Elias." Not knowing what he said, the words are just passing from 
 his babbling lips, when the eye that follows the retreating figures 
 is filled with another and a brighter light. A cloud comes down 
 upon the mountain-top a cloud of brightness a cloud which, 
 unfolding its hidden treasures, pours a radiance down upon the 
 scene that throws even the form of the Redeemer into shadow, and 
 in the darkness of whose excessive light the forms of Moses and 
 Elias sink away and disappear. This cloud is no other than the 
 Shekinah, the symbol of Jehovah's gracious presence. From the 
 midst of its excellent glory, there comes the voice, " This is my 
 beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him," not 
 Moses, nor Elias, nor any other lawgiver, nor any other prophet, 
 but hear ye him. As the apostles hear that voice they are sore 
 afraid ; the strength goes out of them, and they fall with their faces 
 to the ground. Jesus comes, touches them. The touch restores 
 their strength. He says, "Arise, and be not afraid." They spring 
 up; they look around. The voices have ceased, the forms have 
 vanished, the glory is gone ; they are alone with Jesus as at the first. 
 Such as we have now recited them were the incidents of the 
 Transfiguration. Let us consider now its scope and design. In 
 the shaded history of the man of sorrows, this one passage stands 
 out so unique a single outburst of light and glory on the long 
 track of darkness that we look at it with the most intense
 
 THE TRANSFIGURATION. 259 
 
 curiosity ; and as we look the questions start to our lips, Why was 
 it that for that one brief season the brow that was to be crowned 
 with thorns was crowned with glory, the countenance that was to be 
 marred and spit upon shone as the sun, the raiment that was to be 
 stripped off and divided among foreign soldiers became so bright 
 and glistering ? Why was it that he who ere long was to be seen, 
 hanging up to die between the two malefactors, was now and thus to 
 be seen with Moses and Elias standing by his side paying to him the 
 most profound obeisance ? Why did that clouded glory come down 
 and glide across the mountain-top, and that voice of the Infinite 
 Majesty speak forth its awful and authoritative, yet instructive 
 and encouraging words ? In answer to these questions, we must 
 say that we know too little of the world of spirits to take it upon 
 as to conjecture or to affirm what it was, so far as they personally 
 vrere concerned, or the community of which they formed a part, 
 which brought Moses and Elias from their places of abode in the 
 invisible world to stand and talk for this short season with Jesus 
 on the mount. Doubtless the benefit, as the honour, to them was 
 singular and great, involving a closer approach to, a nearer fellow- 
 ship with, Jesus in his glorified estate, than was ever made or 
 enjoyed by any other of our race on earth, that may be made or 
 enjoyed even by the redeemed in heaven. But we venture not to 
 specify or define what the advantage was which was thus conferred. 
 We know too little also of the inner history and of the human 
 mind of the man Christ Jesus, to say how seasonable, how service- 
 able this brief translation into the society of the upper sanctuary 
 may have been what treasures of strength and comfort fitting 
 him for the approaching hour and power of darkness, the solemn 
 announcement of his sonship by the Father, the declaration of 
 satisfaction with all his earthly work, may have conveyed into his 
 soul. Doubtless here, too, there were purposes of mercy and grace 
 towards the Redeemer subserved, which it is difficult for us to 
 apprehend, more difficult for us fully to fathom. But there is 
 another region lying far more open to our inspection than either of 
 those now indicated. It is not difficult to perceive how the whole 
 scene of the transfiguration was ordered so as to fortify and confirm 
 the apostles' faith. That it had this as one of its immediate and 
 more prominent objects is evident, from the simple fact that Peter, 
 James, and John were taken up to the mount to witness it. Not 
 for Christ's own sake alone, nor for the sake of Moses and Elias 
 alone, but for their sake also, was this glimpse of the glorified con- 
 dition of our Lord afforded j and when we set ourselves deliberately 
 to consider what the obstructions were which then lay in the way of a 
 true faith on their part in Christ, we can discern how singularly 
 fitted, in its time, its mode, and all attendant circumstances, it was 
 to remove these obstructions, and establish them in that faith.
 
 260 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 1. It helped them to rise to a true conception of the dignity of 
 the Saviour's person. The humbleness of Christ's birth, his social 
 estate, the whole outward manner and circumstances of his life 
 created then a prejudice against him and his claims to the Messiah- 
 ship, the force of which it is now difficult to compute : " Can there 
 any good thing come out of Nazareth 1" was the question not of a 
 captious scribe or a hostile Pharisee, but of an Israelite indeed, in 
 whom there was no guile. "Is not this the carpenter's son?' ; was 
 the language of those who had been intimate with him from his 
 birth when they heard him in their synagogue apply the memorable 
 passage in the prophecies of Isaiah to himself "Is not this the 
 carpenter's son ? is not his mother called Mary, and his brothers 
 James and Joses, and Simon and Judas ; and his sisters, are they 
 not all with us ? And they were offended in him." In the case of 
 his own disciples, his character, his teaching, his miracles, his life 
 fully satisfied them that he was that Prophet who was to be sent. 
 Yet the very familiarity of their daily intercourse with him as a 
 man stood in the way of their rising to the loftier conception of his 
 divinity. Besides, had no such incident as that of the Trans- 
 figuration occurred in the Saviour's history, we can well conceive 
 how at this very stage they might have been thrown into a condition 
 of mind and feeling exactly the reverse of that of their countrymen 
 at large. Blinded by pride and prejudice, the Jews generally would 
 not look at those Scriptures which spoke of a suffering, dying 
 Messiah, but fixing their eyes alone upon those glowing descriptions 
 given by their prophets of the majesty of his person and the glory 
 of his reign, they cast aside at once and indignantly the pretensions 
 of the son of the carpenter. Now, for the first time, the idea of 
 his suffering unto death was presented to the minds of his own 
 disciples. Afterwards they were more fully instructed out of the 
 writings of Moses and the prophets how it behoved Christ to suffer 
 all these things, and then to enter into his glory. But the glory of 
 which so much had been foretold that bright side of the prophetic 
 picture what was it, and when and how was it to be revealed ? 
 Here again, just when their faith was widened, in one direction, in 
 another it might have begun to falter. To meet all the trials of 
 their position, in mercy to all their weaknesses, one sight was given 
 of the Lord's transfigured form; one visible manifestation of the 
 place he held in the invisible kingdom \ one glimpse of the heavenly 
 glory, with Jesus standing in the midst. Sense stretched out its 
 vigorous hand to lay hold of blind and staggering Faith. And long 
 afterwards thirty years and more from the time that the great 
 manifestation was made in Peter's person, Faith, when she had 
 got over all her difficulties and stood serene, secure, triumphant, 
 looked back and owned the debt, and published abroad her obliga- 
 tion, saying, " We have not followed cunningly devised fables, when
 
 THE TRANSFIGURATION. 261 
 
 we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus 
 Christ, but were eye-witnesses of his majesty. For he received from 
 God the Father honour and glory, when there came such a voice to 
 him from the excellent glory, This is my beloved Son, in whom I 
 am well pleased. And this voice we heard when we were with him 
 in the holy mount." 
 
 2. The position which Christ assumed towards the Jewish 
 priesthood and the Mosaic ritual was not a little perplexing his 
 habitual neglect of some, his open and severe condemnation of other 
 religious observances sanctioned by the highest ecclesiastical 
 authorities, regarded generally as of divine origin and authority, 
 and rigorously observed by all who made any pretensions to piety. 
 He wore no phylacteries hejmade no long prayers neither he 
 nor his disciples fasted he and they ate with unwashed hands 
 he sat down with publicans and sinners in many ways, according 
 to the current ideas, he and his disciples broke the Sabbath he 
 separated himself from the priesthood he walked not in their ways 
 he discountenanced many of their practices he taught and he 
 practised a religion that made but little of holy rites and outward 
 orderly observances. The religion of the heart, the home, the 
 secret chamber, the broad highway, the solitary mountain-side a 
 religion that in its heavenward aspects opened a way direct for any 
 sinner of our race to God as his heavenly Father that in its earth- 
 ward aspects found its sphere and occupation in the faithful and 
 kindly discharge to all around of the thousand nameless duties of 
 human brotherhood : such religion the Scribes, the Pharisees, the 
 hierarchy, the whole body of the Jewish priesthood, disliked ; they 
 looked askance upon it and upon its author; took up the tale 
 against Jesus many of them no doubt believing it, and circulated 
 it that this man was an enemy of Moses, was ill-affected to the 
 Law and to the Prophets, was an innovator, a revolutionist. To see 
 and hear their Master thus arraigned, and with much apparent 
 reason too, as one throwing himself into a hostile attitude towards 
 all the venerated popular superstitions, must have been not a little 
 trying to our Lord's apostles. But if there entered into their minds 
 a doubt as to the actual inner spiritual harmony between their 
 Master's teaching and that of Moses and the prophets, the vision of 
 the mount the sight of Moses and Elias, the founder and the 
 restorer, the two chief representatives of the old covenant, appear- 
 ing in glory, entering into such fellowship with Jesus, owning him 
 as their Lord, must have cleared it away satisfying them by an 
 ocular demonstration that their Master came not to destroy the 
 law and the prophets not to destroy, but to fulfil 
 
 3. The manner of Christ's death was, of itself, a huge stumbling- 
 block in the way of faith one over which, notwithstanding all 
 that had been done beforehand to prepare them, the apostles at
 
 262 THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 first stumbled and fell. And yet one might have thought that the 
 conversation which Peter, James, and John overheard upon the 
 mount, might have satisfied them that a mysterious interest hung 
 around that death obscure to the dull eyes of ordinary mortals, 
 but very visible to the eyes of the glorified. It formed the one 
 and only topic of that sublimest interview that ever took place on 
 earth. And doubtless, when the apostles recovered from the first 
 shock of the Crucifixion, and, under Christ's and the Spirit's teach- 
 ing, the meaning and object of the great sacrifice for human guilt 
 effected by that death revealed itself, and they began to remember 
 all that the Lord had told them of it, and the seal of silence that 
 had been put upon the lips of Peter, James, and John was broken 
 when they could not only tell that it was about this decease, and 
 about it alone, that Moses and Elias had spoken to their Lord, but 
 knew now why it was that it formed the only selected topic of 
 discourse that recalled conversation of the holy mount would 
 contribute to fix their eyes in adoring gratitude upon the Cross, and 
 to open their lips, as they determined to know nothing among 
 their fellow-men but Jesus Christ, and him crucified. 
 
 4. The peculiar way in which Jesus spake of his relationship to 
 God was another great difficulty in the way of faith. It seemed so 
 strange, so presumptuous, so blasphemous, for a man with nothing 
 to mark him off as different from other men to speak of God as 
 his Father, not in any figurative or metaphorical sense, not as any 
 one, every one of his creatures might do, but in such a sense as 
 obviously to imply oneness of nature, of attributes, of authority, of 
 possession. How, against all the counter forces that came into play 
 against it, was a faith in his true sonship to the Father to be 
 created and sustained? They had his word, his character, his 
 works to build upon. But knowing the frailty of that spirit within 
 which the faith had to be built up, God was pleased to add another 
 evidence, even that of his personal and audible testimony. And so 
 from that cloudy glory which hung for a few moments above the 
 mountain-top, his own living voice was heard authenticating all that 
 Jesus had said, or was to say, of the peculiar relationship to him in 
 which he stood, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well 
 pleased. Hear ye him." 
 
 Once before, at the Baptism, had the voice of the Father beeff 
 heard uttering the same testimony confirming the same great fact 
 or truth. What more could the Father do than break the silence 
 so long preserved, bow the heavens and come down, take into his 
 lips one of our human tongues, and in words that men could under- 
 stand, thus twice and so solemnly declare, that this Jesus of 
 Nazareth this unique sojourner upon our earth was no other 
 than his only begotten, his well-beloved Son, to whom, above all 
 others, we were to open our ears, to hear and to believe, to obey
 
 THE TRANSFIGURATION. 263 
 
 and to be blessed ? In shape of mere sensible demonstration could 
 faith ask a higher, better proof? 
 
 What then may we not say as we contemplate the single but 
 strong help to faith given in this one brilliant passage of our 
 Eedeemer's life ? What hath God not done to win the faith of the 
 human family in Jesus Christ as his Son our Saviour ] If miracles 
 of wonder could have done it ; if lights seen on earth that were 
 kindled before the sun, and forms seen on earth that had passed 
 into the heavens, and the very voice heard on earth that spake and 
 it was done, that commanded and all things stood fast, could have 
 done it it had been done long ago. But, alas ! for hearts so slow 
 and hard as ours, we need Christ to be revealed to us by the Spirit, 
 as well as revealed outwardly by the Father, ere to that great say- 
 ing of his upon the mount we make the right response, looking 
 upon Jesus and saying, " Truly this is the Son of God my Lord, 
 my God, my one and only Saviour with whom I, too, am well 
 pleased, and through whom I humbly trust that the Father will be 
 well pleased with me !"
 
 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 /.THE DESCENT OF THE MOUNT OF TRANSFIGURATION. 
 
 MATT. xvn. 9-27 ; MARK ix. 9-32 ; LUKE ix. 37-45. 
 
 MORNING has dawned upon the mountain-top which had wit- 
 nessed the wonderful night-scene of the Transfiguration. Jesus and 
 the three disciples begin to descend. The silence they at first 
 observe is broken by our Lord turning to his disciples and saying, 
 ' Tell the vision to no man until the Son of man be risen again 
 from the dead.' A few days before, Jesus had straitly charged 
 them that they should tell no man that he was the Christ. The 
 discovery would be premature. The people were not prepared for 
 it. It would come unsuitably as well as unseasonably from the lips 
 of the apostles. It might serve to interrupt that course of things 
 which was to guide onward to the great decease to be accomplished 
 at Jerusalem. And whatever reasons there were for a temporary 
 concealment from the multitude of such knowledge as to their 
 Master's true character and office as the apostles possessed, still 
 stronger reasons were there that they should preserve silence as to 
 this vision on the Mount, the narration of which would be sure at 
 that time to provoke nothing but derision. Not even to the other 
 nine were the three to speak of it till the key to its true interpreta- 
 tion was in all their hands, for even by them, in the meantime, it 
 was little likely to be rightly apprehended, and it was not a topic 
 to be rudely handled as a thing of idle and ignorant talk. The 
 seal thus put upon the lips of the three, we have no reason to believe 
 was broken till the time came when they stood relieved from the 
 obligation it imposed. All the more curiously would the matter be 
 scanned by the three when alone. The thing that most perplexed 
 them as they did so was, what the rising from the dead could mean. 
 They did not venture to put any question to their Master. Now, 
 upon the mountain-side, as afterwards, they were afraid to ask him 
 about it, with something perhaps of the feeling of those who do nol 
 like to ask more about a matter which has saddened them so much
 
 THE DESCENT OF THE MOUNT OF TRANSFIGURATION. 265 
 
 to hear about at all ; from all fuller and distincter sight of which 
 they shrink 
 
 But there was a question, and that a very natural one in the 
 existing circumstances, which they did venture to put to Jesus 
 by the way. They had just seen Elias standing by the side of then- 
 Master, to be with him in that brief interview, and then depart. 
 Was this that coming of the Great Prophet about which the scribes 
 spoke so much ? It could scarcely be so, for that coming was to 
 precede the advent of the Messiah. But if Jesus were the Christ, 
 and this which they had just witnessed were the coming of Elias, 
 the prescribed prophetic order would be reversed. In the uncer- 
 tainty and confusion of their thoughts they put the question to 
 their Master, "Why say the scribes that Elias must first cornel" 
 Jesus had already months before on the occasion of the visit of 
 the two disciples of the Baptist, said to them plainly enough, " If 
 ye will receive it, this is Elias which was to come." They had not 
 fully understood or received it. In common with the whole body 
 of their countrymen, their original idea had been, that it was to be 
 an actual return of Elijah himself to the earth which was to be the 
 precursor of the appearance of their Messiah. This conception the 
 sayings of Jesus may have served partially to rectify; but now, 
 when Elijah comes and presents himself before their eyes, it returns, 
 and in returning blinds and confuses them once more. Our Lord's 
 answer is so far clear enough, that he confirms the dictum of the 
 scribes as founded on a right reading of the ancient prophecies, 
 especially of the one by Malachi, recorded in the fourth chapter of 
 that prophet's writings. It was true what these scribes had said, 
 that Elias must first come. But they were in error when they 
 looked for a personal visit from the old prophet as the precursor of 
 the first advent of the Christ. They had failed to see in the person 
 and ministry of John one coming in the spirit and power of Elias. 
 They had taken too hastily the Baptist at his word when he said 
 he was not Elias, as in a literal sense he was not. And misappre- 
 hending his character and mission, they had allowed their natural 
 dislike to such a person and ministry as his to grow till it culmi- 
 nated in that act of Herod by which the disliked preacher of 
 righteousness was cut off. Once more, therefore, does Jesus renew 
 the testimony he had already borne to the Baptist : " I say unto 
 you, That Elias is come already, and they knew him not, but have 
 done unto him whatsoever they listed." The treatment they gave 
 to the forerunner was no inapt symbol of that which they were 
 preparing for Christ himself, for " likewise shall also the Son of 
 man suffer of them." 
 
 Then the disciples understood that " he spake unto them of 
 John the Baptist." But did they understand that in his answer 
 to their inquiry our Lord alluded to another, a future coming of
 
 266 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 Elias, of which that of the Baptist was but a type or a prelude, an 
 well as to another, a future coming of the Son of man with which 
 it was to be connected ? Many think that, not obscurely, such an 
 allusion lay in the words which Christ employed, and that it is in 
 the two advents, each prefaced with its appropriate precursorage, 
 that the full and varied language of ancient prophecy receives alone 
 its fit and adequate accomplishment. 
 
 But we must now turn our eye from the little group conversing 
 about Elias, as they descended the hill-side, to what was occurring 
 elsewhere, down in the valley among the villages that lay at the 
 base of the mountain. Among the villagers there had occurred a 
 case of rare and complicated distress. A youth, the only son of 
 his father, had fallen the victim to strange and fearful paroxysms, 
 in which his own proper speech was taken from him, and he uttered 
 hideous sounds, and foamed, and gnashed with his teeth, and was 
 cast sometimes into the fire, and sometimes into the water, from 
 which he was drawn with difficulty, and half dead. To bodily 
 and mental distemper, occult and incurable, there was added 
 demoniac possession, mingling itself with and adding new horrors 
 to the terrible visitations. "With the arrival of Christ and his 
 disciples in this remote region there had come the fame of the 
 wonderful cures that he had elsewhere effected; cures, many of 
 them, of the very same kind of malady with which this youth 
 was so grievously afflicted. On learning that the company of 
 Galilean strangers had arrived in the neighbourhood of his own 
 dwelling, the father of this youth thought that the time had come 
 of relief from that heavy domestic burden that for years he had 
 been bearing. He brought to them his son. Unfortunately, it 
 so happened that he brought him when Christ and the three 
 disciples were up in the mountain, and the nine were left behind. 
 It was to them, therefore, that the application for relief was made. 
 It does not appear that when in company with Christ the disciples 
 were in the habit of claiming or exercising any preternatural 
 power over disease. No case at least of a cure effected by their 
 hands in such circumstances is recorded. But in that short 
 experimental tour, when they had been sent out away from him 
 to go two by two through Galilee, Jesus had given them power 
 over unclean spirits a power which they had exercised without 
 check or failure. And now, when they are left alone, and this most 
 painful case is brought to them, they imagine that the same power 
 is in their hands, and they essay to exercise it. In their Master's 
 name again and again they command that unclean spirit to go forth, 
 but their words return to them void. They stand baffled and 
 covered with confusion before the crowd that had gathered to 
 witness the cure. They can give no reason, for they know none, 
 why the failure had taken place. Nor are they suffered to skulk
 
 THE DESCENT OF THE MOUNT Of TRANSFIGURATION. 267 
 
 away in their defeat. Some scribes are there ready enough to 
 take advantage of the awkward dilemma into which they have 
 been thrown by assuming an authority which turns out to be 
 impotent their Master's character involved in their defeat. We 
 can well imagine what an instrument of reproach would be put 
 thus into the hands of these scribes, and how diligently and 
 effectively they would employ it; pressing the disciples with 
 questions to which they could give no satisfactory replies, and 
 turning the whole occurrence to the best account in the way of 
 casting discredit upon the Master, as well as upon his disciples. A 
 great multitude had in the meantime assembled; a profane, and 
 scoffing, and half-malignant spirit had been stealing into the hearts of 
 many, when Jesus and the three are seen coming down from the hill- 
 side. The suddenness of his appearance his coming at the very 
 time that his disciples were hard pressed, perhaps too the very 
 calmness and majesty of his appearance, as some of that glory of 
 the mountain-top still lingers around him produces a quick revolu- 
 tion of feeling in the fickle multitude. Straightway a kind of awe 
 half admiration, half alarm comes over them, and "greatly 
 amazed," they leave the scribes and the discomfited disciples, and 
 they run to him and salute him not in mockery, certainly, or 
 hailing him as one whose claims upon their homage they are ready 
 to set aside but rather with a rebound from their recent incredulity, 
 prepared to pay to him the profounder respect. And now, as on 
 some battle-field which subordinate officers have entered in absence 
 of their chief, and in which they have been worsted by the foe, at 
 the crisis of the day, the chief himself appears, and at once the tide 
 of battle turns so acts the presence of Christ. Bearing back with 
 him the multitude that had run forth to greet him, he comes up to 
 where the scribes are dealing with the apostles, and says to them, 
 "What question ye with them?" The questioners are struck 
 dumb stand silent before the Lord. In the midst of the silence 
 a man comes forward, kneels down before Jesus, tells him what 
 has happened, how fearful the malady was that had fallen upon 
 his only child, how he had brought the child to his disciples 
 and they had failed to cast the devil out of him. Too much 
 occupied with his own grief, too eager to seize the chance now given 
 that the Master may do what his disciples could not, he makes no 
 mention of the scribes, or of the hostile feeling against him they 
 have been attempting to excite But Jesus knows it all, sees how 
 in all the various regions then around him, in the hearts of the 
 people who speak to him, in the hearts of the disciples from whom 
 he had temporarily been parted, in the hearts of those scribes who 
 had been indulging in an unworthy and premature triumph, the 
 spirit of incredulity had been acting. Contemplating the sad 
 picture of prevailing unbelief, there bursts from his lips the mourn-
 
 268 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 ful ejaculation, " O faithless, incredulous, and perverse generation 1 
 How long shall I be with you and you, remain ignorant of who and 
 what I am ? How shall I suffer you, as you continue to exhibit 
 such want of trust in my willingness and power to help and save 
 you 1 " Not often does Christ give us any insight into the personal 
 emotions stirred up within his heart by the scenes among which he 
 moves not often does there issue from his lips anything approach- 
 ing to complaint. Here for a moment, out of the fulness of his 
 heart he speaketh, revealing as he does so a fountain-head of 
 sorrow lying deep within his soul, the fulness and bitterness of 
 whose waters, as they were so constantly rising up to flood and 
 overflow his spirit, who can gauge ? What must it have been for 
 Jesus Christ to come into such close familiar contact with the 
 misconceptions and incredulities, and dislikes and oppositions of the 
 men he lived among 1 With a human nature like our own, yet far 
 more exquisitely sensitive than ours to injustice and false reproach, 
 what a constant strain and burden must thus have been laid upon 
 his heart ! What an incalculable amount of patience must it have 
 called him to exercise ! 
 
 The brief lament over the faithless and perverse generation 
 uttered, Jesus says to the father, " Bring thy son hither." And 
 now follows a scene to which there are few parallels in scriptural 
 or in any other story, for our vivid conception of which we are 
 specially indebted to the graphic pen of the second Evangelist. 
 They go for the youth and bring him. So soon as he comes into 
 the presence of Jesus, and their eyes meet, whether it was that 
 the calm, benignant, heavenly look of Christ operated as a kind of 
 stimulant upon a worn-out, weak, unstrung, excitable, nervous 
 system, or that the devil, knowing that his time was short, would 
 raise one last and vehement commotion within that poor distracted 
 frame, the youth falls to the ground, wallowing, foaming, torn by 
 a power he is unable to resist. Jesus looks upon him as he lies, 
 and all who are around look at Jesus, wondering what he will do. 
 Is it easy to imagine a conjunction of outward circumstances more 
 striking or affecting 1 The youth writhing on the ground, Jesus 
 bending on him a look of ineffable pity, the father standing on the 
 tip-toe of eager expectation, the disciples, the scribes, the multitude, 
 pressing on to witness the result. Such was the season, such were 
 the circumstances, that Jesus chose for one of the shortest but 
 most memorable of his conversations. Before he says or does 
 anything as to the son, he says, quietly, inquiringly, compassion- 
 ately, to the father : " How long is it ago since this came unto 
 him ?" The father tells how long, and tells how terrible it has 
 been ; but as if somewhat impatient at such a question being put 
 at such a time, he adds, " But if thou canst do anything, have 
 compassion on us and help us." Genuine and pathetic utterance
 
 THE DESCENT OF THE MOUNT OF TRANSFIGURATION. 269 
 
 of a deep-smitten fatherly affection, identifying itself with the 
 object of its love, and intent upon the one thing of getting that 
 child cured ; all right here in the father's feeling toward his son, 
 but something wrong, something defective in the feeling toward 
 Christ, which for the man's own sake, and for his son's sake, and 
 for the sake of that gathered crowd, and for the sake of us, and of 
 all who shall ever read this narrative, Jesus desired to seize upon 
 this opportunity to correct. " If thou canst do anything," the 
 father says. " If thou canst believe," is our Lord's quick reply. 
 ' It is not as thou takest it, a question as to the extent of My 
 power, but altogether of the strength of thy faith, for if thou canst 
 but believe, all things are possible, this thing can easily be done.' 
 Eeceiving the rebuke in the spirit in which it was given, awaking 
 at once to see and believe that it was his want of faith that stood 
 in the way of his son's cure, sensible that he had been wrong in 
 challenging Christ's power, that Christ was right in challenging 
 his faith, with a flood of tears that told how truly humble and 
 broken his spirit was, the man cries out, " Lord, I believe ; help 
 thou mine unbelief." Who is not grateful to the man who lets us 
 see into that tumult and agony of soul in which true faith is born, 
 how it is that out of the dull and fearful spirit of mistrust the 
 genuine child-like confidence of the heart in Jesus struggles into 
 being. " Lord, I believe." ' I have a trust in thee. I know that 
 thou hast all power at thy command, and canst exercise it as thou 
 wilt. But when I look at that which this power of thine is now 
 called to do, my faith begins to falter. Lord, help mine unbelief. 
 Thou only canst do it. Thou only canst strengthen this weak and 
 failing heart of mine. It is thine to cure the bodily distemper of 
 my son. It is thine to heal the spiritual infirmities of my soul.' 
 What a mixture here of weakness and strength the cry for help 
 betraying the one, yet in that very cry the other standing revealed ! 
 Few utterances that have come from human lips have carried more 
 in them of the spirit that we should all seek to cherish, nor would 
 it be easy to calculate how many human beings have taken up the 
 language this man taught them to employ, and who have said to 
 Jesus, "Lord, we believe; help thou our unbelief." 
 
 In answer to this confession and this prayer, something still 
 further might have been said, had not our Lord perceived a fresh 
 pressure in upon them of the neighbouring crowd, at sight of which 
 he delayed no longer, but, turning to him who still lies upon the 
 ground before him, in words of sternness and decision he says, 
 " Thou dumb and deaf spirit, I charge thee come out of him, and 
 enter no more into him." A fresh cry of agony a last and most 
 violent convulsion and the poor afflicted youth lies stretched out 
 so motionless, that many looking at him, say that he is dead. But 
 Jesus takes him by the hand and lifts him up, and delivers him
 
 270 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 perfectly cured to his glad and grateful father. The work was 
 done, the crowd dispersed, " all amazed at the mighty power of 
 God." 
 
 Afterwards, when alone with him in the house, the apostles 
 asked Jesus why it was that they could not cast the devil out. 
 He told them that it was because of their unbelief. They had 
 suffered perhaps that late announcement which he had made to 
 them of his impending sufferings and death to dim or disturb their 
 faith, or they had allowed that still more recent selection of the 
 three, and his withdrawal from them up into the mountain, to 
 engender a jealousy which weakened that faith. One way or 
 other, their faith had given way, and in its absence they had 
 tried the power of their Master's name, in the hope that it might 
 act as a charm or talisman. Jesus would have them know that it 
 was not thus that his name was rightly, or could ever effectively, 
 be employed. Yet at the same time he would have them know 
 that the kind of spirit by which this youth had been possessed 
 was one not easy of ejection which required, in fact, on the part 
 of the ejector, such a faith as could only be reached by much 
 prayer and fasting ; teaching them thus, in answer to their inquiry, 
 the double lesson that the primary source of their failure lay in the 
 defect of their faith ; and that the manner in which that faith could 
 alone be nourished up to the required degree of strength was by 
 fasting and by prayer, by weaning themselves from the pursuits and 
 enjoyments of sense, by repeated and earnest supplications to the 
 Giver of every good and perfect gift, whose office it is to work in 
 his people the work of faith with power. At the same time Jesus 
 took the opportunity which this private interview with his disciples 
 afforded as he had taken the opportunity of his interview with the 
 importunate father to proclaim the great power, the omnipotence 
 of faith. 1 This obviously was the one great lesson which, in this 
 passage of his earthly history, Jesus designed to teach. 
 
 Sudden and very striking must have been the transition from 
 the brightness, the blessedness of that sublime communion with 
 Moses and Elias on the mount, to the close contact with human 
 misery in the shape of the possessed lunatic who lay writhing at his 
 feet; so sharp and impressive the contrast that the prince of 
 painters, in his attempt to picture to our eye the glories of the 
 Transfiguration, has thrown in the figure of the suffering child at 
 the base of the mountain. But more even than by this contact 
 with human misery does our Saviour seem on this occasion to have 
 been impressed by his coming into such close contact with so many 
 forms of human unbelief. And he appears to have framed and 
 selected this as the first occasion on which to announce, not only 
 the need and the benefit, but the illimitable power of faith. 
 
 1 Matt. xvii. 20.
 
 THE DESCENT OF THE MOUNT OF TRANSFIGUKATION. 271 
 
 He could easily have arranged it so that no application had been 
 made to his disciples in his absence, but then they had wanted the 
 lesson the failure carried in its bosom. He could easily have cured 
 that maniac boy at once and by a word ; but then his father had 
 missed that lesson which, in the short preliminary conversation 
 with him, was conveyed. And through both, to us and to all, the 
 great truth is made known that in this world of sin and sorrow the 
 prime necessity is, that we should have faith in God and faith in 
 Jesus Christ not a faith in certain truths or propositions about God 
 or about Jesus Christ but simple, child-like trust in God as our 
 Father, in Jesus as our Saviour ; a faith that will lead us in all 
 times of our weakness and exposure, and temptation and distress, 
 to fly to them to succour us, casting ourselves upon a help that 
 never was refused to those who felt their need of it. Neither for 
 our natural nor for our spiritual life is the physical removal of 
 mountains necessary ; if it were, we believe that it would be given 
 in answer to believing prayer; but mountains of difficulty there 
 are, moral and spiritual, which do need to be removed ere our way 
 be made plain, and we be carried smoothly and prosperously along 
 it ; corruptions within us to be subdued j temptations without us 
 to be overcome. These must be met, and struggled with, and over- 
 come. It is by the might and mastery of faith and prayer that 
 this can alone be accomplished. And it is no small comfort for us 
 to be assured, on the word of our Lord himself, that though our 
 faith be small in bulk as the mustard seed, yet if it be genuine, if 
 it humbly yet firmly take hold of the mighty power of God and 
 hang upon it, it will avail to bring that power down to our aid and 
 rescue, so that, weak as we are in ourselves, and strong as the world 
 is to overcome us, yet greater shall he be that is with us than he 
 that is in the world, and we shall be able to do all things through 
 him who strengtheneth us. Prayer, it has been said, moves him 
 who moves the universe. But it is faith which gives to prayer the 
 faculty of linking itself in this way with Omnipotence, and calling 
 it to human aid. And so you find that, in one of the other two 
 instances in which Jesus made use of the same expressions as to 
 the power of faith which he employed upon this occasion, he coupled 
 faith and prayer together. "Master," said Peter, wondering at the 
 effect which a single word of Jesus had produced, "Master, be- 
 hold the fig-tree which thou cursedst is withered away. And Jesus 
 answering said unto them, Have faith in God. For verily I say 
 unto you, That whosoever shall say to this mountain, Be thou re- 
 moved, and be thou cast into the sea, and shall not doubt in his 
 heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come 
 to pass, he shall have whatsoever he saith. Therefore I say unto 
 you, What things soever ye desire when ye pray, believe that ye 
 receive them, and ye shall have them." Wonderful words, assign-
 
 272 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 ing an all-embracing, an absolutely unlimited efficacy to faith and 
 prayer words not to be lightly judged of, as if they were intended 
 to encourage the rash and the ignorant conceits and confidences of 
 a presumptuous enthusiasm but words of truth and soberness, 
 notwithstanding the width and compass of their embrace, if only 
 we remember that true faith will confide in God, or Christ, only 
 for that as to which he invites, and so warrants, its confidence ; and 
 true prayer will ask for that alone which is agreeable to the will of 
 God, and will promote the spiritual and eternal good of him upon 
 whom it is bestowed. These are the conditions natural and 
 reasonable which underlie all that Christ has said of the power of 
 faith and prayer. And within these conditions we accept all that 
 he has said as true in itself, and wanting only a firmer faith, and 
 a more undoubting prayer than we have exercised or put forth, to 
 Deceive its fulfilment in our own experience. 
 
 II. 
 
 THE PAYMENT OF THE TRIBUTE-MONEY THE STRIFE AS TO WHO 
 SHOULD BE GREATEST IN THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. 
 MATT. xvn. 22-27 ; xvni. 1-35 ; MARK ix. 30-41 ; LUKE ix. 43-50. 
 
 FROM his retirement in the neighbourhood of Csesarea-Philippi 
 Jesus returned to Galilee not, however, to resume his public 
 ministry there. He sought privacy now, even among the scenes of 
 his former labours a privacy that he wished to consecrate to the 
 further enlightenment of the twelve as to his own character and 
 office, and the true nature of the kingdom he came to institute. 1 
 It was in fulfilment of this purpose that on the way from the scene 
 of the Transfiguration to his old haunts about Capernaum, he made 
 a second announcement of his impending death and resurrection, 
 adding to the details of his passion formerly given that of his 
 betrayal. So hid was the meaning of Christ's words, that all that 
 the apostles appear to have derived from them was a vague impres- 
 sion that some great and decisive events in their Master's history 
 were drawing near, in contemplation of which they began disputing 
 among themselves which should be greatest in the kingdom which 
 they hoped to see so soon set up, keeping, as they imagined, their 
 disputings about this topic concealed from Christ. 
 
 On their arrival at Capernaum the persons appointed to receive 
 the annual tribute which was paid for the support of the Temple 
 services, came to Peter and said to him, "Doth not your Master 
 pay tribute 1 " Those who put this question were not the publicans 
 or ordinary tax-gatherers who levied the, dues laid upon the Jews 
 i Mark ix. 30, 31.
 
 THE PAYMENT OF THE TKIBUTE-MONEY. 273 
 
 by their governors the Komans. Nor was the question one about 
 the payment of any common tax, any civil impost. The very form 
 of the question, had it been literally rendered, would have indicated 
 this, "Doth not your Master pay the didrachma 1 ?" a modern coin 
 then in circulation, equivalent in value to the old half-shekel, which, 
 having gone out of use, had become rare. Every Jew of twenty 
 years old and upward was required to give a half-shekel yearly for 
 the maintenance, first of the Tabernacle, and afterwards of the 
 Temple. Although this payment was legally imposed, it does not 
 appear to have been enforced by civil pains or penalties. It was 
 left rather, like other of the Mosaic imposts, to the spontaneous 
 action of conscience, and a good-will towards the theocracy on the 
 part of the people. It was to the payment of this didrachma or 
 half-shekel for the upholding of the Temple and its ordinances, that 
 the question put to St. Peter referred. It is impossible for us to 
 say positively in what spirit or with what motive the question was 
 put. It certainly was not the question of the lynx-eyed collectors 
 of the ordinary revenue, detecting an attempted evasion of the 
 payment of one or other of the common taxes. From no civil 
 obligation laid upon him by law did Jesus ever claim to be exempt, 
 nor would the argument which he used afterwards with the apostle, 
 embodying a claim to exemption in this case, have been applicable 
 to any such obligation. But why did those to whom the gathering 
 of this ecclesiastical impost was intrusted speak as they did to St. 
 Peter ? Was it from doubt or ignorance on their part as to whether 
 Jesus ought to be asked or now meant to pay this tax ? Priests, 
 Levites, prophets, some tell us that even Eabbis, were held to be 
 free from this payment. Had Christ's retirement now from public 
 duty suggested the idea that he had thrown aside that character 
 under which immunity might have been claimed by him, and that 
 he might be called upon therefore to submit to all the ordinary 
 obligations under which every common inhabitant of the country 
 was laid ? Or was this a piece of rude impertinence on the part of 
 the under officials of the hierarchy, who, seeing the disfavour into 
 which Jesus had sunk with their superiors, were quick to take 
 advantage of their commission to obtrude a question that seemed to 
 cast some reproach on Christ as if he were a defaulter? Some 
 colour is given to the supposition that it was in a sinister spirit that 
 the inquiry was made from the circumstance of St. Peter's prompt 
 reply a reply in which there may have been indignation at an 
 implied suspicion, and a scorn at disputing about such a trifle, 
 so that without any communication with Jesus he shuts the mouths 
 of these gainsayers by saying, Yes, his Master paid or would pay 
 the tribute. Had the tone in which the question was asked, and 
 the apostle's reply was given, been known to us, we might have 
 told whether it was so or not. As it is, it can only be a conjecture
 
 274 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 that it was iu a hostile and malicious spirit that the collectors of the 
 tribute-money acted. Peter, however, was too rash and hasty. It 
 might be true enough that his Master had no desire to avoid that 
 or any other service which he owed to the Temple and to its worship. 
 It might be safe enough in him to undertake for his Master so 
 trifling a payment, which, whether Jesus acquiesced in the engage- 
 ment or not, the apostle could easily find the means for meeting. 
 But in such an instant acknowledgment of the obligation there was 
 an overlooking on Peter's part of the dignity of Christ's person, 
 and of his position towards the Temple. To remind him of this 
 oversight, to recall his attention to what was implied in his own 
 recent confession at Caesarea-Philippi, when they were come into 
 the house, without waiting for any communication from Peter as 
 to what had occurred, Jesus said to him, "What thinkest thou, 
 Simon 1 of whom do the kings of the earth take custom or tribute 1 
 of their own children, or of strangers 1" those who are not members 
 of their own family not sons, but subjects. Peter saith to him, 
 "Of the latter, of strangers. Jesus saith to him, Then are the 
 children free." Upon this simple principle Christ would have 
 Peter to recognise his immunity from that tribute which was now 
 claimed for was he not greater than the Temple ? Did he not 
 bear to that Temple the relation of the Son in the house of his 
 Father ? And did he not as such stand free from all the obliga- 
 tions which the King and Lord of that house had laid upon his 
 servants, his subjects 1 It will not be easy to show any pertinence 
 in the plea for immunity thus presented, without admitting the 
 altogether peculiar relationship in which Christ stood to the Father. 
 Accept the truth of his divine Sonship to the Father, and the plea 
 holds good ; reject that truth, and the plea seems weak and void. 
 And was it not for the purpose of still further illustrating that very 
 Sonship to God which Peter for the moment had forgotten, that 
 our Lord directed him to do that which in the issue carried with it 
 so remarkable a proof that in the Great Temple of the visible 
 creation Jesus was not a servant but a son ; that everywhere within 
 and over that house he ruled ; that all things there were ready to 
 serve him the flowers of the field, the birds of the air, the fish of 
 the sea, seeing that at Christ's bidding one of the latter was to be 
 ready to grasp at Peter's hook, and on being taken up was to have 
 in its mouth the stater, the four-drachm piece, the very sum required 
 from two persons for the yearly Temple tax 1 It is as viewed in 
 this connection that a miracle which otherwise would look needless 
 and undignified out of keeping with the general character of our 
 Lord's great works, all of which in some way have something more 
 than mere exhibiting of power takes rank with all the rest as 
 illustrative of the higher character and office of the Eedeemer. It 
 was not want which forced our Lord upon this forth-putting of his
 
 THE STRIFE AS TO WHO SHOULD BE GREATEST. 275 
 
 divinity. Even had the bag which Judas carried been for the 
 moment empty, the sum required to meet this payment was not so 
 large but that it could easily have been otherwise procured ; but in 
 the manner in which the need was met Jesus would set forth that 
 character on the ground of which he might have claimed immunity, 
 throwing over the depths of his earthly poverty the glory of his 
 divine riches, and making it manifest how easy it had been for him 
 to have laid all nature under contribution to supply all his wants. 
 Yet another purpose was served by this incident in our Saviour's 
 life. In point of time it harmonises with the first occasions on 
 which Jesus began to speak of that Church, that separate society 
 which was to spring forth out of the bosom of Judaism, and to take 
 the place of the old theocracy. Had he, without explanation made, 
 at once ratified the engagement that Peter made for him, it might 
 have been interpreted as an acknowledgment of his subjection to 
 the customs and laws of the old covenant. That no offence might 
 be taken taken in ignorance by those who were ignorant of the 
 ground upon which immunity from this payment on his part might 
 have been asserted he was willing to do as Peter said he would. 
 In this it became him to fulfil all the righteousness of the law, but 
 even in doing so he will utter in private his protest, and in the 
 mode wherein that protest is embodied convey beforehand no 
 indistinct intimation that a breach was to take place between the 
 Temple service and the new community of the free of which he was 
 to be the Head. 
 
 It is extremely difficult to determine what the exact order of 
 events was on the arrival at Capernaum. If it were while they 
 were on the way to the house most likely that of Peter, in which 
 Jesus took up his abode that the collectors of the Temple tax 
 made their application, then the first incident after the arrival 
 would be the short conversation with Simon, and the despatching 
 him to obtain the stater from the fish's mouth upon the lake. In 
 Peter's absence, and after they had entered the house, Jesus may 
 have said to his disciples, " What was it that ye disputed among 
 yourselves by the way?" They were so struck by surprise, had 
 been so certain that their Master had not overheard the dispute 
 that had taken place, that they had no answer to give to his inquiry. 
 Meanwhile, Peter has returned from his errand, and reported its 
 result, while they in turn report to him the inquiry that had been 
 made of them. Let us remember here that up to the time of the 
 arrival in the neighbourhood of Csesarea-Philippi, no instance is on 
 record of any controversy having arisen among the personal attend- 
 ants on Christ as to the different positions they were to occupy in 
 his kingdom. All had hitherto been so vague and indefinite as to 
 the time and manner of the institution of the kingdom, that all 
 conjecture or anticipation as to their relative places therein had
 
 276 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 been kept in abeyance. Now, however, they see a new tone and 
 manner in their Master. He speaks of things they do not well 
 know what which are about to occur in Jerusalem. He tells them 
 that there were some of them standing there before him which 
 should not taste of death till they had seen the kingdom of God. 
 Which of them could it be for whom such honour was in reserve ? 
 He takes Peter and James and John up with him to the mount, 
 and appears there before them in so new an aspect, invested with 
 such a strange and exceeding glory, that the privilege of being 
 present at such a spectacle must have appeared to the three as 
 a singular distinction conferred upon them. They were not to tell 
 the others what they had seen, but they could scarcely fail to tell 
 them they had seen something wonderful beyond anything that 
 had happened in their Lord's wonderful life, which they were not 
 permitted to reveal. Would not the seal of secrecy so imposed 
 enhance in their estimation the privilege which had been conferred 
 on them, and would it not in the same degree be apt to awaken a 
 jealousy on the part of the nine ? At the very time, then, that 
 they all began to look out for the coming of the kingdom as near 
 at hand, by the materials thus supplied for pride with some, for 
 envy with the rest, an apple of discord was thrown in among the 
 twelve. They were but men of like passions with ourselves. They 
 had as yet no other notion of the kingdom that was shortly to 
 appear than that it would be a temporal one ; that their Master was 
 to become a powerful and victorious prince, with places, honours, 
 wealth, at his command. And what more natural than that they 
 whom he had chosen to be confidential attendants in the days of 
 his humiliation should be then signally exalted and rewarded? 
 Such being their common expectations, any mark of partiality on 
 Christ's part would be particularly noted ; and what more natural 
 than that such a signal one as that bestowed upon the three, in 
 their being chosen as the only witnesses of the Transfiguration, 
 should have stirred up the strife by the way as to who should be 
 the greatest in the kingdom of heaven 1 
 
 This first outbreak of selfishness and pride and ambition and 
 envy and strife, among his chosen companions, was a great occasion 
 in the sight of Jesus. It might and it did spring in a large extent 
 from ignorance, and, with the removal of that ignorance, might be 
 subdued ; but it might and it did spring from sources which, after 
 fullest knowledge had been conveyed of what the kingdom was and 
 wherein its distinctions lay, might still have power to flood the 
 Church with a whole host of evils. Therefore it was that Jesus 
 would signalise this occasion by words and an act of particular 
 impressiveness. Peter had returned from the lake-side with the 
 stater in his hand to pay for himself and for Jesus. The others 
 told him of the questions that had been put to them, and of the
 
 THE STRIFE AS TO WHO SHOULD BE GREATEST. 277 
 
 silence they had observed. As they do so, this new instance of 
 Peter's selection for a separate service stirs the embers of their 
 former strife, and in their curiosity and impatience one of them is 
 bold enough to say to Jesus, " Who is or shall be the greatest in 
 the kingdom of heaven?" Jesus sits down, calls the twelve that 
 they might be all around him, and says to them, " If any man 
 desire to be first, the same shall be last." 'If any man, actuated 
 by selfish, covetous, ambitious motives, seek to be first in my king- 
 dom, he shall be last the very efforts that he shall make to climb 
 to the highest elevation there being of their very nature such as 
 shall plunge him to the lowest depths. But if any man would be 
 first within that kingdom, first in goodness, first in usefulness, first 
 in honour there, let him be last, willing to be the servant of others, 
 ready to esteem others better than himself, prepared to take any 
 place, to make any sacrifice, to render any service, provided only 
 that others' welfare be thereby advanced. In humbling himself so, 
 that man shall be exalted. I give to this great truth a visible and 
 memorable representation.' Jesus called a little child to him, set 
 him in the midst, then took him into his arms, and said, " Verily 
 I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little chil- 
 dren, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." 'Ye are 
 fighting about places, power, pre-eminence in my kingdom ; but I 
 tell you that the selfishness, the pride, the ambition, out of which 
 all such strife emerges, are so wholly alien from the nature of that 
 kingdom which I have come to introduce and establish, that unless 
 you be changed in spirit, and become meek, humble, teachable, sub- 
 missive as this little child which I now hold so gently in my arms, 
 ye cannot enter into that kingdom, much less rise to places of dis- 
 tinction there. You wish to know who shall be greatest in that 
 kingdom. It shall not be the wisest, the wealthiest, the most 
 powerful, but whosoever shall most humble himself, and in humility 
 be likest to this little child, the same shall be greatest in the king- 
 dom of heaven.' ' If that be true,' we can fancy the Apostles think- 
 ing and saying, ' if all personal distinction and pre-eminence must be 
 renounced by us, if in seeking to be first we must be last, and each 
 be the servant of all the others, what then will become of our official 
 influence and authority who will receive and obey us as thy repre- 
 sentatives ? ' Our Lord's reply is this ' Your true and best reception 
 as my ambassadors does not depend upon the external rank you 
 hold, or the official authority with which you may be clothed. It 
 depends upon your own personal qualities as humble, loving, devoted 
 followers of me. This is true of you and of all ; for whosoever 
 receiveth one such little child one of these little ones which believe 
 in me, in my name receiveth me ; and whosoever receiveth me, 
 receiveth not me but him that sent me.' 
 
 This new idea about receiving the least of Christ's little ones
 
 278 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 in Christ's name, awakens in the breast of one of his auditors a 
 troubling remembrance. John recollects that he and some others 
 of the disciples had once seen a man casting out devils in the name 
 of Christ, and that they had forbidden him to do so, because, as 
 they thought, he had no authority to do so, had received no com- 
 mission, was not even openly a follower of Jesus. Somewhat in 
 doubt now, after what he has heard, as to whether they had been 
 right in doing so, he states the case to Jesus, and gets at once the 
 distinct and emphatic " Forbid him not, for there is no man which 
 shall do a miracle in my name that can lightly speak evil of me." 
 John had judged this man rashly and severely, had counted him 
 guilty of presumption in attempting, whilst standing outside the 
 circle of Christ's acknowledged friends and followers, to do anything 
 in his name ; had doubted or disbelieved that he was a disciple of 
 or a believer in Jesus. Full of the spirit of officialism, in the pride 
 of his order as one of the selected twelve, to whom alone, as he 
 imagined, the power of working miracles in Christ's name had 
 been committed, John had interfered to arrest his procedure, 
 acting thus as the young man and as Joshua did, of whom we read 
 in the Book of Numbers, " And there ran a young man, and told 
 Moses, and said, Eldad and Medad do prophesy in the camp. And 
 Joshua the son of Nun, answered and said, My lord Moses, forbid 
 them." But Moses, in the very spirit of Christ, said, "Enviest 
 thou for my sake 1 Would God that all the Lord's people were 
 prophets, and that the Lord would put his Spirit upon them ! " 1 
 " Forbid him not," said Jesus. ' His doing a miracle in my name 
 is a far better evidence of his cherishing a real trust in me, being 
 one of mine, than any external position or official rank that he 
 could occupy. Be not hasty in deciding as to who are and who 
 are not my genuine disciples ; for while that is true which I taught 
 you when I was speaking of those who alleged that I cast out 
 devils by Beelzebub the prince of the devils, that " he that is not 
 with me is against me, and he that gathereth not with me scattereth 
 abroad," 2 it is no less true that " he that is not against us is on our 
 part." ' Neither of the two sayings, indeed, can be universally and 
 unlimitedly applied ; but there are circumstances in which absence 
 of open hostility may of itself be taken as evidence of friendship ; 
 and there are circumstances in which absence of open friendship 
 may of itself be taken as evidence of hostility. Instead of over- 
 looking, as they had done, such a strong conclusive evidence as that 
 of working miracles in Christ's name, John and the others should 
 have been ready, as their Master was, to recognise the slightest 
 token of attachment. "For whosoever," added Jesus, "shall give 
 you a cup of water to drink, in my name, because ye belong to 
 Christ, verily I say unto you, He shall not lose his reward." 
 i Numbers xi. 27, 29. * Matt. xii. 30.
 
 CHRIST AND HIS BRETHREN. 279 
 
 We have liad before us the first of the two instances in which 
 John was led away by a fiery and intemperate zeal in this instance 
 to misjudge and condemn one who, though he had not faith nor 
 fortitude enough to leave all and follow Jesus, yet had faith enough 
 to enable him to work miracles in Christ's name. It is not told us 
 how John took the check which Jesus laid upon that spirit of 
 officialism and fanaticism which had been working in his breast. 
 But we do know how thoroughly that spirit was at last subdued in 
 the heart of the meekest and most loving of the twelve, and how 
 he moved afterward through his fellow-men with step of Christ-like 
 gentleness, and became " the guardian spirit of the little ones of 
 the kingdom." 
 
 III. 
 
 CHRIST AND HIS BRETHREN. 
 JOHN vn. 1-9. 
 
 WE like to follow those, who by their sayings and doings have 
 filled and dazzled the public eye, into the seclusion of their homes. 
 We like to see such men in their undress, when, all restraint 
 removed, their peculiarities of character are free to exhibit them- 
 selves in the countless artless ways and manners of daily domestic 
 life. It brings them so much nearer to us, gives us a closer hold 
 of them, makes us feel more vividly their kinship to us, to know 
 how they did the things that we have all every day to do, how 
 they comported themselves in the circumstances in which we all 
 every day are placed. Great pains have been taken by biographers 
 of distinguished men to gratify this desire. Quite apart, indeed, 
 from any object of this kind, we could scarcely sit down to write 
 out an account of what we we saw and heard in the course of two 
 or three years' close intercourse with a friend, without dropping 
 many a hint as to the minor modes and habits of his life. 
 
 Is there nothing remarkable in the entire absence of anything 
 of this kind in the narrative of the four Evangelists ? Engrossed 
 with what they tell us, we think not of what they have left untold ; 
 think not, for example, that they have left no materials for gratify- 
 ing the desire that we have spoken of one so natural and so strong. 
 It is as if in writing these narratives a strong bias of our nature 
 had been put under restraint. They say not a word about the 
 personal appearance of their Master; there is nothing for the 
 painter or sculptor to seize on. They give us no details of his 
 private and personal habits, of any peculiarities of look or speech 
 or gesture, of the times or ways of his doing this thing or that. 
 St. Mark, the most graphic describer of the four, tells us once or
 
 280 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 twice of a particular look or motion of our Lord, but not so as to 
 indicate anything distinctive in their manner. Why this silence 1 
 Why thus withhold from us all means of forming a vivid conception 
 of the Redeemer's personal appearance, and of following him 
 through the details of his more familiar daily intercourse with 
 the twelve ? Was it that the materials were wanting, that there 
 were no personal peculiarities about Jesus Christ, that inwardly 
 and outwardly all was so nicely balanced, all was in such perfect 
 harmony and proportion, that as in his human intellect and human 
 character, there was nothing to distinguish him individually from 
 his fellow-men, nothing, I mean, of that kind by which all in- 
 dividual intellects and characters are each specially characterised, 
 so even in the minor habits of his life there was nothing distinc- 
 tive to be recorded ? Or was it that the veil has been purposely 
 drawn over all such materials, to check all that superstitious wor- 
 ship of the senses which might have gathered round minute pictures 
 of our Lord in the acts and habits of his daily life ? If, even as it 
 is, the passion for such worship has made the food for itself to feed 
 upon, and, living upon that food, has swelled out into such large 
 proportions, what would it have been if such food had from the 
 first been provided ? Is it not well that the image of our Lord in 
 his earthly life, while having the print of our humanity so clearly 
 and fully impressed upon it, should yet be lifted up and kept apart, 
 and all done that could be done to keep it from being sullied by 
 such rude, familiar, irreverent regard ? 
 
 What is true of our Lord's habits generally, is true of his 
 religious habits, of the time and manner in which religious duties 
 were performed. We know something of the manner in which 
 these duties were discharged by a truly devout Jew of Christ's 
 age, of the daily washings before meals, and the frequent fastings, 
 and the repeated and long prayers, of the attendance at the syna- 
 gogue, and the regular going up to the great feasts at Jerusalem. 
 Some of these Jesus appears to have neglected. The scribes and 
 the Pharisees came to him, saying, "Why do thy disciples trans- 
 gress the tradition of the elders 1 for they wash not their hands 
 when they eat bread." l Again they came to him with another 
 similar complaint, "why do the disciples of John fast often and 
 make prayers, and likewise the disciples of the Pharisees, but 
 thine eat and drink?" These charges are brought nominally 
 against the disciples, who only followed the example of their 
 Master. He neglected the ordinary ablutions to which in Jewish 
 eyes a sacred character attached. He himself did not fast, and he 
 taught his disciples that when they did so it was to be in such a 
 manner that men might not know that they were fasting. Of the 
 times and the manner in which our Lord's private devotions were 
 i Matt. xv. 2.
 
 CHRIST AND HIS BRETHREN. 281 
 
 conducted, how little is revealed ! You read of his rising up a great 
 while before day, and retiring into a solitary place to pray. 1 You 
 read of his sending the multitude away and going up into a moun- 
 tain to pray ; of his continuing all night in prayer. 2 You read of 
 special acts of devotion connected with his baptism, his transfigura- 
 tion, his agony in the garden, his suffering on the cross. We 
 know that it was by him, and him alone, of all the children of 
 men, that the precept "pray without ceasing" was fully and per- 
 fectly kept kept by its being in the spirit of prayer that his 
 whole life was spent, but when we ask what Christ's daily habit 
 was, how often each day did he engage in specific acts of devotion, 
 and how, when he did so, were these acts performed did he 
 retire each morning and evening from his disciples to engage in 
 prayer? did he daily, morning and evening, pray with and for 
 his disciples 1 the Evangelists leave us without an answer. The 
 single thing they tell us, and it conveys but little precise informa- 
 tion, is, that " it came to pass, that, as he was praying in a certain 
 place, when he ceased, one of his disciples said unto him, Lord, 
 teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples." 3 This took 
 place during the last six months of our Lord's ministry. It looks 
 as if the disciples had come upon their Master when engaged in 
 his solitary devotions, and had been so struck with what they saw 
 and heard, that one of them, when the prayer was over, could not 
 help asking him to teach them to pray. Eemembering that this 
 happened at so late a period in their intercourse with him, does it 
 not seem as if Jesus had not been in the habit of daily leading 
 their devotions ? The very difficulty that we feel in understanding 
 how at such a time such a question came to be put to him shows 
 us what a blank there is here in the evangelic narrative, and how 
 ignorant we must be content to remain. 
 
 If the generally accepted chronology of our Lord's life be the 
 true one and we see no reason to reject it we are not left in 
 such ignorance as to how another of the religious duties practised 
 at the time by those around him was discharged by Christ. His 
 ministry in Galilee lasted eighteen months. During this period 
 four of the great annual religious festivals which the Jews were 
 enjoined to attend had taken place at Jerusalem two Pente- 
 costs, one Passover, and one feast of Tabernacles, at none of 
 which Jesus appeared. There was indeed a reason for his absence, 
 grounded on the state of feeling against him existing in Jerusalem, 
 and the resolution already taken by the Jewish leaders there to 
 cut him off by death. TUl his work in Galilee was completed he 
 would not place himself in the circumstances which would inevit- 
 ably lead on to that doom being executed. But who of all around 
 him knew of that or any other good or sufficient reason for his 
 i Mark i. 35. 2 Matt. xiv. 23 ; Luke vi. 12. * Luke ^ j
 
 282 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTKY. 
 
 absenting himself from these sacred festivals 1 And to them what 
 a perplexing fact must that absence have appeared ! Altogether, 
 when you take the entire attitude, bearing, and conduct of Jesus 
 Christ as to their ablutions, their fastings, their prayers, their 
 keeping of the Sabbath, their attendance at the feasts, it is not 
 difficult to imagine what an inexplicable mystery he must have 
 been to the great majority of his countrymen. I do not speak row 
 of the scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, of whom his teaching and 
 his life was one continued rebuke, and who hated him with a 
 deadly hatred from the first, but of the many sincerely devout, 
 superstitiously religious Jews amongst whom he lived. What a 
 perfect puzzle to such the character and career of this man Christ 
 Jesus one speaking so much and in such a way of God and of godli- 
 ness, proclaiming the advent of God's own kingdom on the earth, 
 unfolding its duties, its privileges, its blessednesses, yet to their 
 seeming so neglectful, so undevout, so irreligious ! We may not 
 be able now thoroughly to put ourselves in these men's position 
 thoroughly to understand with what kind of eyes it was that they 
 looked upon that wonderful spectacle which the life of Jesus 
 pressed upon their vision ; but we should be capable of discerning 
 the singular and emphatic protest which that life was ever raising 
 against all mere formal piety, the piety of times and seasons and 
 ordinances, the religion of rule and of routine. 
 
 But let us now rejoin our Lord. He is once more at Capernaum, 
 or in its neighbourhood. A year and a half has elapsed since he 
 joined the bands in company with whom he had gone up to Jeru- 
 salem to keep the second Passover after his baptism. It is autumn, 
 and all around are busy in preparing for their journey to the 
 capital to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles. But he exhibits no 
 intention to accompany them. He is going apparently to treat this 
 festival as he had done the four which preceded it. "What others 
 thought of his behaviour in this respect we are left to conjecture. 
 His brethren, however those who were either his actual brothers 
 or his cousins the members of that household in which he had 
 been brought up could not let the opportunity pass without telling 
 him what they thought of his conduct. He and they had latterly 
 been separated. They did not believe in him. They did not rank 
 themselves among his disciples. Yet uninterested spectators of 
 what had been going on in Galilee they could not remain. Now 
 that Joseph was dead, he was the head of their family, and they 
 could not but feel that their position and prospects were in some 
 way linked with his. Somewhat proud they could not but be that 
 he had excited such great attention, done such wonderful works, 
 drawn after him such vast crowds. At first, with all their incredu- 
 lity, they were half inclined to hope that some great future was in 
 store for him. One who spake so highly and with such authority
 
 CHEIST AND IHS BRETHREN. 283 
 
 as he did, who claimed and exercised such power, what might he 
 not be and do in a community so peculiarly placed, so singularly 
 excitable as the Jewish one then was ? He might even prove to be 
 the Messiah, the great princely leader of the people for whom so 
 many were waiting. Against that was the whole style and char- 
 acter of his teaching in which, instead of there being anything 
 addressed to the social or political condition of the people, anything 
 fitted to. stir up the spirit of Jewish pride and independence, there 
 was everything calculated to soothe and subdue to lead the 
 thoughts and hopes of the people in quite other than earthly 
 channels. Against it, too, there was the fact, becoming more 
 apparent as the months ran on, that the natural leaders of the com- 
 munity the scribes and Pharisees by and through whom it could 
 only be that any great civil emancipation could be effected, were 
 uniting against him in a bond of firmer and fiercer hostility. Even 
 the crowds of the common people, which had at first surrounded 
 him, were latterly declining, offended at the way in which he was 
 beginning to speak of himself telling them that except they ate 
 his flesh and drank his blood they had no life in them. Embold- 
 ened by all this to use the old familiarity to which in other days 
 they had been accustomed, his brethren come to him and say, 
 "Depart hence and go into Judea, that thy disciples also may see 
 the works that thou doest. For there is no man that doeth any 
 thing in secret, and he himself seeketh to be known openly : if thou 
 do these things, shew thyself to the world." Imputing to him the 
 common motives by which all worldly, selfish, ambitious men are 
 animated, they taunt him with weakness and folly. Who that 
 possessed such powers as he did would be satisfied with turning 
 them to such poor account ? If he were what he seemed, was he 
 to hide himself for ever among these hills of Galilee, and not go up 
 boldly to the capital, and wrest from the rulers the acknowledg- 
 ment of his claims ? It was but a pitiful success to draw after him 
 some thousands of a gaping multitude, who followed him because 
 they ate of the bread that he furnished and were filled all whose 
 faith in him was exhausted in wondering at him as the worker of 
 such miracles. Let him, if he had the spirit of a true courage in 
 him if he was fit to take the leadership of the people let him 
 aim at once at far higher game, place himself at once in the centre 
 of influence at Jerusalem, and show himself to the world. Then if 
 on that broad theatre he made his pretensions good, it would be 
 some honour to claim connection with him, some benefit to be en- 
 rolled as his followers. 
 
 How true is all this to that spirit of a mere earthly prudence 
 and policy by which the lives of multitudes are regulated ! Christ's 
 own brothers judge of him by themselves. They cannot conceive 
 but that he must desire to make the most for his own benefit and
 
 284 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 aggrandisement of whatever gifts he possessed. They count it to be 
 weak in him, or worse, that he will not do the most he can in this 
 way and for this end. They measure all by outward and visible 
 success. And if success of that kind be not realised, all the chances 
 and opportunities that are open to him they regard as thrown away 
 and lost. In speaking thus to Jesus they sever themselves by a 
 wide interval from their great relative. He was not of this world. 
 Unselfish, unworldly were all his motives, aims, and ends. They 
 are of the world, and true children of the world they are, in thus 
 addressing him, proving themselves to be. And this they must be 
 told at least, if they will not effectually be taught. It was in a tone 
 of assumed superiority that they had spoken to him when they pre- 
 scribed the course he should pursue. How far above them does he 
 rise, as from that altitude whose very height hid it from their eyes, 
 he calmly yet solemnly rolls back on them their rebuke "My 
 time is not yet come, but your time is always ready. The world 
 cannot hate you, but me it hateth, because I testify of it that the 
 works thereof are evil. Go ye up unto the feast. I go not up yet 
 unto the feast, for my time is not yet full come." They would 
 have him seize upon the opportunity of the approaching feast to 
 show himself to the world, to win the world's favour and applause. 
 This was their notion of human life. The stage upon which men 
 play their parts here was in their eyes but as a mixed array of 
 changes and chances upon which the keen eye of selfishness should 
 be always fixed, ready to grasp and make the most of them for 
 purposes of personal aggrandisement. For such as they were, the 
 time was always ready. They had no other reckoning to make- 
 no other star to steer by than simply to discern when and how 
 their selfish interests could be best promoted, and what their hands 
 thus found to do, to do it with all their might. The world could 
 not hate them, for they were of the world, and the world loveth its 
 own. Let them court its favour, let them seek its pleasures, its 
 honours, its profits, and the world would be pleased with the hom- 
 age that was offered it, and if they but succeeded, they might count 
 upon its applause, for men would praise them when they did well 
 for themselves. 1 It was not so with Jesus, but utterly and diamet- 
 rically the reverse. His was no life either of random impulses, of 
 fitful accident, or of regulated self-seeking. The world he lived in 
 was to him no antechamber, with doors of aggrandisement here 
 and there around, for whose opening he was greedily to watch, that 
 he might go in speedily and seize the prizes that lay beyond, before 
 others grasped them. It was the place into which the Father had 
 sent him to do there that Father's business, to finish the work 
 there given him to do. And in the doing of that work there is to 
 be no heat, no hurry, no impatience with him. The time, the hour 
 i Psalm zliz. 18.
 
 CHRIST AND HIS BRETHREN. 285 
 
 for each act and deed was already settled in the purposes and ordi- 
 nances of the Father. And the Father's time, the Father's hour 
 were his, for which he was always ready calmly and patiently to 
 wait. The world's hatred he counted on he was prepared for. 
 He knew what awaited him at Jerusalem. He knew what the 
 hatred cherished against him there would finally and ere long effect ; 
 but he must not prematurely expose himself to it, nor suffer it to 
 hasten by a single day the great decease he was to accomplish at 
 Jerusalem. His time was coming the time of his manifestation 
 to Israel of his showing forth to the world a very different kind 
 of manifestation from that of which his brethren were dreaming. 
 But it was not yet fully come, and therefore he did not mean to go 
 up to Jerusalem and openly to take part from the beginning as one 
 of its celebrators in this approaching Feast of Tabernacles. This, 
 in ways which we can easily conjecture, but are not at liberty dog- 
 matically to assert, would have interfered with the orderly evolution 
 of the great event in which his earthly ministry was to close. But 
 the time was fixed that feast was drawing on when his hour would 
 come, and then it would be seen how the Son would glorify the 
 Father and the Father be glorified in the Son. 
 
 IV. 
 
 CHRIST AT THE FEAST OF TABERNACLES. 
 JOHN vn. 11-52. 
 
 GREAT national benefits, civil, social, and religious, were con- 
 ferred upon the Jews by the ordinance that three times each year 
 the whole adult population of the country should assemble at 
 Jerusalem. The finest seasons of the year, spring and autumn, 
 were fixed on for these gatherings of the people. The journeyings 
 at such seasons of friends and neighbours, in bands of happy fellow- 
 ship, must have been healthful and exhilarating. Separated as it 
 was into clans or tribes, the frequent reunion of the entire commu- 
 nity must have served to counteract and subdue any jealousies or 
 divisions that might otherwise have arisen. The meeting together 
 as children of a common progenitor, living under the same laws, 
 heirs of the same promises, worshippers of the same God, must not 
 only have cultivated the spirit of brotherhood and nationality, but 
 have strengthened their faith and guarded from the encroachments 
 of idolatry the worship of the country. Among^the lesserjadvantages 
 that these periodic assemblages brought along with them, they 
 afforded admirable opportunities for the expression and interchange 
 of the sentiments of the people on every subject that particularly
 
 286 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 interested them : what in our times the press and public meetings 
 do, they did for the Jews. So far as we know, no nation of antiquity 
 had such full and frequent means of testing and indicating the state 
 of public feeling. Whatever topic had been engrossing the thoughts 
 of the community would be sure to be the subject of general con- 
 versation in the capital the next time that the tribes assembled in 
 Jerusalem. Eemembering how fickle public feeling is, how difficult it 
 is to fix it and keep it concentrated upon one subject for any consider- 
 able period, we may be certain that it was a subject singularly 
 interesting one which had taken a general and very strong hold 
 of the public mind, that for a year and a half, during five successive 
 festivals, came up ever fresh upon the lips of the congregated 
 thousands. 
 
 Yet it was so as to the appearance among them of Jesus Christ. 
 Eighteen months had passed since he had been seen in Jerusalem, 
 yet no sooner has the Feast of Tabernacles commenced than the 
 Jews look everywhere around for him, and say, " Where is he ? " 
 The absence of one man among so many thousands might, we should 
 think, have passed by unnoticed. The absence of this man is the 
 subject of general remark. The people generally speak of him 
 with bated breath, for it is well enough known that he is no 
 favourite with the great men of the capital, and as they speak, great 
 discord of opinion prevails. It gives us, however, a very good idea 
 of the extent and strength of the impression he had made upon the 
 entire population of the country, that at this great annual gathering, 
 and after so long an absence, he is instantly the object of search, 
 and so generally the subject of conversation. Even while they were 
 thus speaking of him he was on his way to Jerusalem. Travelling 
 alone, or but slenderly escorted, and choosing an unfrequented route, 
 so that no pre-intimation of his approach might reach the city, he 
 arrives about the middle of ;,the feast, and throws off at once all 
 attempt at concealment. Passing, as we might think, from the 
 extreme of caution to the extreme of daring, he plants himself 
 among the crowd in the Temple courts, and addresses them as 
 one only of the oldest and most learned of the Rabbis might have 
 ventured to do. Some of the rulers are there, but the suddenness 
 of his appearance, the boldness of the step he takes, the manner of 
 his speech, make them for the time forget their purpose. They 
 can't but listen like the rest, but they won't give heed to the things 
 about the divine kingdom that he is proclaiming. What strikes 
 them most, and excites their wonder, is that he speaks so well, 
 quotes the Scriptures, and shows himself so accurately acquainted 
 with the law. " How knoweth this man letters," they say of him, 
 "having never learned?" They would turn the thoughts of the 
 people from what Jesus was saying to the consideration of his title 
 and qualification to address them so. Who is this 1 in what school
 
 CHRIST AT THE FEAST OF TABERNACLES. 287 
 
 was he trained ] at the feet of which of our great Eabbis did he sit ? 
 by what authority does he assume this office] Questions very 
 natural for men full of all the proud and exclusive spirit of officialism 
 to put ; questions, by the very putting of which they would lower 
 him in the estimation of the multitude, and try to strip his teaching 
 of its power. They give to Jesus the opportunity of declaring, " My 
 doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me." ' I am not addressing 
 you either as a self-taught man, or one brought up in any of your 
 schools. I am not addressing to you truths that I was taught by 
 others, or have myself elaborated. Think not of me, who or what I 
 am; think of what I teach, receive it as coming, not from me, but from 
 him who sent me. You ask about my credentials ; you would like 
 to know what right I have to become a teacher of the people. There is 
 a far simpler and better way of coming to a just conclusion about my 
 teaching than the one that you are pointing to, and, happily, it is 
 one that lies open unto all. If any man is truly willing to do the 
 divine will ; if he wants to know what that will is in order that he 
 may do it ; if that, in listening to my teaching, be his simple, earnest 
 aim, he shall know of the doctrine that I am teaching, whether it 
 be of God, or whether I speak of myself. No amount of native 
 talent, no extent of school learning of any kind, will compensate 
 for the want of a pure and honest purpose. But if such a purpose 
 be cherished, you shall see its end gained ; if your eye be single, 
 your whole body shall be full of light.' And still the saying of our 
 Lord holds good, that in the search of truth, in the preserving us 
 from error, in the guiding of us to right judgments about himself 
 and his doctrine, the heart has more to do with the matter than 
 the head the willingness to do telling upon the capacity to know 
 and to believe. Jesus asks that he himself be judged by this 
 principle and upon this rule. What, in teaching, was his aim 1 ? 
 Was it to display his talent, to win a reputation, to have his ideas 
 adopted as being his? was it to please himself, to show forth his 
 own glory ? How boldly does he challenge these critical observers 
 to detect in him any symptom of self-seeking ! With what a serene 
 consciousness of the entire absence in himself of that element from 
 which no other human heart was ever wholly free, does he say of 
 himself, " He that speaketh of himself seeketh his own glory : but 
 he that seeketh his glory that sent him, the same is true, and no 
 unrighteousness is in him." 
 
 So much is said by Jesus to encourage all truly desirous to know 
 about him; so much to vindicate himself against the adverse 
 judgment of the rulers ; but how does all this apply to them 1 Have 
 they the willingness to do 1 have they the purity and the unselfish- 
 ness of purpose 1 This feast of tabernacles was the one peculiarly 
 associated with the reading of the law. " And Moses commanded 
 them, saying, At the end of every seven years, in the feat of
 
 288 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 tabernacles, when all Israel is come to appear before the Lord thy 
 God in the place which he shall choose, thou shalt read this law 
 before all Israel in their hearing, that they may hear, and that they 
 may learn, and fear the Lord your God, and observe to do all the 
 words of this law." 1 It is in presence of the very men whose duty 
 it was to carry out this ordinance, that Jesus is now standing. 
 From the first they hated him, and from the time, now eighteen 
 months ago, that he had cured the paralytic, breaking, as they thought, 
 the Sabbath, and said that God was his father, making himself 
 equal with God, they had resolved to kill him. This was the way 
 by cherishing hatred and the secret intent to murder that they 
 were dealing with the law. Boiling their adverse judgment of him 
 back upon themselves, and dragging out to light the purpose that 
 in the meantime they would have kept concealed, Jesus said, " Did 
 not Moses give you the law, and yet none of you keepeth the law ? 
 Why go ye about to kill me ? " Those to whom that question is 
 more immediately addressed have no answer to give to it ; but in 
 the crowd are those who, ignorant of the plot against the life of 
 Jesus, yet sharing in the rulers' contempt and hatred, say to him 
 " Thou hast a devil : who goeth about to kill thee ?," Christ stops 
 not to deal with such a speech, but takes up at once what had 
 furnished so painful a weapon in the hands of the Pharisees against 
 him. He refers to that one deed still fresh in the minds of all 
 those in Jerusalem. The offence of that one act of his in curing 
 the impotent man on a Sabbath-day had been made to overshadow 
 all his other acts, to overbear all his other claims to attention and 
 regard. "I have done one work," he said, " and ye all marvel," as 
 if I had thereby plainly proved myself a breaker of the Sabbath 
 law. Formerly, before the Sanhedrim, he had defended himself 
 against this charge of Sabbath-breaking by other and higher 
 arguments. Now addressing, as he does, the common people, he 
 takes an instance familiar to them all. The Sabbath-law runs thus : 
 " Thou shalt do no work on the seventh day." How was this law 
 to be interpreted ? If the circumcision of a man on the seventh 
 day was not a breach of it, and no one thought it was, what 
 was to be said of the healing of a man upon that day ? If ye on 
 the Sabbath circumcise a man, and the law of Moses is not broken, 
 why "are ye angry at me, because I have made a man every whit 
 whole on the Sabbath-day ? " The analogy was so perfect, and the 
 question so plain, that no reply was attempted. In the temporary 
 silence that ensues, some of the citizens of Jerusalem who were 
 aware of the secret resolution of the Sanhedrim, struck with wonder 
 at what they now see and hear, cannot help saying, " Is not this 
 he whom they seek to kill ? But, lo, he speaketh boldly, and they 
 say nothing unto him. Do the rulers know indeed that this is the 
 i Deut. xxxi. 10-12.
 
 CHRIST AT THE FEAST OF TABERNACLES. 289 
 
 very Christ ? " We might imagine the words to have come from 
 those who were ready themselves to see the very Christ in Jesus, 
 but though they share not their rulers' persecuting spirit, these men 
 have a prejudice of their own. It had come to be a very general 
 opinion about this time in Judea, that the Messiah was to have no 
 common human origin, no father or mother, was to be raised from 
 the dead beneath, or to come as an angel from the heavens. His 
 not meeting this requirement is enough with these men to set aside 
 the claims of Jesus of Nazareth. "Howbeit," they say, as men 
 quite satisfied with the sureness of the ground on which they go, 
 " Howbeit we know this man whence he is : but when Christ 
 cometh, no man knoweth whence he is. Then cried Jesus in the 
 temple as he taught," such an easy and self-satisfied way of dis- 
 posing of the whole question of his Messiahship causing him to 
 lift up his voice in loud and strenuous protest, " Ye both know 
 me, and ye know whence I am : and I am not come of myself, but 
 he that sent me is true, whom ye know not. But I know him : for I 
 am from him, and he hath sent me." The old and oft-repeated truth 
 of his mission from the Father, coupled now with such a strong asser- 
 tion of his own knowledge and of these men's ignorance of who his 
 Father was, that they are so irritated as to be disposed to proceed 
 to violence ; but upon them, as upon the rulers, there is a restraint : 
 " No man laid hands on him, because his hour was not yet come." 
 
 So impressed in his favour have many of the onlookers now 
 become, that they are bold enough to say, " When Christ cometh, 
 will he do more miracles than these which this man hath done 1 " 
 As Jesus had done no miracles at this time in Jerusalem, the speakers 
 obviously refer to what he had elsewhere wrought. Their speech 
 is immediately reported to the Pharisees and Chief Priests sitting 
 in council in an adjacent court of the Temple, who, so soon as they 
 hear that the people are beginning to speak openly in his favour, 
 send officers to take him. With obvious allusion to the errand on 
 which these men come, as if to tell them how secure he felt, how 
 sure he was that his comings and his goings in the future would 
 be all of his own free will, Jesus says, " Yet a little while am I 
 with you, and then I go to him that sent me. Ye shall seek me, 
 and shall not find me : and where I am, thither ye cannot come;" 
 words very plain to us, but very dark to those who have no other 
 interpretation to put upon them but that he may mean perhaps to 
 leave Judea and go to the dispersed among the Gentiles. Little, 
 however, as they were understood, there was such a tone of quiet, 
 yet sad assurance about them, that the high priests' officers are 
 arrested, and return to give this to their employers as the reason 
 why they had not executed the order given them, "Never man 
 spake like this man." 
 
 So ended our Lord's first day of teaching in the Temple, a day
 
 290 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 revealing on his part a wisdom, a courage, a serene, sublime, un- 
 troubled trust which took his adversaries by surprise, and held all 
 their deadly purposes against him in suspense and on the part of 
 the multitude the strangest mixture of conflicting opinions and 
 sentiments, with which our Lord so dealt as to win exemption from 
 like interruptions afterwards, and to secure for himself an unbroken 
 audience on the day when his last and greatest words were spoken. 
 The Feast of Tabernacles was instituted to commemorate the 
 time when the Israelites had dwelt in tents during their sojourn in 
 the desert. To bring the remembrance of those long years of tent- 
 life more vividly before them, the people were enjoined, during the 
 seven days that it lasted, to leave their accustomed homes, and to 
 dwell in booths or huts made of gathered branches of the palm, the 
 pine, the myrtle, or other trees of a like thick foliage. It must 
 have been a strange spectacle when, on the day before the feast, the 
 inhabitants of Jerusalem poured out from their dwellings, spread 
 themselves over the neighbourhood, stripped the groves of their 
 leafiest branches, brought them back to rear them into booths upon 
 the tops of their houses, along the leading streets, and in some of 
 the outer courts of the Temple. The dull, square, stony aspect of 
 the city suffered a singular metamorphosis as these leafy structures 
 met everywhere the eye. It was the great Jewish harvest-home 
 for this feast was celebrated in autumn, after all the fruits of the 
 earth had been gathered in. It was within the Temple that its 
 joyous or thanksgiving character especially developed itself. Morn- 
 ing and evening, day by day, during sacrifices more crowded than 
 those of any other of the great festivals, the air was rent with the 
 praises of the rejoicing multitudes. At the time of the libation of 
 water, the voice of their glad thanksgiving swelled up into its 
 fullest and most jubilant expression. Each morning a vast proces- 
 sion formed itself around the little fountain of Siloam down in the 
 valley of the Kedron. Out of its flowing waters the priests filled a 
 large golden pitcher. Bearing it aloft, they climbed the steep 
 ascent of Moriah, passed through the water-gate, up the broad stairs 
 and into the Court of the Temple, in whose centre the altar stood. 
 Before this altar two silver basins were planted, with holes beneath 
 to let the liquid poured into them flow down into the subterranean 
 reservoir beneath the Temple, to run out thence into the Kedron, 
 and down into the Dead Sea. One priest stood and poured the 
 water he had brought up from Siloam into one of these basins. 
 Another poured the contents of a like pitcher filled with wine into 
 the other. As they did so the vast assemblage broke out into the 
 most exulting exclamations of joy. The trumpets of the Temple 
 sounded. In voice and upon instrument the trained choristers put 
 forth all their skill and power. Led by them, many thousand 
 voices chanted the Great Hallel (the Psalms from the 113th to the
 
 CHRIST AT THE FEAST OF TABERNACLES. 291 
 
 118th), pausing at the verses on which the chief emphasis was 
 placed to wave triumphantly in the air the branches that they all 
 bore, and make the welkin ring with their rejoicing. This was the 
 happiest service in all the yearly ceremonial of Judaism. " He," 
 said the old Jewish proverb, " who has never seen the rejoicing at 
 the pouring out of the waters of Siloam has never seen rejoicing 
 all his life." All this rejoicing was connected with that pictur- 
 esque proceeding by which the Lord's providing water for his people 
 in their desert wanderings was symbolised and commemorated. 
 And few, if any, have doubted that it was with direct allusion to 
 this daily pouring out of the waters of Siloam, which was so striking 
 a feature of the festival, that on the last, that great day of the feast, 
 Jesus stood and cried, " If any man thirst, let him come unto me 
 and drink." ' Your forefathers thirsted in the wilderness, and I 
 smote the rock for them, so that the waters flowed forth. I made 
 a way for them in the wilderness, and gave rivers in the desert to 
 give drink to my people my chosen. But of what was that thirst 
 of theirs, and the manner in which I met it, an emblem ? Did not 
 Isaiah tell you, when in my name he spake, saying, " I will pour 
 water upon him that is thirsty, and floods upon the dry ground. 
 I will pour my Spirit upon thy seed, and my blessing upon thine 
 offspring. When^the poor and needy seek water, and there is none, 
 and their tongue faileth for thirst, I the Lord will hear them, I the 
 God of Israel will not forsake them. I will open rivers in high 
 places, and fountains in the midst of the valleys. I will make the 
 wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water"? And 
 now I am here to fulfil in person all the promises that I made by 
 the lips of my servant Isaiah, and I gather them up and condense 
 them in the invitation " If any man thirst, let him come unto me 
 and drink." ' 
 
 " He that belie veth in me, as the scripture saith, out of his belly 
 shall flow rivers of living waters." Below the spot on which Jesus 
 stood when speaking in the courts of the Temple, there lay vast 
 subterranean vaults, whose singular recesses have only recently been 
 explored. Descending into them, you get a glimpse, by help of 
 dimly burning tapers, of a vast cistern below the site of the ancient 
 temple. Whether this large reservoir be filled wholly from without, 
 or has a spring of living waters supplying it from below, remains to 
 be ascertained. Enough, however, has been discovered to stamp 
 with truth the ancient Jewish stories about the great cistern, 
 "whose compass was as the sea," and about the unfailing waters of 
 the Temple. Nor can we any longer doubt that it was to these 
 subterranean supplies of water that the prophet Joel alluded when 
 he said, " It shall come to pass in that day that a fountain shall come 
 forth out of the house of the Lord, and shall water the valley of 
 Shittim;" that the prophet Zechariah alluded when he said, "It
 
 292 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 shall be in that day that living waters shall go out from Jerusalem, 
 half of them turned toward the former sea, and half of them toward 
 the hinder;" that still more pointedly the prophet Ezekiel alluded 
 when he said, "Afterward he brought me again into the door of the 
 house, and behold waters issued out from under the threshold of the 
 house eastward, and the waters came down from under the right side 
 of the house, at the south side of the altar." And as little can we 
 doubt that Jesus had these very scriptures in his thoughts, and that 
 cavity beneath his feet in his eye when he said, " He that believeth 
 in me, as the scripture saith, out of his belly shall flow rivers of 
 living waters." ' He that believeth shall not barely and alone have 
 his own thirst assuaged, but I in him, by my Sprit given, moulding 
 him into my own likeness, shall turn him into a separate well-head, 
 from whose depths rivers of living water shall flow forth to visit, 
 gladden, fructify some lesser or larger portipn of the arid waste 
 around.' Let us know and remember then, that Jesus, the divine 
 assuager of the thirst of human heatts, imparts the blessing to each 
 who comes to him, that he may go and impart the blessing to others. 
 He comforts us with a sense of his presence, guidance, protection, 
 sympathy, that we may go and console others with that same 
 comfort wherewith we have been comforted of him. He never 
 gives that we may selfishly hoard the treasure that we get. That 
 treasure, like the bread that was broken for the thousands on the 
 hill-side of Galilee, multiplies in the hand that takes it to divide 
 and to distribute. 
 
 V. 
 
 JESUS THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 
 JOHN vm. 12-59. 
 
 JESUS was in the Treasury. It stood at the north side of on 8 
 of those large enclosures called the Court of the Women, which lay 
 outside the Temple properly so called, and in which, on all the 
 great annual festivals, crowds were wont daily to assemble. In the 
 centre of this court, at the Feast of Tabernacles, two tall stands 
 were placed, each supporting four large branching candelabra. As 
 at the time of the morning sacrifice the procession wound its way 
 up from the fountain of Siloam, and the water was poured out 
 from the golden pitcher to remind the people of the supply of water 
 that had been made for their forefathers during the desert wander- 
 ings ; so after the evening sacrifice all the lights in these candelabra 
 were kindled, the flame broad and brilliant enough to illuminate 
 the whole city, to remind the people of the pillar of light by which 
 their marchings through the wilderness were guided. And still
 
 JESUS THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 293 
 
 freer aiid heartier than the morning jubilations which attended on 
 the libation of the water, were the evening ones which accompanied 
 the kindling of the lights. It was with allusion to the one cere- 
 mony that Jesus said, " If any man thirst let him come unto me 
 and drink." It was with allusion to the other, of which both he 
 and those around him were reminded by the stately chandeliers 
 which stood at the time before their eyes, that he said, " I am the 
 light of the world, he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, 
 but shall have the light of life." In uttering both these sayings, 
 Jesus placed himself in a singular and elevated relationship to the 
 whole human family. In the one he invited the entire multitude 
 of human thirsters to come to him to have their thirst assuaged. 
 In th other he claimed to be the one central source of light and 
 life to the whole world. Is it surprising that as they looked at 
 him, and heard him speaking in this way, and thought of who and 
 what, according to their reckoning, he was, the Jews should have 
 seen egotism and arrogance in his words ? There was in truth the 
 very utmost pitch of such arrogance and egotism in them, had the 
 speaker been such as they deemed him, a man like themselves. 
 But one of his very objects in speaking so was to convince them 
 and us that he was not such that he stood towards the human 
 family in quite other relationship from that in which any single 
 member of it could stand to all the rest that besides his connection 
 with it he had another and higher connection, that with his Father 
 in heaven, which entitled him to speak and act in a way peculiar to 
 Himself By word and deed, again and again repeated, Jesus had 
 sought in vain to convey into the minds of these Jews an idea of 
 how singular that connection was. He tries now once again, and 
 once again he fails. Instead of their asking ' Who is this that 
 offers to quench all human thirst, and who proclaims himself to be 
 the light of the world?' saying to themselves in reply, 'He must 
 be more than human, he must be divine for who but One could 
 claim such a prerogative and power?' they listen only to find some- 
 thing to object to, and, grasping greedily at what lay upon the very 
 surface of the sayings, they say to him, " Thou bearest record of 
 thyself; thy record is not true." Perhaps they had our Lord's own 
 words on the occasion of the former visit to Jerusalem on their 
 memory : " If I bear witness of myself, my witness is not true." 
 He was speaking then of a solitary unsupported testimony, a 
 testimony imagined to be borne by himself, to himself, and for him- 
 self, as one seeking to advance his own interest, promote his own 
 glory. Such a testimony, had he borne it, he had then said would 
 be altogether untrustworthy. His answer now to those who would 
 taunt him at once with egotism and inconsistency is, " Though I 
 bear record of myself, yet my record is true : for I know whence I 
 came, and whither I go." 'Had I not known that I came forth
 
 294 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 from the Father, am going back to the Father, that I am here only 
 as his representative and revealer, did the consciousness of full, 
 clear, constant union with him not fill my spirit, I would not, 
 could not, speak as I now do. But I know the Father even as I am 
 known by him ; he works, and I work with him ; whatsoever things 
 he doeth I do likewise. It is out of the depth of the consciousness 
 of my union with him that I speak, and what man knoweth the 
 things of a man save the spirit of man that is in him, and how ever 
 else are you to know what can alone be known by my revealing it 
 if I do not speak of myself, or do not speak as he only can who 
 stands in the relationship in which I do to the Father ? ' 
 
 'But "ye cannot tell whence I come and whither I go." You 
 never gave yourselves any trouble to find it out. You never opened 
 mind or heart to the evidence that I laid before you. What early 
 alienated you from me was that I came not accredited as you would 
 have desired, submitted no proofs of my heavenly calling to you 
 for your approval, made no obeisance to you on entering on my 
 career, came not up here to seek instruction at your hands, asked 
 not from you any liberty to act as a scribe, a teacher of the law 
 instead of this, claimed at once this Temple as my Father's house, 
 condemned the way in which you were suffering its sacred precincts 
 to be defiled, and have ever since, in all that I have said and done, 
 been lifting up a constant, loud, and strenuous protest against you 
 and your ways. You sit now in judgment upon me you condemn 
 me. You say that I am bearing record of myself, and that my 
 record is not true, but "ye judge after the flesh." You have 
 allowed human prejudice, human passion, to fashion your judgment. 
 I so judge no man. It was not to judge that I came into this 
 world. I came not to condemn, but to save it. And yet if I 
 judge, as in one sense I must, and am even now about to do, my 
 judgment is true, for I am not alone, but I and the Father that 
 sent me judge, as we do everything, together. Your own very law de- 
 clares, " that the testimony of two men is true." I am one that bear 
 witness of myself, and the Father that sent me beareth witness of me.' 
 As if they wished this second witness to be produced, they say 
 to him contemptuously, "Where is thy Father? Jesus answered, 
 Ye neither know me, nor my Father." ' You think that you know 
 me, you pride yourselves in not being deceived in me as the poor 
 ignorant multitude is my earthly pedigree as believed in by you 
 satisfies you as to my character and claims. You can scarcely, after 
 all that I have said, have failed to perceive whom I meant when I 
 . was speaking of my Father. Him, too, you think you know ; you 
 pride yourselves on your superior acquaintance with him ; you pre- 
 sent yourselves to the people as the wisest and best expounders of 
 his will and law. But " ye neither know me nor my Father ;" for 
 to know the one is to know the other to remain ignorant of the
 
 JESUS THE LIGHT OF THE WOULD. 295 
 
 one is to remain ignorant of the other. It is your want of all true 
 knowledge of me that keeps you from knowing God. It is the 
 want of all true knowledge of God that keeps you from knowing 
 me. Had you known me, you should have known him ; had you 
 known him, you should have known me.' 
 
 So fared it with our Lord's declaration that he was the light of 
 the world as it was at first spoken in the Temple ; so ended the 
 first brief colloquy with the Jews to which its utterance gave birth. 
 There was one, however, of its first hearers upon whom it made a 
 very different impression from that it made on the rulers of the 
 Jews, who treasured it up in his heart, who saw ever as his Master's 
 life evolved itself before him, more and more evidence of its truth, 
 whose spirit was afterwards enlightened to take in a truer, larger 
 idea of the place and function of his Lord in the spiritual kingdom 
 than has ever, perhaps, been given to another of the children of 
 men, who, on this account, was chosen of the Lord to set them 
 forth in his Gospel and in his Epistles, and who has given to us this 
 explanation of the words of his Master : "In the beginning was the 
 Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The 
 same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by 
 him ; and without him was not anything made that was made. In 
 him was life ; and the life was the light of men. And the light 
 shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not." 
 John " came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all 
 men through him might believe. He was not that Light, but was 
 sent to bear witness of that Light. That was the true Light, which 
 lighteth every man that cometh into the world." 
 
 The short colloquy betwixt Christ and the Pharisees, conse- 
 quent upon his announcement of himself as the light of the world, 
 ended in their lips being for the moment closed. The silence that 
 ensued was speedily broken by our Lord's repeating what he had 
 said before about his going away going where they could not 
 follow. The speech had formerly excited only wonder, and they 
 had said among themselves, "Will he go unto the dispersed among 
 the Gentiles 1" Now their passion against him has so risen that it 
 excites contempt, and they say openly, not indeed to him, but of 
 him, " Will he kill himself ? That would indeed be to go where we 
 could not follow. Perhaps that may be what he means." The 
 drawing of such a distinction between themselves and him gives to 
 Jesus the opportunity of setting forth the real and radical difference 
 that there was between them. The portraiture of their character 
 and pedigree which, with truthful and unsparing hand, he proceeded 
 to fill up, amid many rude breaks and scornful interruptions on 
 their part, we shall not minutely scrutinise. One or two things 
 only about the manner of our Lord's treatment of his adversaries 
 in this word-battle with them, let us note.
 
 296 THE CLOSE OF TIIE MINISTRY. 
 
 He does not say explicitly that he is the Christ. His question- 
 ers were well aware what kind of person their Messiah was gener- 
 ally expected to be, how different from all that Jesus was. They 
 would provoke him to make a claim which they knew would be 
 generally disallowed. He will not do it. When they say, "Who 
 art thou?" he contents himself by saying, 'I am essentially or 
 radically that which I speak, my sayings reveal myself, and tell 
 who and what I am.' In this, as in so many other instances of his 
 dealing with those opposed to him at Jerusalem, his sayings were 
 confined to assertions or revelations, not of his Messiahship, but of 
 his unity of nature, will, and purpose with the Father. This was 
 the great stumbling-block that the Jews found ever and anon flung 
 down before them. That in all which Jesus was and said and did 
 he was to be taken as revealing the character and expressing the 
 will of God, was what they never could allow, and the more that 
 the idea of a connection between him and God approaching to 
 absolute identification was pressed upon them, the more they 
 resented and rejected it. But why 1 Jesus himself told them. 
 Their unbelief, he constantly asserted, sprang from a morally 
 impure source ; from an unwillingness to come into such living con- 
 tact with the Father ; from their dislike to the purity, the bene- 
 volence, the godliness that were in him as in the Father. When 
 driven from the position they first assumed as children of Abraham, 
 they claimed a still higher paternity, and said, "We have one 
 Father, even God." Our Lord's reply was, "If God were your 
 Father, ye would love me, for I proceeded forth and came from 
 God ; neither came I of myself, but he sent me. Why do ye not 
 understand my speech ? even because ye cannot hear my word." 
 
 They wore a mask; behind that mask they hid a malicious 
 disposition, and so long as deceitfulness and malignity ruled their 
 spirit and regulated their lives, children of Abraham, children of 
 God, they were not, could not be. They might boast what other 
 parentage they pleased, but their works proclaimed that they were 
 none other than the children of him who was a liar and a murderer 
 from the beginning. "Ye are of your father the devil, and the 
 lusts of your father ye will do." Very plain language, and very 
 severe not language for man to use to man suitable alone foi 
 him who knew what was in man, who came as its light into the 
 world, and discharged one of his offices as such in laying bare the 
 hidden corruption with which he came into contact, for " all things 
 that are reproved are manifest by the light, for whatsoever doth 
 make manifest is light." 
 
 " But as he spake these words many believed on him," and for 
 them, amid all his rebukes of his enemies, this was his word of 
 encouragement, that if they continued in his word, if they but 
 followed faithfully the light that shone in him, they should know the
 
 JESUS THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 297 
 
 truth, know him who was the truth, and in him, and by that truth, 
 they should be made free. These Jews imagined that simply as the 
 children of Abraham they were free. So fondly did they cling to this 
 idea that often as the yoke of the stranger had been on them they 
 were ready proudly to say, " We were never in bondage to any man." 
 Notwithstanding this they were slaves slaves to sin and Satan. 
 In one sense they were in God's house, numbered outwardly as mem- 
 bers of its household ; but being actually such slaves, in that house 
 they could not abide for ever. But if he who was not a servant in 
 the house of another, but an heir in his own house his Father's 
 house if he made his followers free, then were they free indeed. 
 And into what a glorious liberty should they thus be introduced ! 
 freedom from the Law, its curse and condemnation ; freedom from 
 tbe yoke of Jewish and all other ceremonialism ; freedom from the 
 fear of guilt and the bondage of corruption ; freedom to serve God 
 willingly and lovingly, to be all, do all, suffer all which his will 
 requires, this was the liberty wherewith Christ was feady to make 
 free. This freedom was to be tasted but in imperfect measure by 
 any here on earth, for still onward to the end the old tyrant whose 
 subjects they had been would be making his presence and power 
 felt ; still onward to the end, while the mind was serving the law 
 of God, a law would be in the members warring against the law of 
 the mind. But the hour of a final and complete emancipation was 
 to come at death. Death ! it looked to nature like the stoppage of 
 all life, the breaking of all ties, the quenching of all freedom and 
 all joy. Not such was it to be to him who shared the life that 
 Jesus breathes into the soul. To him it was to be rather light than 
 darkness, rather life than death, the scattering of every cloud, the 
 breaking of every fetter, the deliverance from every foe, the setting 
 the spirit absolutely and for ever free to soar with unchecked, un- 
 shadowed wing, up to the fountain-head of all life and blessedness, 
 to bask in the sunshine for ever. " Verily, verily, if a man keep 
 my sayings, he shall never see death." 
 
 But now let us look a moment at the special testimonies to his 
 own person and character which, upon this occasion, and in the 
 course of these rough conflicts with scornful and contemptuous 
 opponents, Jesus bore. Light is its own revealer. The sun can 
 be seen alone in the beams that he himself sends forth. So is it 
 with him who is the light of the world. It is in the light of 
 his own revelation of himself that we can see Jesus as he is. 
 And what, as seen in the beams that he here sheds forth, does he 
 appear? Two features of his character stand prominently dis- 
 played : his sinless holiness, his pre-existence and divine dignity. 
 In proof of the stainless purity of his nature and his life, Jesus 
 when here on earth made a threefold appeal. He appealed to 
 earth, to hell, to heaven, and earth, hell, and heaven each gave its
 
 298 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 answer back. Two of these appeals you have in the passage that 
 is now before us. Jesus appealed to earth when, looking round 
 upon those men who with the keen eye of jealousy and hatred had 
 been watching him from the beginning to see what flaws they 
 could detect in him, he calmly and confidently said, ' Which of you 
 convinceth me of sin, of any sin, the slightest transgression ?' And 
 earth gave her answer when these men stood speechless before him. 
 
 He appealed to hell to that devil of whom he spoke so plainly 
 as the father of all liars and all murderers, who would have accused 
 and maligned him had he dared. "The prince of this world 
 cometh and findeth nothing in me" nothing of his own, nothing 
 that he can claim, no falsehood, no malice, no selfishness, no 
 unholiness in me. And hell gave its answer when the devil whom 
 Christ's word of power drove forth from his human habitation was 
 heard to say, "I know thee who thou art, the Holy One of God." 
 
 Again, our Saviour carried the appeal to heaven, and, standing 
 in the presence of the Great Searcher of all hearts, he said, in 
 words that had been blasphemous from any merely human lips, 
 "I do always those things that please him." And thrice during 
 his mortal career the heavens opened above his head, and the voice 
 of the Father was heard proclaiming, " This is my beloved Son, in 
 whom I am well pleased." 
 
 What shall we think or say of him who claimed such perfect 
 immunity from sin the entire absence of anything that could draw 
 down upon it the Divine displeasure, the full presence of all that 
 could draw down upon it the Divine approval ? Was he, who knew 
 others so well, ignorant of himself, or, conscious of transgression, 
 did he yet deny it ? Ignorant beyond other men, a hypocrite worse 
 than those whom he charged with hypocrisy, must Jesus Christ 
 have been, if, in speaking of his sinlessness as he did, his speech 
 was not the free and natural expression of a self-consciousness of 
 perfect purity, truth, and holiness of heart and life. In presence 
 of one realising such unstained perfection, who never once in 
 thought or word or deed swerved from the right, the true, the 
 good, the holy, how humbled should we be under the consciousness 
 of how different it is with us ! and yet with that sense of humiliation 
 should not the elevating, ennobling thought come in, that he in 
 whom the sublime idea of a sinless perfection stands embodied, was 
 no other than our Lord and Saviour, who came to show us to what a 
 height this weak and sinful humanity of ours could be raised, who 
 became partaker of our nature that we through him might become 
 partakers of the Divine, and of whom we know that when he shall 
 appear we shall be like him, when we shall see him as he is ? 
 
 " Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day, and he saw it, 
 and was glad." Christ's day was no other than that of his mani- 
 festation in the flesh. Abraham rejoiced that he should see that
 
 THE CURE OF THE MAN BORN BLIND. 299 
 
 day, and lived his earthly life cheered by the animating prospect. 
 And he saw it, as Moses and Elijah did, for he was one of those 
 who, in Christ's sense of the words, had not tasted of death, of 
 whom it was witnessed that he liveth, to whom, in the realms of 
 departed spirits, the knowledge of the Redeemer's advent had beer, 
 conveyed. 
 
 Jesus had said that Abraham had seen his day. They twist 
 his words as if he had said that he had seen Abraham. " Thou art 
 not yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham ? " The con- 
 temptuous query gives to our Lord the opportunity of lifting the 
 veil that concealed his glory, and making the last, the greatest 
 revelation of himself: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before 
 Abraham was, I am." Not simply "Before Abraham was, I was," 
 not simply a declaration of a being before Abraham, but a taking 
 to himself of the great, the incommunicable name, carrying with it 
 the assertion of self-existence, of supreme divinity. So they under- 
 stood it, who instantly took up stones to stone him as a blasphemer. 
 And so let us understand it, not taking up stones to stone him, but 
 lifting up hearts and hands together to crown him Lord of all. 
 
 VL 
 
 THE CTTRE OF THE MAN BORN BLIND. 
 JOHN ix. 
 
 WITHIN the court of the Temple, in presence of the Pharisees 
 and their satellites, Jesus had said, " I am the light of the world : 
 he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the 
 light of life." The saying, resented as egotistical and arrogant, led 
 on to that altercation which ended in their taking up stones to cast 
 at him, and in his hiding himself in some mysterious way and 
 passing out of the Temple, "going through the midst of them." 
 At one of the Temple gates, or by the road-side without, " as Jesus 
 passed by he saw a man which was blind from his birth," a well- 
 known city beggar, whom Jesus and his disciples may have often 
 passed in their way up to the Temple. Now at the very time when 
 we might have imagined him more than ordinarily desirous to 
 proceed in haste, in order to put himself beyond the reach of the 
 exasperated men out of whose hands he had just escaped, Jesus 
 stops to look compassionately upon this man. He sees in him a fit 
 subject for a work being done, which in the lower sphere of man's 
 physical nature shall illustrate the truth which he had in vain been 
 proclaiming in the treasury, that he was the light of the world. 
 As He stops, his disciples gather round him and fix their ey6s also
 
 300 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTKY. 
 
 upon the man whose case has arrested their Master's footsteps, and 
 seems to have absorbed his thoughts. But their thoughts are not 
 as his. They look, to think only of the rarity and severity of the 
 affliction under which the man is labouring to regard it as a 
 judgment of God, whereby some great sin was punished the man's 
 own, it would be natural to suppose it should be ; but then, the 
 judgment had come before any sin had been committed by him he 
 had been blind from his birth. Could it be that the punishment 
 had preceded the offence ; or was this a case in which the sins of 
 the parents had been visited on their child 1 " Master," they say 
 to Jesus in their perplexity, " who did sin, this man or his parents, 
 that he was born blind?" The one thing that they had no doubt 
 about, and in having no such doubt, were only sharing in the 
 sentiment of all the most devout of their fellow-countrymen, 
 was that some signal sin had been committed, upon which the 
 signal mark of God's displeasure had been stamped. It was not as 
 to the existence somewhere of some exceeding fault that they were 
 in the least uncertain. Their only doubt was where to lay it. It 
 was the false but deep conviction which lay beneath their question 
 that Jesus desired to expose and correct when he so promptly 
 and decisively replied, "Neither hath this man sinned nor his 
 parents," neither the one nor the other has sinned so peculiarly that 
 the peculiar visitation of blindness from birth has been visited on 
 the transgression. Not that Jesus meant to disconnect altogether 
 man's suffering from man's sins. Had he meant to do so, he would 
 not have said to the paralytic whom he cured at the pool of 
 Bethesda, "Go thy way, sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon 
 thee;" but that he wanted, by vigorous stroke, to lay the axe at 
 the root of a prevalent superstitious feeling which led to erroneous 
 and presumptuous readings of God's providences, connecting parti- 
 cular sufferings with particular sins, and arguing from the relative 
 severity of the one to the relative magnitude of the other. 
 
 Nor was this the only instance in which our Saviour dealt in the 
 same manner with the same popular error. But a few weeks from 
 the time in which he spake in this way to his disciples, Jesus 
 was in Peraea. There had been a riot in Jerusalem some petty 
 premature outburst of that insurrectionary spirit which was rife 
 throughout Judea. Pilate had let loose his soldiers on the mob. 
 Some Galileans who had taken part in the riot, or were supposed 
 to have done so for the Galileans were always in the front rank 
 of any movement of the kind were slain slain even while engaged 
 in the act of sacrificing, their blood mingled with their sacrifices : 
 an incident so fitted to strike the public eye, to arouse the public 
 indignation, that the news of it travelled rapidly through the 
 country. It reached the place where Christ was teaching. Some 
 of his hearers, struck perhaps by something that he had said about
 
 THE CURE OF THE MAN BORN BLIND. 301 
 
 the signs of the times and the judgments that were impending, 
 took occasion publicly to tell him of it. Perhaps they hoped that 
 the recital would draw out from him some burning expressions of 
 indignation, pointed against the foreign yoke under which the 
 country was groaning; the deed done by the Eoman governor 
 had been so gross an outrage upon their national religion, upon 
 the sacredness of the holy Temple. If the tellers of the tale 
 cherished any such expectation they were disappointed. As 
 upon all like occasions, whenever any purely political question 
 was brought before him, Christ evaded it. He never once touched 
 or alluded to that aspect of the story. But there was another 
 side of it upon which he perceived that the thoughts of not 
 a few of his hearers were fastened. It was a terrible fate that these 
 slaughtered Galileans had met not only death by the Eoman 
 sword but death within the courts of the Temple death upon 
 the very steps of the altar. There could be but one opinion as to 
 the deed of their murderers those rough Gentile soldiers of Pilate. 
 But the murdered, upon whom such a dreadful doom had fallen, 
 what was to be thought of them ? Christ's all-seeing e"ye perceived 
 that already in the breasts of many of those around him, the leaven 
 of that censorious, uncharitable, superstitious spirit was working, 
 which taught them to attach all extraordinary calamities to extra- 
 ordinary crimes. " Suppose ye," said Jesus, " that these Galileans 
 were sinners above all Galileans because they suffered such things 1 
 I tell you nay." To give his question and his answer a still broader 
 aspect- to take out of them all that was peculiarly Galilean he 
 quotes another striking and well-known occurrence that had recently 
 happened near Jerusalem a calamity not inflicted by the hand of 
 man. "Or those eighteen," he adds, "upon whom the tower in 
 Siloam fell, think ye that they were shiners above all men that 
 dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you nay." He does not deny that 
 either the slaughtered Galileans or the crushed Jerusalemites were 
 sinners. He does not say that they did not deserve their doom. 
 He does not repudiate or run counter to that strong instinct of the 
 human conscience which in all ages has taught it to trace suffering 
 to sin. What he does repudiate and condemn is the application of 
 that principle to specific instances, by those who know so little, as 
 we do, of the Divine purposes and aims in the separate events of 
 life making the temporal infliction the measure of the gilt from 
 which it is supposed to spring. It is not a wrong thing for the 
 man himself whom some sudden or peculiarly severe calamity over- 
 takes, to search and try himself before his Maker, to see whether 
 there has not been some secret sin as yet unrepented and unforsaken, 
 which may have had a part in bringing the calamity upon him. It 
 was not a wrong thing in Joseph's brethren, in the hour of their 
 great distress in Egypt, to remember their former conduct, and to say,
 
 302 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 " We are verily guilty concerning our brother, therefore is this dis- 
 tress come upon us." It was not a wrong thing for the king of Besek, 
 when they cruelly mutilated him, cutting off his thumbs and great toes, 
 to say, " Threescore and ten kings having their thumbs and great 
 toes cut off gathered their meat under my table. As I have done, 
 so God hath requited me." But it was a wrong thing in the 
 inhabitants of Melita, when they saw the viper fasten on Paul's 
 hand, to think and say, that "no doubt this man is a murderer, 
 whom, though he hath escaped the sea, yet vengeance suffereth not 
 to live." It was a wrong thing in the widow of Zarephath, when 
 her son fell sick, to say to Elijah, " What have I to do with thee, 
 O thou man of God 1 Art thou come to call my sins to remem- 
 brance, and to slay my son ?" It was a wrong thing for the friends 
 of Job to deal with their afflicted brother as if hia abounding 
 misfortunes were so many proofs of a like abounding iniquity. It 
 is a very wong thing in any of us to presume to interpret any 
 single dealing of God with others, particularly of a dark or adverse 
 kind, for all such dispensations of his providence have a double 
 character. They may be retributive, or they may be simply dis- 
 ciplinary, corrective, protective, purifying. They may come in 
 anger, or they may be sent in love. And while as to ourselves it 
 may be proper that we should view them as bearing messages of 
 warning, we are not at liberty as to others to attribute to them any 
 other character than that of being the chastenings of a wise and 
 loving Father. 
 
 " Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents, but that the 
 works of God should be manifest in him." Those works works of 
 mercy and almighty power were given to Christ to do, and here 
 was an opportunity for one of them being done. To pause thus by 
 the way, to occupy himself with the case of this poor blind beggar, 
 might seem a waste of time, the more so that the purpose of his 
 persecutors to seize and to stone him had been so recently and so 
 openly displayed. But that very outbreak of their wrath foretold 
 to Jesus his approaching death the close of his allotted time of 
 earthly labour; and so he says, "I must work the works of him 
 that sent me while it is day ; the night cometh, when no man can 
 work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world." 
 ' I said so to those proud and unbelieving men from whose rough 
 violence I have just escaped. I will prove now the truth of what I 
 said by bringing the light physically, mentally, spiritually, to this 
 poor blind beggar.' 
 
 All this time not a word is spoken by the blind man himself. 
 Whatever cries for help he may have raised when he heard the 
 footsteps of the approaching company, as they stop before him he 
 becomes silent. He hears the question about his own sins and his 
 parents' sins put by strange Galilean tongues to one addressed
 
 THE CUKE OF THE MAN BORN BLIND. 303 
 
 evidently with the greatest respect. He hears the one thus ap- 
 pealed to say, with an authority that he wonders at, " Neither hath 
 this man sinned, nor his parents," grateful words to the poor 
 man's ear. He may have thought, in common with others, that he 
 had been signally marked as an object of the Divine displeasure. 
 The words that he now hears may have helped to lift a load off his 
 heart ; already he may be more grateful to the speaker of these few 
 words than if he had cast the largest money-gift into his bosom. 
 But the speaker goes further : he says that he had been born blind 
 "that the works of God should be made manifest in him." If it 
 were not the work of God's anger in the punishment of his own or his 
 father's sins, what other work could it be ? And who can this be who 
 is now before him, who speaks of what he is, and what he does, and 
 what he is about to do, with such solemnity and self-assurance? Who 
 can tell us what new thoughts about himself and the calamity that 
 had befallen him, what new thoughts about God and his purposes in 
 thus dealing with him, what wonderings as to who this stranger 
 can be that takes such an interest in him, what flutterings of hope 
 may have passed through this poor man's spirit while the brief 
 conversation between Christ and his disciples was going on, and 
 during that short and silent interval which followed as Jesus " spat 
 on the ground and made clay of the spittle " ? This we know, that 
 when Christ approached and laid his hand upon him, and anointed 
 his eyes with that strange salve, and said to him, while yet his 
 sightless balls were covered with what would have blinded for the 
 time a man who saw, " Go, wash in the pool of Siloam," he had 
 become so impressed as quietly to submit to so singular an opera- 
 tion, and, without a word of arguing or remonstrance, to obey the 
 order given, and to go off to the pool to wash. It lay not far off, 
 at the base of the hill on which the Temple stood, up and around 
 which he had so often groped his way. He went and washed, 
 and lo a double miracle ! the one wrought within the eyeball, the 
 other within the mind each wonderful even among the wonders 
 wrought by Christ. Within the same compass there is no piece of 
 dead or living mechanism that we know of, so curious, so complex, 
 so full of nice adjustments, as the human eye. It was the great 
 Creator's office to make that eye and plant it in its socket, gifting 
 it with all its varied powers of motion, outward and inward, and 
 guarding it against all the injuries to which so delicate an instru- 
 ment is exposed. It was the Creator's will that some fatal defect, 
 or some fatal confusion of its parts and membranes, should from 
 the first have existed in the eyeball of this man. And who but 
 the Creator could it be that rectified the defect or removed the 
 confusion, bestowing at once upon the renovated organ the full 
 power of vision 1 ! Such instant reconstruction of a defective, or 
 mutilated, or disorganised eye, though not in itself a greater,
 
 304 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 appears to us a more surprising act of the Divine power than the 
 original creation of the organ. You watch with admiration the 
 ciperation of the man who, with a large choice of means and 
 materials, makes, and grinds, and polishes, and adjusts the set of 
 lenses of which a telescope is composed. But let some accident 
 happen whereby all these lenses are broken and crushed together 
 in one mass of confusion, what would you think of the man who 
 could out of such materials reconstruct the instrument ? It was 
 such a display of the Divine power that was made when the man 
 born blind went and washed and saw. 
 
 But however perfect the eye be, it is simply a transmitter of 
 light, the outward organ by which certain impressions are made upon 
 the optic nerves, by them to be conveyed to the brain, giving birth 
 there to the sensations of sight. But these sensations of themselves 
 convey little or no knowledge of the outward world till the ob- 
 server's mind has learned to interpret them as signs of the position, 
 forms, sizes, and distances of the outlying objects of the visible 
 creation. It is but slowly that an infant learns this language of 
 the eye. It requires the putting forth of innumerable acts of 
 memory, and the acquiring by much practice a facility of rapid in- 
 terpretation. That the man born blind should be able at once to 
 use his eyes as we all do, it was needed that this faculty should be 
 bestowed on him at once, without any teaching or training, and 
 when we fully understand (as it is somewhat difficult to do) what 
 the powers were which were thus instantly conveyed, the mental 
 will appear not less wonderful than the material part of the miracle 
 of our Lord that part of it too of which it is utterly impossible 
 to give any explanation but the one that there was in it a direct 
 and immediate putting forth of the Divine power. The skilful 
 hand of the coucher may open the eye that has been blind from 
 birth, but no human skill or power could confer at once that faculty 
 of using the eye as we now do, acquired by us in the forgotten days 
 of our infancy. It may be left to the fanaticism of unbelief to 
 imagine that it was the clay and the washing which restored his 
 sight to the man born blind, but no ingenuity of conception can 
 point us to the natural means by which the gift of perfect vision 
 could have been at once conferred. 
 
 Yet of the fact we have the most convincing proof. It was so 
 patent and public that there could be no mistake about it. It was 
 subjected to the most searching investigation to all the processes 
 of a judicial inquiry. When one so well known as this blind beggar, 
 whom so many had noticed on their way up to the Temple, was 
 seen walking among the other worshippers, seeing as well as any 
 of them, the question was on all sides repeated, "Is not this he 
 that sat and begged ] " Some said it was ; others, distrusting their 
 own sight, could only say he was like him ; but he removed their
 
 THE CURE OF THE MAN BOEN BLIND. 305 
 
 doubts by saying, " I am he. " Then came the question as to how 
 his eyes were opened. He told them. Somehow or other, he had 
 learned the name of his healer. "A man that is called Jesus made 
 clay and anointed mine eyes, and said to me, Go to the pool of 
 Siloam and wash, and I went and washed, and I received my 
 sight." But Jesus had not yet been seen by him ; he knew not 
 where he was. It was so very singular a thing this that had been 
 done made more so by its having been done upon a Sabbath-day 
 that some of those to whom the tale was told would not be 
 satisfied till the man went with them to the Pharisees, sitting in 
 council in a side-chamber of the Temple. They put the same 
 question to him the others had done, as to how he had received 
 his sight, and got the same reply. Even had Jesus cured him by 
 a word, they would have regarded it as a breach of the Sabbath, 
 but when they hear of his making clay and putting it on his eyes, 
 and then sending him to lave it off in the waters of Siloam all 
 servile work forbidden, as they taught they seize at once upon 
 this circumstance, and say, "This man is not of God, because he 
 keepeth not the Sabbath-day." The question now was not about 
 the cure, which seemed, in truth, admitted, but about the character 
 of the curer. Such instant and peremptory condemnation of him 
 as a Sabbath-breaker roused a spirit of opposition even in their own 
 court. Joseph was there, or Nicodemus, or some one of a like 
 sentiment, who ventured, in opposition to the prevailing feeling, to 
 put the question, " How can a man that is a sinner do such miracles'?" 
 But they are overborne. The man himself, at least, who is there 
 before them, will not dare to defend a deed which he sees that the 
 majority of them condemn. They turn to him and say, ""What 
 sayest thou of him that hath opened thine eyes 1 " They are 
 mistaken. Without delay or misgiving, he says at once, "He is a 
 prophet." They order him to withdraw. They are somewhat per- 
 plexed. They wish to keep in hand the charge of Sabbath-breaking, 
 but how can they do so without admitting the miracle 1 It would 
 serve all their purposes could they only make it out that there had 
 been some deception or mistake as to the man's having been born 
 blind the peculiar feature of the miracle that had attracted to it 
 such public notice. They summon his parents, who have honesty 
 enough to acknowledge that the man is their son, and that he waa 
 born blind, but as to how it is that he now sees, they are too timid 
 to say a word. They know it had been resolved that if any man 
 confessed that Jesus was the Christ, he was to be excommunicated 
 a sentence carrying the gravest consequences, inflicting the 
 severest social penalties. But they have great confidence in the
 
 306 TEE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 again in their presence, ignorant of what has transpired, of what 
 his parents, in their terror, may have said. And now, as if their 
 former judgment against Jesus had been quite confirmed, and stood 
 unquestionable, they say to him, " Give God the praise " an or- 
 dinary Jewish form of adjuration. " My son," said Joshua to 
 Achan, " give glory to the Lord God of Israel, and make confession 
 to him, and tell me now what thou hast done." And so now these 
 Pharisees to this poor beggar. " My son, give God the praise. We 
 know, and do you confess, that this man is a sinner." They are 
 again at fault. In blunt, plain speech, that tells sufficiently that 
 he will not believe that Jesus is a sinner simply because they say it, 
 he answers, " Whether he be a sinner, I know not ; one thing I 
 know, that whereas I was blind, now I see." Balked in their first 
 object to browbeat and overawe him, they will try again Avhether 
 they can detect any inconsistency or contradiction in his testimony, 
 and so they ask him to tell them over again how the thing had 
 happened. Seeing through all the thin disguise they are assuming 
 in seeming to be so anxious to get at the truth, he taunts them, 
 saying, " I told you before, and ye did not hear ; wherefore would 
 you hear it again 1 will ye also be his disciples ? " No ambiguous 
 confession of discipleship on his part. So at least they took it who 
 replied, " Thou art his disciple ; we are Moses' disciples. We know 
 that God spake unto Moses ; as for this fellow, we know not from 
 whence he is." Poor though he be, and altogether at the mercy 
 of the men before whom he stands, the healed man cannot bear to 
 hear his healer spoken of in such contemptuous terms. With a 
 courage that ranks him as the first of the great company of confes- 
 sors, and with a wisdom that raises him above all those high-born 
 and well-taught Pharisees, he says, " Why, herein is a marvellous 
 thing, that ye know not from whence he is, and yet he hath opened 
 mine eyes. Now we know that God heareth not sinners ; but if a 
 man be a worshipper of God, and doeth his will, him he heareth. 
 Since the world began was it not heard that any man opened the 
 eyes of one that was born blind. If this man were not of God, he 
 could do nothing." So terse, so pungent, so unanswerable the 
 speech, that passion now takes the place of argument, and the old 
 and vulgar weapon of authority is grasped and used. Meanly 
 casting his calamity in his teeth, they say, "Thou wast altogether 
 born in sin, and dost thou teach us 1 " And they cast him out 
 excommunicated him on the spot. 
 
 Jesus hears of the wisdom and the fearlessness that he had 
 displayed in the defence of the character and doings of his healer, 
 and of the heavy doom that had in consequence been visited on 
 him, and throws himself across his path. Meeting him by the way, 
 he says to him, "Dost thou believe in the Son of God?" Up to 
 this moment he had never seen the man who had anointed his eyes
 
 THE CURE OF THE MAN BORN BLIND. 307 
 
 with the clay and bidden him to go and wash in the pool of Siloam. 
 He might not by look alone have recognised him, but the voice he 
 never could forget. As soon as that voice is heard, he knows who 
 the speaker is. Much he might have liked to tell, and much to 
 ask; but all other questions are lost in the one, that with such 
 emphasis the Saviour puts " Dost thou believe in the Son of God ? " 
 He had heard of jinen of God, prophets of God, the Christ of God: 
 but the Son of God one claiming the same kind of paternity in 
 God that every true son claims in his father such a one he had 
 never heard of. "Who is he, Lord?" he asks, "that I might 
 believe in him ? And Jesus said unto him, Thou hast both seen 
 him, and it is he that talketh with thee." Never but once before 
 that we know of or can remember never but to the woman of 
 Samaria was so clear, so direct, so personal a revelation of himself 
 made by Jesus Christ. In both the woman by the well-side, the 
 blind beggar by the wayside Jesus found simplicity and candour, 
 quickness of intelligence, openness to evidence, readiness to confess. 
 Both followed the light already given. Both, before any special 
 testimony to his own character was borne by Jesus himself, acknow- 
 ledged him to be a prophet. Both thus stepped out far in advance 
 of the great mass of those around them in advance of many who 
 were reckoned as disciples of the Lord. The man's, however, was 
 the fuller and firmer faith. It had a deeper foundation to rest on. 
 Jesus exhibited to the woman such a miracle of knowledge as drew 
 from her the exclamation, "Sir, I perceive thou art a prophet." 
 Upon the man he wrought such a miracle of power and love as 
 begat within the deep conviction that he was a true worshipper of 
 God a faithful doer of the Divine will a man of God a prophet 
 of God ; and to this conviction he had adhered before the frowning 
 rulers, and in face of all that they could do against him. He had 
 risked all and lost much rather than deny such faith as he had in 
 Jesus. And to him the fuller revelation was imparted. Jesus only 
 told the woman of Samaria that it was Messiah the Christ of God 
 who stood before her. He told the man that it was the Son of 
 God who stood before him. How far the discovery of his Sonship 
 to God his true and proper divinity went beyond that of his 
 Messiahship, we shall have occasion hereafter to unfold. But see 
 how instantaneous the faith that follows the great and unexpected 
 disclosure. "Who is he, Lord?" the Sen of God of whom you 
 speak ? " I that speak unto thee am he. And he said, Lord, I 
 believe, and he worshipped him;" worshipped him as few of his 
 immediate followers yet had done : worshipped him as Thomas and 
 the others did when they had the great miracle of the resurrection 
 and the sight of the risen Saviour to originate and confirm their 
 faith. What shall we say of this quick faith and its accompanying 
 worship evidences as they were of a fresh full tide of light poured
 
 308 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 into this man's mind ? Shall we say that here another miracle was 
 wrought an inward and spiritual one, great and wonderful as that 
 when by the pool-side of Siloam, he washed those sightless eyeballs, 
 and as he washed, the clear, pure, bubbling water showed itself 
 the first bright object that met his opening vision and he lifted 
 up his eyes and looked around, and the hills of Zion and of Olivet, 
 and the fair valley of the Kedron, burst upon his astonished gaze ? 
 That perhaps were wrong, for great as the work of Clod's Holy 
 Spirit is in enlightening and quickening the human soul, it is not 
 a miraculous one, and should not be spoken of as such. But, 
 surely, of the two the opening of the bodily and the opening 
 of the spiritual vision the latter was God's greater and higher 
 gift. 
 
 VII. 
 
 THE GOOD SHEPHERD. 
 JOHN ix. 39-41 ; x. 1-39. 
 
 THE blind beggar of Jerusalem was healed. How different the 
 impression and effect of this healing upon the man himself, on the 
 one side, and the Pharisees, his excommunicators, on the other ! 
 He a poor, uneducated, yet simple-minded, simple-hearted man, 
 grasping with so firm a hold, and turning to such good account, the 
 knowledge that he had, and eager to have more ; reaping, as the 
 fruit of Christ's act of mercy met in such a spirit, the unfolding by 
 our Lord himself of his highest character and office they, the 
 guides and leaders of the people, so well taught and so wise, unable 
 to discredit the miracle, yet seizing upon the circumstance that it 
 was done upon the Sabbath, and turning this into a reproach, their 
 prejudices fed and strengthened, their eyes growing more blinded, 
 their hearts more hardened against Christ. This contrast appears 
 to have struck the mind of our Lord himself. It was in the Temple, 
 the only place where he could meet his fellow-men while under the 
 ban of the Sanhedrim, that the healed man met Jesus. They may 
 have been alone, or nearly so, when Christ put the question, " Dost 
 thou believe on the Son of God ?" and, having got the answer which 
 showed what readiness there was to receive further light, made the 
 great disclosure of his Divinity. Soon, however, a number of the 
 Pharisees approach, attracted by the interview. As he sees, com- 
 pares, contrasts the two the man and them he says, "For 
 judgment am I come into this world, that they which see not " (as 
 this poor blind beggar) " may see, and that they which see " (as 
 the Pharisees) " might be made blind." The Pharisees are not so 
 blind as not to perceive the drift and bearing of the speech. They
 
 THE GOOD SHEPHERD. 309 
 
 mockingly inquire, "Are we blind also I" "If ye were blind," 
 is our Lord's reply utterly blind, had no power or faculty of 
 vision, " ye should have no sin : but now ye say, We see." ' You 
 think you see ; you pride yourselves on seeing so much better and 
 so much further than others. Unconscious of your existing blind- 
 ness, you will not come to me to have your eyes opened : will not 
 submit to the humbling operation at my hands : therefore your sin 
 remaineth, abides, and accumulates upon you. Here was a poor 
 stricken sheep, whom ye, claiming to be the shepherds of the flock, 
 have cast out from your fold, whom I have sought and found. 
 Let me tell you who and what a true shepherd of God's flock is. 
 He is one that enters by the door into the sheepfold, to whom the 
 porter opens readily the door, whose voice the sheep are quick to 
 recognise, who calleth his own sheep by name, going before them 
 and leading them out. He is a stranger, a thief, a robber, and no 
 true shepherd of the sheep, who will not enter by the door, but 
 climbeth up some other way.' Acute enough to perceive that this 
 was said concerning human shepherds generally, leaders or pastors 
 of the people : intended to distinguish the true among such from 
 the false, and that some allusion to themselves was intended, Christ's 
 hearers were yet at a loss to know what the door could be of which 
 he was speaking, and who the thieves and robbers were. Dropping, 
 therefore, all generality and all ambiguity, Jesus adds, "Verily, 
 verily, I say unto you, I am the door of the sheep." ' I have been, 
 I am, I ever shall be, the one and only door of entrance and of exit, 
 both for shepherds and for sheep. All that ever came before me, 
 without acknowledging me, independently of me, setting me aside, 
 yet pretending to be shepherds of the sheep they are the thieves 
 and the robbers. I am the door; by me, if any man enter in, 
 whether he claims to be a shepherd, or numbers himself merely as 
 one of the flock those who are shepherds as to others, being still 
 sheep as to me if any man so enter in, he shall be saved, and shall 
 go in and out, and find pasture.' 
 
 This much being said of the door, the one way of entrance into 
 God's true fold, the image of the door is dropped, and without cir- 
 cumlocution or reserve Christ announces himself as the Good 
 Shepherd, and proceeds to describe his character and work as such. 
 ' I am the Good Shepherd ; not simply a kind or loving shepherd, 
 as opposed to such as are unkind or harsh in their treatment of the 
 flock, but I am the one, the only one, in whom all the qualities 
 needful to constitute the true and faithful shepherd meet and cul- 
 minate in full and harmonious perfection. I am the Good Shepherd, 
 who has already done, who waits still to do, that for the sheep 
 which none other ever did or could do.' On one or two of the 
 qualities or characteristics which Christ here claims for himself, as 
 wearing and executing the office, let us now fix our thoughts.
 
 310 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTKY. 
 
 1. He sets before us the minute personal interest that he takes 
 in each individual member of his flock. " He calleth his own sheep 
 by name, and leadeth them out." The allusion here is to the fact 
 that Eastern shepherds did give a separate name to each separate 
 sheep, who came in time to know it, and, on hearing it, to follow at 
 the shepherd's call. It is thus that, when Isaiah would set forth 
 the relation in which the Great Creator stands to the starry host, 
 he represents him as leading them out at night as a shepherd leadeth 
 out his sheep. "Lift up your eyes, and behold who hath created 
 these things ; that bringeth out their host by number : he calleth 
 them all by names." It is no mere geSferal knowledge, general 
 care, that the Great Creator possesses and exercises. There is not 
 a single star in all that starry host unnoticed, unguided, unnamed. 
 The eye that seeth all, sees each as distinctly as if it alone were 
 before it. The hand that guideth all, guides each as carefully as if 
 it alone had to be directed by it. So is it with Jesus and the great 
 multitude of his redeemed. Singling each out of that vast company, 
 he says, " I have redeemed thee : I have called thee by thy name, 
 thou art mine." "I have graven thy name on the palms of my 
 hands," to be ever there before mine eye. " To him that overcometh 
 will I give a white stone, and on the stone a new name written, 
 which no man knoweth saving he who receiveth it." Individual 
 names are given to mark off individual objects, to separate each, 
 visibly and distinctly, from all others of the same kind. A new 
 island is discovered, its discoverer gives to it its new name. A new 
 instrument is invented, its inventor gives to it its new name. In 
 that island, as distinguished from all other islands, its discoverer 
 takes ever afterwards a special interest. In that instrument, as 
 different from all others, a like special interest is taken by its in- 
 ventor. Another human spirit is redeemed to God : its Kedeemer 
 gives to it its new name, and for ever afterwards in that spirit he 
 takes a living, personal, peculiar interest : bending over it continu- 
 ally with infinite tenderness, watching each doubt, each fear, each 
 trial, each temptation, each fall, each rising again, each conflict, 
 each victory, each defeat, every movement, minute or momentous, 
 by which its progress is advanced or retarded, watching each and 
 all with a solicitude as special and particular as if it were upon it 
 that the exclusive regards of his loving heart were fixed. 
 
 It was no vague, indefinite, indiscriminate good-will to all man- 
 kind that Jesus showed when here on earth. A large part of the 
 narrative of his life and labours is occupied with the details of his 
 intercourse with individuals, intended to set forth the special 
 personal interest in each of them that he took. Philip brings 
 Nathanael to him. Jesus says, "Before that Philip called thee, 
 when thou wast under the fig-tree, I saw thee." "Go, call thy 
 husband, and come hither." " I have no husband," the woman of
 
 THE GOOD SHEPHERD. 311 
 
 Samaria answers. Jesus says, "Thou hast well said, I have no 
 husband, for thou hast had five husbands, and he whom thou now 
 hast is not thy husband ; in that saidst thou truly." A lone, afflicted 
 woman creeps furtively near to him, that she may touch but the 
 hem of his garment ; she is healed, but must not go away imagin- 
 ing that she was unseen, unrecognised. Zaccheus climbs up into 
 the sycamore, expecting simply to get a sight of him as he passes 
 by. Christ comes up, stops before the tree, looks up, and says, 
 " Zaccheus, make haste and come down, for to-day I must abide at 
 thy house." " Our friend Lazarus sleepeth." " Simon, Simon, 
 Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat, but 
 I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not." Too numerous to 
 go on quoting thus were the manifestations of personal and parti- 
 cular regard shown by Jesus before his death. And when he rose 
 from the sepulchre, he rose with the same heart in him for special 
 affection. It was the risen Saviour who put the message into the 
 angel's lips, " Go, tell the disciples and Peter that he is risen from 
 the dead." And when he ascended up to heaven, he carried the 
 same heart with him to the throne. " Saul, Saul, why persecutest 
 thou me ?" There was not one of those, his little ones, whom Saul 
 was persecuting, that he did not identify with himself. No vague, 
 indefinite, indiscriminate superintendence is that which the great 
 Good Shepherd still exercises over his flock, but a care that particu- 
 larises each separate member of it, and descends to the minutest 
 incidents of their history. 
 
 We rightly say that one great object of the Incarnation was so 
 to manifest the unseen Divinity, that our weak thoughts and our 
 languid affections might the more easily comprehend and embrace 
 him as embodied in the person of Jesus Christ the Son. But we 
 fail to realise the full meaning, and to take home to ourselves the 
 full comfort of the Incarnation, if we regard not our Divine 
 Redeemer as seeing each of us wherever we are as distinctly as he 
 saw Nathanael under the fig-tree, Zaccheus upon the sycamore- 
 tree as knowing all about our past history as minutely as he knew 
 all about that of the woman by the well-side sympathising as 
 truly and tenderly with all our spiritual trials and sorrows as he 
 did with those of Peter and the churches whom Saul was per- 
 secuting. 
 
 2. Christ speaks of the mutual knowledge, love, and sympathy 
 which unites the Shepherd and the sheep, creating a bond between 
 them of the closest and most endearing kind. " I know my sheep, 
 and am known of mine, as my Father knoweth me, and as I know 
 the Father." The mutual knowledge of the Shepherd and the 
 sheep is likened thus to the mutual knowledge of the Father and 
 the Son. The ground of the comparison cannot be in the omni- 
 science possessed equally by the Father and the Son, in virtue of
 
 312 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 which each fully knows the other, for no such faculty is possessed 
 by the sheep, and yet their knowledge of the Shepherd is said to 
 be the same in kind with his knowledge of them, and both to be 
 the same in kind with the Father's knowledge of the Son, and the 
 Son's knowledge of the Father. What possibly can be meant by 
 this but that there is a bond of acquaintanceship, affection, com- 
 munion, fellowship between each true believer and his Sav'our, 
 such in its origin, such in its strength, such in its sacredness, such 
 in its present blessedness, such in its glorious issues in eternity, 
 that no earthly bond whatever no, not the closest that binds man 
 to man, human heart to human heart can offer the fit or adequate 
 symbol of it, to get which we must climb to those mysterious 
 heights, to that mysterious bond, by which the Father and the Son 
 are united in the intimacies of eternal love ? This bond consists 
 in oneness of life, unity of spirit, harmony of desire and affection. 
 In the spiritual world, great as the distances may be which divide 
 its members (and vast indeed is that distance at which any of us 
 stand from our Redeemer), like discerneth like even afar off, like 
 draws to like, like links itself to like, truth meets truth, and love 
 meets love, and holiness clings to holiness. The new-born soul 
 turns instinctively to him in whom it has found its better, its 
 eternal, life. Known first of him, it knows him in return ; loved 
 first by him, it loves him in return. He comes to take up his 
 abode in it, and it hastens to take up its abode in him. He dwells 
 in it; it dwells in him. And broken and imperfect as, on the 
 believer's part, this union and communion is, yet is there in it a 
 nearness, a sacredness, a tenderness that belongs to no other tie by 
 which the human spirit can be bound. 
 
 3. The manner in which the Good Shepherd leads his flock 
 "He calleth his own sheep by name, and leadeth them out; 
 and when he putteth forth his sheep, he goeth before them, 
 and the sheep follow him." The language is borrowed from 
 pastoral life in Eastern lands ; and it is remarkable that in almost 
 every point in which a resemblance is traced between the office and 
 work of the Shepherd and that of Christ, the usages of Eastern 
 differ from those of our Western lands. Our shepherds drive their 
 flocks before them ; and, in driving, bring a strong compulsion of 
 some kind to bear upon the herd. This fashion of it puts all 
 noticing, knowing, naming, calling of particular sheep out of the 
 question ; it is not an attraction from before, it is a propulsion 
 from behind, that sets our flocks of sheep moving upon the way ; 
 it is not the hearing of its name, it is not the call of its master, it 
 is not by the sight of him going on before that any single sheep is 
 induced to move onward in the path. It is quite different in the 
 East : the Eastern shepherd goes before his sheep, he draws them 
 after him draws them by those ties of dependence, and trust, and
 
 THE GOOD SHEPHERD. 313 
 
 affection that long years of living together have established between 
 them. He calls them by their name ; they hear and follow. 
 Hence the language of the Old Testament "The Lord is my 
 shepherd ; he leadeth me beside the still waters." " Thou leddest 
 thy people like a flock by the hand of Moses and of Aaron." " Give 
 ear, O Shepherd of Israel, thou that leadest Joseph like a flock" 
 a usage this of Eastern shepherd life truly and beautifully illustra- 
 tive of the mode by which Jesus guides his people onward to the 
 fold of their eternal rest ; not by fear, not by force, not by com- 
 pulsion of any kind no, but by love ; by the attraction of his 
 loving presence, the force of his winning example. No guide or 
 pastor he, like those Pharisees whom Jesus had in his eye when, 
 in contrast to them, he called himself the Good Shepherd men 
 binding heavy burdens, and laying them on other men's shoulders, 
 whilst they would not touch them themselves with one of their 
 fingers. In our blessed Lord and Master we have one who him 
 self trod before us every step that he would have us tread, bore 
 every burden he would have us bear, met every temptation he 
 would have us meet, shared every grief he would have us share, 
 did every duty he would have us do. Study it aright, and it will 
 surprise you to discover over what a wide and varied field of human 
 experience the example of our Saviour stretches, how difficult it is 
 to find a position or experience of our common human life to which 
 you may not find something answering in the life of Jesus of 
 Nazareth. 
 
 4. The consummating act of his love for the sheep, and the 
 perfect voluntariness with which that act is done. "I am the 
 Good Shepherd the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep." 
 The hireling undertakes to guard the sheep as best he can. It is 
 expected that he should be vigilant, alert, courageous in their 
 defence, running at times, if need be, some risk even of limb or 
 life. But no owner of a flock ever bound it upon the shepherd 
 whom he hired, as a condition of his office, that if ever it came to 
 be the alternative that the sheep must perish, or the shepherd 
 perish, the latter must give up his life to save the flock. A human 
 life is too precious a thing to be sacrificed in such a way. The 
 owner of the flock would not give his own life for the sheep : he 
 could not righteously ask his hireling to do it. The intrinsic 
 difference in nature and in worth between the man and the sheep 
 is such as to preclude the idea of a voluntary surrender of life by 
 the one, simply to preserve the other. How much in value above 
 all the lives for which it was given was that of God's own eternal 
 Son, we have no means of computing; but we can see how far 
 above all sacrifice, that either the owner of the flock acting himself 
 as shepherd, or any under-shepherd whom he hired, ever made or 
 could be expected to make, was that which Jesus made when he
 
 314 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 laid down his life for the sheep. Yet how freely was this done ! 
 " I lay down my life that I might take it again : no man taketh it 
 from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it 
 down, and I have power to take it again." Life is that mysterious 
 thing the giving and restoring of which the Creator keeps in his 
 own hands. No skill or power of man ever made a new living 
 thing. No skill or power of man ever rekindled the mystic light 
 of life when once gone out. The power lies with man to lay down 
 or take away his own life, but once laid down, what man is he that 
 can take it up again ? Yet Jesus speaks as one who has the 
 recovery of his own life as much at his command as the relinquish- 
 ing of it, speaks of laying it down in order to take it again. He 
 would have it to be known, that whatever he might permit the 
 men to do who had already resolved to take his life, his death would 
 not be their doing but his own ; a death undergone spontaneously on 
 his part, of his own free and unconstrained choice. Most willingly, 
 through sheer love and pity, out of the infinite fulness of his divine 
 compassion, was he to lay down his life for the sheep, that thus they 
 might have life, and have it more abundantly than they otherwise 
 could have his death their life his life from the dead drawing 
 their life up along with it and linking their eternity with his own. 
 
 So we understand, and may attempt to illustrate this description 
 by himself of himself as the Good Shepherd ; but to the men who 
 first listened to it, especially to those Pharisees whose conduct as 
 shepherds it was meant to expose, how absolutely unintelligible in 
 many of its parts must it have appeared ! What an assumption in 
 making himself the one and only door, in raising himself so high 
 above all other shepherds, representing himself as possessed of 
 attributes that none of them possessed, making sacrifices none of 
 them ever made ! If a shepherd gave his life for the sheep, one 
 would think that the sheep would lose rather than gain ; would, in 
 consequence of his removal, be all the more at the mercy of the 
 destroyer. But here is a shepherd, whose death is held out as not 
 only protecting the sheep from death, but imparting to them a new 
 life ; who dies, while yet by his dying they lose nothing do not 
 even lose him as their shepherd for he no sooner dies than he lives 
 again to resume his shepherd's office. More than obscure ambi- 
 tious, and utterly self-contradictory must this account of himself 
 have appeared to the listening Pharisees, their recoil not lessened 
 by Christ's dropping incidentally the hint that there were other 
 sheep, not of the Jewish fold, whom he meant to bring in, so that 
 there should be one fold, over which he should be the one shepherd. 
 " There was a division therefore again among the Jews for these 
 sayings." To many they appeared so presumptuous and inexpli- 
 cable, that they said, " He hath a devil, and is mad ; why hear ye 
 him?" There were others who, unable to give any explanation of
 
 THE GOOD SHEPHERD. 315 
 
 the sayings, yet clung to the evidence of his miracles, particularly 
 of the one they had just witnessed. " These are not the words of 
 him that hath a devil. Can a devil open the eyes of the blind 1" 
 
 Leaving them to settle these differences among themselves, 
 Jesus withdrew ; and for two months from the time of the Feast 
 of Tabernacles to that of the Feast of the Dedication the curtain 
 drops over Jerusalem, and we see and hear no more of anything 
 said or done by Jesus there. Where and how were those two 
 months spent ? Many think that our Lord must have remained in 
 or near the capital during this interval. It appears to us much 
 more likely that he had returned to Galilee. We are expressly told 
 that he " would not walk in Jewry because the Jews sought to kill 
 him." After the formal attempt of the rulers to arrest him, and 
 after the populace having taken up stones to stone him, during the 
 Feast of Tabernacles, it seems little likely that he would remain so 
 long a time within their reach and power. When next he appears 
 in Solomon's porch, and the Jews gather round him, the tone of 
 the conversation that ensues, in which there is so direct a reference 
 to his declarations about himself, uttered at the close of the pre- 
 ceding festival, is best explained by our conceiving that this was a 
 sudden reappearance of Jesus in the midst of them, when the 
 thoughts both of himself and his hearers naturally reverted to the 
 incidents of their last interview in the Temple. " Then came the 
 Jews round about him, and said, How long dost thou make us to 
 doubt ] If thou be the Christ, tell us plainly." There was not a 
 little petulance, and a large mixture of hypocrisy in the demand. 
 These were not honest inquirers seeking only relief from perplexing 
 doubts. Whatever Christ might say about himself, their mind 
 about him was quite made up. They do not come to ask about 
 that late discourse of his in which he had spoken so plainly about 
 his being the one and only true shepherd of the sheep. They do 
 not come to inquire further about that door, by which he had said 
 that the true fold could alone be entered. They come with the one 
 distinct and abrupt demand, that he should tell them plainly 
 whether he was the Christ ; apparently implying some readiness on 
 their part to believe, but only such a readiness as the men around 
 the cross expressed when they exclaimed, "Let him come down 
 from the cross, and we will believe." They want him to assert 
 that he was the Christ. They want to get the evidence from his 
 own lips on which his condemnation by the Sanhedrim could be 
 grounded ; knowing beside that an express claim on his part to the 
 Messiahship would alienate many even among those whose incredu- 
 lity had been temporarily shaken. 
 
 There was singular wisdom in our Lord's reply : "I told you 
 before, and ye believed not." In no instance had he ever openly 
 declared to these Jews of Jerusalem that he was the Christ. Nor
 
 316 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 was lie now about to affirm it in the way that they prescribed. 
 Nevertheless it was quite true that he had often told them who and 
 what he was ; told enough to satisfy them that he must be either 
 their long-expected Messiah or a deceiver of the people. And 
 though he had said nothing, his works had borne no ambiguous 
 testimony to his character and office. But they had not received, 
 they had rejected all that evidence. They wanted plain speaking, 
 and now they get .it, get more of it than they expected or desired, 
 for Jesus not only broadly proclaims their unbelief, but, reverting 
 to that unwelcome discourse which was still ringing in their troubled 
 ears, he tells them of the nature and the source of their unbelief: 
 " Ye believe not, because ye are not of my sheep, as I said unto 
 you." Without dwelling, however, upon this painful topic, one 
 about which these Jews then, and we readers of the Gospel now, 
 might be disposed to put many questions, to which no satisfactory 
 answers from any quarter might come to us, Jesus goes on to 
 dwell upon what to him, as it should be to us, was a far more grate- 
 ful topic, the characteristics and the privileges of his own true 
 and faithful flock : " My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, 
 and they follow me." That and more he had previously said while 
 speaking of himself as the good shepherd, and noting some of the 
 characteristics of his sheep. But now he will add something more 
 as to the origin and nature, the steadfast and eternal endurance, of 
 that new relationship, into which, by becoming his, all the true 
 members of his spiritual flock are admitted. 
 
 " And I give unto them eternal life." "My sheep shall never 
 perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. My 
 Father which gave them me is greater than all, and none shall 
 pluck them out of my Father's hands." Are we not entitled to 
 gather from these words the comforting assurance that all who by 
 the secret communications of his grace have had this life transfused 
 into their souls, shall be securely and eternally upheld by the 
 mighty power of Christ, so that they shall never perish ? not so 
 upheld, whatever they afterwards may be or do, not so upheld that 
 the thought of their security may slacken their own diligence or 
 tempt them to transgress, but so that the very sense of their having 
 such a presence and such a power as that of Jesus ever with them 
 to protect and bless shall operate as a new spring and impulse to all 
 holy activities, and shall keep them from ever becoming or ever doing 
 that whereby his friendship would be finally and for ever forfeited 
 and lost. Do we feel the first faint beatings of the new life in our 
 heart ? Do we fear that these may be so checked and hardened as to 
 be finally and for ever stopped ? Let us think not of our weakness, 
 but of Christ's strength ; not of our faith, but of his faithfulness ; 
 not of the firmness of our hold of him, but of the firmness of his hold 
 of us. The hollow of that hand of our Eedeemer is the one safe
 
 TIIE GOOD SHEPHERD. 317 
 
 place for us into which to put our sinful soul. Not into the hand 
 of the Father, as the great and holy Lawgiver, would the spirit in 
 the first exercises of penitence and faith venture to thrust itself, lest 
 out of that hand it should indignantly be flung, and scattered and 
 lost should be the wealth of its immortality. It is into the hand of 
 the Son, the Saviour, that it puts itself. Yet, soon as ever it does 
 so, the other hand, that of the Father, closes over it, as if the 
 redoubled might of Omnipotence waited and hastened to guard the 
 treasure. "Neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. 
 ... No man is able to pluck them out of my Father's hand." The 
 believer's life is hid '"with Christ." Far up beyond all reach of 
 danger this of itself would place it. But further still, it is hid 
 " with Christ in God." Does this not, as it were, double the dis- 
 tance, and place the breadth of two infinites between it and the 
 possibility of perishing ? 
 
 " I and my Father are one." It was on his saying so that they 
 took up stones again to stone him. He might have claimed to be 
 Christ, but there had been nothing blasphemous in his doing so. 
 Many of the people some even of the rulers believed, or half 
 suspected, that he was the Messiah; yet it never was imagined 
 that in setting forth such a claim Jesus was guilty of a crime for 
 which he might righteously be stoned to death. The Jews were 
 not expecting the Divine Being to appear as their Messiah. They 
 were looking only for one in human nature, of ordinary human 
 parentage, to come to be their king. It is not till he speaks of his 
 hand being of equal power with the Father's to protect till he 
 grounds that equality of power upon unity of nature till he says 
 that he and the Father are one that they take up stones to stone 
 him. And their words explain their actions. While yet the stones 
 are in their hands, Jesus says to them, " Many good works have I 
 showed you of my Father, for which of these works do ye stone 
 me t " Ready for the moment to concede anything as to the 
 character of his works, they answer, " For a good work we stone 
 thee not, but for blasphemy, and because that thou, being a man, 
 makest thyself God." They understood him as asserting his divinity. 
 Had they misunderstood his words, how easy it had been for Christ 
 to correct their error to tell them that he was no blasphemer as 
 they thought him ; that in calling himself the Son of God he did 
 not mean to claim equality with the Father. He did not do so. 
 He quotes, indeed, in the first instance, a sentence from their own 
 Scriptures, in which their judges were called gods ; but he proceeds 
 immediately thereafter to separate himself from, and to exalt him- 
 self above, those to whom, because of their office, and because of 
 the word of God coming to them, the epithet was once or twice 
 applied, and reasons from the less to the greater. He says, " If he 
 called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, say ye of him
 
 318 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTKY. 
 
 whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world, Thou 
 blasphemest; because I said, I am the Son of God?" At first 
 there was some ambiguity in the defence. Although intimating 
 that the appellation might be applied with more propriety to him 
 than to any of their old judges, it might be on the ground only of 
 a higher office or higher mission than theirs that Jesus -was reason- 
 ing. They listen without interrupting him. But when he adds 
 " If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not. But if I do, 
 though ye believe not me, yet believe the works : that ye may 
 know, and believe, that the Father is in me, and I in him," they 
 see that'he is taking up the same ground as at the first is claiming 
 to be equal with the Father is making himself God ; and so once 
 again they seek to take him to deal with him as a blasphemer ; 
 but he escaped out of their hands. That neither upon this nor 
 upon any other occasion of the same kind did our Lord complain 
 of being condemned mistakenly when regarded as being guilty of 
 blasphemy, nor offer the explanation which at once would have set 
 aside the charge, we regard as the clearest of all proofs that the 
 Jews were not in error in interpreting his sayings as they did. 
 
 We take, then, our Lord's wonderful sayings at the Feast of 
 Dedication as asserting the essential unity of nature and attributes 
 between himself and the Father, and as thus assuring us of the 
 perfect and everlasting security and well-being of all who put their 
 souls for keeping into his hand. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 INCIDENTS IN OUR LORD'S LAST JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM. 
 LUKE ix. 51-62 ; x. 1-24. 
 
 WE are inclined to believe that it was during the two months' 
 interval betwixt the Feast of Tabernacles and the Feast of Dedica- 
 tion that Christ's last visit to Galilee was paid his farewell taken 
 of the home of his youth the scenes of his chief labours. Those 
 labours had lasted for about two years, and in them an almost 
 ceaseless activity had been displayed. He had made many circuits 
 through all the towns and villages of the district, performed 
 innumerable miracles, and delivered innumerable addresses to larger 
 or smaller audiences. Yet the visible results had not been great. 
 He had attached twelve men to him as his constant and devoted 
 attendants. There were four or five hundred more ready to ac- 
 knowledge themselves as his disciples. A vast excitement and a 
 large measure of public sympathy had at first been awakened. 
 Multitudes were ready to hail him as the great expected Deliverer. 
 But as the months rolled on, and there was nothing in his character,
 
 INCIDENTS IN OUR LORD'S LAST JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM. 319 
 
 or teaching, or doings answering to their ideas of what this deliverer 
 was to be and do, they got incredulous their incredulity fanned 
 into strength by a growing party headed by the chief Pharisees, who 
 openly rejected and reviled him. There had not been much in his 
 earlier instructions to which exception could be taken, but when 
 he began at a later period to speak of himself as the bread of life, 
 and to declare that unless men ate his flesh and drank his blood 
 they had no life in them, his favour with the populace declined, 
 and they were even ready to believe all that his enemies insinuated, 
 as to his being a profane man an enemy to Moses and to their 
 old laws. Not a few were still ready to regard him as a prophet, 
 perhaps the forerunner of the Messiah ; but outside the small 
 circle of his immediate attendants there were few if any who recog- 
 nised him as the Christ of God. Of this decline in favour with the 
 multitude his adversaries greedily availed themselves, and Galilee 
 was fast becoming as dangerous a home for him as Judea. Mean- 
 while his own disciples had been slowly awakening from their first 
 low and earthly notions of him their eyes slowly opening to the 
 recognition of the great mystery of his character, as being no othei 
 than the incarnate Son of God. Till they were lifted up above 
 their old Jewish notions of the Messiah till they came to perceive 
 how singular was the relationship in which Jesus stood to the Father, 
 how purely spiritual were the ends which he came to accomplish 
 he did not, could not, intelligibly speak to them of his approaching 
 death, resurrection, and ascension. The confession of Peter in the 
 name of all the rest that he was the Christ, 'the Son of God, marked 
 at once the arrival of the period at which Jesus began so to speak, 
 and the close of his labours in Galilee. On both sides, on the part 
 alike of friends and enemies, things were ripening for the great 
 termination, the time had come " that he should be received up," 
 and " he steadfastly set his face to go up to Jerusalem." 
 
 Starting from Capernaum and travelling southward by the route 
 on the west side of the Jordan, he sends messengers before his face, 
 who enter a village of the Samaritans. We remember how gladly 
 he had been welcomed two years before in one town of that district, 
 how ready the inhabitants of Sychar had been to hail him as the 
 Messiah, and we may wonder that now the people of a Samaritan 
 village should so resist his entrance and reject his claims. It may 
 have been that they were men of a different spirit from that of the 
 Sycharites. But it may also have arisen from this that the Samari- 
 tans at first had hoped that if he were indeed the Messiah, he 
 would decide in favour of their temple and its worship, but that 
 now, when they see him going up publicly to the feasts at Jeru- 
 salem, and sanctioning by his presence the ordinances of the sanc- 
 tuary there, their feelings had changed from those of friendliness 
 into those of hostility. However it was, the men of this village
 
 320 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 the first Samaritan one that lay in the Lord's path " would not 
 receive him, because his face was as though he would go to Jeru- 
 salem." Some marked expressions of their unfriendliness had been 
 given, some open indignities flung upon his messengers, of which 
 James and John were witnesses. These two disciples had been 
 lately with their Master on the Mount of Transfiguration, and had 
 seen there the homage that the great prophet Elijah had rendered 
 to him. They were now in the very region of Elijah's life and 
 labours. They had crossed the head of the great plain, at one end 
 of which stood Jezreel, and at the other the heights of Carmel. 
 The events of the last few weeks had been filling their minds with 
 vague yet unbounded hopes. Their Master had thrown off much 
 of his reserve, had shown them his glory on the mount, had spoken 
 to them as he had never done before, had told them of the strange 
 things that were to happen at Jerusalem, had made them feel by 
 the very manner of his entrance upon this last journey from Galilee, 
 that the crisis of his history was drawing on. He courts secrecy no 
 longer. He sends messengers before his face. He is about to make 
 a public triumphant entry into Jerusalem. Yet here are Samaritans 
 who openly despise him will not give him even a night's lodging 
 in their village. The fervid attachment to Jesus that beats in the 
 hearts of James and John kindles into indignation at this treatment. 
 Their indignation turns into vengeful feeling towards the men who 
 were guilty of such conduct. They look around. The heights of 
 Carmel remind them of what Elias had done to the false prophets, 
 and fancying that they were fired with the same spirit, and had a still 
 weightier wrong to avenge, they turn to Jesus, saying, " Lord, wilt 
 thou that we command fire to come down from heaven and consume 
 them, even as Elias did?" They expect Jesus to enter fully and 
 approvingly into the sentiment by which they are animated ; they 
 know it springs from love to him; they are so confident that 
 theirs is a pure and holy zeal, that they never doubt that the fire 
 from heaven waits to be its minister ; they want only to get per- 
 mission to use the bolts of heavenly vengeance that they believe 
 are at their command. How surprised they must have been when 
 Jesus turned and rebuked them, saying, "Ye know not what 
 manner of spirit ye are of; for the Son of man is not come to 
 destroy men's lives, but to save them." 
 
 Eejected by the Samaritans, Jesus turned to another village and 
 chose another route to Jerusalem, in all likelihood the well-known 
 and most frequented one leading through Persea, on the east side 
 of the Jordan. In prosecuting this journey, he " appointed other 
 seventy also, and sent them two and two before his face into every 
 city and place whither he himself would come." Our Lord had 
 gathered around him in passing from Capernaum to Samaria almost 
 the entire body of his Galilean discipleship. It could scarcely fur-
 
 INCIDENTS IN OUE LORD'S LAST JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM. 321 
 
 nish more men than were sent forth on this important mission. 
 Every available disciple of suitable age and character was enlisted 
 in the service. It can scarcely be imagined that they were employed 
 for no other purpose than to provide suitable accommodation 
 beforehand for their Master. Theirs was a higher and far more 
 important errand. For the wisest reasons Jesus had hitherto 
 avoided any public proclamation of his Messiahship. He had left 
 it to his words and deeds to tell the people who and what he was. 
 He had, not long before this time, charged his apostles "that they 
 should tell no man that he was Jesus the Christ." 1 But the time 
 had come for his throwing aside this reserve for seeking rather 
 than shunning publicity for letting all men know, not only that 
 the kingdom had come, but that he, the head of that kingdom, the 
 Christ, the Son of David, the king of Israel, was in the midst of 
 them. Before his departure from among them, the Israelitish nation 
 was to have this proclaimed through all its borders. This was to 
 be the peculiar distinction of his last journeyings towards the Holy 
 City that all along upon their course his Messianic character 
 should be publicly proclaimed, that so a last opportunity for re- 
 ceiving or rejecting him might be afforded. And how could this 
 have been better effected than by the mission of the seventy 1 By 
 the advance of so many men two by two before him, the greatest 
 publicity must have been given to all his movements. In every 
 place and city the voice of his forerunners would summon forth the 
 people to be waiting his approach. The deputies themselves could 
 scarcely fail to feel how urgent and important the duty was which 
 was committed to their hands. Summoning them around him 
 before he sent them forth, Jesus addressed to them instructions 
 almost identical with those addressed to the twelve at the time of 
 their inauguration as his apostles. The address to the twelve, 
 reported by St. Matthew (chap, x.), was longer, bore more of the 
 character of an induction to a permanent office, carried in it allu- 
 sions to duties to be done, persecutions to be endured, promises to 
 be fulfilled, in times that were to follow the removal of the Lord ; 
 but so far as that first short mission of the twelve and this mission 
 of the seventy were concerned, the instructions were almost literally 
 the same. Both were to go forth in the same character, vested 
 with the same powers, to discharge the same office in the same way ; 
 to the rejecters and despisers of both the same guilt was attached, 
 and upon them the same woes were denounced. We notice, indeed, 
 these slight differences : that the prehibition laid upon the twelve 
 not to go into the way of the Gentiles, nor into any city of the 
 Samaritans, is now withdrawn, and that the gift of miraculous 
 power is seemingly more limited as committed to the seventy, being 
 restricted nominally to the healing of the sick. But these scarcely 
 i Matt. xvi. 20. 
 X
 
 322 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 affect the question when comparison is made between the commis- 
 sions given to the twelve and to the seventy, as employed respec- 
 tively on the two temporary missions on which Jesus sent them 
 forth. The result of that comparison is, that no real distinction of 
 any importance can be drawn between the two. Does this not 
 serve, when duly weighed, to stamp, with far greater significance 
 than is ordinarily attached to it, the mission of the seventy raising 
 it to the same platform with that of the apostles ? 
 
 Where the seventy went, into what places and cities they 
 entered, how they were received, what spiritual good was effected 
 by them, all this is hidden from our view. The sole brief record 
 of the result of their labours is what is told us about their return. 
 They came back rejoicing. One thing especially had struck them, 
 and of this only they make mention that, though they had not 
 been told of it beforehand, the very devils had been subject unto 
 them through their Master's name. They were pleased, perhaps 
 somewhat proud, that what nine of the Lord's own apostles had 
 failed in doing they had done. Jesus tells them that his eye had 
 been on them in their progress that he had seen what they could 
 not see how the powers of the invisible world had been moved, 
 and Satan had fallen as lightning from heaven. He tells them that 
 it was no temporary power this with which they had been invested 
 that instead of being diminished, it would afterwards be enlarged 
 till it covered and brought beneath its sway all the power of the 
 enemy. But there was a warning he had to give them. He saw 
 that their minds and hearts were too much occupied by the mere 
 exercise of power by the most striking and tangible results of the 
 exercise of that power. Knowing how faithless an index what is 
 done by any agent is of what that agent himself is, of his real 
 worth and value in the sight of God, he checks so far their joy by 
 saying, " Notwithstanding, in this rejoice not, that the spirits are 
 subject to you ; but rather rejoice because your names are written 
 in heaven." 
 
 The joy of the disciples had an impure earthly element in it 
 which needed correction. No such element was in the joy which 
 the intelligence that the seventy brought with them kindled in the 
 Saviour's breast. He was the man of sorrows ; a load of inward 
 unearthly grief lay heavy upon his heart. But out of that very 
 grief the grief that he endured for the sinful world he came to 
 save there broke a joy the purest, the sublimest, the most bliss- 
 ful that felt by him when he saw that the great ends of his 
 mission were being accomplished, and that the things belonging to 
 their eternal peace were being revealed to the souls of men. " In 
 that hour Jesus rejoiced in spirit, and said, I thank thee, Father, 
 Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hid these things from the 
 wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes. Even so,
 
 OUR LORD'S MINISTRY IN PER^EA. 323 
 
 Father, for so it seemed good in thy sight." Once before Jesus 
 had offered up the same thanksgiving, in the same words, to the 
 Father. We sought then to enter a little into its meaning. 1 No\v 
 from the very repetition of it let us learn how fixed the order is, 
 and how grateful we should be that it is so that it is to the simple, 
 the humble, the teachable, the childlike in heart and spirit, that 
 the blessed revelation cometh. 
 
 Blessed we have called it, taking the epithet from Christ's own 
 lips ; for after he had offered up that thanksgiving to his Father, 
 he turned to his disciples and said to them privately, " Blessed are 
 the eyes which see the things that you see : for I tell you that many 
 prophets and kings have desired to see those things which ye see, 
 and have not seen them, and to hear those things which ye hear, 
 and have not heard them." 
 
 IX. 
 
 OUR LORD'S MINISTRY IN 
 
 LUKE ix. 51 to xvin. 16. 
 
 THE Feast of Tabernacles, at which St. John tells us that Jesus 
 was present, was held in the end of October. The succeeding 
 Passover, at which our Lord was crucified, occurred in the beginning 
 of April. Between the two there intervened five months. Had 
 we depended alone upon the information given us by the first two 
 Evangelists, we should have known nothing of what happened in 
 this interval beyond the fact that, when his ministry in Galilee was 
 over, Christ went up to Jerusalem to die there. They tell us of 
 two or three incidents which occurred at the close of this last 
 journey, but leave us altogether in the dark as to any preceding 
 visit to Jerusalem or journeyings and labours in any other districts 
 of the land. True to his particular object of giving us the details of 
 Christ's ministry in Judea, St. John enables us so far to fill up this 
 blank as to insert: (1.) The appearance at the Feast of Tabernacles; 
 (2.) The appearance at the Feast of Dedication, held in the latter 
 end of December; (3.) A retirement immediately after the feast to 
 Persea, the region beyond the Jordan; (4.) A summons back to 
 Bethany upon the occasion of the death of Lazarus ; (5.) A retreat 
 to " a country near to the wilderness, into a city called Ephraim ;" 
 and (6.) A coming up to Bethany and Jerusalem six days before 
 the Passover. These cover, however, but a small portion of the 
 five months. At the first of the two feasts Jesus was not more 
 than four or five at the second, not more than eight days in 
 1 See p. 180, seq.
 
 324 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 Jerusalem. His stay at Bethany, when he came to raise Lazarus 
 from the dead, was cut short by the conspiracy to put him to death. 
 Not more than a fortnight out of the five months is thus accounted 
 for as having been passed in Jerusalem and its neighbourhood. 
 Where, then, was spent the remaining portion of the time ? The 
 Gospel of St. Luke and it alone enables us to answer these 
 questions. There is a large section of this Gospel from the close 
 of the 9th to near the middle of the 18th chapter which is occupied 
 with this period, and which stands by itself, having nothing parallel 
 to it in any other of the Evangelists. This section commences 
 with the words, " And it came to pass, when the time was come 
 that he should be received up, he steadfastly set his face to go to 
 Jerusalem, and sent messengers before his face : and they went, and 
 entered into a village of the Samaritans, to make ready for him." 1 
 St. Matthew describes what is obviously the same event our Lord's 
 farewell to Galilee in these words : " And it came to pass, that, 
 when Jesus had finished these sayings, he departed from Galilee 
 and came into the coasts of Judea beyond Jordan." 2 And similarly 
 St. Mark, of the same movement, says, "And he arose from 
 thence, and cometh into the coasts of Judea beyond Jordan." 3 
 In the same chapters, and but a few verses after those in which 
 these announcements are made, both St. Matthew and St. Mark 
 relate the incident of little children having been brought to 
 Jesus. But in the Gospel of St. Luke, the record of this incident, 
 instead of following so closely upon the notice of the departure from 
 Galilee, does not come in till the close of the entire section already 
 alluded to so many as eight chapters intervening. From that 
 point the three narratives become again coincident, and run on 
 together. We have thus so much, then, as a third part of the 
 entire narrative of St. Luke, and that continuous to which, so far 
 as the sequence of the story goes, there is nothing that corresponds 
 in any of the other Gospels. 
 
 In this part of St. Luke's Gospel there are so few notices of 
 time and place, that had we it alone before us, our natural conclusion 
 would be that it described continuously the different stages of one 
 long journey from Galilee up through Persea to Jerusalem. Taking 
 it, however, in connection with the information supplied to us by 
 St. John, we become convinced that it includes all the journeyings 
 to and fro which took place between the time when Jesus finally 
 left Galilee to the time when he was approaching Jericho, on going 
 up to his last Passover. But how are we to distribute the narrative 
 so as to make its different parts fit in with the different visits to 
 Jerusalem and its neighbourhood, related by St. John ? Our first 
 idea here would be to start with identifying the final departure 
 from Galilee, described by St. Luke, with the going up to the 
 Luke ix. 61, 52. Matt. xix. 1. Mark x. 1.
 
 OUR LORD'S MINISTRY IN PER^A. 325 
 
 Feast of Tabernacles, as related by St. John. Looking, however, 
 somewhat more closely at the two narratives, we are persuaded 
 that they do not refer to the same journey. In the one, public 
 messengers were sent before Christ's face to proclaim and prepare 
 for his approach; in the other, he went up, "not openly, but, as it 
 were, in secret." The one was slow, prolonged by a large circuit 
 through many towns and villages; the other was rapid Jesus 
 waited behind till all his brethren and friends had departed, and 
 then suddenly appeared at Jerusalem in the midst of the feast. 
 Did Jesus then return to Galilee immediately after the Feast of 
 Tabernacles, and was it in the course of the two months that 
 elapsed between the two festivals that the first part of the journey 
 described by St. Luke was undertaken ; or was it not till after the 
 Feast of Dedication that the last visit to Galilee and the final 
 departure from it took place 1 The absolute silence of St. John as 
 to any such return to Galilee, and the unbroken continuity of his 
 account of what happened at the two Feasts, seem to militate 
 against the former of these suppositions. We remember, however, 
 that such silence is not peculiar to this case that there is a similar 
 instance of a visit paid to Galilee between the time of the occurrences, 
 reported respectively in the 5th and 6th chapters of St. John's 
 Gospel, of which not the slightest trace is to be discovered there. 
 We remember that if Jesus did remain in Judea between the Feasts, 
 it must have been in concealment, for we are told of this very 
 period, that he would not walk in Jewry because the Jews sought 
 to kill him. 1 We remember that St. John speaks of his going to 
 Persea after the Feast of Dedication, as if it were one following 
 upon another that had recently preceded it, " He went away again 
 beyond Jordan." 2 We reflect besides that if it were not till the 
 beginning of January that the journey from Galilee commenced, 
 there would be but little room for all the occurrences detailed in 
 these eight chapters of St. Luke's Gospel ; and we accept it as being 
 much the more likely thing that Jesus did retire from Judea to 
 Galilee instantly after the close of the Feast of Tabernacles, and it 
 was then that the series of incidents commenced, the sole record 
 of which is preserved to us by the third Evangelist. This, of 
 course, implies that we break down the portion of his narrative 
 devoted to the journeys to Jerusalem into portions corresponding 
 with the interval between the two festivals, and those between the 
 latter of these and the visit to Bethany. This might plausibly 
 enough be done by fixing upon what appears to be something like 
 one break in the narrative, occurring at chap. xiii. 22, and some- 
 thing like another at chap. xvii. 11. Without resting much upon 
 this, let us (distribute its parts as we may) take the whole account 
 contained in these eight chapters of St. Luke, as descriptive of a 
 1 John vii. 1. " John x. 40.
 
 326 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 period of our Lord's life and ministry, which otherwise would have 
 been an utter blank, as telling us what happened away both from 
 Galilee and Judea during the five months that immediately preceded 
 the crucifixion. 
 
 Evidently the chief scene or theatre of our Lord's labours 
 throughout the period was in the region east of the Jordan. 
 Departing from Capernaum turned aside by the inhabitants of 
 the Samaritan village he passed along the borders of Galilee and 
 Samaria, crossed the Jordan at the ford of Bethshean, entering the 
 southern part of the populous Decapolis, passing by Jabesh-GUead r 
 penetrating inward perhaps as far as Jerash, whose wonderful ruins 
 attest its wealth and splendour ; then turning southward towards 
 Jerusalem, crossing the Jabbok, pausing at Mahanaim, where Jacob 
 had his long night-struggle ; climbing or skirting those heights and 
 forests of Gilead to which, when driven from Jerusalem by an un- 
 grateful son, David retreated, and which now was furnishing a like 
 refuge to the Son and Lord of David in a similar but still sadder 
 extremity. Much of this country must have been new to Jesus. 
 He may once or twice have taken the ordinary route along the 
 eastern bank of the Jordan, but it is not at all likely that he had 
 ever before gone so deep into or passed so leisurely through this 
 district. Certainly he had never visited it in the same style or 
 manner. He came among this new population with all the prestige 
 of his great Galilean name. He came sending messengers before 
 his face in all likelihood the seventy expending their brief but 
 ardent activities upon this virgin soil. He came as he had come 
 at first to the Galileans, at the opening of his ministry, among 
 whom many of the notices of what occurred here strikingly remind 
 us, for we are distinctly told when he came into the " coasts beyond 
 Jordan he went through the cities and villages," and " great multi- 
 tudes followed him, and he healed them," and " the people resorted 
 to him, and gathered thick together ; and as he was wont, he 
 taught them." "And when there were gathered together an innu- 
 merable multitude of people, insomuch that they trode one upon 
 another, he began to say to his disciples." 1 Here we have all the 
 excitements, and the gatherings, and the manifold healings which 
 attended the earlier part of the ministry in Galilee. The two 
 communities were similarly situated, each remote from metropolitan 
 influence, more open to new ideas and influences than the residents 
 in Jerusalem. The instrumentality brought to bear upon them in 
 the presence of Jesus and his disciples, in the proclamation of the 
 advent of the kingdom, in the working of all manner of cures upon 
 the diseased among them, was the same. Are we surprised at it, 
 that so many of the very scenes enacted at first in Galilee should be 
 enacted over again in Persea, and that, exactly similar occasions 
 i Luke xiii. 22; Matt. xix. 2 ; Mark x. 1 ; Luke xi. 29, 42 ; xii. 1.
 
 OUR LORD'S MINISTRY IN PER^A. 327 
 
 having arisen, the same discourses should be repeated 1 that once 
 more we should hear the same accusation brought against Jesus 
 when he cast out devils that he did so by Beelzebub, and that 
 against this accusation we should hear from his lips the same 
 defence? 1 that once more, as frequently before, there should be a 
 seeking of some sign from heaven, and a telling again the evil 
 generation that so sought after it that no sign but that of 
 Jonas the prophet should be given ? that once more, when asked 
 by the disciples to teach them to pray, the Lord should have re- 
 peated the prayer he had recited in the Sermon on the Mount ? 
 that upon another and equally suitable occasion, about half of that 
 sermon should now be re-delivered ? that we should have in this 
 period two cases of healing on the Sabbath, exciting the same 
 hostility, that hostility in turn rebuked by the employment of the 
 same arguments and illustrations ? These and other resemblances 
 are not surprising, and yet it is the very discernment of them which 
 has perplexed many so much, that (in direct opposition to the ex- 
 pressed purpose of the Gospel as announced in its opening sentence) 
 they have been tempted to think that, in violation of all chronologi- 
 cal order, St. Luke has imported into what bears to be an account of 
 what occurred after the departure from Galilee many of the incidents 
 and discourses of the preceding ministry in Galilee. Instead, how- 
 ever, of our being perplexed at finding these resemblances or 
 coincidences, knowing as we do otherwise, that it was the practice 
 of our Saviour to reiterate (it is likely very often) the weightiest of 
 his sayings, they are such as we should have expected when once 
 we come to understand precisely the peculiarities of this brief 
 Peraean ministry. But whilst these coincidences as to events, and 
 repetitions as to discourses, do occur, there occur along with them, 
 mixed up inseparably with them, many things both in the spirit and 
 actions of Christ appropriate exclusively to this particular epoch of 
 his life. No allusions to the time or manner of his own death, no 
 reference to the departure and his return, no pressing upon his 
 disciples of the great duty of waiting and watching for his second 
 advent, no prophecies of the approaching overturn of the Jewish 
 economy, came from the lips of Jesus during his sojourn in Galilee. 
 It was not till the time of his transfiguration that he began to speak 
 of such matters privately to his disciples, and even then it was with 
 bated breath. But now all the reasons for reserve are nearly, if not 
 entirely gone. Jesus has set his face to go up to Jerusalem to die. 
 He waits and works only a little longer in this remote region beyond 
 Jordan, till the set time has come. Nothing that he can say or 
 do here can have much effect in hastening or retarding the day of 
 his decease. He may give free expression to those thoughts and 
 sentiments which, now that it is drawing near, must be gathering 
 i Matt. xii. 24 ; Mark iii. 22 ; Luke xi. 14.
 
 328 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTEY. 
 
 often around the great event. And he may also safely draw aside, 
 at least partially, the veil which hides the future, concealing at 
 once the awful doom impending over Jerusalem, and his own speedy 
 return to judge the nation that had rejected him. And this is 
 what we now find him doing. Herod, under whose jurisdiction he 
 still was in Persea, had got alarmed. Fearing the people too much, 
 having burden enough to bear from the beheading of the Baptist, 
 he had no real intention to stretch out his hand to slay Jesus ; but 
 it annoyed him to find this new excitement breaking out in another 
 part of his territories, and he got some willing emissaries among 
 the Pharisees to go to Jesus, and to say, as if from private informa- 
 tion, " Get thee out, and depart hence, for Herod will kill thee. And 
 Jesus said, Go ye and tell that fox " who thinks so cunningly by 
 working upon my fears to get rid of me before my time " Behold, 
 I cast out devils, and I do cures to-day and to-morrow, and the 
 third day I shall be perfected. Nevertheless, I must walk to-day, 
 and to-morrow, and the day following: for it cannot be that a 
 prophet perish out of Jerusalem. Jerusalem, Jerusalem ! which 
 killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee ; 
 how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen 
 doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not 1 Be- 
 hold, your house is left unto you desolate : and verily I say unto 
 you, Ye shall not see me, until the time come when ye shall say, 
 Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord." I have 
 quoted especially these words, the most memorable of which were 
 repeated afterwards, as they present a very accurate reflection of 
 the peculiar mood of our Lord's mind, and the peculiar tone and 
 texture of his ministry at this period. 
 
 First, There was a shortness, a decisiveness, a strength of 
 utterance in the message sent to Herod, which belongs to all 
 Christ's sayings of this period, whether addressed to friends or 
 foes. His instructions, counsels, warnings to his own disciples, 
 he expressed in the briefest, most emphatic terms. Was he 
 speaking to them of faith, he said, " If ye had faith as a grain 
 of mustard-seed, ye would say to this sycamore-tree, Be thou 
 plucked up by the root, and be thou planted in the sea, and it 
 should obey you." Was he inculcating humility, he said, "Which 
 of you, having a servant ploughing or feeding cattle, will say unto 
 him by and by, when he is come from the field, Go and sit down 
 to meat ? and will not rather say unto him, Make ready wherewith 
 I may sup, and gird thyself, and serve me, till I have eaten and 
 drunken, and afterward thou shalt eat and drink 1 Doth he thank 
 that servant because he did the things that were commanded him ? 
 I trow not. So likewise ye, when ye shall have done all those 
 things which are commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants, 
 we have done that which was our duty to do." Was he warning
 
 OUR LORD'S MINISTRY IN PEE^A. 329 
 
 them against covetousness, he did it in the story of the rich man 
 who, as he was'making all his plans about throwing down his barns 
 and building greater ones, had the words addressed to him, " Thou 
 fool, this night shall thy soul be required of thee, then whose shall 
 those things be which thou hast provided ? " Was he inculcating 
 the necessity of self-denial, an entire surrender of the heart and life 
 to him, he did it by turning to the multitude that followed him, 
 and saying, " If any come to me, and hate not his father and his 
 mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and 
 his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. And whosoever doth 
 not bear his cross, and come after me, he cannot be my disciple. 
 Whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he 
 cannot be my disciple." 1 
 
 There was curtness even in our Lord's dealings with those who, 
 influenced with no hostile feeling, came to him with needless and 
 impertinent inquiries. " Master," said one of the company, " speak 
 to my brother that he may divide the inheritance with me. And 
 he said, Man, who made me a judge or a divider over you ? " 
 " There were present some that told him of the Galileans whose 
 blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices." It was not enough 
 to tell them that they were wrong if they imagined that these men 
 were sinners above all the Galileans because they suffered such things. 
 They must have it also there told to them, " I say unto you, Except 
 ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish." Marked especially by the 
 same feature was our Lord's treatment of his enemies, the Pharisees. 
 Their hostility to him had now reached its height. " They began 
 to urge him vehemently, and to provoke him to speak many things ; 
 laying wait for him and seeking to catch something out of his 
 mouth, that they might accuse him," and " as they heard all these 
 things they derided him." 2 He gave them indeed good reason to 
 be provoked. One of them invited him to dinner, and he went in 
 and sat down to meat. The charge, whether expressed or not, 
 that he had not first washed before dinner, gave Jesus the fit 
 opportunity ; and in terms very different from any he had employed 
 in Galilee, he denounced the whole body to which his host belonged. 
 " Now do ye Pharisees make clean the outside of the cup and the 
 platter ; but your inward part is full of ravening and wickedness. 
 Ye fools 1 Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites ! for ye 
 are as graves which appear not, and the men that walk over them are 
 not aware of them," the first notes thus sounded of that terrible 
 denunciation that rung through the Courts of the Temple as our 
 Lord turned to take his last farewell of them, and of his enemies. 
 
 1 Luke xiv. 26, 27, 33 compared with Matthew x. 37, 38. " He that loveth 
 father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. And he that loveth wife or 
 daughter more than me is not worthy of lie. And he that taketh not his cross and 
 followeth me is not worthy of me." 
 
 2 Luke xi. 53, 54 ; xvi. 14.
 
 330 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 Corresponding with this manner of speaking was our Lord's 
 manner of action at this time. The three conspicuous miracles of 
 this period were the two Sabbath cures and the healing of the ten 
 lepers. Like all the others of the same class, the two former were 
 spontaneous on Christ's part, wrought by him of his own free 
 movement, and not upon any application or appeal. In a syna- 
 gogue one Sabbath-day he saw a woman that for eighteen years 
 had been bowed together, and could in no way lift herself up. And 
 when he saw her, " he said unto the woman, Thou art loosed from 
 thine infirmity ; and he laid his hands on her, and immediately she 
 was made straight, and glorified God." Invited on another Sabbath- 
 day to sup with one of the chief Pharisees, as he entered he saw 
 before him a man which had the dropsy, brought there perhaps on 
 purpose to see what he would do. Turning to the assembled 
 guests, Jesus put a single question to them, more direct than any 
 he had put in Galilee : " Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath-day ?" 
 They said nothing, and he "took the man and healed him, and let 
 him go." Entering into a certain village, he saw before him ten 
 lepers, who stood afar off, and lifted up their voices and said, " Jesus, 
 Master, have mercy on us." He said to them as soon as he saw 
 them, "Go, show yourselves unto the priests." 'You have what 
 you ask ; you are cured already. Go, do what the cured are required 
 by your law to do.' A few words are spoken at a distance, and all the 
 men are at once healed. Is there not a quick promptitude displayed 
 in all these cases, as if the actor had no words or time to spare ? 
 
 But, secondly, our Lord's thoughts were fixed much at this 
 time upon the future his own future and that of those around 
 him. His chief work of teaching and healing was over. True, he 
 was teaching and healing still, but it was by the way. All was 
 done as by one that was on a journey who had a great goal 
 before him, upon which his eye was intently fixed. With singular 
 minuteness of perspective, the dark' close of his own earthly exist- 
 ence now rose up before him. " Behold," he said at its close, " we 
 go up to Jerusalem, and all things that are written by the prophets 
 concerning the Son of man shall be accomplished. For he shall be 
 delivered unto the Gentiles, and shall be mocked, and spitefully 
 entreated, and spitted on : and they shall scourge him, and put 
 him to death." 1 "I have a baptism to be baptized with," he said 
 at the beginning of the period, " and how am I straitened till it be 
 accomplished!" 2 " And the third day he shall rise again." But 
 beyond the days, whether of his own death or of his resurrection, 
 that other day of his second coming now for the first time is spoken 
 of. He is pressing upon his disciples the great duty of taking no 
 undue thought for the future using the same terms and employing 
 the same images as he had in the Sermon on the Mount ; but he 
 1 Luke xviii. 31-33. 2 Luke xii. 50.
 
 OUR LORD'S MINISTRY IN PER^A. 331 
 
 goes now a step further than he had done then, closing all by say- 
 ing, "Let your loins be girded about, and your lights burning; 
 and ye yourselves like unto men that wait for their lord, when he 
 will return from the wedding ; that, when he cometh and knocketh, 
 they may open to him immediately. Blessed are those servants, 
 whom the lord, when he cometh, shall find watching. ... Be 
 ye therefore ready also : for the Son of man cometh at an hour 
 when ye think not." 1 Still in darkness as to the true nature of 
 the kingdom of God, irritated, it may have been, that after the 
 announcement that it had come so little should be said about it, so 
 few tokens of its presence should appear, the Pharisees demanded 
 of him when the kingdom of God should come. He told them that 
 they were looking for it in an altogether wrong direction. " The 
 kingdom of God," he said, " cometh not with observation ; neither 
 shall they say, Lo here ! or Lo there ! for, behold, the kingdom of 
 God is within you," for them, for us, for all men, one of the most 
 important lessons that ever could be taught that God's true 
 spiritual kingdom is in nothing outward, but lies in the inward 
 state and condition of the soul. Nevertheless, there was to be 
 much outward and visible enough, much connected with that king- 
 dom and his own lordship over it, of which these Pharisees were 
 little dreaming, and which was destined to break upon them and upon 
 their children with all the terror of a terrible surprise. This was 
 in his thoughts when, after having corrected the error of the 
 Pharisees as to the nature of the kingdom, he turned to his dis- 
 ciples and said to them, " The days will come when ye shall desire 
 to see one of the days of the Son of man, and ye shall not see it. 
 And they shall say unto you, See here ! or, See there ! go not after 
 them, nor follow them; for as the lightning, that lighteneth out of the 
 one part under heaven, shineth unto the other part under heaven, so 
 shall also the Son of man be in his day. But first must he suffer 
 many things, and be rejected of this generation. And as it was in the 
 days of Noah, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man. Like- 
 wise also as it was in the days of Lot . . . thus shall it be in the day 
 when the Son of man is revealed," our Lord enlarging upon this 
 topic till in what he said upon this occasion you have the first rough 
 sketch of that grand and awful picture presented in his last discourse to 
 the apostles upon the ridge of Mount Olivet, preserved in Matt. xxiv. 
 That section of our Lord's life and labours, of which a short 
 sketch has been presented, has been greatly overlooked thrown, 
 in fact, into the distance and obscurity which hangs over the 
 region in which it was enacted. A careful study will guide to the 
 conviction that in it Christ occupied a position intermediate between 
 the one assumed in Galilee and the one taken up by him at Jeru- 
 salem iu the days that immediately preceded his crucifixion, 
 i Luke iii. 35, 36, 87, 40.
 
 332 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 X. 
 
 THE PARABLES OF THE PEILEAN MINISTRY. THE 
 LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 LUKE x. 25-37 ; xi. 1-13. 
 
 DURING that ministry in Persea whose course and character we 
 have traced, our Lord delivered not fewer than ten parables as 
 many within these five months as in the two preceding years a 
 third of all that have been recorded as coming from his lips. 1 
 The events, the miracles, the parables of the period, are all in 
 harmony ; and as a whole we may safely say, that they carry in 
 their bosom internal evidence of their being unsuitable either for 
 any preceding or any posterior section of our Lord's life. It is but 
 attributing to Christ our humanity in true and perfect form to 
 imagine that the ending of his labours in Galilee and Judea, and 
 the near prospect of his death, threw him into an attitude of thought 
 and feeling congenial to the circumstances in which he was placed. 
 It was natural that the unseen and the future should at this time 
 absorb the seen and the present. It may be a fancy, but I have 
 thought, while reading again and again the ten parables which 
 belong to this period, that far more frequently and more vividly 
 than ever before in his ministry is the invisible world laid bare. 
 The spirit summoned that night into the immediate presence of its 
 Judge the angels rejoicing over each repentant returning sinner 
 the bosom of Abraham upon which Lazarus is represented as 
 reposing the hell into which the soul of the rich man in dying 
 sinks, where in any of the preceding addresses or parables of our 
 Lord have we the same unfolding of the world that lies beyond the 
 grave 1 Is it not as one who is himself holding closer fellowship 
 with that world into which he is so soon himself to enter that Jesus 
 speaks ? One thing is not a fancy, that more frequently and more 
 urgently than ever before does Jesus press upon his disciples the 
 duty of holding such fellowship. By the story of the friend at 
 midnight awakened by the continued and repeated solicitations of 
 his neighbour, by that of the unjust judge moved to redress her 
 wrongs by the simple importunity of the widow, by that of the 
 prayer of the poor publican heard at once and answered, by the 
 appeal to their own generosity as fathers in the treatment of their 
 children, did Jesus at this time seek to draw his disciples to the 
 throne of grace, and keep them there, praying on in the assurance 
 
 1 The parables of the Good Samaritan, the Rich Fool, the Barren Fig-tree, the 
 Great Supper, the Lost Sheep, the Lost Piece of Money, the Prodigal Son, the 
 Provident Steward. Dives and Lazarus, the Unjust Judge, the Pharisee and the 
 Publican.
 
 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 333 
 
 that earnest, renewed, repeated petitions offered in sincerity and 
 faith shall never go up to God in vain. 
 
 At some time and in some place of which we must be content 
 to remain ignorant, Jesus had gone apart from his disciples to pray. 
 They had noticed his doing so frequently before ; but there was a 
 peculiarity in this case. He had either separated himself from 
 them by so short a distance, or they had come upon him afterwards 
 so silently and unobserved, that they stood and listened to him as 
 he prayed. Perhaps they had never previously overheard our 
 Lord when engaged in private devotion. The impression made on 
 them was so deep, the prayer that they had been listening to was 
 so unlike any that they themselves had ever offered if that and 
 that only be prayer, they feel they know so little how to do it 
 that, on the impulse of the moment, one of them, when Jesus had 
 ceased, said to him, " Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught 
 his disciples." We do not stand in the same peculiar external 
 circumstances with him who preferred this request, but the same 
 need is ours. There is access still for us into the presence of our 
 Eedeemer, nor is there in coming to him one petition that should 
 spring more quickly to our lips, one that can come from them more 
 appropriately, than this " Lord, teach us to pray." To pray is to 
 realise the presence of the Supreme to come into the closest 
 possible connection with the greatest of Beings. To pray is to lay 
 our imperfect tribute of acknowledgment at his feet to supplicate 
 for that which we know that he only can bestow to bring our sin 
 to him, so that it may be forgiven our wants to him, so that he 
 may supply them as seems best in his sight. What is our warrant 
 for making such approach 1 how may it best be made ? what should 
 we ask for 1 ? and how should we ask for it ? None can answer these 
 questions for us as Jesus could. How gladly, then, should we 
 welcome, and how carefully should we study such answers as he has 
 been pleased to give ! 
 
 On bringing together all that Christ has declared in the way of 
 precept, and illustrated in the way of example, I think it will 
 appear that as there is no one duty of the religious life of such pre- 
 eminent importance in its direct bearing on our spiritual estate, so 
 there is no one about the manner of whose right discharge fuller in- 
 structions have been leit by him. Thus, in the instance now before 
 us, in answer to the request presented to him, he at once recited 
 a prayer which stands as the pattern or model of all true prayer. 
 
 Of course it never was intended to confine within the limits of 
 its few sentences the free spirit of prayer. The example of our 
 Lord himself, of the apostles of the Church in all ages, has taught 
 us how full and varied are the utterances of the human heart, when 
 it breathes itself out unrestrainedly unto God in prayer. Where 
 the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty ample the freedom and
 
 334 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 wide the range that the Holy Spirit takes when he throws the 
 human spirit into the attitude, and sustains it in the exercise of 
 prayer prompting those yearnings which cannot be uttered, those 
 desires and affections which words multiplied to the uttermost fail 
 adequately to express. In the past history, in the existing condi- 
 tion of every human soul, there is an infinitude of individual pecu- 
 liarities. To forbid all references to these, all manifestations of 
 these in prayer to tie every one down at every season to pray as 
 every one else to allow no minute confession of particular trans- 
 gressions, no recital of the circumstances in which they were com- 
 mitted, aggravations by which they were accompanied, no acknow- 
 ledgment of special mercies, nor glad and grateful recounting how 
 singularly appropriate and satisfying they had been to cramp 
 down within one dry and narrow mould all the plaints of sorrow, 
 the moanings of penitence, the aspirations of desire, the beatings of 
 gratitude, the breathings of love, the exultations of joy and hope, 
 which fill the human heart, and which, in moments of filial trust, 
 it would pour out into the ear of the Eternal this were indeed to 
 lay the axe at the root of all devotion. But while pleading for the 
 very fullest liberty of prayer, let us not be insensible of the great 
 benefit there is in ever and anon stepping out of that circle in which 
 our own personal and particular sorrows and sins shape and inten- 
 sify our prayers, into that upper and wider region in which, laying 
 all those specialities for the time aside, we join the great company 
 of the prayerful in all ages, in those few and simple, yet all-embrac- 
 ing petitions which they and we, and all that have gone before, and 
 all that shall come after, unite in presenting to the Hearer and 
 Answerer of prayer. And this is what we do in repeating the 
 Lord's prayer. In it we have, stripped of all secondary or adven- 
 titious elements, the concentrated spirit and essence of prayer, a 
 brief epitome of all the topics that prayer should embrace, a con- 
 densed expression of all those desires of the heart that should go 
 up to God in prayer. It is not a prayer this for any one period of 
 life for any one kind of character for any one outward or inward 
 condition of things for any one country for any one age. The 
 child may lisp its simple sentences as soon as it knows how to 
 pray ; it comes with no less fitness from the wrinkled lips of age. 
 The penitent in the first hour of his return to God, the straggler in 
 the thick of the spiritual conflict, the believer in the highest soar- 
 ings of his faith and love, may take up and use alike this prayer. 
 The youngest, the oldest, the simplest, the wisest, the most sin- 
 stained, the most saintly, can find nothing here unsuitable, unseason- 
 able. It gathers up into one what they all can and should unite in 
 saying as they bend in supplication before God. And from the 
 day when first it was published on the mount, as our Lord's own 
 directory for prayer, down through all these eighteen centuries, it
 
 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 335 
 
 has been the single golden link running through the ages that has 
 bound together in one the whole vast company of the prayerful. 
 Is there a single Christian now living upon earth is there one 
 among the multitude of the redeemed now praising God in heaven, 
 who never prayed this prayer ? I believe not one. It is not then, 
 as isolated spirits, alone in our communion with God, it is as units 
 in that unnumbered congregation of those who have bent, are bend- 
 ing, will bend, before the Throne, that we are to take up and to use 
 this prayer. Not "my Father," but "our Father," is its key-note. 
 Let it calm, and soothe, and elevate our spirits, as, leaving all that 
 belongs to our own little separate circle of thoughts, and doubts, 
 and fears, and hopes, and joys, behind, we rise to take our place in 
 this vast company, and to mingle our prayers with theirs. 
 
 And to what is it that the Lord's prayer owes especially the 
 universality of its embrace the omnipotence of its power? To 
 the special character in which it presents God to all the peculiar 
 standing before him into which it invites all to enter. It is not to 
 him as the great I AM, the omnipotent, the Omnipresent Creator 
 and Lord of All : it is not to him as dwelling in the light that no 
 man can approach to as clothed with all the attributes of majesty 
 and power, and justice and truth and holiness, the Moral Governor 
 of the Universe that it invites us to come. No, but to him as our 
 Father in heaven a Father regarding us with infinite pity, loving 
 us with an everlasting love, willing and waiting to bestow, able and 
 ready to help us. It is to him who taught us this prayer that we 
 owe the revelation of God to us as such a Father. More than that, it 
 is to Christ we owe the establishment of that close and endearing 
 connection of sonship to the Father a connection which it only 
 remains for us to recognise, in order to enter into possession of 
 all its privileges and joys. He who taught this prayer to his 
 disciples, taught them, too, that no man can come unto the Father 
 but through him. It were a great injustice unto him, if, because 
 he has not named his own name in this prayer, we should forget 
 that it is he who, by his Incarnation and Atonement, has so linked 
 God and man, earth and heaven, together, that all those senti- 
 ments of filial trust and confidence which this prayer expresses, 
 may and should be cherished by every individual member of our 
 race. There is not a living man who may not use this prayer, for 
 while it is true that no man cometh to the Father but through 
 Christ, it is equally true indeed the one truth is involved in the 
 other that all men, every man, may now so come ; not waiting till 
 he is sure that he is a child of God, has such faith in God, or grati- 
 tude to God, or willingness to serve God as he knows a child should 
 cherish ; not grounding his assurance of God's Fatherhood to him 
 on his sonship to God no, but welcoming the assurance given to 
 him in and by Jesus Christ, that God is his Father, and using that
 
 336 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 very Fatherhood as his plea in his first and last, his every approach 
 to him. To each and every one of the multitude upon the moun- 
 tain-side of Galilee to them just as they were to them simply as 
 sons of men, partakers of that humanity which he also shared, 
 Jesus said, " God is your Father, treat him as your Father, com- 
 mend your future to him, cast all your care upon him as such." 
 " Take no thought, saying, What shall we eat 1 or, What shall we 
 drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? Your heavenly 
 Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things." Pray to 
 him as such, then. " When thou prayest pray to thy Father which 
 seeth in secret." After this manner pray ye " Our Father which 
 art in heaven." And what Jesus said to the multitude on the 
 mountain-side, he says to every child of Adam. Was it not, indeed, 
 upon the existence and character of that very relationship of God 
 to us and to all men that Jesus grounded the assurance he would 
 have us cherish that our prayers shall not, cannot, go up in vain to 
 heaven ? For it is worthy of remark that on both occasions when 
 this prayer was recited within the compass of the same discourse, 
 shortly after he had repeated it as if his thoughts were returning 
 to the subject, and he wished to fix firm in the hearts of his dis- 
 ciples a faith in the efficacy of such prayer he added, " I say unto 
 you, Ask, and it shall be given ; seek, and ye shall find ; knock, 
 and it shall be opened unto you. For every one that asketh "- 
 asks as I have told you he should, or for what I have told you he 
 should " every one that asketh, receiveth ; and he that seeketh, 
 findeth, and to him that knocketh, it shall be opened. If a son ask 
 bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone ? or if 
 he ask for a fish, will he give him a serpent 1 .... If ye, then, 
 being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much 
 more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that 
 ask him?" 
 
 XL 
 
 JESUS THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE. 
 JOHN x. 39-42 ; xi. 1-27. 
 
 CHRIST'S first visit to Peraea, on his way up to the Feast 01 
 Dedication, was one of much locomotion and manifold activities. 
 His second was dedicated rather to seclusion and repose. He 
 retired to one chosen and hallowed spot the place where John at 
 first baptized where he himself had first entered on his public 
 ministry. Many resorted to him there, and many believed on him, 
 but he did not go about as he had done before. Living in quiet 
 with his disciples, a message came to him from Bethany. Some
 
 JESUS THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE. 337 
 
 sore malady had seized upon Lazarus. His sisters think of that 
 kind friend, who they knew had cured so many others, and who 
 surely would not be unwilling to succour them in their distress, 
 and heal their brother ; but they knew what had driven him lately 
 from Jerusalem, and are unwilling to break in upon his retire- 
 ment, or ask him to expose himself once more to the deadly hatred 
 of his enemies. The disease runs on its course ; Lazarus is on the 
 very point of death. They can restrain no longer. They send off a 
 messenger to Jesus. No urgent entreaty, however, is conveyed 
 that he should hasten to their relief. No course is dictated. No 
 desire even is expressed. They think it is not needed. They re- 
 member all the kindnesses they had already experienced at his 
 hands how often he had made their house his home what special 
 marks of personal attachment and regard he had shown to them- 
 selves and to their brother. They deem it enough, therefore, to 
 bid their messenger say, as soon as he met Jesus, " Lord, he whom 
 thou lovest is sick." Jesus hears the message, and, without giving 
 any other indication of his purpose, simply says, "This sickness is 
 not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might 
 be glorified thereby." This is all the answer that he makes to a 
 message so simply and delicately expressed ; by that very simplicity 
 and delicacy making all the stronger appeal to his sympathy. No- 
 thing more being said by Jesus, nor anything further apparently 
 intended to be done, the messenger of the anxious sisters has to be 
 satisfied with this. It seems to be so far satisfactory : " This sick- 
 ness is not unto death." Jesus either knows that Lazarus is to 
 recover, or he is to take some method of averting death is to cure 
 him; may have already done so by a word spoken a volition 
 formed at a distance. Treasuring up the sentence that he has heard 
 uttered, and extracting from it such comfort as he can, the 
 messenger returns to Bethany, and Jesus remains still two days in 
 the place where he was. During these two days the incidents of 
 the message and the answer fail not to be the subject of frequent 
 converse among the disciples. They too might understand it to be 
 the reason of their Master's saying and doing nothing further in 
 the matter that he was aware that the death the sisters dreaded 
 was not to happen ; or they too might think that his great power 
 had already been exerted on behalf of one whom they knew he 
 loved so much. So might they interpret the saying, " This sickness 
 is not unto death;" but what can they make of those other words 
 by which these had been followed up 1 How could it be said of 
 this sickness of Lazarus, whether it left him naturally or was re- 
 moved by a mysterious exercise of their Master's powers of healing, 
 that it was to be "for the glory of God, that the Son of God might 
 be glorified thereby"? This was saying a great deal more of the 
 illness, however cured, than, so far as they can see, could be truly
 
 338 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 and fitly said of it. No further explanation, however, is made by 
 Jesus, and they must wait the issue. 
 
 Two days afterwards Jesus calmly and resolutely, but somewhat 
 abruptly and unexpectedly, says to them, " Let us go into Judea 
 again." Though nothing was said or hinted about the object of the 
 proposed visit, it would be very natural that the disciples should 
 connect it with the message that had come from Bethany. But if 
 it was to cure Lazarus that Christ was going, why had he not gone 
 sooner 1 If the sickness that had been reported to him was not 
 unto death, why go at all? why expose himself afresh to the 
 malice of those who were evidently bent upon his destruction 1 ? 
 "Master," they say to him, "the Jews of late sought to stone 
 thee, and goest thou thither again?" a remonstrance dictated by a 
 sincere and laudable solicitude for their Master's safety, yet not 
 without ingredients of ignorance and mistrust. " Are there not," 
 said Jesus in reply, "twelve hours in the day?" 'My time for 
 working, for the doing the will of my Father which is in heaven, is 
 it not a set time, its bounds as fixed as those of the natural day, 
 having, like it, its twelve hours, that no man can take from, and no 
 man can add to ? The hours of this my allotted period for finish- 
 ing my earthly work must run out their course ; and while they 
 are running, so long as I am upon the path marked out for me, 
 walking by the light that comes from heaven, they cannot be 
 shortened, go where I may; so long as I go under my Father's 
 guidance, so long as I do what he desires, my life is safe. True, 
 eleven hours of this my day may be already gone ; I may have 
 entered upon the last and twelfth, but till it end, a shield of defence 
 is round me that none can break through. Fear not for me, then ; 
 till that twelfth hour strike I am as safe in Judea as here. And 
 for your own comfort, know that what is true of me is true of every 
 man who walks in God's own light the light that the guiding 
 Spirit gives to every man kindled within his soul to direct him 
 through all his earthly work. If any man walk in that light, he 
 will not, cannot stumble, or fall, or perish ; but if he walk in the 
 night, go where he is not called, do what he is not bidden, then he 
 stumbleth, because there is no light in him. He has turned the 
 day into night, and the doom of the night-traveller hangs over 
 him.' 
 
 He pauses to let these weighty truths sink deep into the dis- 
 ciples' hearts, then, turning to them, he says, " Our friend Lazarus 
 sleepeth, but I go that I may awake him out of sleep." In their 
 anxiety about their Master they had forgotten their absent friend 
 whose love to Jesus had flowed over upon them, to whom they also 
 were attached. How humanly, how tenderly does the phrase " our 
 friend Lazarus" recall him to their thoughts ! It would seem as if 
 the ties that knit our Lord to the members of that family at Beth-
 
 JESUS THE RESUKRECTION AND THE LIFE. 339 
 
 any had been formed for this as for other reasons, to show how 
 open the heart of Jesus was, not merely to a universal love to all 
 mankind, but to the more peculiar and specific affections of friend- 
 ship. Among the twelve there was the one whom he particularly 
 loved ; among the families he visited there was one to which he 
 was particularly attached. Outside the circle of his immediate 
 followers there was one whom he called his friend. Had he not 
 already so distinctly said that his sickness was not unto death, the 
 disciples, remembering that he had said of Jairus's daughter, " she 
 is not dead, but sleepeth," might at first have caught the true 
 meaning of their Master's words ; but the idea of the death of 
 Lazarus is so far from their thoughts, that they put the first inter- 
 pretation on them that occurs, and without thinking on the worse 
 than trifling end that they were thus attributing to Christ as the 
 declared purpose of his proposed visit, they say, " Lord, if he sleep, 
 he shall do well." Then said Jesus unto them plainly, "Lazarus 
 is dead, and I am glad for your sakes that I was not there, to the 
 intent ye may believe; nevertheless let us go unto him." Glad 
 that he was not there ! Yes, for it spared him the pain of looking 
 at his friend in his agony, at his sisters in their grief. Glad ; for 
 had he been there, could he have resisted the appeal of such a 
 deathbed over which such mourners were bending? Could he, 
 though meaning afterwards to raise him from the dead, have stood 
 by and see Lazarus depart ? Glad that he was not there ! Was 
 he insensible, then, to all the pangs which that departure must 
 have cost Martha and Mary? this one among the rest, that he 
 was not there, and had not come when sent for ? Was he insen- 
 sible to the four days' weeping for the dead that his absence had 
 entailed ? Glad that he was not there ! Had the mourning 
 sisters heard the words, they might have fancied that his affection 
 for their family had suffered a sudden chill But there was no 
 lack of sensibility to their sufferings; his sympathies with them 
 had suffered no reverse. It was not that he loved or pitied them 
 the less. It was that his sympathies, instead of resting on the 
 single household of Bethany, were taking in the wider circle of his 
 discipleship, and through them, or along with them, the whole 
 family of our sinful, suffering humanity. It was with a calm, 
 deliberate forethought that, on hearing of the sickness, he allowed 
 two days to pass without any movement made to Bethany. He 
 knew when Lazarus died knew that he had died two days before 
 he told his disciples of it, for the death, followed by speedy burial, 
 must have occurred soon after the messenger left Bethany, in all 
 likelihood before he reached the place where Jesus was ; for if a 
 day's journey carried the messenger (as it might have done to 
 Bethabara), and another such day of travel carried Jesus and his 
 disciples back again to Bethany, as Lazarus was four days in the
 
 340 THE CLOSE OP THE MINISTRY, 
 
 grave when Jesus reached the spot, his decease must have taken 
 place within a very short time after the original despatch of the 
 message. Knowing when it happened, Jesus did not desire to be 
 present at it deliberately arranged it so that it should not be till 
 four days after the interment that he should appear in Bethany. 
 He had already in remote Galilee raised two from the dead one 
 soon after death, the other before burial. But now, in the immedi- 
 ate neighbourhood of Jerusalem, in presence of a mixed company 
 of friends/ and enemies, he has resolved, in raising Lazarus, to per- 
 form the great closing, crowning miracle of his ministry ; and he 
 will do it so that not the most captious or the most incredulous 
 can question the reality either of the death or of the resurrection. 
 It was to be our Lord's last public appearance among the Jews 
 previous to his crucifixion. It was to be the last public miracle he 
 was to be permitted to work. From the day that this great deed 
 was done was to date the formal resolution of the Sanhedrim to put 
 him to death. This close connection of the raising of Lazarus with 
 his own decease was clearly before his eye. His sayings and doings 
 at Bethabara show with what deep interest he himself looked for- 
 ward to the issue. If we cannot with certainty say that no miracle 
 he ever wrought occupied beforehand so much of our Saviour's 
 thoughts, we can say that no other miracle was predicted and pre- 
 pared for as this one was. 
 
 " Lazarus is dead . . . . nevertheless let us go unto him." Had 
 the disciples but remembered their Master's first words, to which 
 the key had now been put into their hands, they might at once 
 have gathered what the object of that journey was in which Jesus 
 invited them to accompany him, and the thought of it might have 
 banished other fancies and other fears. But slow to realise the 
 glory of the coming and predicted miracle, or quick to connect it 
 with the after-risk and danger, they hesitate. One there is among 
 them as slow in faith as the slowest fuller, perhaps, than any of 
 them of mistrust yet quick and fervid in his love, seeing nothing 
 but death before Jesus if once he shows himself at Jerusalem who 
 says unto his fellow-disciples, " Let us also go, that we may die 
 with him : " the expression of a gloomy and somewhat obstinate 
 despondency, sinking into despair, yet at the same time of heroic 
 and chivalrous attachment. Jesus says nothing to the utterer of 
 this speech. He waits for other and after occasions to take 
 Thomas into his hands, and turn his incredulity into warm and 
 living faith. 
 
 The group journeys on to Bethany, and at last comes near the 
 village. Some one has witnessed its approach, and goes with the 
 tidings to where the mourning sisters and those who have to com- 
 fort them are sitting. It may have been into Martha's ear that the 
 tidings are first whispered Mary beside her, too overwhelmed wit.hu
 
 JESUS THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE. 341 
 
 grief to hear. As soon as she hears that Jesus is coining, Martha 
 rises and goes out to meet him. Mary, whether she hears or not, 
 sees her sister rise and go, yet stays still in the house the two 
 sisters, the one in her eager movement, the other in her quiet rest, 
 here as elsewhere showing forth the difference of their characters. 
 Martha is soon in the Saviour's presence. The sight of Jesus fills 
 her heart with strange and conflicting emotions. In his kind look 
 she reads the same aifectionate regard he had ever shown. Yet 
 had he not delayed coming to them in their hour of greatest need 1 
 She will not reproach, for her confidence is still unbroken. Yet 
 she cannot help feeling what looked like forgetfulness or neglect. 
 Above all such personal feelings the thought of her dead brother 
 rises. She thinks of the strange words the messenger had reported. 
 She knows not well what they could have meant, to what they 
 could have pointed ; but the hope still lingers in her heart, that 
 now that he at last is here, the love and power of Jesus may find 
 some way of manifesting themselves perhaps even in recalling 
 Lazarus from the dead. And in the tumult of these mixed feelings 
 in the agitation of regret and confidence, and grief and hope 
 she breaks out in the simple but pathetic utterance, " Lord, if thou 
 hadst been here, my brother had not died " ' it is what Mary and 
 I have been saying to ourselves and to one another, over and over 
 again, ever since that sad and sorrowful hour. If only thou hadst 
 been here ! I do not blame you for not being here. I do not 
 know what can have kept you from coming. I will not doubt or 
 distrust your love but " if thou hadst been here my brother had 
 not died " you could, you would have kept him from dying you 
 could, you would have raised him up, and given him back to us in 
 health. Nay, " I know that even now whatsoever thou wilt ask of 
 God, God will give it thee." ' 
 
 The reply of Jesus seems almost to have been framed for the 
 very purpose of checking the hope that was obviously rising in 
 Martha's breast. " Thy brother," he says, " shall rise again," 
 words not indeed absolutely precluding the possibility of a present 
 restoration of her brother to life, but naturally directing her 
 thoughts away from such a restoration to the general resurrection 
 of the dead. Such at least is their effect upon Martha, as is 
 evident from her reply, " I know that he shall rise again in the 
 resurrection at the last day" a reply which, though it proved the 
 firmness of her faith in the future and general resurrection of the 
 dead, indicated something like disappointment at what Jesus had 
 said. But our Lord's great object in entering into this conversation 
 had now been gained. Instead of fostering the expectation of 
 immediate relief, he had drawn Martha's thoughts off for a time 
 from the present, and fixed them upon the distant future of the 
 invisible and eternal world. Having created thus the fit oppor-
 
 342 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTKY. 
 
 tunity here on the eve of performing the greatest of his miracles 
 here in converse with one of sincere but imperfect faith, plunged 
 in grief, and seeking only the recovery of a lost brother, Jesus 
 says, " I am the resurrection and the life ; he that believeth on 
 me, though he were dead, yet shall he live ; and whosoever liveth 
 and believeth on me shall never die" as if he had said, ' Martha, 
 Martha, thou wert troubled once when I was in your dwelling with 
 the petty cares of your household, but now a heavier trouble has 
 come upon your heart. You mourn a brother's death, but would 
 that even now I could raise your thoughts above the consideration 
 of the life, the death, the resurrection of the perishable body, to 
 the infinitely more momentous one of the life and the death of the 
 indwelling, the immortal soul ! You are looking to me with a linger- 
 ing hope that I might find some way to assuage your present grief 
 by giving back to you the brother that lies buried. You believe 
 so far in me as to have the confidence that whatever I ask of 
 God, God will give it me. Would that I could get you and all 
 to look to me in another and far higher character than the assuager 
 of human sorrow, the bringer of a present relief ; that I could fix 
 your faith upon me as the Prince of life, the author, the bestower, 
 the originator, the supporter, the maturer of that eternal life 
 within the soul over which death hath so little dominion that 
 whosoever once hath this life begun, in dying still lives, and in 
 living can never die.' For let us notice, as helping us to a true 
 comprehension of these wonderful words of our Kedeemer, that 
 immediately after their utterance, he addressed to Martha the 
 pointed question, " Believest thou this 1 " It was not unusual for 
 our Lord to ask some profession of faith in his power to help from 
 those on whom or for whom that power was about to be exerted. 
 He did not need to ask any such profession from Martha. She had 
 already declared her full assurance that he had the power of Deity 
 at command. The very manner in which the question was put 
 to Martha, "Believest thou this?" plainly intimates that some 
 weighty truth lay wrapped up in the words just uttered beyond any 
 to which she had already assented. Had there been nothing in 
 what Christ now said beyond what Martha had previously believed 
 to which he had already testified such an interrogation would 
 have been without a meaning. It cannot be a mere proclamation 
 of the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body, and 
 of Christ's connection with them, either as their human announcer 
 or their Divine author, that is here made. No such interpretation 
 would explain or justify the language here employed. The primary 
 and general assertion, " I am the resurrection and the life," gets 
 its only true significance assigned to it by the two explanatory 
 statements with which it was followed up. "I am the life," said 
 Jesus, not in any general sense as being the great originator and
 
 JESUS THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE. 343 
 
 sustainer of the soul's existence, but in this peculiar and specific 
 sense, that "whosoever liveth and believeth on me" or rather, 
 liveth by believing on me "shall never die." And "I am the 
 resurrection" in this sense, that "whosoever believeth on me, 
 though he were dead, yet shall he live." 
 
 Such language connects, in some peculiar way, the life and 
 resurrection that Jesus is now speaking of with believing on him ; 
 it at least implies that he has some other and closer connection with 
 the life and the resurrection of those who believe than he has with 
 that of those who believe not. Jesus, in fact, is here, in these 
 memorable words, only proclaiming to Martha, and through her 
 to the world of sinners he came to save, what the great end of his 
 mission is, and how it is that that end is accomplished. Sin 
 entered into this world, and death not the dissolution of the body, 
 but spiritual death this death by sin. " In the day thou eatest 
 thereof thou shalt die." And the death came with the first trans- 
 gression. The pulse of the true spiritual life, of life in God and to 
 God, ceased its beatings. Death reigned in all its coldness ; the 
 warmth of a pervading love to God had gone, and the chill of a 
 pervading fear seized upon the soul. Death reigned in all its 
 silence, for the voice of ceaseless prayer and praise was hushed. It 
 reigned in all its torpid inactivity, for no longer was there a con- 
 tinued putting forth of the entire energies of the spirit in the 
 service of its Maker. And the same death that came upon the first 
 transgressor has passed upon all men, for that all have sinned. 
 And if to be under condemnation be death, if to be carnally- 
 minded be death ; if, amid all the variety of motives by which we 
 naturally are influenced, there be, but at lengthened intervals, a weak 
 and partial regard to that Great Being whom no creature can alto- 
 gether banish from its thoughts, then surely the Scriptures err not 
 in the representation that it was into a world of the dead that 
 Jesus came. He came to be the quickener of the dead ; having life 
 in himself, to give of this life to all who came to him for it. 
 
 Take up the Gospel of St. John, the special record of those 
 discourses of our Lord in which he most fully unfolded himself, 
 telling who he was, and what he came to this earth to do, and you 
 will not find one of them in which the central idea of life coming 
 to the dead through him is not presented. Thus, in his conversation 
 with Nicodemus on the occasion of his first Passover (John iii 14-16) : 
 in his conversation with the woman of Samaria (John iv. 10-14) : 
 in his next discourse at Jerusalem, on the occasion of his second 
 Passover (John v. 21, 24, 40) : in the great discourse delivered 
 after the feeding of the five thousand (John vi. 39, 40, 48, 50, 51, 
 53, 56) : at the Feast of Tabernacles (John viii. 12, 51): and so 
 also on the eve of his last and greatest miracle : " I am the resur- 
 rection and the life : he that believeth in me, though he were dead,
 
 344 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 yet shall he live, and whosoever liveth and believeth on me shall 
 never die." Is there nothing striking in it that, from first to last, 
 running through all these discourses of our Saviour to be found in 
 every one of them, without a single exception this should be held 
 out to us by our Lord himself as the great end and object of his 
 life and death, that we, who were all dead in trespasses and sins, 
 alienated from the life of God, should find for these dead souls of 
 ours a higher and everlasting life in him ? 
 
 The life of the soul lies, first, in the enjoyment of God's favour 
 in the light of his reconciled countenance shining upon it, in the 
 everlasting arms of his love and power embracing it. The great 
 obstacle to our entrance upon this life is conscious guilt the sense 
 of having forfeited the favour incurred the wrath of God. This 
 obstacle Christ has taken out of the way by dying for us, by 
 bearing our sins in his own body on the tree. There is redemption 
 for us through his blood, even the forgiveness of our sins. Not 
 that the Cross is a talisman which works with a hidden, mystic, 
 unknown, unfelt power not that the blood of the great sacrifice is 
 one that cleanseth past guilt away, leaving the old corruption 
 untouched and unsubdued. Jesus is the life in a further and far 
 higher sense than the opener of a free way of access to God through 
 fche rent veil of his flesh. He is the perennial source of that new 
 life within, which consists in communion with God likeness to 
 God in gratitude, in love, in peace, and joy, and hope in trusting, 
 serving, submitting, enduring. This life hangs ever and wholly 
 upon him ; all good and gracious affections, every pure and holy 
 impulse, the desire and the ability to be, to do, to suffer coming 
 to us from him to whose light we bring our darkness, to whose 
 strength we bring our weakness, to whose sympathy our sorrow, to 
 whose fulness our emptiness. Our natural life, derived originally 
 from another, is for a season dependent on its source, but that 
 dependence weakens and at last expires. The infant hangs help- 
 lessly upon its mother at the first. But the infant grows into the 
 child, the child into the man the two lives separate. Not such 
 our spiritual life. Coming to us at first from Christ, it comes 
 equally and entirely from him ever afterwards. It grows, but 
 never away from him. It gets firmer, more matured; but its 
 greater firmness and maturity it owes to closer contact with him 
 simpler and more entire dependence on him, deeper and holier love 
 to him. It is as the branch is in the vine (having no life when 
 parted from it), not as a child is in its parent, that believers are in 
 Christ. There is but one relationship, of Son to Father one 
 wholly unique, which fitly represents this union, which was 
 employed by Christ himself to do so : " That they all may be one, 
 as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one 
 in us. I in them and thou in me, that they may be made perfect
 
 THE RAISING OF LAZARUS. 345 
 
 in one." It is indeed but the infancy of that life which lies in such 
 oneness with the Son and the Father that is to be witnessed here 
 on earth. Yet within that feeble infancy are the germinating 
 seeds of an endless, an ever-progressive, an indestructible existence, 
 raised by its very nature above the dominion of death ; bound by 
 ties indissoluble to him who was dead and is alive again, and liveth 
 for evermore ; an existence destined to run on its everlasting course, 
 getting ever nearer and nearer, growing ever liker and liker to him 
 from whom it flows. 
 
 Amid the death-like torpor which hath fallen upon us, stripping 
 us of the desire and power to live wholly in God and wholly for 
 God, who would not wish to feel the quickening touch of the great 
 Life-Giver, Jesus Christ to be raised to newness of life in him 
 to have our life bound up with his for ever hid with him in God ? 
 This nothing less than this, nothing lower than this is set before 
 us. Who would not wish to see and feel it realised in his present, 
 his future, his eternal existence? Then, let us cleave to Christ, 
 resolved in him to live, desiring in him to die, that with him we 
 may be raised at last, at the resurrection, on the great day, to those 
 heavenly places where, free from all weakness, vicissitude, corrup- 
 tion, and decay, this life shall be expanded and matured throughout 
 the bright ages of an unshadowed eternity. 
 
 XII. 
 
 THE RAISING OF LAZARUS. 
 JOHN XL 27-54. 
 
 IT is not likely that Martha understood in its full meaning what 
 Christ had said about his being the Resurrection and the Life. So 
 far, however, as she did comprehend, she believed; and so when 
 Jesus said to her, "Believest thou this?" understanding that he 
 had spoken about himself, and wished from her some expression of 
 her faith she said to him, " Yea, I believe that thou art the Christ, 
 the Son of God, which should come into the world." With crude 
 ideas of the character and offices they attributed to him, many were 
 ready to call Jesus the Christ, to believe that he was the Messias 
 spoken of by the prophets. Martha's confession went much further 
 than this : she believed him to be also the Son of God, to be that 
 for claiming to be which the Jews had been ready to stone him 
 as one making himself equal with God. It may have been, regard- 
 ing him too much as a mere man having power with God, that she 
 had previously said, " But I know that even now whatsoever thou 
 wilt ask of God, God will give it thee;" but now that her thoughts
 
 346 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTKY. 
 
 are concentrated upon it, she tells out all the faith that is in her, 
 and in so doing ranks herself beside Peter and the very few who 
 at that time could have joined in the confession, " I believe that 
 thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." 
 
 Had Mary and Lazarus not been in his thoughts, Jesus might 
 have pronounced over Martha the same benediction that he did 
 over Peter, and said to her, " Blessed art thou, Martha, for flesh 
 and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is 
 in heaven." As it is, he simply accepts the good confession, and 
 bids Martha go and call her sister. 
 
 Mary had not heard at first of the Lord's coming, or, if she had, 
 was too absorbed in her sorrow to heed it. But now when Martha 
 whispers in her ear, " The Master is come, and calleth for thee," she 
 rises and hastens out to where Jesus is, outside the village. No 
 one had followed Martha when she went out there. But there was 
 such an unusual quickness, such a fresh and eager excitement in 
 this movement of Mary, that those around her rose with her and 
 followed, saying, " She goeth to the grave to weep there." Thus 
 did she draw along with her the large company that was to wit- 
 ness the great miracle. 
 
 Once again in the Master's presence, Mary is overwhelmed with 
 emotion. She falls weeping at his feet ; has nothing to say as she 
 looks up at him through her tears but what Martha had said before : 
 "Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died." Her 
 grief checks all further utterance. Nor has Jesus anything to say. 
 Mary is weeping at his feet, Martha is weeping at his side, the Jews 
 are weeping all around. This is what death hath done, desolating 
 a once happy home, rending with such bitter grief the two sisters' 
 hearts, melting into kindred sorrow the hearts of friends and neigh- 
 bours. The calm that had its natural home in the breast of the 
 Redeemer is broken up : he grieves in spirit and is troubled. Too 
 heavy in heart himself, too troubled in spirit, as he stands with 
 hearts breaking and tears falling all around him, to have any words 
 of counsel or comfort for Mary such as he addressed to Martha, he 
 can only say, "Where have ye laid him ? They say to him, Lord, 
 come and see." He can restrain no longer. He bursts into tears. 
 
 What shall we think or say of these tears of Jesus ? There 
 were some among those who saw him shed them, who, looking at 
 them in their first and simplest aspect as tears shed over the grave 
 of a departed friend said one to another, " Behold how he loved 
 him !" There were others not sharing so much in the sisters' grief, 
 who were at leisure to say, " Could not this man which opened the 
 eyes of the blind have caused that even this man should not have 
 died ?" ' If he could have saved him, why did he not do it 1 He 
 may weep now himself : had it not been better that he had saved 
 these two poor sisters from weeping V We take our station beside
 
 THE RAISING OF LAZARUS. 347 
 
 these men. With the first we say, Behold how he pities ! See in 
 the tears he sheds what a singular sympathy with human sorrow 
 there is within his heart a sympathy deeper and purer than we 
 have ever elsewhere seen expressed. To weep with others or for 
 others is no unusual thing, and carries with it no evidence of extra- 
 ordinary tenderness of spirit. It is what at some time or other of 
 their lives all men have done. But there is a peculiarity in the 
 tears of Jesus that separates them from all others that gives them 
 a new meaning and a new power. For where is Jesus when he 
 weeps ? a few paces from the tomb of Lazarus ; and what is he 
 about immediately to do ? to raise the dead man from the grave, 
 and give him back to his sisters. Only imagine that, gifted with 
 such a power, you had gone on such an errand, and stood on the 
 very edge of its execution, would not your whole soul be occupied 
 with the great thing you were about to do, the great joy you were 
 about to cause 1 You might see the sisters of the dead one weeping, 
 but, knowing how very soon you were about to turn their grief into 
 gladness, the sight would only hasten you forward on your way. 
 But though knowing what a perfect balm he was so soon to lay 
 upon all the sorrow, Jesus shows himself so sensitive to the simple 
 touch of grief, that even in such peculiar circumstances he cannot 
 see others weeping without weeping along with them. How ex- 
 quisitely tender the sympathy manifested in the tears that in such 
 peculiar circumstances were shed ! 
 
 Again we take our station beside the onlookers, and to the 
 second set of speakers we would say He could have caused that 
 this man had not died. But his are no false tears, though shed 
 over a calamity he could have prevented. He allowed Lazarus to 
 die, he allowed his sisters to suffer all this woe, not that he loved 
 them less, but because he knew that for him, for them, for others, 
 for us all, higher ends were in this way gained than could have been 
 accomplished by his cutting the illness short, and going from Beth- 
 abara to cure. Little did the weeping sisters know what a place in 
 the annals of redemption the death and resurrection of their brother 
 was to occupy. How earnestly in the course of the illness did they 
 pray for his recovery ! How eagerly did they despatch their 
 messenger to Jesus ! A single beam of light fell on the darkness 
 when the messenger brought back as answer the words he had heard 
 Jesus utter " This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of 
 God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby." What other 
 meaning could they put upon the words, but that either their 
 brother was to recover, or Jesus was to interfere and heal him 1 
 Their brother died, and all the more bitterly because of their dis- 
 appointment did they bemoan his loss. But what thought they 
 when they got him back again what thought they when they heard 
 of Christ's own death and resurrection what thought they when
 
 348 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTKY. 
 
 they came to know, as they had never done before, that Jesus was: 
 indeed the abolisher of death, the bringer of life and immortality to 
 light 1 Would they then have wished that their brother had not, 
 died that they had been saved their tears, but lost the hallowed 
 resurrection-birth of their brother to his Lord, lost to memory the 
 chiefest treasure that time gave to carry with them into eternity ? 
 
 Groaning again in spirit, Jesus came to the grave. It was a, 
 cave, and a stone covered the niche within which the body of the 
 dead was lying. Jesus said, "Take ye away the stone." The 
 doing so would at once expose the dead, and let loose the foul 
 effluvium of the advanced decomposition. The careful Martha, 
 whose active spirit ever busied itself with the outward and tangible 
 side of things, at once perceives this, and hastens to interpose a 
 check. Gently, but chidingly, the Lord said unto her, " Said I not 
 unto thee, that, if thou wouldest believe, thou shouldest see the 
 glory of God ?" ' Was it not told thee in the words brought back 
 by thy messenger that this sickness was to be for the glory of God 
 a glory waiting yet to be revealed ? Have I not been trying to 
 awaken thy faith in myself, as the resurrection and the life ? Why 
 think, then, of the existing state of thy brother's body ? Why not 
 let faith anticipate the future, and put all such lower thoughts and 
 cares away?' The rebuke was gently given; but given at such a 
 time, and in such presence, it must have fallen heavily upon poor 
 Martha's heart. 
 
 And now the order is obeyed. Taking a hasty glance within, 
 the removers of the stone withdraw. Jesus stands before the open 
 sepulchre. But all is not ready yet. There is to be a slowness, a 
 solemnity in every step, that shall wind up every spirit to the top- 
 most point of expectation. Jesus lifts his eyes to heaven and prays, 
 not to ask God to work the miracle, or give him power to do so. 
 So might Moses, or Elijah, or any other of the great miracle-workers 
 of earlier times have done, proclaiming thereby in whose name it 
 was and by whose power they wrought. Jesus never did so. He 
 stands alone in this respect. All that he did was done indeed in 
 conjunction with the Father. He was careful to declare that the 
 Son did nothing of himself, nothing independently. It was in faith, 
 with prayer, that all his mighty works were wrought ; but the faith 
 was as peculiar as the prayer both such as he alone could cherish 
 and present. Ordinarily the faith was hidden in his heart, the 
 prayer was in secret, unuttered and unheard. But now he would 
 have it known how close was the union between him and the Father. 
 He would turn the approaching miracle into an open and incontro- 
 vertible evidence that he was the sent of the Father, the Son of God. 
 And so, in words of thanksgiving rather than of petition, he says, 
 " Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me " the silent prayer 
 had already been heard and answered " And I know that thou
 
 THE RAISING OF LAZARUS. 349 
 
 hearest me always," that thy hearing is not peculiar to this case, 
 for as I am always praying, so thou art always answering " but 
 because of the people that stand by I said it, that they may believe 
 that thou hast sent me." In no more solemn manner could the fact 
 of his mission from the Father, and of the full consent and continued 
 co-operation of the Father with him in all he said and did, be sus- 
 pended upon the issue of the words that next come from his lips : 
 " And when he had thus spoken, he cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, 
 come forth." The hour has come for the dead to hear and live. At 
 once, and at that summons, the body lives, starts into life again, not 
 as it had died, the life injected into a worn and haggard frame. It 
 gets back in a moment all its healthful vigour. At once, too, and 
 at that summons, from a dreamless sleep that left it nothing to tell 
 about the four days' interval, or from a region the secrets of which 
 it was not permitted to disclose, the spirit returns to its former 
 habitation. Lazarus rises and stands erect. But he is bound hand 
 and foot, a napkin is over his face and across his eyes. So bound, 
 as good as blind, he could take but a few timid shuffling steps in 
 advance. " Loose him," said Jesus, " and let him go." They do it. 
 He can see now all around. He can go where he pleases. Shall we 
 doubt that the first use he makes of sight and liberty is to go and 
 cast himself at the Eedeemer's feet 1 
 
 The raising of Lazarus was too conspicuous a miracle, it had been 
 wrought too near the city, had been seen by too many witnesses, 
 and had produced too palpable results, not to attract the immediate 
 and fixed attention of the Jewish rulers. Within a few hours 
 after its performance Jerusalem would be filled with the report of 
 its performance. A meeting of the Sanhedrim was immediately 
 summoned, and sat in council as to what should be done. No 
 doubt was raised as to the reality of this or any of the other miracles 
 which Christ had wrought. They had been done too openly to 
 admit of that. But now, when many even of the Jews of Jerusalem 
 were believing in him, some stringent measures required to be taken 
 to check this rising, swelling tide, or who could tell to what it may 
 carry them? There were divisions, however, in the council It 
 was constituted of Pharisees and of Sadducees, who had been look- 
 ing at Jesus all through with very different eyes. The Pharisees, 
 from the first, had hated him. He had made so little of all their 
 boasted righteousness, had exalted goodness and holiness of heart 
 and life so far above all ritualistic regularity, had simplified religion 
 so, and encouraged men, however sinful, to go directly to God as 
 their merciful Father, setting aside the pretensions of the priesthood, 
 and treating as things of little worth the laboured theology and 
 learning of the schools, he had been so unsparing besides in ex- 
 posing the avarice, the ambition, the sensuality that cloaked them- 
 selves in the garb of a precise and exclusive and fastidious
 
 350 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 religionism, that they early felt that their quarrel with him was 
 not to be settled otherwise than by his death. Very early, on the 
 occasion of his second visit to Jerusalem, they had sought to slay 
 him, at first nominally as a Sabbath-breaker, then afterwards, and 
 still more, as a blasphemer. 1 In Galilee to which he had retired 
 to put himself out of the reach of the Pharisees of the capital 
 their hostility pursued him, till we read of the Pharisees and the 
 Herodians then taking counsel together "how they might destroy 
 him." 2 Once and again, at the Feast of Tabernacles and at the 
 Feast of the Dedication, stones had been taken up to stone him to 
 death, officers had been sent to arrest him, and the resolution come 
 to and announced, that if any man should confess that he was the 
 Christ, he should be excommunicated. But as yet no formal 
 determination of the Sanhedrim had been made that he should be 
 put to death. The reason of this delay, for suffering Christ to go 
 at large even for so long a time as he did, was in all likelihood 
 the dominance in the Sanhedrim of the Sadducean element. The 
 Sadducees had their own grounds for disliking the person, the 
 character, the teaching, the pretensions of Jesus, but they were not 
 so vehement or so virulent in their persecution of him. Caring less 
 about religious dogmas and observances than the rival sect, they 
 might have been readier to tolerate him as an excited enthusiast ; 
 but now they also got frightened, for they were the great supporters 
 of the Eoman power, and the great fearers of popular revolt. And 
 so when this meeting of the Great Council was called in haste, 
 Pharisees and Sadducees found common ground in saying to one 
 another, " What do we ? for this man doeth many miracles. If we 
 let him thus alone, all men will believe on him ; and the Eomans 
 will come and take away both our place and nation." Neither 
 party believed that there was any chance of Jesus making a success- 
 ful revolt, and achieving by that success a liberation from the 
 Roman yoke, as it then lay upon them. The Pharisees, the secret 
 enemies of the foreigner, saw nothing in Jesus of such a warlike 
 leader as the nation longed for and required. The Sadducees, 
 dreading some outbreak, but utterly faithless as to any good issue 
 coming out of it, saw nothing before them as the result of such a 
 movement but the loss of such power as they were still permitted 
 to exercise. And so both combined against the Lord. But there 
 was some loose talking, some doubts were expressed by men like 
 Nicodemus, or some feebler measures spoken of, till the high priest 
 himself arose, Caiaphas, the son-in-law of Annas, connected thus 
 with that family in which the Jewish pontificate remained for fifty 
 years four of the sons as well as the son-in-law of Annas having 
 with some interruptions enjoyed this dignity. All through this 
 period, embracing the whole of Christ's life from early childhood, 
 * John v. 16, 18. 2 Mark iii. 6.
 
 THE RAISING OF LAZARUS. 351 
 
 Annas, the head of this favoured family, even when himself out of 
 office, retained much of its power, being consulted on all occasions 
 of importance, and acting as the president of the Sanhedrim. 
 Hence it is that in the closing scenes of our Lord's history Annas 
 and Caiaphas appear as acting conjunctly, each spoken of as High 
 Priest. Caiaphas, like the rest of his family, like all the aristocracy 
 of the Temple, was a Sadducee ; and the spirit both of the family 
 and the sect was that of haughty pride and a bold and reckless 
 cruelty. Caiaphas cut the deliberations short by saying impetuously 
 and authoritatively to his colleagues, " Ye know nothing at all, nor 
 consider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the 
 people, and that the whole nation perish not." One life, the life 
 of this Galilean, what is it worth ? What matters it whether he 
 be innocent or guilty, according to this or that man's estimate of 
 guilt or innocence ; it stands in the way of the national welfare. 
 Better one man perish than that a whole nation be involved in 
 danger, it may be in ruin. The false, the hollow, the unjust plea, 
 upon Avhich the life of many a good and innocent man, guilty of 
 nothing but speaking the plain and honest truth, has been sacrificed, 
 had all the sound, as coming from the lips of the High Priest, of a 
 wise policy, a consultation for the nation's good. Pleased with 
 themselves as such good patriots, and covering with this disguise 
 all the other grounds and reasons for the resolution, it was deter- 
 mined that Jesus should be put to death. It remained only to see 
 how most speedily and most safely it could be accomplished. 
 
 Unwittingly, in what he said Caiaphas had uttered a prophecy, 
 had announced a great and central truth of the Christian faith. 
 He had given to the death determined on too limited a range, as if 
 it had been for that nation of the Jews alone that Jesus was to die. 
 But the Evangelist takes up, expounds, and expands his words as 
 carrying with them the broad significance that not for that nation 
 only was he to die, but that by his death lie " should gather to- 
 gether in one the children of God that were scattered abroad." 
 Strange ordering of Providence, that here at the beginning and 
 there at the close of our Lord's passion here in the Sanhedrim, 
 there upon the cross here from the Jewish High Priest, there 
 from the Roman governor words should come by which the uncon- 
 scious utterers conspired in proclaiming the priestly and the kingly 
 authority and office of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ 1
 
 352 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTEY. 
 
 XIII. 
 
 THE LAST JOURNEY THROUGH PER^EA : THE TEN LEPERS THE 
 COMING OF THE KINGDOM THE QUESTION OF DIVORCE LITTLE 
 CHILDREN BROUGHT TO HIM THE YOUNG RULER. 
 
 LUKE xvn. 11-37, xvin. 15-27 ; MATT. xix. 1-26 ; MARK x. 1-27. 
 
 CHRIST'S stay at Bethany on the occasion of his raising Lazarus 
 from the dead must have been a very short one. The impression 
 and effect of the great miracle was so immediate and so great that 
 no time was lost by the rulers in calling together the council and 
 coming to their decision to put Jesus to death. Hearing of this, no 
 time on his part would be lost in putting himself, now only for a 
 short time, beyond their reach. He retired in the first instance to 
 a part of the country near the northern extremity of the wilderness 
 of Judea, into a city called Ephraim, identified by many with the 
 modern town of Taiyibeh, which lies a few miles north-east of 
 Bethel. After some days of rest in this secluded spot, spent we 
 know not how, the Passover drew on, and Jesus arose to go up to 
 it. He took a circuitous course, passing eastward along the border- 
 line between Galilee and Samaria, which lay not more than half a 
 day's journey from Ephraim, descending into the valley of the Jor- 
 dan, crossing the river, entering once more into Persea, travelling 
 through it southwards to Jericho. It was during this, the last of 
 all his earthly journeys, that as he entered into a certain village 
 there met him ten men that were lepers, who stood afar off, as the 
 law required ; but not wishing to let him pass without a trial made 
 of his grace and power, lifted up their voices and said, "Jesus, 
 Master, have mercy on us." " Go show yourselves unto the priests," 
 was all that Jesus said. He gave this order, and passed on. The 
 first thing that the leper who knew or believed that the leprosy had 
 departed from him had to do, was to submit himself for inspection 
 to the priesthood, that his cure might be authenticated, and he be 
 formally relieved from the restraints under which he had been laid. 
 And this is what these ten men are bidden now to do, whilst as yet 
 no sign of the removal of the disease appears. Whether they all 
 had a firm faith from the first that they would be cured we may 
 well doubt. Perhaps there was but one among them who had such 
 faith. They, all, however, obey the order that had been given ; it 
 was at least worth trying whether anything could come out of it, and 
 as they went they were all cleansed. The moment that the cure was 
 visible, one of them, who was a Samaritan, ere he went forward to 
 the priest, went back to Jesus glorifying God with a loud voice, and 
 falling at Christ's feet to give him thanks. The other nine went
 
 THE QUESTION OF DIVORCE. 353 
 
 on, had their healing in due course authenticated, returned to their 
 families and friends, but inquired not for their deliverer, nor sought 
 him out to thank him. The contrast was one that Christ himself 
 thought fit to notice. "Were there not ten cleansed," he said, "but 
 where are the nine 1 There are not found that returned to give 
 glory to God, save this stranger. And he said unto him, Arise, go 
 thy way, thy faith hath made thee whole." But now once more the 
 Pharisees betake themselves to their congenial work, asking him 
 when the kingdom of God should come. He corrects their errors, 
 gives them solemn warnings as to a coming of the Son of man, in 
 whose issues the men of that generation should be very disastrously 
 involved, adding the two parables of the Unjust Judge and of the 
 Pharisee and the Publican. Once more, however, these inveterate 
 enemies return to the assault. At an earlier period they had sought 
 in his own conduct, or in that of his disciples, to find ground of 
 accusation. Baffled in this, they try now a more insidious method, 
 to which we find them having frequent recourse towards the close 
 of our Lord's ministry. They demand his opinion upon the vexed 
 question of divorce. The two great schools of their Kabbis differed 
 in their interpretation of the law of Moses upon this point. Which 
 side would Jesus take 1 Decide as he may, it would embroil him 
 in the quarrel. To their surprise he shifted the ground of the 
 whole question from the only one upon which they rested it, the 
 authority of Moses ; told them in effect that they were wrong in 
 thinking that because Moses, or God through Moses, tolerated 
 certain practices, that therefore these practices were absolutely 
 right and universally and throughout aU time to be observed 
 furnishing thereby a key to the Divine legislation for the Israelites, 
 which we have been somewhat slow to use as widely as we should ; 
 told them that it was because of the hardness of their hearts, to 
 prevent greater mischiefs that would have followed a purer and 
 stricter enactment, that the Israelites had been permitted to put 
 away their wives (divorce allowed thus, as polygamy had been), but 
 that from the beginning it had not been so, nor should it be so 
 under the new economy that he was ushering in, in which, save in 
 a single case, the marriage tie was to be indissoluble. 
 
 In happy contrast with all such insidious attempts to entangle 
 him in his talk was the next incident of the last journey through 
 Peraea. They brought little children infants to him. It is not 
 said precisely who brought them, but can we doubt that it was the 
 mothers of the children ? They brought their little ones to Jesus that 
 he might touch them, put his hands upon them, pray for and bless 
 them. Some tinge of superstition there may have been in this, 
 some idea of a mystic benefit to be conveyed even to infancy by 
 the touch and the blessing of Jesus. But who will not be ready 
 to forgive the mothers here, though this were true, as we think of 
 z
 
 35-t THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 the fond regard and deep reverence they cherished towards him 1 
 They see him passing through their borders. They hear it is a 
 farewell visit he is paying. These little babes of theirs shall never 
 live to see and know how good, how kind, how holy a one he is ; 
 but it would be something to tell them of when they grew up, 
 something that they might be the better for all their lives afterwards, 
 if he would but touch them and pray over them. And so they 
 come, carrying their infants in their arms, first telling the disciples 
 what they want. To them it seems a needless if not impertinent 
 intrusion upon their Master's graver labours. What good can 
 children so young as these get from the Great Teacher ? Why 
 foist them upon the notice and care of one who has so much 
 weightier things in hand 1 Without consulting their Master, they 
 rebuke the bringers of the children, and would have turned them 
 at once away. Jesus saw it, and he was "much displeased." 
 There was more than rudeness and discourtesy in the conduct of 
 his disciples. There was ignorance, there was unbelief ; it was a 
 dealing with infants as if they had no part or share as such in his 
 kingdom. The occasion was a happy one perhaps the only one 
 that occurred for exposing their ignorance, rebuking their un- 
 belief, and so, after looking with displeasure at his disciples, Jesus 
 said to them, " Suffer the little children to come unto me, and 
 forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven." We take 
 the last words here in the simplest and most obvious sense, as 
 implying that the kingdom of heaven belongs to infants, is in a 
 measure made up of them. 
 
 Setting forth afresh, and now in all likelihood about to pass 
 out of that region, there met him one who came running in all 
 eagerness, as anxious not to lose the opportunity, and who kneeled 
 to him with great reverence as having the most profound respect 
 for him as a righteous man, and who said, " Good Master, what 
 good thing shall I do, that I may inherit eternal life?" Jesus 
 might at once and without any preliminary conversation have laid 
 on him the injunction that he did at the last, and this might 
 equally have served the final end that the Lord had in view ; but 
 then we should have been left in ignorance as to what kind of man 
 he was, and how it was that the injunction was at once so needful 
 and so appropriate. It is by help of the preparatory treatment 
 that we are enabled to see further than we should otherwise have 
 done into the character of this petitioner. He was young, he was 
 wealthy, he was a ruler of the Jews. Better than this, he was 
 amiable, he was virtuous, had made it from the first a high object 
 of ambition to be just and to be generous, to use the advantages of 
 his position to win in a right way the favour of his fellow-men. But 
 notwithstanding, after all the successful attempts of his past life, 
 there was a restlessness, a dissatisfaction in his heart. He had not
 
 THE YOUNG RULER. 355 
 
 reached the goal. He heard Jesus speak of eternal life, something 
 evidently far higher than anything he had yet attained, and he 
 wondered how it was to be got at. Nothing doubting but that it 
 must be along the same track that he had hitherto been pursuing, 
 but by some extra work of extraordinary merit, he comes to Jesus 
 with the question, " Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that 
 I may inherit eternal life ?" Jesus saw at once that he was putting 
 all upon moral goodness, some higher virtue to be reached by his 
 own effort entitling him to the eternal life. He saw that he was so 
 fully possessed with this idea that it regulated even his conception 
 of Christ's own personal character, whom he was disposed to look 
 upon rather as a pre-eminently virtuous man than as one having 
 any peculiar relationship to God. Checking him, therefore, at the 
 very first taking exception to the very form and manner of his 
 address, he says, " Why callest thou me good 1 there is none good 
 but one, that is, God." 
 
 Endeavouring thus to raise his thoughts to the true source of 
 all real goodness, rather than to say anything about his own con- 
 nection with the Father, which it is no part of his present object to 
 speak about, Jesus takes him first upon his own ground. There 
 need be no talk about any one particularly good thing, that behoved 
 to be done, till it was seen whether the common acknowledged 
 precepts of God's law had all been kept. "Thou knowest the 
 commandments : Do not commit adultery, Do not kill, Do not steal, 
 Do not bear false witness, Defraud not, Honour thy father and thy 
 mother." As the easiest instrument of conviction, as the one that 
 lay entirely in the very region to which all this youth's thoughts 
 and efforts had been confined, Jesus restricted himself to quoting 
 the precepts of the second table of the law, and says nothing in the 
 meantime about the first. The young man, hearing the challenge, 
 listens to the precepts as they are detailed, and promptly, without 
 apparently a momentary misgiving, he answers, " All these have 
 I observed from my youth." There was no doubt great ignorance, 
 great self-deception in this reply. He knew but little of any one 
 of these precepts in its true significance, in all the strictness, spiri- 
 tuality, and extent of its requirements, who could venture on any 
 such assertion. Yet there was sincerity in the answer, and it- 
 pointed to a bygone life of singular external propriety, and that the 
 fruit not so much of constraint as of a natural amiableness and 
 conscientiousness. As he gave this answer, Jesus beholding him 
 loved him. It was new and refreshing to the Saviour's eye to see 
 such a specimen as this of truthfulness and purity, of all that was 
 morally lovely and of good report among the rulers of the Jews. 
 Here was no hypocrite, no fanatic, here was one who had not 
 learned to wear the garb of sanctimoniousness as a cover for all 
 kinds of self-indulgence ; here was one free from the delusion that
 
 356 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 the strict observance of certain formulas of devotion would stand 
 instead of the weightier matters of justice and of charity ; here was 
 one who so far had escaped the contagion of his age and sect, who 
 was not seeking to make clean the outside of the cup and the 
 platter, but was really striving to keep himself from all that was 
 wrong, and to be towards his fellow-men all that, as he understood 
 it, God's law required. Jesus looked upon this man and loved 
 him. 
 
 But the very love he bore him prompted Jesus to subject him 
 to a treatment bearing in many respects a likeness to that to which 
 he subjected Nicodemus. With not a little, indeed, that was 
 different, there was much that was alike in the two rulers, the 
 one who came to Jesus by night at the beginning of his ministry in 
 Judea ; the one who now comes to him by day at the close of his 
 labours in Peraea : both honest, earnest men, seekers after truth, 
 and lovers of it in a fashion too, but both ignorant and self-deceived ; 
 Nicodemus's error rather one of the head than of the heart, flowing 
 from an entire misconception of the very nature of Christ's king- 
 dom; the young ruler's one of the heart rather than of the head, 
 flowing from an inordinate, an idolatrous attachment to his worldly 
 possessions. In either case Christ's treatment was quick, prompt, 
 decisive, laying the axe at once at the root of the evil. Beneath 
 all the pleasing show of outward moralities Christ detected in the 
 young ruler's breast a lamentable want of any true regard to God, 
 any recognition of his supreme and paramount claims. His heart, 
 his trust, his treasure, were in earthly, not in heavenly tilings. He 
 needed a sharp lesson to teach him this, to lay bare at once the 
 true state of things within. Christ was too kind and too skilful a 
 physician to apply this or that emollient that might have power to 
 allay a symptom or two of the outward irritation. At once he 
 thrusts the probe into the very heart of the wound. "One thing 
 thou lackest : go thy way," said he, at once assuming his proper 
 place as the representative of God and of his claims, "go thy way, 
 sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor : and come, take up 
 the cross, and follow me." The one thing lacking was not the 
 renunciation of his property in bestowing it upon the poor. It was 
 a supreme devotedness to God, to duty a willingness to give up 
 anything, to give up everything where God required it to be given 
 up, when the holding of it was inconsistent with fidelity to him. 
 This was the one thing lacking. And instead of proclaiming his 
 fatal deficiency in this primary requirement, without which there 
 could be no true obedience rendered to any part of the Divine law, 
 Christ embodies the claim which he knew the young ruler was 
 unprepared to honour in that form which struck directly at the 
 idol of his heart, and required its instant and absolute dethrone- 
 ment.
 
 THE YOUNG RULER. 357 
 
 Not for a moment, then, can we imagine that in speaking to 
 him as he did, Jesus was issuing a general command, or laying 
 down a universal condition of the Christian discipleship, or that he 
 was even holding up the relinquishment of earthly possessions as 
 an act of pre-eminent meritoriousness, which all strivers after Chris- 
 tian perfection should set before them as the summit to be reached. 
 There is nothing of all this here. It is a special treatment of a 
 special case. Christ's object being to frame and to apply a decisive 
 touchstone or test whereby the condition of that one spirit might 
 be exposed, he suited with admirable skill the test to the condition. 
 Had that condition been other than it was, the test employed had 
 been different. Had it been the love of pleasure, or the love 
 of power, or the love of fame, instead of the love of money that 
 had been the ruling passion, he would have framed his order 
 so that obedience to it would have demanded the crucifixion of 
 the ruling passion, the renunciation of the one cherished idol 
 The only one abiding universal rule that we are entitled to 
 extract from this dealing of our Lord with this applicant being this 
 that in coming to Christ, in taking on the yoke of the Christian 
 discipleship, it must be in the spirit of an entire readiness to part 
 with all that he requires us to relinquish, and to allow no idol to 
 usurp that inward throne, that of right is his. 
 
 XIV. 
 
 JESUS AT JERICHO THE REQUEST OF THE SONS OF ZEBEDEE. 
 MATT. xx. 17-34 ; MARK x. 2-52 ; LUKE xvm. 35-43, xx. 2-10. 
 
 No district of the Holy Land is more unlike what it once was 
 and what it still might be than that in which Jericho, the city of 
 palms, once stood. Its position, commanding the two chief passes 
 up to the hill country of Judea and Samaria, the depth and 
 fertility of its well-watered soil, and the warmth of its tropical 
 climate, early indicated it as the site of a city which should not 
 only be the capital of the surrounding territory, but the protection 
 of all western Palestine against invaders from the east. Joshua 
 found it so when he crossed the Jordan ; and, as his first step towards 
 the conquest of the country which lay beyond, laid siege to a city 
 which had walls broad enough to have houses built upon them, and 
 whose spoil when taken, its gold and its silver, its vessels of brass and 
 of iron, its goodly Babylonish garments, bore evidence of affluence 
 and of traffic. No town in all the territory which the Israelites after- 
 wards acquired westward of Jordan could compete with Jericho. It 
 fell, was reduced to ruins, and the curse of Joshua pronounced upon
 
 358 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 the man who attempted to raise again its walls. 1 In the days of Ahab 
 that attempt was made, and though the threatened evil fell upon 
 the maker, the city rose from its ruins to enter upon another stage 
 of progressive prosperity, which reached its highest point when 
 Herod the Great selected it as one of his favourite resorts, beautified 
 it with towers and palaces, becoming so attached to it that, feeling 
 his last illness to have come upon him, he retired there to die. 
 Soon after his death the town was plundered, and some of its finest 
 buildings were destroyed. These, however, were speedily restored 
 to all their original splendour by Archelaus, and as he left it 
 Josephus has described it its stately buildings rising up among 
 groves of palm-trees miles in length, with gardens scattered round, 
 in which all the chief flowers and fruits of eastern lands grew up in 
 the greatest luxuriance. The rarest and most precious among them, 
 the balsam, a treasure " worth its own weight in silver, for which 
 kings made war," 2 " so that he," says the Jewish historian, as he 
 warms in his recital of all its glories, "he who should pronounce the 
 place to be divine would not be mistaken, wherein is such plenty of 
 trees produced as is very rare, and of the most excellent sort. 
 And, indeed, if we speak of these other fruits, it will not be easy 
 to light on any climate in the habitable earth that can well be com- 
 pared to it." And such as Josephus has described was Jericho and 
 the country round when Christ's eye rested on them, in descending 
 into the valley of the Jordan, and above the tops of the palm-trees, 
 and the roofs of the palaces, he saw the trace of the road that led 
 up to Jerusalem. None beside the twelve had gone with him into 
 the retreats of Ephraim and Peraea. But now he is on the track of 
 the companies from the north, who are going up to the Passover, 
 that is to be celebrated at the close of the following week. The 
 time, the company, the road, all serve to bring up to the Saviour's 
 thoughts events that are now so near, to him of such momentous 
 import. A spirit of eager impatience to be baptized with the 
 impending baptism seizes upon him, and gives a strange quickness 
 and a forwardness to his movements. His talk, his gait, his gestures 
 all betoken how absorbed he is ; the eye and thought away from 
 the present, from all around, fixed upon some future, the purport 
 of which has wonderfully excited him. His hasty footsteps carry 
 him on before his fellow-travellers. "Jesus went before them," 
 St. Mark tells us, " and they were amazed ; and as they followed 
 they were afraid." There was that in his aspect, attitude, and 
 actions that filled them with wonder and with awe. It was not 
 
 1 Within two miles of it, sharing in all its great natural advantages, stood 
 Gilgal, the first encampment of the Israelites, where the ark stood till its removal to 
 Shiloh, which we read of as one of the stations to which Samuel resorted in 
 administering justice throughout the country, where the tribes so often met in the 
 days of Saul, to which the men of Judah went down to welcome David back again to 
 Jerusalem. 2 Martineau.
 
 THE REQUEST OF THE SONS OF ZEBEDEE. 359 
 
 long till an explanation was offered them. He took the twelve 
 aside, and once again, as twice before, but now with still greater 
 minuteness and particularity of detail, told them what was about 
 to happen within a few days at Jerusalem, how he was to be 
 delivered into the hands of the Jewish rulers, and how they were 
 to deliver him into the hands of the Gentiles, how he was to be 
 mocked and scourged, and spit upon and crucified, till all things 
 that were written by the prophets concerning him should be 
 accomplished, and how on the third day he was to rise again. 
 Everything was told so plainly that we may well wonder that any 
 one could have been at any loss as to Christ's meaning ; but the 
 disciples, we are told, "understood none of these things, and the 
 sayings were hid from them, neither knew they the things which 
 were spoken." This only proves what a blinding power precon- 
 ception and misconception have in hiding the simplest things told 
 in the simplest language a blinding power often exercised over us 
 now as to the written, as it was then exercised over the apostles as 
 to their Master's spoken words. The truth is, that these men were 
 utterly unprepared at the time to take in the real truth as to what 
 was to happen to their Master. They had made up their minds, on 
 the best of evidence, that he was the Messiah. He had himself 
 lately confirmed them in that faith. But they had their own notions 
 of the Messiahship. With these such sufferings and such a death 
 as were actually before Jesus were utterly inconsistent. They 
 could be but figurative expressions, then, that he had employed 
 intended, perhaps, to represent some severe struggle with his 
 adversaries through which he had to pass before his kingdom was 
 set up and acknowledged. 
 
 One thing alone was clear that the time so long looked for- 
 ward to had come at last. This visit to Jerusalem was to witness 
 the erection of the kingdom. All other notions lost in that, the 
 thought of the particular places they were to occupy in that king- 
 dom entered again into the hearts of two of the apostles that 
 pair of brothers who, from early adherence, and the amount of 
 sacrifice they had made, and the marked attention that on more 
 than one occasion Jesus had paid to them, might naturally enough 
 expect that if special favours were to be dispensed to any, they 
 would not be overlooked. James and John tell their mother Salome, 
 who has met them by the way, all that they have lately noticed in 
 the manner of their Master, and all that he has lately spoken, 
 pointing to the approaching Passover as the season when the 
 manifestation of the kingdom was to be made. Mother and sons 
 agree to go to Jesus with the request that in his kingdom and glory 
 the one brother should sit upon his right hand and the other upon 
 his left, a request that in all likelihood took its particular shape 
 and form from what Jesus had said but a few days before, when,
 
 360 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 in answer to Peter's question, " Behold, we have forsaken all, and 
 followed thee; what shall we have therefore? And Jesus said 
 unto them, Verily I say unto you, That ye which have followed me, 
 in the regeneration when the Son of man shall sit in the throne of 
 his glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve 
 tribes of Israel." 1 What could these thrones, this judging be 1 ? 
 Little wonder that the apostles' minds were set a-speculating by 
 what still leaves us, after all our speculating, about as much in the 
 dark as ever. But while Salome and James and John were proffer- 
 ing their request, and trying to pre-engage the places of highest 
 honour, where was Peter ? It had not come into his thoughts to 
 seek a private interview with his Master for such a purpose. He 
 had no mother by his side to fan the flame that was as ready to 
 kindle in his as in any of their breasts. That without any thought 
 of one whose natural claims were as good as theirs, James and John 
 should have gone to Jesus and made the request they did, satisfies 
 us at least of this, that it was not the understanding among the 
 twelve that when the Lord had spoken to Peter as he did after his 
 good confession, he had assigned to him the primacy, or indeed any 
 particular pre-eminence, over the rest. 
 
 "Ye know not what ye ask" They did it ignorantly, and so 
 far they obtain mercy of the Lord. What it was to be placed on 
 his right and on his left in the scenes that awaited him in Jeru- 
 salem, two at least of the three petitioners, John and Salome, shall 
 soon know as they stand gazing upon the central cross of Calvary. 
 "Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of? and be baptized with 
 the baptism that I am baptized with ? They say, We can." From 
 this reply it would appear that the disciples understood the Lord 
 as asking them whether they are prepared to drink along with him 
 some cup of sorrow that was about soon to be put into his hands, 
 to be baptized along with him in some baptism of fire to which he 
 was about to be subjected. They are prepared, they think that 
 they can follow him, they are willing to take their part in whatever 
 suffering such following shall entail. Through all the selfishness, 
 and the ambition, and the great ignorance of the future that their 
 request revealed, there shone out in this prompt and no doubt per- 
 fectly sincere and honest reply, a true and deep attachment to their 
 Master, a readiness to suffer with him or for him. And he is far 
 quicker to recognise the one than to condemn the other. "Ye 
 shall indeed drink of the cup that I drink of ; and with the baptism 
 that I am baptized withal shall ye be baptized." 'You, James, 
 shall be the first among the twelve that shall seal your testimony 
 with your blood. You, John, shall have the longest if not the 
 largest experience of what the bearing of the cross shall bring with 
 it. But to sit on my right and on my left in my kingdom and my 
 i Matt. xix. 27, 28.
 
 JESUS AT JERICHO. 361 
 
 glory ; ask me not for that honour as if it were a thing in the con- 
 ferring of which I am at liberty to consult my own individual will 
 or taste or humour. It is not mine so to dispense. It is mine to 
 give, but only to those for whom it is prepared of my Father, and 
 who by the course of discipline through which he shall pass them 
 shall be duly prepared for it.' 
 
 James and John have to be content with such reply. Their 
 application, though made to Christ when alone, soon after became 
 known to others, and excites no small stir among them. Which of 
 them indeed may cast the first stone at the two ? They had all 
 been quarrelling among themselves not long before, as to which of 
 them should be greatest. And they shall all ere long be doing so 
 again. Christ's word of rebuke as he hears of this contention is 
 for all as well as for James and John. He tells us that no such 
 kind of authority and power as is practised in earthly government 
 the authority of mere rank or power carrying it dictatorially and 
 tyrannically over subjects and dependantsis to be admitted among 
 his disciples ; greatness among them being a thing to be measured 
 not by the amount of power possessed, but by the amount of ser- 
 vice rendered, by their greater likeness to the Son of man, " who 
 came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his 
 life a ransom for many." The contention is thus momentarily 
 hushed, to break out again, when it shall receive a still more im- 
 pressive rebuke. 
 
 Jesus and his disciples, and a great multitude of people who had 
 joined themselves to him by the way, now drew near to Jericho. 
 Of what occurred in and near the city I offer no continuous narra- 
 tive, for it is difficult to frame such out of the details which the 
 different Evangelists present. St. Mark and St. Luke tell us of one 
 blind man only who was healed. St. Matthew tells us of two. Two 
 of the three Evangelists speak of the healing as having occurred on 
 Christ's departure out of the town, the third of its having taken 
 place on his entrance into it We may conclude with certainty 
 that there were two, and we may conjecture that there were three 
 blind men cured on this occasion. In a city so large as Jericho 
 then was, computed to contain well-nigh 100,000 inhabitants, the 
 number swelled by the strangers on their way to the Passover, 
 it would not surprise us that more cases than one of the kind 
 described should have occurred. One general remark upon this and 
 all similar discrepancies in the Gospel narratives may be offered. 
 It is quite enough to vindicate the entire truthfulness of each 
 separate account, that we can imagine some circumstance or circum- 
 stances omitted by all, the occurrence of which would enable us to 
 reconcile them. How often does it happen that two or three wit- 
 nesses each tell what they saw and heard ; their testimonies taken 
 by themselves present almost insuperable difficulties in the way of
 
 362 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTKY. 
 
 reconciling them ; yet when the whole in all its minute details is 
 known, the key is then put into our hands by which the apparent 
 discord is at once removed. And when the whole never can be 
 known, is it not the wisest course to let the discrepancies remain 
 just as we find them ; satisfied if we can imagine any way by which 
 all that each narrator says is true ? 
 
 This can easily enough be done in the case before us. Satisfied 
 with this, let us fix our attention on the stories of Bartimeus and 
 Zaccheus, on the two striking incidents by which our Lord's 
 entrance into and exit from Jericho were made for ever memorable. 
 How different in all the outward circumstances of their lot in life 
 were these two men ! the one a poor blind beggar, the other among 
 the richest men in the community. The revenues derived from the 
 palm trees and balsam-gardens of Jericho were so great, that the 
 grant of them was one of the richest gifts which Antony presented 
 to Cleopatra. Herod farmed them of the latter, and intrusted the 
 collection of them to these publicans, of whom Zaccheus was the 
 chief. His position was one enabling him to realise large gains, and 
 we may believe that of that position he had taken the full advantage. 
 Unlike in other things, in this Bartimeus and Zaccheus were at one, 
 in their eagerness, their earnestness, their perseverance, their re- 
 solution to use all possible means to overcome all obstacles thrown 
 in the way of their approach to Christ. The poor blind beggar sits 
 beneath the shade of some towering palm, waiting to salute each 
 stray passenger as he goes by, and solicit alms. Suddenly he hears 
 the tread as of a great multitude approaching. He wonders what 
 it can be. He asks ; they tell him that Jesus of Nazareth is com- 
 ing, and is about to pass by. Jesus of Nazareth ! he had heard of 
 him before, heard of healings wrought by him, of blind eyes opened, 
 of dead men raised. Many a time in his darkness, in his solitude, 
 as he sat alone by the wayside, he had pondered who this great 
 miracle-worker could be, and he had come to the conclusion that he 
 could be no other than the Son of David, the Messiah promised to 
 their fathers. It had never crossed his thoughts that he and this 
 Jesus should ever meet, when now they tell him that he is near at 
 hand, will soon be passing by. He can, he may do that for him 
 which none but he can do. The whole faith and hope of his spirit 
 breathed into it, he lifts the loud and eager cry, "Jesus, Son of 
 David, have mercy on me." They check him, they blame him, in 
 every way they can they try to stop him. He cries " the more a 
 great deal ;" it is his one and only chance. He will not lose it, he 
 will do all he can to reach that ear, to arrest that passer-by. He 
 cries the more a great deal, " Son of David, have mercy on me." 
 
 So is it with the poor blind beggar, and so is it with the rich 
 publican. He too hears that Jesus of Nazareth is coming into 
 Jericho. He too has heard much about the Nazarene. He is
 
 BARTIMEUS AND ZACCHEUS. 363 
 
 living now, he may have been living then, in the very neighbour- 
 hood where John the Baptist taught, where Jesus was himself 
 baptized. The gospel of the kingdom as preached by both, the 
 gospel of repentance, of turning from all iniquity and bringing forth 
 fruits meet for repentance, was familiar to his ears. The Baptist's 
 answer to publicans when they came to him, " Exact no more than 
 that which is appointed you," had sunk into his heart. That was 
 the kingdom, the kingdom of truth, of righteousness, into which 
 now above all things he desired to enter. "With a conscience 
 quickened, a heart melted and subdued we know not how, he hears 
 that Jesus is at hand. What would he not give even for a sight of 
 one whom secretly he has learned to reverence and to love ! He 
 goes out, but there is a crowd coming ; he cannot stand its pressure ; 
 he is little of stature, and in the bustle and the throng will not be 
 able even to catch a sight of Jesus. A happy thought occurs : he 
 sees behind him a large tree which casts its branching arms across 
 the path. He runs and climbs up into the tree. He cares not for 
 the ridicule with which he may be assailed. He cares not for the 
 grotesque position which he, the rich man and the honourable, may 
 be seen to occupy. He is too bent upon his purpose to let that or 
 anything stand in the way of the accomplishment of his desire. 
 
 And now let us notice how these two men are treated. Jesus 
 stands still as he comes near the spot where poor Bartimeus is, 
 points to him, and tells those around him to go and bring him 
 into his presence. The crowd halts. The messengers do Christ's 
 bidding. And now the very men who had been rebuking 
 Bartimeus for his too loud and too impatient entreaties, touched 
 with pity, say, "Be of good comfort, rise, he calleth thee." He 
 does not need to be told a second time, he does not wait for any 
 guiding hands to lead him to the centre of the path. His own 
 quick ear has fixed the point from which the summons comes. His 
 own ready arm flings aside the rude garment that he had worn, 
 which might hinder him in his movement. A few eager footsteps 
 taken, he stands in the presence of the Lord. Nor has he then to 
 renew his supplication. Jesus is the first to speak. " What wilt 
 thou that I should do unto thee?" There are not many things 
 among which to choose. There is that one thing that above all 
 others he would have done. "Lord," says he, "that I might 
 receive my sight." And Jesus said, "Receive thy sight, go thy 
 way ; thy faith hath made thee whole. And immediately he received 
 his sight." 
 
 See now how it fares with Zaccheus. He has got up into the 
 tree, he is sitting there among its branches, half hoping that, seeing 
 all, he may remain himself unseen. The crowd comes up. He 
 does not need to ask which is the one he desires so much to see. 
 There he is, the centre of the throng, his calm, majestic, benignant
 
 364 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTKY. 
 
 look and bearing marking him off from all around. The eyes of 
 the chief publican are bent upon him in one fixed, concentrated 
 gaze of wonder and of love, when a new ground of wonder and of 
 gratitude is given. Here too Jesus stops, and looking up he names 
 him by his name, as if he had known him long and well : 
 "Zaccheus," he said, "make haste and come down; for to-day I 
 must abide at thy house." 
 
 Such is the free spontaneous mercy in either case exercised by 
 our Lord, such is the way in which he meets simplicity of faith, 
 ardour of desire, strenuousness of effort, as seen in the blind beggar 
 and in the rich publican. And what in either case is the return ? 
 " Go thy way," said Jesus to Bartimeus. He did not go, he could 
 not go. His blinded eyes are opened. The first object they rest 
 on is their opener. Bright shines the sun above fair is that valley 
 of the Jordan gorgeous the foliage of the palm and the sycamore, 
 the acacia and the balsam-tree. New and wondrous sights to him, 
 but he sees them not, or heeds them not. That fresh faculty of 
 vision is exercised on him by whom it had been bestowed, and upon 
 him all the wealth of its power is lavished. And him " he follows, 
 glorifying God." Not otherwise is it with Zaccheus : " Make 
 haste," said Jesus, "and come down. And he made haste, and 
 came down, and received Christ joyfully," little heeding the 
 derisive looks cast on him as he made his quick descent, the 
 murnmrings that arose from the multitude as he received Jesus into 
 his house. The threshold is scarcely crossed when he stands in all 
 humility before Jesus and says, "Behold, Lord, the half of my 
 goods I give to the poor ; and if I have taken anything from any 
 man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold." One scarce can 
 tell whether he is describing a practice for some time previously 
 pursued, or a purpose then for the first time in the presence of 
 Jesus deliberately taken. In either case the evidence of a true 
 repentance on his part is the same. The man among the Jews who 
 gave the fifth part of his income to the poor was counted as having 
 reached the height of perfection as to almsgiving. Zaccheus gives 
 one-half, and not one-fifth. The law of Moses required in one 
 special case alone that a fourfold restitution should be made. 
 Zaccheus, in every instance in which he can remember that by any 
 dishonourable practice on his part any man had suffered loss, 
 promises that restitution to that extent should be made to him. 
 Jesus, accepting the evidence of a true repentance that is thus 
 presented, makes no criticism upon the course of conduct indicated, 
 suggests no change, but says, " This day is salvation come to this 
 house, forasmuch as he also is a son of Abraham " once a lost 
 sheep of the chosen fold, lost, but now found by the good Shepherd, 
 and by him welcomed back, " for the Son of man," he adds, " is 
 come to seek and to save that which was lost."
 
 THE ANOINTING AT BETHANY. 365 
 
 Jericho is changed from what it was. So little is left of the 
 city, of its hippodrome and amphitheatre, its towers and its palaces, 
 that it is difficult to determine its site. Its gardens and its groves 
 are gone, not one solitary palm-tree for a poor blind beggar to sit 
 beneath, nor a sycamore for any one to climb. The City of Fragrance 
 it was called of old. There remains now but the fragrance of those 
 deeds of grace and mercy done there by him who in passing 
 through it closed his earthly journeyings, and went up thence to 
 Jerusalem to die. 
 
 XV. 
 
 THE ANOINTING AT BETHANY. 
 MATT. xxvi. 6-13 ; MARK xrv. 3-9 ; JOHN xii. 1-8. 
 
 IN the whole bearing and conduct of Jesus in and about Jericho 
 there was much to indicate that some great crisis in his history 
 was at hand. It does not surprise us to be told of the disciples 
 believing " that the kingdom of God should immediately appear." 
 It was because he knew that they were so misconceiving the future 
 that lay before him and them, that, either in the house of Zaccheus, 
 or afterwards on the way up to Jerusalem, Jesus addressed to them 
 the parable of the Pounds. He would have them know, and could 
 they but have penetrated the meaning of that parable they would 
 have seen, that so far from any such kingdom as they were dream- 
 ing of being about to be set up for him in Jerusalem, he was going 
 through the dark avenue of death to another, to a far country, to 
 receive the kingdom there, and after a long interval to return ; and 
 that, so far from their being about to share the honours and rewards 
 of a newly erected empire, they were to be left without a head, 
 each man to occupy and to labour till he came again. Another 
 parable, that of the Labourers in the Vineyard, spoken but a day 
 or two before, had a kindred object was intended to check the too 
 eager and ambitious thirst for the distinctions and recompences 
 that the apostles imagined were on the eve of being dispensed. 
 The addressing of two such parables as these to his disciples, with 
 the specific object of rectifying what he knew to be their false 
 ideas and expectations, the readiness with which he listened to the 
 cry of the blind beggars by the wayside, and the interest that he 
 took in the chief of the publicans, conspire to show how far from 
 a mere narrow or selfish one was the interest with which Jesus 
 looked forward to what was awaiting him in Jerusalem. During 
 the two days' journey from Persea through Jericho to the holy city, 
 his thoughts were often and absorbingly fixed on his approaching 
 sufferings and death, but it was not so much in their isolated and
 
 366 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 personal as in their public and world-wide bearings and issues that 
 he was contemplating them ; nor had the contemplation any such 
 effect as to make him less attentive to the state of thought and 
 feeling prevailing among his disciples, or less ready to be interested 
 in those who, like Bartimeus and Zaccheus, threw themselves in 
 his way. 
 
 In coming down into the valley of the Jordan, Jesus had joined 
 the large and growing stream of people from the north and the cast, 
 passing up to the approaching Passover. There would be many 
 Galileans among the group who had not seen him now for many 
 months, and who, if they had not heard of it before, must have 
 heard now at Jericho of all that had happened at the two preceding 
 Feasts of Tabernacles and Dedication, of his last great miracle at 
 Bethany, of the great excitement that had been created, and of the 
 resolution of the Sanhedrim to put him to death. And now he 
 goes up to face these rulers, to throw himself, as they fancy, upon 
 the support of the people, to unfold the banner of the new kingdom, 
 and call on all his followers to rally round it. His Galilean friends 
 heartily go in with what they take to be his design ; they find the 
 people generally concurring in and disposed to further them. One 
 can imagine what was thought and felt, and hoped and feared, by 
 those who accompanied Jesus as he left Jericho. A few hours' walk 
 would now carry him and them to the metropolis. It was Friday, 
 the 8th day of their Jewish month Nisan. The next day was 
 Saturday, their Jewish Sabbath. On the Thursday following the 
 lamb was to be slain, and the Passover festival to commence. The 
 great body of the travellers press on, to get into the town before 
 the sunset, when the Sabbath commences. Jesus and his apostles 
 turn aside at Bethany, where the house of Martha and Mary and 
 Lazarus stands open to receive them. Here in this peaceful retreat 
 the next day is spent, a quiet Sabbath for our Lord before entering 
 on the turmoil of the next few days. The companions of his last 
 day's journey have in the meantime passed into Jerusalem. It is 
 already thronged with those who had come up from the country to 
 purify themselves for the feast. With one and all the engrossing 
 topic is Jesus of Nazareth. Gathering in the Courts of the Temple, 
 they ask about him, they hear what has occurred ; they find that 
 " both the chief priests and the Pharisees had given a command- 
 ment, that if any man knew where he was, he should show it, that 
 they might take him." What, in the face of such an order, will 
 Jesus do ] " What think ye," they say to one another, " that he 
 will not come to the feast?" But now they hear from the newly 
 arrived from Jericho that he is coming, means to be at the feast, is 
 already at Bethany. They hear that Lazarus, the man whom he so 
 recently raised from the dead, is also there. He may not have 
 been there till now. He may have accompanied Jesus to Ephraim,
 
 TITE ANOINTING AT BETHANY. 367 
 
 or chosen some other place of temporary retreat, for a bitter enmity 
 had sprung up against him as well as against Jesus. " The chief 
 priests had consulted that they might put Lazarus also to death, 
 because that by reason of him many of the Jews believed on Jesus." 
 Whether he had retired for a time or not, Lazarus is now at Bethany. 
 Many, unable to restrain their curiosity, go out to the village, "not 
 for Jesus' sake only, but that they might see Lazarus also." It was 
 but a short distance, not much more than the Sabbath-day's journey. 
 During this day, while Jesus and Lazarus are there together, many 
 visitors go forth to feast their eyes upon the sight, and on returning 
 to quicken the excitement among the multitude. 
 
 It was on the evening of the Saturday, when the Sabbath was 
 over, and the next, the first day of the week, had begun, that they 
 made Jesus a supper in the house of Simon, who once had been a 
 leper, some near relative in all likelihood of the family of Lazarus, 
 and Jesus sits at this feast between the one whom he had cured of 
 his leprosy and the other whom he had raised from the dead. 
 Martha serves. She had not so read the rebuke before administered 
 to her as to believe that serving the thing that she most liked, to 
 which her disposition and her capabilities at once prompted her 
 was in itself unlawful or improper, that her only duty was to sit 
 and listen. But she had so profited by the rebuke that, concerned 
 as she is that all due care be taken that this feast be well got 
 through, she turns now no jealous look upon her sister, leaves Mary 
 without murmuring or reproach to do as she desires. And Mary 
 seizes the opportunity now given. She has not now Jesus to her- 
 self. She cannot, as in the privacy of her own dwelling, sit down 
 at his feet to listen to the gracious words coming from his lips. 
 But she has an alabaster phial of fragrant ointment her costliest 
 possession one treasured up for some unknown but great occasion. 
 That occasion has>rrived. She gets it, brings it, approaches Jesus 
 as he sits reclining at the table, pours part of its contents upon his 
 head, and resolves that its whole contents shall be expended upon 
 this office. She compresses the yielding material of which the 
 phial was composed, breaks it, and pours the last drop of it upon 
 his feet, flinging away the relics of the broken vessel, and wiping 
 his feet with her hair. Kingly guest at royal banquet could not 
 have had a costlier homage of the kind rendered to him. That 
 Mary had in her possession so rich a treasure may be accepted as 
 one of the many signs that her family was one of the wealthiest in 
 the village. That she now took and spent the whole of it upon Jesus 
 was but a final expression of the fulness and the intensity of her 
 devotion and her love. 
 
 Half hidden behind the Saviour's reclining form, she might 
 have remained unnoticed, but the fragrant odour rose and filled the 
 house, and drew attention to her deed. Cold and searching and
 
 368 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 jealous eyes are upon her, chiefly those of one who never had any 
 cordial love to Jesus, who never had truly sympathised with the 
 homage rendered him, who held the bag, had got himself appointed 
 keeper of the small purse they had in common, who already had 
 been tampering with the trust, and greedily filching from the 
 narrow stores committed to his care. Love so ardent, consecration 
 so entire, sacrifice so costly as that of Mary, he could not appreciate. 
 He disliked it, condemned it ; it threw such a reproach by contrast 
 upon his own feeling and conduct to Christ. And now to his 
 envious, avaricious spirit it appears that he has got good ground 
 for censure. He had been watching the movements of Mary, had 
 seen her bring forth the phial, had measured its size, had gauged 
 the quantity, estimated the quality, and calculated the value of its 
 contents. And now he turns to his fellow-disciples, and whispers 
 in their ears the invidious question, " Why was not this ointment 
 sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor?" Three 
 hundred pence ! equal to the hire of a labourer for a whole year, 
 a sum capable of relieving many a child of poverty, of bringing 
 relief to many a house of want. Had Judas got the money into 
 his own hands, instead of being all lavished on this act of outward 
 attention, had it been thrown into the common stock, it would not 
 have been upon the poor that it should have been spent. He would 
 have managed that no small part of the money should have had a 
 very different direction given to it. But it serves his mean malicious 
 object to suggest that such might have been its destination. And 
 by his craft, which has a show in it of a wise and thoughtful 
 benevolence, he draws more than one of his fellow-apostles along 
 with him, so that not loud but deep, the murmuring runs round 
 the table, and they say to one another, " To what purpose is this 
 waste ? this ointment might have been sold for so much, and given 
 to the poor." 
 
 Mary hears the murmuring, sees the eyes of one and another 
 turned askance and condemningly upon her, shrinks under the detract- 
 ing criticism of the Lord's own apostles, begins to wonder whether 
 she may not have done something wrong, been guilty of a piece of 
 extravagance which even Jesus may perhaps condemn. It had 
 been hard for her before to bear the reproach of her bustling sister, 
 but harder a thousand times to bear the reproach of the twelve. 
 But neither then nor now did she make any answer, offer any 
 defence of herself. She did not need. She had one to do that office 
 for her far better than she could have done it for herself. Jesus is 
 there to throw the mantle of his protection over her, to explain and 
 vindicate her deed. " Let her alone," he said, " why trouble ye 
 the woman ? she hath wrought a good work upon me." He might 
 have singled out the first adverse criticiser of Mary's act, the 
 suggester and propagator of the censorious judgment that waa
 
 THE ANOINTING AT BETHANY. 369 
 
 making its round of the table. Then and there he might have 
 exposed the hollowness, the hypocrisy of the pretence about his 
 caring for the poor, upon which the condemnation of Mary was 
 based. And doing so, he might have made the others blush that 
 they had given such ready ear to a speech that such a mean and 
 malignant spirit had first broached. He did not do this, at least 
 he said nothing that had any peculiar and exclusive reference to 
 Judas. But there must have been something in our Lord's manner, 
 a look, perhaps, such as he bent afterwards on Peter in the judg- 
 ment-hall, that let Judas know that before Jesus he stood a 
 detected thief and hypocrite. And it was not to weep bitterly that 
 he went forth from that supper, but with a spirit so galled and 
 fretted that he took the earliest opportunity that occurred to 
 him to commune with the chief priests and the Temple guard as 
 to how he might betray his Master, and deliver him into their 
 hands. 
 
 Losing sight of him, let us return to Christ's defence of Mary. 
 " She hath done a good work," he said, ' a noble work, one not 
 only free from censure, but worthy of all praise. She hath done 
 it unto me, done it out of pure deep love a love that will bring 
 the best, the costliest thing she has, and think it no waste, but 
 rather its fittest, worthiest application, to bestow it upon me.' 
 Upon that ground alone, upon his individual claims as compared 
 with all others, Jesus might well have rested his vindication of 
 Mary's act. 
 
 It is, however, upon somewhat narrower ground that Christ 
 vindicates the act of Mary. It was one of such personal attention 
 to him as could be shown to him only while he was present in the 
 flesh. "The poor," said he, "ye have with you always, and when- 
 soever ye will ye may do them good, but me ye have not always." 
 Further still, it was one that but once only in all his earthly life 
 could be shown to Jesus, for " in that she hath poured this oint- 
 ment on me, she is come aforehand to anoint my body for the 
 burial." Had Mary any definite idea that she was doing before- 
 hand what Joseph and Nicodemus would have no time and oppor- 
 tunity for doing, what the two other Marys would go out to do to 
 find only that the need for its being done was over and gone 1 It 
 may be assuming too much for her to believe that with a clearer 
 insight and a simpler faith in what Jesus had said than had yet 
 been reached by any of the twelve, she anticipated the death and 
 burial of her Master as near at hand. But neither can we think 
 that she acted without some vague presentiment that she was 
 seizing upon a last opportunity, that the days of such intercourse 
 with Jesus were drawing to an end. She knew the perils to which 
 he would be exposed whenever he entered Jerusalem. She had 
 heard him speak of his approaching sufferings and death. To others
 
 370 THE CLOSE OF THE MINISTKY. 
 
 the words might appear to be without meaning, or only to be 
 allegorically interpreted, but the quick instinct of her deeper love 
 had refused to regard them so, and they had filled her bosom with 
 an indefinite dread. The nearer the time for losing, the more 
 intense became the clinging to him. Had she believed as the 
 others around her did, had she looked forward to a speedy triumph 
 of Jesus over all his enemies, and to the visible erection of his 
 kingdom, would she have chosen the time she did for the anointing ? 
 would she not have reserved to a more fitting opportunity a service 
 that was more appropriate to the crowning of a new monarch than 
 the preparing of a living body for the tomb 1 In speaking as he 
 did, Jesus may have been only attributing to Mary a fuller under- 
 standing of and simpler faith in his own prophetic utterances than 
 that possessed at the time by any of his disciples. Such a concep- 
 tion of her state of mind and heart would elevate Mary to a still 
 higher pinnacle than that ordinarily assigned to her, and we can 
 see no good reason for doubting that it was even so. But it does 
 not require that we should assign to her any such pre-eminence of 
 faith. It was the intensity of the personal attachment to Jesus 
 that her act expressed which drew down upon it the encomium of 
 the Lord. Thus he had to say of it what he could say of so few 
 single services of any of his followers, that in it she did what she 
 could, did all she could, in that direction there was not a step 
 further that she could have taken. Of all like ways and forms of 
 expressing attachment there was not a higher one that she could 
 have chosen. Her whole heart of love went out in the act, and 
 therefore Jesus said of it, " Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever this 
 gospel shall be preached throughout the whole world, this also that 
 she hath done shall be spoken of for a memorial of her," the one 
 and only case in which Jesus ever spoke of the after earthly fame 
 of any service rendered to him, predicting for it such a wide-spread 
 reputation and such an undying remembrance. Thus said Chry- 
 sostom, when discoursing upon this incident, " While the victories 
 of many kings and generals are lost in silence, and many who have 
 founded states and reduced nations to subjection are not known by 
 reputation or by name, the pouring of ointment by this woman is 
 celebrated throughout the whole world. Time hath passed away, 
 but the memory of the deed she did hath not waned away. But 
 Persians and Indians and Scythians and Thracians, and the race of 
 the Mauritanians, and they who inhabit the British Isles, publish 
 abroad an act which was done in Judea privately in a house by a 
 woman." Fourteen hundred years have passed and gone since in 
 the great church of St. Sophia at Constantinople Chrysostom 
 uttered these words, referring to these British Isles as one of the 
 remotest places of the then known world. The centuries that have 
 rolled by since then have witnessed many a revolution, not the
 
 THE ANOINTING AT BETHANY. 371 
 
 least wonderful among them the place that these British Isles now 
 occupy, but still wider and wider is the tale of Mary's anointing 
 of her Master being told, the fragrance of the ointment spreading, 
 yet losing nothing of its sweetness, such fresh vitality, such 
 self-preserving power, lodging in a simple act of pure and fervid 
 love.
 
 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 L THE TRIUMPHAL ENTRY INTO JERUSALEM JESUS 
 WEEPING OVER THE CITY. 
 
 MATT. xxi. 1-11 ; MABK xi. 1-11 ; LUKE six. 29-44 ; JOHN xn. 12-18. 
 
 THE road from Jericho to Jerusalem, as it winds up the eastern 
 slopes of Olivet, passes close by the village of Bethany. From the 
 village a footpath runs up to the top of the Mount, and thence 
 down a steep declivity into the ravine of the Kedron. This, being 
 the shortest, may have been the path ordinarily taken by the 
 villagers when going on foot to and from Jerusalem. It was not 
 the way that any rider, not the way that the caravans of Passover 
 pilgrims coming up from Jericho, would choose. They naturally 
 would take the somewhat longer, but much better and more level 
 road, which runs round the southern shoulder of the ridge as 
 it shelves down toward the Mount of Offence. The single cir- 
 cumstance that, on the occasion now before us, Jesus rode into 
 the city, might of itself have led us to believe that it was by the 
 latter road he went. Still further confirmation of this meets us 
 as we enter into the details of the short but ever memorable pro- 
 cession. 
 
 The quiet day of Sabbatic rest at Bethany is over. Released 
 from its restraints, visitors may now freely pass from Jerusalem to 
 Bethany. Of this freedom numbers avail themselves, and the 
 village is crowded. It is understood that at some time in the 
 course of the day the first day of the week Jesus means to go 
 into the city. During the forenoon the tidings of this intention 
 are widely circulated. It was now but four days to the Passover, 
 and the crowds of pilgrims, requiring as they did a day or two 
 of preparation, have nearly all arrived. In and about Jerusalem 
 between two and three millions of people l more than a third of 
 
 1 Josephus estimates the numbers present on a Passover occasion at about three 
 millions, little short of half the popiilation of the two provinces. The number of 
 lambs slain is stated to have been 250,500. 
 372
 
 THE PROCESSION INTO JERUSALEM. 373 
 
 the entire population of Judaea and Galilee are assembled. The 
 town itself is unable to afford accommodation to all the strangers. 
 The environs all around are studded with booths and tents. The 
 side of Olivet that looks toward the city, not the least favourite 
 suburb, along which the road from Jericho descends, is covered 
 with these temporary erections. In the afternoon Jesus leaves the 
 village and joins the companies coming up from the valley of the 
 Jordan. The road winds southward for a short distance out upon 
 a ledge of the mountain, from the top of which is caught a dis- 
 tant view of a part of Mount Zion lying outside the walls, the great 
 city itself being concealed. At this point, immediately before and 
 beneath the traveller, there is a deep hollow running up into and 
 dying out upon the hill side, to avoid descending into which the 
 road takes first a sudden bend to the right, till it reaches nearly to 
 the top of the ravine, and then turns again to the left, to traverse 
 the opposite spur of the mountain. Pausing for a moment at this 
 spot, Jesus sees " over-against " him, across the hollow, the village 
 of Bethphage. 1 Calling two of his disciples he bids them go by 
 the short cut across the valley over to the village, and bring an ass 
 and a colt that they would find there, and to have them ready upon 
 the road running near to Bethphage by the time that he and the rest 
 of the disciples have made the round by the head of the hollow. 2 
 The disciples listen with wonder to these instructions. It is but a 
 short distance into the town an hour's walk, or less ; it cannot be 
 through weariness that Jesus wishes to have an ass to ride upon. 
 He had seldom if ever before used this mode of travelling, one not 
 having any special dignity in our eyes, but one that highest digni- 
 taries in the East., kings and princes, prophets and priests, might 
 not unsuitably, upon the most important occasions, make use of. 
 Can it be that the hour so long waited for has come ? Can it be 
 that Jesus is about to throw off his disguise, assume his regal rank 
 and character, and enter the capital as the King of the Jews ? As 
 they move on, groups of pilgrims coming out from Jerusalem meet 
 them by the way. To them they tell the orders Christ has given 
 tell the hopes that are rising in their hearts. The excitement 
 spreads and deepens. They meet the asses by the way. It is the 
 colt, the one upon which no man yet had sat, that Jesus chooses. 
 
 1 The description of the text is derived from a minute personal examination of 
 the localities. Upon the spot where in that description the village of Bethphage is 
 represented as standing, tanks and foundations were perceived, the undoubted evi- 
 dences of the former existence of a village. The site is the same, I presume, as the 
 one assigned to the village by Dr. Barclay in the City of the Great King. It fully 
 and minutely answers, as I have endeavoured to indicate, all the requirements of 
 the narrative. 
 
 2 As usual, the narrative of St. Mark is characterised by the mention of minute 
 particulars, such as the finding of the colt " by the door without, in a place where 
 two ways met." St." Mark may have received his information from St. Peter, who 
 may have been one of the two sent across the valley by Clirist.
 
 374 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 They cast their garments on it, and set him thereon. They hail 
 him as their Messiah, their King. He does now what he never 
 did before : he accepts the title, he receives the homage. All is 
 true, then, that they had been thinking and hoping. It is openly 
 and avowedly as Christ their King that he is about to go into 
 Jerusalem. 
 
 Then let all the honours that they can give him be bestowed. 
 It is but little of outward pomp or splendour they can throw 
 around this regal procession. They cannot turn the narrow 
 mountain-path into a broad and covered roadway for their King, 
 but they can strip off their outer garments, and cast them as a 
 carpet beneath his feet. They can cut down leafy branches from 
 the olive-trees and strew them in his way. Eoyal standards they 
 have none to carry, they have no emblazoned flags of victory to 
 wave. No choice instruments of music are here, through which 
 practised lips may pour the swelling notes of joy and triumph, but 
 they can pluck the palm-tree branches (Nature's own emblems of 
 victory) and wave them over his head, and they can raise their 
 voices in hosannas round him. He allows all this, receives it.^11 as 
 seemly and due. The spirit of exultation, and of triumph expands 
 under the liberty and sanction thus given. Swelling in numbers, 
 freer and more animated in its expressions, the procession moves 
 on till the ridge of the hill is gained, and the city begins to open to 
 the view. The mighty multitude breaks out into acclamations of 
 praise ; those going before and those following after vie with one 
 another, and fill the air with their hosannas, applying to Jesus, 
 and this entry into Jerusalem, passages that all understood to relate 
 to the Messiah. " Hosanna to the Son of David ; blessed is he that 
 cometh in the name of the Lord ; hosanna in the highest, blessed 
 be the King, and blessed be the kingdom of our father David ; 
 peace in heaven and glory in the highest." Some Pharisees who 
 are looking on and listening press through the crowd, and speaking 
 to Jesus as one who must know and feel how misplaced and how 
 perilous his public acceptance of such homage as this must be, 
 would have him stop it. "Master," they say to him, "rebuke thy 
 disciples." " I tell you," is his reply, " that if these should hold their 
 peace, the stones would immediately cry out." 
 
 Down the sloping path the procession moves. A ledge of rock 
 is reached, looking from which across the valley of the Kedron the 
 whole city lies spread out before the Saviour's eye. 1 The sight 
 arrests him ; the procession stops. All around is light and joy and 
 triumph. But a dark shadow falls upon the Saviour's countenance. 
 His eyes fill with tears. He beholds the city, and he weeps over it. 
 Another Jerusalem than the one sitting there at ease, clothed in 
 holiday attire, busied with her Passover preparations, is before his 
 i See Dr. Stanley's Sinai and Palestine, p. 191.
 
 THE TEAKS SHED OVER JERUSALEM. 375 
 
 eye, a Jerusalem beset, beleaguered, crouching in fear and terror, 
 doomed to a terrible destruction. How little power has the pre- 
 sent over the mind and heart of Jesus ! What cares he for this 
 adulation of the multitude, this parade of praise ? Even had it all 
 been genuine, all the outburst of an intelligent faith, an enthusiastic 
 attachment to him in his true character and office, it had not 
 checked the current of thought and feeling within the Saviour's 
 heart. But he knows how hollow it all is, how soon it will all die 
 away. He thinks of the future ; but of what future ? Why was it 
 not the future of the next few days ? Why did the scenes that 
 were then before him not call up that future 1 There before him 
 lay the garden of Gethsemane ; there, across the valley, outside the 
 city walls, the hill of Calvary ; there, in the midst of the lofty 
 buildings that crowned the heights of Zion and Moriah, rose the 
 dwellings of the high priest and the palace of Herod ; and he who 
 is now looking upon these places knows well that before another 
 Sabbath dawns he would be lying in agony in that garden, that 
 beneath these roofs he would be jeered at and spit upon, and mock 
 emblems of royalty forced upon him the sentence of condemnation 
 ratified by the fiendish cries of the city multitude : " Away, away 
 with him ! crucify, crucify him ! " and that there, upon the hill of 
 Calvary, he would have to die the death of the cross. It had been 
 no disparagement to the humanity of Jesus had the sights then 
 before his eyes brought up before his thoughts the sufferings and 
 the death with which so soon they were to be associated. But 
 there is a higher reach of self-forgetfulness here than that of dead- 
 ness or indifference to the acclamation of the surrounding multitudes. 
 Jesus puts aside the prospect of his own endurances, though so near 
 and so dark. He looks over and beyond them. Without naming 
 the city, yet, by some glance of the eye or motion of the hand 
 making clear the reference of his words as he stands weeping, he 
 exclaims : " If thou hadst known, even thou," ' thou upon whom for so 
 many ages so much of the divine goodness has been lavished, whose 
 gates the Lord has loved more than all the dwellings of Jacob, 
 within whose holy Temple for so many generations the smoking 
 altar and the bleeding sacrifice without, and the glimmering light 
 of the Shekinah within, have spoken of a God there waiting to be 
 gracious, if thou, even thou, with all thy crowded sins upon thee, 
 thy stoning of the prophets and casting forth of those that were 
 sent to thee, if thou at least, at last, in this thy day, when, all his 
 other messengers rejected, the Father has sent forth his own Son to 
 thee, saying, Surely they will reverence my Son, if thou in thy 
 day hadst known the things belonging to thy peace spoken so often, 
 so earnestly by him.' 
 
 "If thou hadst but known." The sentence is cut short For a 
 moment the bright vision rises of all that Jerusalem might have
 
 376 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 been had she hut known the time of her visitation. Had she but 
 owned and welcomed her Messiah when he came, then might she 
 have sat as a queen among all the cities of the earth. And he 
 whom she honoured would have honoured her so as to cast all her 
 former glory into the shade. Then, without her hands being 
 steeped in the wickedness of the deed, or any hands of wickedness 
 being employed to do it, some fit altar might have been found or 
 reared, and in sight not of mocking enemies, but adoring friends, 
 might the great sacrifice have been offered up ; and from Jerusalem, 
 as from the centre of the great Christian commonwealth, might the 
 tidings of the completed redemption have gone forth, and unto her 
 all the glory and the honour of the nations might have been brought. 
 All this, and more, might have been in that bright vision which 
 for a moment rises before the Saviour's eye. But quickly the 
 vision dissipates ; gives place to one, alas ! how different. " But 
 now they are hid from thine eyes. For the days shall come upon 
 thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and 
 compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side, and shall lay 
 thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee ; and they 
 shall not leave in thee one stone upon another; because thou 
 knewest not the time of thy visitation." 
 
 The pause, the tears, the lament over the doomed city, must 
 have produced a deep impression on those around. How little 
 could they understand the meaning of what Christ said, or the 
 source of the emotion he displayed. One thing was clearly shown : 
 the absence of all anticipation on the part of Jesus of any present 
 individual success and triumph. There was much in the manner of 
 his reception, in the plaudits with which he was hailed, in the 
 popular enthusiasm that had found for itself such a vent, to have 
 impelled a mere political adventurer to take advantage of the 
 occasion, and put himself at the head of a great national movement. 
 How easy had it been for Jesus, had he gone in with the false ideas 
 and expectations of the thousands then congregrated in and about 
 Jerusalem, to have got himself recognised as their leader, and to 
 have created a commotion which there were no means at hand to 
 allay ! His thoughts are far otherwise occupied. A sublime com- 
 passion fills his spirit, draws forth his tears, and prompts those 
 pathetic lamentations. 
 
 We are not told what effect the strange interruption of the 
 triumphal march produced. It must have done something to 
 subdue the ardour, to quiet the demonstrations of the crowd. The 
 procession, however, after the momentary pause, moves on; the 
 hosannas abated, it may have been, but still continued. They go 
 down into the valley, they cross the Kedron, they climb the heights 
 on which the city stood, they enter into the nearest gate. The 
 whole city is moved. The great bulk of the town population look
 
 THE BARREN FTG-TREE. 377 
 
 askance upon this singular spectacle, far less acquainted with and 
 less interested in Jesus than the strangers from the country. 
 
 " Who is this 1" they say, as they see Jesus in the centre of the 
 excited multitude; 'and what can all this mean?' They are told 
 by those taking part in the procession : ' This is Jesus the prophet 
 of Nazareth of Galilee.' How they received the intelligence we do 
 not know ; with something of wonder we may believe, and not a 
 little of incredulity and dislike. The movement, however, is too 
 deep and too extensive for any instant questioning of its character 
 or interruption of its progress. The authorities, taken in all likeli- 
 hood by surprise, do not interfere. Jesus goes up into the Temple, 
 looks round upon all things that he saw there, and, the even-tide 
 being now come, 1 he turns, retraces his steps, and retires, we know 
 not how attended, to the quiet home at Bethany. 
 
 n. 
 
 THE FIG-TREE WITHERING AWAY THE SECOND CLEANSING 
 OF THE TEMPLE. 
 
 MATT. xxi. 12-17 ; MARK xi. 12-19 ; LUKE xix. 45-48 ; JOHN xii. 19. 
 
 SPEAKING generally of the days and nights of the memorable 
 week which preceded his crucifixion, St. Luke tells us that Jesus 
 " in the day-time was teaching in the temple, and at night he 
 went out, and abode in the mount that is called the mount of 
 Olives." 2 The other evangelists speak of his going out at even-tide 
 to Bethany, to lodge there. Some of the nights may have been 
 spent in the village home ; some outside in the olive-gardens. If the 
 night which succeeded his triumphal entry into the city was spent 
 in the latter way, it may have been in solitude, in sleeplessness, 
 in fasting, and in prayer, that its silent watches passed. And this 
 would explain to us the circumstance, otherwise obscure, that next 
 morning as he returned into the city Jesus was hungry. In this 
 condition, he saw at some distance before him, by the wayside, a 
 fig-tree covered with leaves. It is the peculiar nature of this tree 
 that ordinarily its fruit appears before its leaves. Showing as it 
 did, such profusion of leaf, the fig-tree on which the eye of Jesus 
 rested should have had some fruit hanging on its branches. But 
 when he came up to it, it had none. Here is a tree which by its 
 show of leaves gives promise that it has fruit upon it. Nay more, 
 here is a tree which steps out in advance of all its fellows, for the 
 i Mark xi. 11. * Luke xxi. 37.
 
 378 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 time of figs, the ordinary season for that fruit ripening in the 
 neighbourhood of Jerusalem, has not yet come; here is a tree 
 which, by the very prematureness and advanced condition of its 
 foliage, tempts the traveller to believe that he will find there the 
 first ripe figs of the season It is as an ordinary traveller that 
 Jesus approaches it, and when "he finds that it has by its barrenness 
 not only sinned against the laws of its species, and failed to profit 
 by the advantages it has enjoyed, but in its early foliage made ruch 
 a boastful and deceitful show of precedence and superiority above 
 its neighbours, he seizes upon it as one of the fittest emblems he 
 can find of that land and people so highly favoured, for which the 
 Great Husbandman had done so much, which had set itself out 
 before all other lands and peoples, and made so large yet so 
 deceitful a profession of allegiance to the Most High. In his treat- 
 ment of this tree, Jesus would symbolise and shadow forth the 
 doom that the making and the falsifying of these professions has 
 drawn down upon Israel It was in mercy that in dumb prophetic 
 show he chose to represent this doom in a calamity visited upon a 
 senseless tree rather than upon a human agent. He might have 
 taken one or more of the men of whom this tree was but a type, 
 and in some terrible catastrophe inflicted upon them have prefigured 
 the fate of their countrymen. Or he might, as he had done not 
 long before, when pointing to the heavy judgments impending 
 over Judea, have taken actual instances of human suffering, such 
 as that of the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their 
 sacrifices, or of the eighteen upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, 
 and employed them as emblems of the like destruction in reserve 
 for the impenitent. Upon the very occasion now alluded to, when 
 the first hint or obscure prophecy was given of the kind of ruin 
 coming upon Judea, he had spoken a parable in which he had used 
 a fig-tree as an emblem of Israel, a fruitless fig-tree, for which a 
 period of respite had been solicited and obtained, for which year 
 after year everything had been done, by digging about it and dunging 
 it, that skill and care could suggest. That parable, however, had 
 stopped at a very critical point. The intercession had prevailed. 
 The barren fig-tree was to be allowed to stand, another year of trial 
 was to be given to it. We may assume that all which the dresser 
 of the vineyard promised would be done; but the issue is not 
 revealed. The curtain drops as the fourth year begins. What 
 happened at its close is left uncertain. After all this care and 
 culture the barren fig-tree might remain barren still, and the 
 sentence, " Cut it down ; why cumbereth it the ground 1" come to be 
 executed upon it. Whether it was actually to be so or not, the 
 parable did not reveal. But now this actual fig-tree of the wayside, 
 found so full of leaf though so empty of fruit, is taken, even as the 
 fig-tree of the parable, to represent impenitent Israel, and in his
 
 THE CLEANSING OF THE TEMPLE. 379 
 
 treatment of it Jesus takes up, carries on, and completes the parable, 
 telling what it left untold. 
 
 The sentence against the fig-tree pronounced, Jesus passes on 
 into the city and up into the temple. He had on the preceding 
 evening merely looked around on all that was to be seen. It was 
 the day (the tenth of the month Nisan) on which, according to the 
 old command, the Jews were solemnly to set apart the paschal lamb 
 for the coming sacrifice. And Christ's object may then have simply 
 been to present himself as the true Lamb of God, set apart from 
 the beginning, who four days thereafter was to offer up himself in 
 the sacrifice of the cross. At the time of that short evening visit 
 all may have been comparatively quiet within the Temple. But 
 now, as at an early hour he enters the court of the Gentiles, the 
 same sights are before him that met his eyes and stirred his spirit 
 three years before : the bustle of a great traffic, of buyers and 
 sellers, and money-changers, all busily engaged. In reproof of such 
 desecration, in assertion of his divine dignity and power as the Son 
 coming to his Father's house, with full authority to dispose of all 
 things there as he pleased, he ha"d at the beginning of his ministry 
 cleansed the Tempje, cast out the traffickers, overturned the tables 
 of the money-changers with little or no effect as it would seem, 
 for now all the abuses are restored. The hand of the cleanser is 
 as much needed as ever, and it is once more put forth as vigorously, 
 perhaps more so, than before, for we detect increase of sternness 
 both in word and deed on this occasion. But why the repetition 
 of the act ? "Why begin and close the ministry in Jerusalem with 
 such cleansing of the Temple? Though we could give no other 
 answer to such a question, we should be satisfied with regarding 
 this as one of the many instances in which Jesus repeated himself 
 as he did both in speech and in action. He knew the nature on 
 which he desired to operate. He knew how difficult it is to fix 
 even the simplest ideas, not connected with the outward world of 
 sense and action, in the minds and hearts of the great mass of man- 
 kind. He knew that however good the instruments might be that 
 are used to do this (and he chose the simplest and the best), to make 
 the impression deep and lasting the stroke must be oft repeated ; 
 the same truth told in the same words, or illustrated by the same 
 emblems, or symbolised by the same acts. In the Gospels of St. 
 Matthew and St. Mark more than a dozen instances occur of the 
 same discourses re-delivered with scarcely any variation in the 
 phraseology ; and we may warrantably conclude that this happened 
 far more frequently in the actual ministry of Jesus than now 
 appears upon the face of the record. It was the same with the 
 miracles as with the teachings^ our Saviour. Twice he fed many 
 thousands on the hill-side, and twice within the lake miraculous 
 draughts of fishes were taken. It was in harmony with the method
 
 380 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 thus so often followed, that at the commencement and at the close 
 of his labours in Judea, within the courts of the Temple, in presence 
 of the priests and the rulers, he asserted by a bold and authoritative 
 act his prophetic and Messianic character, his true and proper Son- 
 ship to the Father. In the latter case we can see a peculiar 
 propriety in his having done so. The day before, he had made his 
 appeal to the people. In language borrowed from ancient prophecy, 
 and known by all to apply to Christ their coming king, they nad 
 hailed him as their Messiah, and in his acceptance of their homage 
 he had publicly appropriated to himself the Messianic office. It 
 remained that he should make a like appeal to the priesthood, call- 
 ing on them to recognise him as holding that high office. He did 
 so the next day in the Temple. It was the first thing he did on 
 entering the holy place. This was the way in which he began that 
 brief ministry within those courts, in which his earthly labours 
 were to close. He knew beforehand how fruitless it would be ; but 
 nevertheless the sign and token of who it was that was amongst 
 them must be given. 
 
 The second cleansing of the courts of the Temple appears to 
 have taken the custodiers of the holy place as much by surprise as 
 did the first. They made no attempt to interrupt it, nor did they 
 interfere with Jesus, in the use to which he turned the courts that 
 he had cleansed. For he did not retire after the purification was 
 accomplished. He remained to keep guard over the place from 
 which the defilement had been removed, not suffering any man to 
 carry even a common vessel across the court, which the Jews had 
 turned into a common city thoroughfare. He continued for hours 
 to occupy it unchallenged ; the people flocked into it, and he taught 
 them there. They were all, we are told, very attentive to hear 
 him, and they were astonished at his doctrine, the citizens who 
 had never heard him teach so before, and the Galileans, to whom 
 the doctrine indeed was not new, but who wondered afresh to hear 
 it spoken under the shadow of the holy place. And the teaching 
 had its usual accompaniment : " The blind and the lame came to him 
 in the Temple, and he healed them" there. 1 He had wrought 
 many miracles before in Jerusalem, but never here or never thus ; 
 never within the walls of the sanctuary ; never in such a public and 
 solemn manner, as direct attestations of his asserted kingly dignity 
 and power. For hours he had the large outer court of the Gentiles 
 at his command, and this was the manner in which the time and 
 the place were employed. What a change from the morning to the 
 forenoon occupation, from the crowding, and the jostling, and the 
 bargaining, and the driving to and fro of cattle, to the silent multi- 
 tude hanging upon the lips of the great Speaker, or watching as one 
 and another of the lame and the blind is brought to him to be healed ! 
 1 Matt. xxi. 14.
 
 THE CLEANSING OF THE TEMPLE. 381 
 
 But where all this while are the priests and the Levites, the rulers 
 and the Temple guard? They are looking on bewildered, their 
 earlier antipathy kindled into a tenfold fervour of hate. The closer 
 to them he comes, the more distinctly and forcibly he presses upon 
 them the evidences of his Messiahship, it convinces them the more 
 what a dangerous man he is, how utterly impossible it is that he 
 can be any longer tolerated or suffered to act in such a bold, 
 presumptuous, defiant style the resolution they had already formed 
 to destroy him taking firmer hold of them than ever. For the 
 moment, however, they fear both him and the people ; l his conduct 
 in braving them within their own stronghold so unlike anything 
 that they had ever fancied he would dare to do ; the current of 
 popular feeling running strongly in his favour. Not that there 
 was much outward demonstration of this feeling. It had expended 
 itself the day before in the triumphal procession without the city 
 gates, where all felt more at liberty. Within, the area of the 
 Temple, and under those searching, frowning looks of the scribes 
 and the chief priests, the breath of the people is abated. Thinking 
 of the strange tears and lamentations over the capital, of all they 
 see and hear within the Temple, something of doubt and uncertainty, 
 of awe and fear, has been stealing over the spirits of the ignorant 
 multitude, which restrains them from any marked or vehement 
 expressions of attachment But there are little clildren among 
 them who had taken part in yesterday's procession, within whose 
 ears its hosannas are still ringing. These feel no such restraint, 
 and in the joyous ardour of the hour and scene, they lift up their 
 voices and fill the courts of the Temple with the cry, " Hosanna 
 to the Son of David ! " This is more than the chief priests and 
 scribes can bear. In their displeasure they appeal to Christ 
 himself, saying, "Hearest thou what these say?" wishing him, as 
 their allies had done the day before, to stop praises, in their ears 
 so profane, so blasphemous. All the answer that they get is a 
 sentence applicable to all praise that comes from the lips of child- 
 hood, cited from a psalm which is throughout a prophecy of himself, 
 a proclamation of the excellency of his name and kingdom over all 
 the earth : " Have ye never read, Out of the mouth of babes and 
 sucklings thou hast perfected praise 1 " Pleasant ever to the eye 
 of Jesus was childhood, with its charm of freshness, simplicity, 
 buoyant freedom and open ardent love and trust, and sweet ever 
 to his ear the strains of juvenile devotion, but never so pleasant 
 as when he saw these bands of children clustering round him in 
 the Temple ; never so sweet as when no others left to do it they 
 lifted up their youthful voices in those hosannas, the last accents 
 of earthly praise that fell upon his ear. 
 
 At the rebuke and the quotation, the baffled scribes and high 
 i Mark xi. 18 ; Luke xix. 48.
 
 382 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 priests retire to do no more that day in the way of interruption ; 
 retire to mature their plans, to wait for the morrow, and see what 
 it will bring forth. So closed the last day but one of the active 
 ministry of Jesus. 
 
 IIL 
 
 THE BARREN FIG-TREEPARABLES OF THE TWO SONS AND OF 
 THE WICKED HUSBANDMEN. 
 
 MARK xi. 20-83; xn. 1-12; MATT. 2x1. 23-46; LUKE xx. 1-19. 
 
 IT was early on the morning of Monday, the second day of the 
 Passion week, that Jesus pronounced the doom upon the fig-tree. 
 The sentence took immediate effect : " Presently the fig-tree withered 
 away." 1 The withering, however, was not so instantaneous and 
 complete as to attract at the moment the attention of the disciples, 
 or the shades of evening may have wrapped the tree from their 
 sight as they went out to the Mount of Olives. Next morning, 
 however, returning into the city by the same path they had taken 
 the day before, they came to the tree, looked at it, and saw that 
 it was " dried up from the roots." 2 Jesus himself seems scarcely to 
 notice it, is about to pass it by. The ready spokesman, Peter, calls 
 his attention to it, and says, " Master, behold, the fig-tree which thou 
 cursedst is withered away." It is simple wonder, and nothing 
 more wonder at the power by which such an effect had been 
 accomplished which breaks out in this expression of the apostle. 
 And he is the faithful representative of the state of feeling in the 
 breasts of his brethren. They manifest no curiosity, at least make 
 no inquiry as to the spiritual meaning of the incident. Their 
 thoughts are engrossed with the singularity of the occurrence, that 
 by a simple word spoken, without any external agency employed, 
 so large a tree, in full leaf, should, within twenty-four hours, have 
 shrunk up from its very roots, and should now stand before them 
 a leafless, shrivelled, lifeless thing. Had they been in a different 
 .frame of mind, had they been wondering, not how, but why so 
 strange a thing was done, Jesus might have spoken to them other- 
 wise than he did. As it was, he graciously accommodates himself 
 to the existing condition of their thoughts, by letting them know 
 that his word had been a word of power, because a word of strong 
 undoubting faith, such faith as they themselves might cherish. 
 "And Jesus, answering, saith unto them, Have faith in God. For 
 verily I say unto you, that whosoever shall say unto this mountain, 
 i Matt. xxi. 19. 2 Mark xi. 20.
 
 THE POWER OF FAITH AND PRAYER. 383 
 
 Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea ; and shall not doubt 
 in his heart, but shall believe; it shall be done." In the early days 
 of Christianity, the faith of the apostles was authorised and 
 encouraged to take hold of the omnipotence of the Deity, and 
 through it to work miracles. This kind of faith, in its absolute and 
 perfect form, existed only in our Lord himself. To the power itself 
 by which the miracles were to be wrought there was absolutely no 
 limit, as there was none to that omnipotence which the faith was 
 to appropriate and employ. But in actual exercise the power was 
 to be proportioned to the faith. It was to be according to their 
 faith that it was to be done by them, as well as in them. We 
 accept it then as true to its whole extent, that at that time, and as 
 to these men, there was no miracle of power needful or useful for 
 the furtherance of their apostolic work, which their faith, had it 
 been perfect, might not have enabled them to accomplish. Of 
 course we understand that that would not have been a true or 
 intelligent faith in God which desired simply to make trial of its 
 strength, independently of the purpose for which the power was 
 exercised. We put aside, therefore, as quite frivolous and out of 
 place, such a question as this : Could St. Peter or St. Paul, when 
 their faith was strongest, have cast a mountain into the sea, or 
 plucked up a sycamore-tree by the roots ? Whatever God saw was 
 meet to be done, the power to do that was given ; and so to the 
 very shadow of the one, and to part of the dress of the other, a 
 wonderful efficacy was once attached. But they and all these early 
 Christians were to know that the gift of working wonders, which 
 sat for a season like a crown of glory upon the brow of the infant 
 Church, was not to be idly and indiscriminately employed, and was 
 ever to be reckoned as of inferior value in God's sight to those 
 inward graces of the soul, in which true likeness to and fellowship 
 with God consists. 
 
 The short conversation by the wayside over the walk into the 
 city is resumed, and the Temple courts are reached, already filled, 
 though it was yet early, with eager expectant crowds. Before 
 beginning his work of teaching and of healing, Jesus is walking 
 leisurely through the courts, calmly surveying all around, looking, 
 perhaps, to see what effect his act of the preceding day has had in 
 the way of removing the profanations of the place. 
 
 The Sanhedrim has met, a consultation has been held, it has 
 been resolved that as a preliminary step he shall be challenged, and 
 forced to produce and authenticate his credentials. 
 
 " As he was walking in the temple, there came to him the chief 
 priests and the scribes and the elders," the three great bodies out 
 of whom the highest council of the Jews was constituted. It is a 
 formal deputation, in all likelihood, from this council, which now 
 approaches and accosts him. Their question seems a fit and fair
 
 384 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 one. They are the constituted keepers of the Temple, of the only 
 public building of the city that the Komans have left entirely under 
 Jewish control. There has been a manifest invasion of the terri- 
 tory committed to their guardianship, of the offices that they alone 
 are held competent to discharge ; fbr who is this that, being neither 
 priest nor Levite, nor scribe nor elder, deals with the sacred place 
 as if it were his own? Nothing at first sight more proper or 
 pertinent than that they should come to one acting in such a way 
 as Jesus had done the day before, and say to him, " By what 
 authority doest thou these things, and who gave thee this authority V 
 They know that no authority but one, that of God himself, 
 could sanction the procedure of the Galilean. He may plead that 
 authority ; but his own bare claiming it will not suffice, he must 
 display his title to the possession of this authority, must tell who 
 gave it him. Looking at the motives by which they were actuated 
 and the sinister objects they had in view considering, too, how 
 full and varied were the materials already in their hands for 
 answering their inquiry, Jesus might have kept silence and refused 
 to answer. He does not do this : he gives indeed no direct or 
 categorical reply ; but it would be wrong to say that he cleverly or 
 artfully evades the question they put to him by asking them 
 another upon a quite different subject ; that he suspends his reply 
 to them on theirs to his, so that, out of their refusal to answer, he 
 may construct a defence of his own silence. It was not as a mere 
 evasion of a captious challenge, as a mere method of stopping the 
 mouths of the challengers, that " Jesus answered and said unto them, 
 I will ask you one question, and answer me, and I will tell you by 
 what authority I do these things : The baptism of John, was it from 
 heaven or of men 1 answer me." Jesus refers to the baptism of 
 John as containing within itself a sufficient reply to their inquiries. 
 If they acknowledged it as divine, they must also recognise his 
 authority as divine ; for John had openly and repeatedly pointed to 
 him as the Messiah, the greater than he, whose shoe-latchet he was 
 not worthy to unloose. First, then, he must have from them a 
 confession as to the true character of the Baptist's ministry. This 
 they are unprepared to give. Though really and in their hearts 
 rejecting it, they had never openly discredited John's claim to be a 
 prophet sent by God. They had managed to keep the people in 
 ignorance of what they thought. They had not needed to interfere 
 to check the career of the Baptist. Herod had done their work for 
 them in his case. John had been removed, and they were willing 
 enough it should be thought that they participated in the popular 
 belief. They felt at once the difficulty of the dilemma in which 
 the question of Jesus involved them. Should they say, as was 
 naturally to be expected they should, that John's baptism was from 
 heaven, Jesus would have it in his power to say, ' Why then did ye
 
 PARABLE OF THE TWO SONS. 385 
 
 not believe him when he testified of me ? If he was from heaven 
 then so am I, my ministry and his being so wrapped together, that 
 together they stand or together they fall.' Such was the instant 
 use to which Jesus could turn a present acknowledgment on their 
 part of the divine origin and authority of the Baptist's ministry, 
 convicting them at once of the plainest and grossest inconsistency. 
 They were not prepared to stand convicted of this in presence of 
 the people, now stirred to intense anxiety as they watched the 
 progress of this collision. But as little were they prepared to face 
 the storm that they would raise by an open denial of the heavenly 
 origin of the Baptist's mission ; and so to Christ's pointed interroga- 
 tion, their only answer, after reasoning among themselves, is, " We 
 cannot tell." It was false ; they could at least have told what they 
 themselves believed. They could, but dared not ; and so by this 
 piece of cowardice and hypocrisy they forfeit the title to have any 
 other or fuller satisfaction given them as to the nature and origin 
 of that authority which Jesus exercised, beyond that which was 
 already in their hands. "And Jesus answering said unto them, 
 Neither do I tell you by what authority I do these things." x 
 
 Scarcely prepared for having the tables turned so quickly and 
 thoroughly upon them, the scribes and chief priests and elders 
 stand crestfallen before the Lord. He has them now in hand, nor 
 will he lose the last opportunity of telling them what they are, and 
 what he knows they have resolved to do. About to pronounce 
 over them his fearful anathemas, when all the word-battles of this 
 troubled day are over, he will force them now beforehand to spread 
 out with their own hands the grounds upon which those anathemas 
 were to rest. Out of their own mouths will he condemn them. 
 This is done by a skilful use of parable ; the same kind of use 
 that Nathan made of it when he got David to judge and condemn 
 his own conduct. " But what think ye ?" says Jesus to them, as if 
 he were introducing a wholly new topic : " A certain man had two 
 sons ; and he came to the first, and said. Son, go work to-day in 
 my vineyard. He answered and said, I will not ; but afterward he 
 repented, and went. He came to the second, and said likewise ; 
 and he answered and said, I go, sir; but went not. Which of 
 these two did the will of his father ? " Little suspecting the real 
 drift of this short and simple story, and rather relieved than other- 
 wise by the question, as getting them out of their embarrassment 
 and covering their fall, they say unto him at once, " The first ; " the 
 one who said he would not, yet who went. Then came the moral 
 and application of the tale : " Verily I say unto you, That the 
 publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you. 
 For John came unto you in the way of righteousness, and ye 
 believed him not ; but the publicans and the harlots believed him : 
 i Mark xi. 33. 
 2B
 
 386 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 and ye, when ye had seen it, repented not afterward, that ye might 
 believe him." It was the treatment given to John and to his ministry 
 that Jesus had been setting forth in the conduct of the two sons 
 to their father. They, the chief priests and elders of the people, 
 were the second son ; and those publicans and harlots, who repented 
 at the preaching of the Baptist, were the first. It was bad enough 
 to have the veil of hypocrisy behind which they had tried to screen 
 themselves torn aside ; to have their unbelief in the Baptist pro- 
 claimed upon the housetops. It was worse to have publicans and 
 harlots preferred before them, the preference grounded upon their 
 own verdict. But they have still more to hear, still more to bear. 
 Jesus had been comparing them, to their great chagrin, with some 
 of the lowest of their own times. His eye now takes a wider range. 
 He looks back to the treatment which these men's forefathers had 
 given to messenger after messenger of the Most High, and he looks 
 forward to that which they, fit sons of such sires, were about to give 
 himself; and bringing the past, the present, and the future into 
 the picture, he tells of a vineyard well fenced, well furnished, let 
 out to husbandmen; of servant after servant sent to receive its 
 fruits ; of one of them being beaten, another stoned, another killed, 
 till the owner of the vineyard having "one son, his well beloved," 
 at last sends him, saying, "They will reverence my son." But the 
 wicked husbandmen, when he comes, take and kill him, and cast 
 him out of the vineyard. " What then," says Jesus, " shall the lord 
 of the vineyard, when he cometh, do unto those husbandmen?" 
 This question was addressed, not to the chief priests and scribes, but 
 to the people, to whom, as St. Luke l tells us, the parable was spoken ; 
 and they, not looking perhaps beyond the simple incidents of the 
 tale, say, "He will come and destroy the husbandmen, and will 
 give the vineyard to others." But why are the chief priests and 
 the elders forced, as unwillingly they are, to remain standing there 
 in Christ's presence with a great crowd around theml what are 
 they thinking of this second story? what will they now say? 
 Scarcely has Christ begun to speak of the vineyard and its fence, 
 and its wine-press, ere Isaiah's vineyard type, they knew, of the 
 house of Israel recurs to their memory ; and as messenger after 
 messenger is spoken of as despatched, what could those be but the 
 prophets whom the Lord had sent unto their forefathers ? Already 
 a strong suspicion that this tale also is to be brought to bear against 
 them has entered into their minds a suspicion that is turned into 
 a certainty as Christ proceeds to speak of the owner of the vine- 
 yard as a father having an only and well-beloved son, just such a 
 son as Jesus had always claimed to be to God ; and as he went on 
 to represent the seizure and the death of that son, the very deed 
 that they already had resolved to do, in these husbandmen they 
 1 Lmke xx. 9.
 
 THE CORNER- STONE. 387 
 
 sec themselves ; in their doom, whatever it may be, they see their 
 own. 
 
 Whilst the people, then, in ready answer to Christ's question, 
 speak out the natural verdict of the unbiassed conscience, and say, 
 "He will destroy the husbandmen, and give the vineyard unto 
 others," they, as they hear such a heavy sentence passed, almost 
 involuntarily exclaim, " God forbid." Jesus looks at them as they 
 utter this vehement disclaimer, and says, " What is this then that 
 is written ? Did ye never read in the Scriptures, The stone which 
 the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner ? 
 This is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes V Christ 
 quotes here from the 118th Psalm, a psalm familiar to the Jews as 
 pointing throughout to their Messiah ; so familiar, that it was from 
 it that those salutations were taken by which Christ on his entry 
 into the city had been hailed by the common people two days 
 before, as well as those hosannas to the Son of David which the 
 children had repeated the next day in the Temple, the echoes of 
 which must still have been ringing somewhat unpleasantly in the 
 ears of the chief priests and the rulers. Jesus wishes by this 
 quotation to carry on as it were the prophecy of the parable ; to 
 show what would be the doom inflicted upon the perpetrators of 
 that dark deed, the murder of the Father's only and well-beloved 
 Son. That Son was to be himself the inflicter of this doom ; but 
 as he in the parable was dead, and could not be represented as a 
 living agent, the image of the vineyard is dropped, and another is 
 introduced, fitting in however with the other, the rejecters of the 
 stone being the same with the husbandmen of the vineyard. The 
 chief priests might have some little difficulty in seeing how it was 
 that in speaking about the corner-stone Jesus was but carrying on 
 the same history a step or two beyond the point at which the parable, 
 by the necessity of its structure, had stopped. Any such difficulty 
 was at once removed by Christ's dropping for a moment all allegory, 
 all imagery : " Therefore I say unto you, The kingdom of God shall 
 be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits 
 thereof." 1 They can mistake no longer; the kingdom is to be 
 taken from them ; as the occupants of the vineyard, they are to be 
 ejected. But is this all? does this exhaust their doom? What 
 about that doom may this new image of the stone convey ? " Who- 
 soever shall fall on this stone shall be broken, but on whomsoever 
 it shall fall it will grind him to powder." First the stone is passive, 
 suffering all kinds of rough usage to be heaped upon it, revenging 
 itself the while for all the insults offered by causing those who offer 
 them to stumble over it, and fall and be broken. But at last, as if 
 invested with some inner living power, or as if lifted and wielded 
 by some invisible but all-powerful hand, it becomes active, gets into 
 
 Matt. xxi. 43.
 
 388 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 motion, lifts itself up, and with a crushing weight descends upon 
 its despisers and grinds them to powder. Such was Christ to that 
 commonwealth of the Jews, to that proud theocracy of which the 
 men before him were the head. By the Great Architect he had 
 been laid of old in Zion, the chief foundation of the great spiritual 
 edifice to be reared out of the "ruins of the Fall For many a 
 generation he had been a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence. 
 All these wrongs of the past he passively had borne, and now in his 
 own person he is to submit to reproach and suffering and death ; 
 but the hour that was to see him exalted because of this, and 
 proclaimed to be the head of the corner, was to see him coming also 
 in judgment He was to arise out of his place ; he was to pour 
 contempt on his despisers ; utter desolation was to come upon the 
 city and people of the Jews. The stone was to fall upon it, and it 
 was in truth a very grinding of that land to powder, when every 
 vestige of its ancient institutions was swept away, its people perished 
 in multitudes, and the remnant, scattered over all the earth, was as 
 the dust which the wind drives to and fro. 
 
 IV. 
 
 THE MARRIAGE OF THE KING'S SON QUESTION AS TO THE 
 
 TRIBUTE-MONEY. 
 MATT. xxn. 1-22 ; MASK xn. 13-17 ; L/-KE xx. 20-26. 
 
 HAVING repelled the challenge to state and to produce the 
 authority upon which he was acting, Jesus had addressed first to 
 the challengers the parable of the two sons, and then to the people 
 the parable of the wicked husbandmen. In both of these parables 
 the conduct of his rejecters had been exposed, and the fate in store 
 for them foretold. Yet another parable was added, intended to 
 complete that picture of the future which Jesus would hold up 
 before their eyes. This parable, the last addressed by our Lord to 
 the people at large, was partly a repetition, partly an expansion of 
 the one delivered some time before in Persea, on the occasion of an 
 entertainment given to Christ by a chief Pharisee, and which is 
 recorded in the 14th chapter of the Gospel of St. Luke. It is inter- 
 esting to notice the difference between the two, corresponding so 
 accurately, as they do, with the differences of time and circum- 
 stances under which they were spoken. When the first was uttered, 
 the hostility of the hierarchy, though deep and deadly, was latent. 
 The certain man, thereforej who makes a supper, and sends out his
 
 PAEABLE OF THE MARRIAGE FEAST. 389 
 
 servant to tell them that were bidden to come, for all things were 
 now ready, has nothing more to complain of than that his messen- 
 ger and his message were both treated with neglect. With more 
 or less courteousness, more or less decision of purpose, more or 
 less implied preference for other engagements, the invitation was 
 refused. And the penalty visited upon this refusal was simply 
 exclusion from the banquet. " For I say unto you that none of 
 those men which were bidden shall taste of my supper." 
 
 In the second parable, the guilt of the first-invited guests is 
 greater, the penalty more severe. The certain man who makes a 
 feast becomes a king, invitations issuing from whom had all the 
 character of commands. And it is for no common purpose that the 
 royal banquet is prepared. It is for a great state occasion; to 
 celebrate a great state event. Even therefore had the king's invi- 
 tations met with no other or different reception than that given to 
 the invitation of the householder, a much higher guilt had been 
 involved in declining it; for a royal banquet made under such 
 circumstances had something in it of a public or political character. 
 To make light of an invitation to such a banquet, to plead any of 
 the events or duties or engagements of ordinary life as a reason for 
 declinature and absence, would not only be in the highest degree 
 discourteous, it would have a taint of treason in it, an element of 
 disloyalty and rebellion. 
 
 In the one case a single servant is sent forth, and when he 
 tells the bidden guests to come, for all things are now ready, with 
 one consent they begin to make excuse ; but there is nothing of 
 contempt or malignity displayed towards either the provider of the 
 feast or the servant who bears the summons. There is an apparent 
 desire to make out something like a good excuse. In the second 
 parable the king sends out not one, but a band of servants, who 
 meet with a flat refusal Other servants are sent forth, not to 
 punish, not to announce the king's purpose to exclude, but to 
 renew the invitation to entreat the refusers to reconsider their 
 resolution. Some make light of it, treat this second invitation with 
 even greater disrespect than the first; while others are so pro- 
 voked that they take the messengers, spitefully entreat them, and 
 slay them. Is it wonderful that the wrath of the king should in 
 consequence of this be so much greater than that of the simple 
 householder ; that he should treat the heavier offence with a deeper 
 mark of displeasure than mere exclusion from his presence and his 
 table ] " He sends forth his armies and destroys these murderers, 
 and burns up their city." 
 
 This bringing in of armies, this mention of a city and its destruc- 
 tion, at once calls up to our thoughts the ruin hovering over 
 Jerusalem, and teaches us to connect the parable of the marriage- 
 feast with that of the wicked husbandmen ; both intended to set
 
 390 THE PASSION WKEK. 
 
 forth the terrible punishment of the Jewish people the taking of 
 the kingdom from them, and the giving it to others. 
 
 The wrath of the chief priests, scribes, and elders at the speaker 
 knew no bounds. They would have laid hold of him and borne him 
 off to inflict the condign punishment that in their eyes he so fully 
 merited. But they feared the people. They were not sure of the 
 temper of the crowd by which they were surrounded, not sure how 
 far they would be supported by the Roman authorities. Outwardly 
 curbing, inwardly nursing their wrath, they withdraw to try an- 
 other method. They have been baffled in the attempt openly to 
 confront him ; but could they not entangle him in his talk by some 
 crafty questions, and force from him an answer that might supply 
 material for accusation, " that so they might deliver him unto the 
 power and authority of the governor?" 1 Leaving some of their 
 underlings to watch him, so as to be ready to report all he says and 
 does, they retire to hold a secret conclave. They call the Herodians 
 into council, whom they find quite willing to combine with them 
 in the execution of any plan that promised to prevail against the 
 man whom they equally hate. The deliberation is brief. A step 
 at once suggests itself that cannot but succeed, which, one way or 
 other, is certain to damage, if not utterly to ruin, their common 
 enemy. The chief priests, however, and scribes, and elders, the 
 leading men who have just had that humiliating colloquy with him, 
 will not go themselves to carry out this well-concocted scheme. 
 They have had enough of personal collision. They will not venture 
 again into his presence, to be taunted and maligned before the 
 people. It is besides a very low and hypocritical piece of work 
 that is to be done, and they commit it to other hands, who tako 
 with them some of these Herodians, to give the matter less of a 
 purely Pharisaic character. 
 
 Having got their instructions, these emissaries approach Jesus, 
 feigning themselves to be sincere men, bent upon ascertaining what 
 their duty is. And when they come they say to him, "Master, we 
 know that thou art true, and carest for no man, for thou regardest 
 not the person of men, but teachest the way of God in truth," a 
 very insidious piece of flattery, a great part of its power lying in the 
 apparent honesty with which the men who offer it embrace them- 
 selves among the number of those for whom they are sure that 
 Jesus will not care ; a kind of flattery consisting in attributing to 
 the person flattered a superiority to flattery, to which, if well ad- 
 ministered, our weak humanity is peculiarly susceptible. With 
 this artful preface, which they hope will tempt him to speak boldly 
 out the answer that may suit them, they say, " Master, is it lawful 
 to give tribute to Caesar, or not ? Shall we give, or shall we not 
 give 1 " It is not the expediency but the lawfulness of paying the 
 i Luke xx. 20.
 
 THE QUESTION AS TO THE TRIBUTE-MONEY. 391 
 
 tribute exacted by the Romans, that they ask about. That law- 
 fulness was denied by many who, under the force and pressure of 
 necessity, yet paid the tax. The Pharisees themselves, who owed 
 much of their power and popularity to their faithful adherence to 
 the principles of the old Jewish theocracy, disputed the lawfulness 
 of the exaction. They took their stand here upon a very plain de- 
 claration of Moses : " Thou shalt in any wise set him king over thee 
 whom the Lord thy God shall choose ; one from among thy brethren 
 shalt thou set king over thee : thou mayest not set a stranger 
 over thee, which is not thy brother." l When the Herodian 
 family, one not of Jewish but of Idumean extraction, backed by the 
 power of Rome, took possession of the throne of Judea, the entire 
 Jewish Sanhedrim, appealing to this scripture, protested against 
 what they rightly enough regarded as a violation of the Mosaic 
 law. Their protest, however, was unavailing. The first two 
 Herods were kept upon the throne by the Roman Emperors, whose 
 policy it then was through them to rule Judea. Ere long indeed, 
 and this happened during our Saviour's life, the mask was dropped. 
 The sovereignty of Judea was directly assumed by the Romans. 
 One or other of its northern provinces was given to one of the 
 Herods, who governed it under the title of tetrarch or king ; but 
 Judea proper was placed under a Roman Procurator. Such a 
 method of foreign rule was still more obnoxious to the Jewish 
 people than the government of the Herods, who, though by descent 
 Idumean, had by intermarriage with Jewish families won for them- 
 selves something like a Jewish title. It was the policy, and we 
 have no doubt it was the honest principle, of the Pharisees secretly 
 to foster the general and deep, but repressed and smouldering 
 opposition to the Roman rule. Distinguished as a religious party 
 for their extreme and punctilious attachment to the ceremoni- 
 alism of the Jewish law, as a political party they won golden 
 opinions of the people by standing in the vanguard as upholders 
 of the national independence. Among the many political ques- 
 tions which the state of the country raised, was one about the 
 payment of the poll-tax imposed by the foreign governors. Argu- 
 ing from the premise that the whole foundation of the Roman 
 authority was hollow, grounded on usurpation and incapable of 
 defence, the leading political Pharisees vehemently denied the 
 legality of the imposition. The Herodians, the defenders of the 
 legitimacy of the Herodian dynasty, could not well deny the 
 justice of the Roman claim to civil supremacy, as it had been by the 
 Roman power that the dynasty which they supported had been 
 instituted. Yet among them there were many who bore no 
 good-will to the Italian conquerors, and who looked to the rule 
 of the Herods as the best protection against an entirely foreign 
 i Deut. xvii. 15.
 
 392 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 domination, the best preservative of something like a separate 
 and independent national existence. Such kind of Herodians 
 perhaps they were who now associated themselves with the Pharisees 
 in putting the question to Jesus "Master, is it lawful to give 
 tribute to Caesar or not ? Shall we give, or shall we not give ?" 
 
 They think that they have shut him up ; no door seems open to 
 evade or to decline an answer. A simple affirmative or a simple 
 negative must be given. On either side, the difficulty and the 
 danger to Jesus seem nearly equal. If he shall say it is lawful to 
 give tribute to Caesar, his favour with the people is gone; his 
 pretensions to be the Messiah are scattered to the winds; from 
 being an object of attraction and attachment he becomes an object 
 of alienation and contempt. Should he, on the other hand, say, 
 as they fondly hope he will, that it is not lawful, the weapon is 
 at once put into their hands which they can use against him with 
 fatal effect. They have but to report him to Pilate as a stirrer-up 
 of sedition, and prove their charge by his own declaration made in 
 the presence of the people. But they are not prepared for the 
 manner in which the insidious question is to be dealt with. " Why 
 tempt ye me, ye hypocrites ? " said Jesus ; " show me a penny," 
 the coin in common circulation. There were two kinds of money 
 at that time in use among the Jews, the Eoman, by which all the 
 common business of life was transacted, and in which the capita- 
 tion-tax, about which the question that had been raised, was paid ; 
 and the old Jewish, still partially employed, and in which especially 
 the Temple tax was paid. They bring him one of the Eoman coins 
 a denarius. He looks at it and says, " Whose image and super- 
 scription is this ? " They say to him, " Caesar's." He says to them, 
 "Sender to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the 
 things that are God's." 
 
 By this singular and short reply the hypocrisy and the incon- 
 sistency of his questioners is at once exposed. The mere payment 
 of the tribute is but a secondary matter after all. The true, the 
 great question was, Should the Roman rule be submitted to or not 1 
 was it or was it not lawful to submit to that authority, to bear the 
 foreign yoke ? This question the Jewish people and these Pharisees, 
 their most influential leaders, had suffered so far to be decided. 
 They had yielded to, and accepted, the foreign yoke. There was 
 this manifest token of subjection, that Roman money was circulat- 
 ing among them as the common and accepted coin of the realm. It 
 was an acknowledged maxim, it had become a rabbinical proverb, 
 that the coin of a country tells who is its king. Things being in 
 that state in Judea, it was an idle, it was a deceitful, it was a 
 base and malignant thing, to come to Jesus and try to force from 
 him such a decision upon that isolated point of the payment of 
 the tax, as would involve him with the Roman authorities. Let
 
 THE QUESTION AS TO THE TRIBUTE MONEY. 393 
 
 those who thought Caesar was a usurper, and were prepared 
 to cast off his authority, raise at once the standard of rebellion, 
 and try the hazard of a civil war. Let those who, holding the 
 existing government to be illegitimate, thought at the same time 
 that matters were not ripe for open resistance, bide their time, and 
 mature their measures as well and as secretly as they pleased ; but let 
 not any, like these Pharisees and Herodians, while fawning upon 
 the Eoman governor, and forward in all the outward expressions 
 of submission, pretend to have any difficulty about the payment of 
 the tax ; above all, let them not, while trying to keep up their 
 own power and popularity by letting it be understood that they 
 sympathised with the people in their opposition to the foreign 
 rule, try to inveigle one who from the first had stood aloof and 
 declined to take any part whatever in the political dissensions of 
 the country, so as to accuse him to the governor, and have him 
 condemned and executed for that which, neither in their own eyes, 
 nor in that of the great majority of their fellow-countrymen, was 
 accounted as a crime. 
 
 Coupling it with his demand for a sight of the Eoman coin, and 
 his pointing to the image and superscription stamped thereon, I have 
 no doubt that those of Christ's auditors would have been right who 
 interpreted the first part of Christ's answer, " Render to Caesar the 
 things that are Caesar's," as implying that it was lawful to pay the 
 tribute-money ; right and consistent, so long as Caesar or any one 
 was acknowledged as king, and the money from his mint taken and 
 employed, that the tribute levied by him should be paid; the 
 duty of obedience springing from the fact of the existing dominion. 
 But there can be as little doubt that those also of that audience 
 would have been right who interpreted the second part of Christ's 
 answer, "Render to God the things that are God's," as carrying 
 with it a severe and most merited rebuke of his questioners. For 
 had they but fulfilled that acknowledged obligation, had they been 
 but true to the spirit and laws of their own ancient government, no 
 Roman soldier had ever invaded their borders, no Roman governor 
 had sat in the Hall of Judgment at Jerusalem. It was their own 
 failure in rendering to God the things that were his, a failure of 
 which Pharisees and Herodians had alike been guilty, which had 
 reduced their country to bondage ; and now to be wrangling about 
 the narrow question of the payment of the tribute, what was it but 
 as if the men who by some act and deed had exposed themselves 
 to the infliction of a certain penalty, were to sit down and discuss 
 on abstract grounds the legitimacy of the authority by which that 
 penalty was exacted ?
 
 394 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 V. 
 
 QUESTION OF THE SADDUCEES AS TO THE RESURRECTION OF 
 
 THE DEAD. 
 MATT. xxii. 23-33 ; MARK xn. 18-27 ; LUKE xx. 27-40. 
 
 BAFFLED and exposed by Christ's answer as to the payment of 
 the tribute-money, the Pharisees retire. And now their great 
 rivals, the Sadducees, take the field, and try to entangle Jesus in 
 his talk. Though constituting a powerful party, it is not till the 
 closing scene of the Saviour's life that the Sadducees appear to 
 have taken any active part against him. It was alien from their 
 disposition to interfere with any popular religious movement till it 
 took such shape as made it in their eyes dangerous to the state, and 
 then they did not scruple summarily to quench it. They looked 
 with a haughty contempt upon what they regarded as the ground- 
 less beliefs and idle superstitious practices of the great bulk of their 
 countrymen. In common with them they believed indeed in the 
 divine origin of the Jewish faith, restricted as they took that faith 
 to be mainly to the announcement that there was but one God, the 
 God of Israel, in opposition to all idolatry. They admitted the 
 divine authority of the laws and institutions of Moses, whom they 
 especially honoured as their great heaven-sent and heaven-instructed 
 lawgiver. But they rejected the whole of that oral tradition which 
 had grown up around the primitive Mosaic revelation, which had 
 come generally to be regarded, and was especially defended by 
 the Pharisees, as of equal authority with it. They accepted the 
 other books of the Old Testament as well as the Pentateuch, but 
 there seems good reason to believe that they held the latter in 
 peculiar and pre-eminent esteem. In then- interpretation of the 
 Pentateuch they adhered rigidly to the letter, rejecting all the 
 false glosses and elaborate explanations and inferences which the 
 Pharisaic Eabbis had introduced. Into their religious creed the 
 Sadducees would admit nothing which Moses had not directly and 
 unambiguously announced. True to their character as the free- 
 thinkers or rationalists of their age and nation, they^were incredulous 
 as to any other existences or powers influencing human afiairs 
 beyond those that lay open to the observation of their senses. 
 They did not as professed disciples of Moses they could not 
 repudiate the agency of God as exerted in the creation and govern- 
 ment of the world; but they limited that agency to a general 
 supervision and control which left full scope to human volition and 
 human effort, which they regarded as the chief factors in the
 
 THE SADDUCEES AND THE RESURRECTION. 395 
 
 unfolding of events. So far as their professed faith would let them, 
 they were materialists. They acknowledged the existence of one 
 great Spirit. They could not deny that beings called angels had 
 occasionally, in the early times whose history was recorded by 
 Moses, appeared to take some part in earthly affairs. But, dis- 
 believing in the existence of any other spirit than that of the 
 Supreme, whatever their explanation of these angelic manifestations, 
 it was one that left them at liberty to deny, as they did, that there 
 was any permanent and separate order of beings called angels 
 standing between men and God. They said that there was " no 
 resurrection, neither angel, nor spirit." 1 They believed in the soul 
 of man only as exhibited in and by the body which enshrined it ; 
 with that body it perished at death. The future state, a world 
 of rewards and punishments hereafter for the things now done in 
 the body, was but a dream. To speak of the resurrection of the 
 body at some after-period was a solecism. There was no spirit for 
 it to be re-united with. It might please God, out of the materials 
 that had once formed one human body, to make another like it, and 
 to plant in it another soul ; but there was, there could be, no real 
 resurrection of the dead, no rising to life again of the same beings 
 that had been buried. If such a thing could be, and were actually 
 to take place, the beings so raised would return (as they imagined) 
 to the same kind of life as that which previously had been theirs ; and 
 from the very absurdities and contradictions which would be implied 
 in this, they drew many an argument against the popular belief in a 
 resurrection, which those adhering to that belief, holding it as they 
 did in a very gross and materialist fashion, were unable to meet. 
 
 How did such men look upon Jesus Christ ? Perhaps in the 
 first instance as a weak but harmless enthusiast, little worth their 
 notice, or worth only a smile or a scoff. His teaching, so far as it 
 was reported to them, or they knew anything about it, was utterly 
 distasteful to them ; it was animated by a spirit totally the reverse 
 of theirs ; it was full of faith in the invisible. In it the spiritual, 
 the future, the eternal, not only enwrapped but absorbed the pre 
 sent, the temporary, the sensible. God was no longer a mere name 
 for a remote and inaccessible Being, who sat aloof upon a throne of 
 exalted supremacy. He was the Father, continually engaged in 
 guiding, protecting, providing; clothing the lilies of the field; 
 feeding the fowls of the air ; causing his sun to shine ; sending his 
 rain from heaven ; caring for all the creatures of his power, all the 
 children of his love. No thought was to be taken for the body as 
 compared with that which should be taken for the soul. The world 
 beyond the present stood out in vivid perspective and relief. The 
 angels of God were represented as rejoicing there over each sinner 
 that repented on earth, and the spirits of the dead as waiting to 
 1 Acts xxiii. 8.
 
 396 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 welcome each brother spirit as it passed up to its place beside them 
 in the heavens. 
 
 How the Sadducees regarded the miracles of our Lord it is diffi- 
 cult to say. They would regard his feeding of the hungry and his 
 curing of the diseased either as impositions, or exercises of some 
 occult power of which he had become possessed. But when he 
 pretended to cast out devils and to raise the dead, his miracles came 
 into direct collision with their unbelief, and awakened more than 
 incredulity stirred up malignity. He was in their eyes a base and 
 bad man who could thus deceive the people. If he would prove 
 that he came from God, let some sign direct from God be given. 
 The only occasion on which, during the course of our Saviour's 
 ministry, the Sadducees interfered with him, was when they once 
 joined the Pharisees in demanding from him a sign from heaven. 
 They got signs enough, some of them wrought under their own 
 eyes, as in the healing^of the man born blind, and in the raising of 
 Lazarus, but signs which only increasingly exasperated them, so 
 that when they saw that the movement created by Jesus was 
 assuming politically so threatening an aspect, they were quite will- 
 ing at last to league with the Pharisees, and assist in removing him ; 
 for it was bettei , so said one of themselves, that one man should die 
 than that the whole nation should perish. Parties to the recent 
 resolution come to by the Sanhedrim, the Sadducees were watching 
 with as jealous eyes as the Pharisees all that was taking place in 
 the courts of the Temple. Though conspiring with them in their 
 design, it may have been with some degree of secret complacency 
 that they noticed how in the word-battle about the tribute-money 
 he had foiled the rival sect. They have a question of their own, 
 however, with which, as they fancy, he will find it more difficult to 
 deal ; one with which they had often pressed their adversaries, and 
 to which they had never got any satisfactory reply. They will see 
 how Jesus will deal with it. If he agree with them, then adieu to 
 his power with the people ; if he fail to answer, what a triumph 
 both over him and all credulous believers in a resurrection ! 
 
 They state their case and propose their query. Moses had 
 commanded that if a Jew died childless, leaving a widow, his 
 brother should marry her, and had ruled that the child of the 
 second marriage should be reckoned as the heir of the brother pre- 
 deceased. There were seven brothers, they told Jesus, who all 
 died, each having been successively the husband of the same 
 woman; and last of all the woman died: "in the resurrection, 
 therefore," they say to him, very confidently somewhat coarsely 
 and contemptuously, " whose wife shall she be of the seven ? " 
 Christ's answer is direct and emphatic. " Ye do err," he says, " not 
 knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God." His charge against 
 them is not one of hypocrisy, but of error, of wrong belief, that
 
 THE SADDUCEES AND THE RESURRECTION. 397 
 
 error having a twofold source : (1.) Their ignorance of the meaning 
 of the Scriptures, of that very book of Moses from which they had 
 quoted ; (2.) Their ignorance of the power of God, of the manner 
 of its exercise generally, and, more particularly, of the way in 
 which it should be exercised in effecting that resurrection which they 
 denied. Taking these sources of error in inverse order, Jesus first 
 unfolds wherein their error as to the power of God consisted. 
 They looked upon it too much as a mere force, illimitable indeed, 
 yet fixed, unvarying, working now as it had ever done before, to 
 work hereafter even as it was working now. They failed to recog- 
 nise it as the forthputting of the energy of a living Being who was 
 ever thereby embodying his will, expressing his purposes, executing 
 his plans ; the very same error as to the power of God which lies 
 at the root of a large part of our modern infidelity, traceable, as it 
 easily is, up to a denial of the personal agency of a Being who has 
 plans and purposes and a will of which the whole creation is but a 
 constant and gradual development But, still more particularly, 
 the Sadducees had erred in limiting the future manifestation of the 
 power of God, in imagining that if the dead were to rise again, 
 they were to live subject to the same conditions, united to each 
 other by the same relationships with those that now exist. Prior 
 to the Incarnation, very little beyond the bare fact that there was 
 to be a resurrection of the dead had been revealed. Had any right 
 conceptions of the character and power of the great Creator been 
 entertained, preparing the mind that entertained them for an end- 
 less variety in the future as we now know that there has been in 
 the past, the very nature of the fact, apart from all further informa- 
 tion about it, that there was to be hereafter a general resurrection 
 of the dead, should have stifled in the birth such an idle objection 
 as that which these Sadducees were urging ; for come how it might, 
 let it be attended with whatever other outward changes in the 
 physical condition of our globe, it was in itself a change too great 
 to allow of any ideas borrowed from the present condition of things 
 being transferred to that new state of which it must form the initial 
 stage. But Jesus goes a step further than this : he puts his hand 
 forward partially to lift the veil, and tell somewhat of the nature 
 and the extent to which these changes will be carried which the 
 resurrection will involve. "And Jesus, answering, said unto them, 
 The children of this world marry, and are given in marriage : but 
 they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, 
 and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry, nor are given 
 in marriage : neither can they die any more : for they are equal 
 unto the angels ; and are the children of God, being the children 
 of the resurrection." 1 This much is told us here, that great 
 changes are in store for us; that out of the grave a new eco- 
 i Luke xx. 34-36.
 
 398 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 nomy is to arise, elevated in all its conditions and relationships 
 above that under which we now dwell. But how much also 
 remains untold ; how much to check that prurient curiosity with 
 which we are tempted to pry into the future, and extort from it 
 its secrets ! 
 
 The error of the Sadducees as to the power of God having been 
 exposed, Christ proceeds to notice their error as to the Scriptures : 
 "As touching the dead that they rise ; have ye not read inthi book 
 of Moses ? " l Among the Jews, down till near the times of Christ, 
 the first five books of our Bible formed but one book, written con- 
 tinuously on one roll of parchment. It is out of this book, called 
 ordinarily the Book of the Law, that he quotes a sentence in proof 
 of the resurrection. He might have cited other ampler and much 
 clearer testimony from other parts of the sacred Scriptures, especially 
 from the Psalms and the books of Job, Daniel, and Hosea ; but he is 
 dealing now with the Sadducees, and he takes the passage from the 
 same writings to which they had themselves appealed. " Have ye not 
 read in the book of Moses, how in the bush God spake unto him, 
 saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the 
 God of Jacob ? He is not the God of the dead, but the God of the 
 living: ye therefore do greatly err." 1 The link that binds here 
 the premise to the conclusion is anything but apparent at first sight. 
 The inference seems neither natural nor necessary. Does God's 
 calling himself the God of the departed patriarchs of itself prove 
 that these patriarchs were still living 1 Is this not the simple and 
 only meaning of the passage quoted, that he who had been the God 
 of the fathers would be the God of the children ? Even granting 
 that the continued existence of those, of whom God spake as being 
 still their God, was to be legitimately inferred from the expression 
 cited, what proof was involved in that of their resurrection ? Might 
 the soul not live though the body were left for ever in the grave 1 
 In answer to such questions, let it be noted that Christ's reply to 
 the Sadducees was evidently rather general than specific cut at the 
 root of their unbelief rather than at the particular branch of it 
 pressed on his regard. These men were unbelievers in the resurrec- 
 tion of the body, because they were unbelievers in the immortality 
 of the soul. The two were so connected in their regards that they 
 stood or fell together. Prove to them the one, the major proposi- 
 tion that the soul survived the dissolution of the body, and you 
 cut away the ground upon which their rejection of the other rested. 
 Establish the fact that Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob were still 
 living when God spake of them as he did to Moses from the bush, 
 and you overturned the foundation of their infidolity. And this is 
 what Jesus does, not so much by argument, as by his own authori- 
 tative declaration that there lay in the phrase, " I am the God of 
 * Mark xii. 26.
 
 THE SADDUCEES AND THE RESURRECTION. 399 
 
 Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob," a depth of meaning that the Sad- 
 ducees had failed to penetrate, that it was nothing short of an 
 announcement that the relationship in which God stood to these 
 departed patriarchs was so peculiar, so close, so gracious, as to pre- 
 clude the possibility of either soul or body ever finally perishing, as 
 to involve at once the immortality of the one and the resurrection 
 of the other. We would be ready at once to acknowledge that, 
 had Christ not put this meaning upon the phrase, had he not 
 furnished us with this key for the unlocking of its full significance, 
 it would not have appeared to us necessarily to have involved the 
 inference that is drawn from it. But let us be equally ready to 
 accept the interpretation of it that he has given. We would do so 
 even though the links that bound the premise to the conclusion 
 remained obscure ; but we lay this brief compendious argument in 
 favour of the resurrection alongside that expanded proof which St. 
 Paul unfolds in the 15th chapter of the First Epistle to the Corin- 
 thians, and light begins to dawn upon it. 
 
 The idle question of the Sadducees was much akin in character, 
 owned the same spiritual pedigree, with that dealt with by the 
 apostle : " But some man will say, How are the dead raised up ? 
 and with" what body do they come ?* As Jesus met the query put 
 to him about the woman and her seven husbands, by telling his 
 questioners that they utterly mistook the nature of the changes 
 that the resurrection was to bring with it, for in that world it was 
 to usher in there was to be neither marrying nor giving in marriage ; 
 so Paul met the questioners of his day by telling them that they 
 too had fallen into the like mistake of confounding the future with 
 the present ; that it was not to be the same body that was buried 
 which was to rise, but one as different from it as the seed that rots 
 beneath the sod is from the stalk of wheat that issues from it ; that 
 flesh and blood could not inherit the kingdom of God ; that the 
 natural was to be changed into the spiritual, the corruptible into 
 the incorruptible, the terrestrial into the celestial. And just as 
 Christ deduces from the covenant relationship in which God stood 
 to the patriarchs the preservation of their entire being, and the 
 clothing it with a deathless immortality, even so from the relation- 
 ship in which Jesus stands to all who are in vital union with him, 
 does the Apostle draw the very same conclusion. In taking their 
 nature on him, in bearing their sins, in dying that they might live, 
 Jesus took their whole humanity and wound it round him, and 
 so identified it with his own being and estate, that as in him they 
 live, with him they must rise again, his life involving theirs, his 
 resurrection involving theirs. 
 
 " For if Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin, but 
 the spirit is life because of righteousness ; and if the Spirit of him 
 that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up
 
 400 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his 
 Spirit that dwelleth in you." 
 
 VI. 
 
 THE LAWYER'S QUESTION THE TWO GREAT COMMANDMENTS 
 CHRIST, DAVID'S SON AND DAVID'S LORD. 
 
 MATT. xxn. 34-46 ; MARK XH. 28-37. 
 
 PHARISEES, Herodians, Sadducees have each in turn been 
 foiled in their assaults. Jesus has either turned aside the edge of 
 their insidious questions, or has given such reply as recoils upon 
 the questioners. Among the auditors who are standing by whist 
 this questioning is going on, there is one, himself a Pharisee and a 
 scribe, who, struck with admiration at our Lord's answer, ventures 
 an inquiry of his own. In making it he does not appear to have 
 been animated by any sinister or malignant motive. He may, as 
 St. Matthew seems to intimate, have been incited by others to put 
 his question, in the hope that it might puzzle or perplex, but the 
 question itself has no such character, reveals no such intent ; bear- 
 ing as it does all the marks of being the ingenuous inquiry of one 
 who, disturbed and dissatisfied with the manifold classifications 
 and frivolous distinctions introduced by the ordinary teachers of 
 the law, sought the judgment of Jesus in addressing to him the 
 question, ' Master, which is the great, the first of all the command- 
 ments 1 Is there any one commandment which is entitled to pre- 
 eminence over all the rest 1 if there be, what is that one command, 
 and upon what ground does its claim to supremacy repose 1 ?' 
 Christ's answer is direct and explicit. There is, he tells the 
 questioner, such a command. To love the Lord our God with all 
 our heart and soul, and mind and strength, is the first and the 
 great commandment of the law. But there is another, a second 
 commandment, like unto the first, flowing out of it, and founded 
 on it : " Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two 
 commandments hang all the law and the prophets." 
 
 The law of God, according to the view thus given of it, was not 
 an aggregation of so many separate precepts, some of which a man 
 might keep, while he broke others ; suggesting of course the double 
 question whether he broke more than he kept, as if that were to 
 decide whether on the whole he was a breaker or a keeper of the 
 law, or, were that held to be too rude and mechanical a method of 
 judging, suggesting a comparison in point of importance between 
 those commands that were kept and those that were broken, so as
 
 THE LAWYER'S QUESTION. 401 
 
 bo supply a better estimate of the amount and value of the obedience 
 rendered. In opposition to all such views of the law of God, 
 views not confined to the Scribes and Pharisees of Christ's day, 
 which lie at the bottom of all those crude notions as to man's 
 actual standing towards the divine law which circulate widely in 
 the world we live in, Jesus teaches that a divine unity pervades 
 that law, a unity that cannot be broken ; all its single and separate 
 commands resting upon a common, firm, immutable basis ; all so 
 connected in meaning, spirit, and obligation, that you cannot truly 
 obey one without obeying all, nor break one without breaking 
 all. Looking at the law in this oneness of character, Jesus points 
 to the two requirements of love to God and love to one another as 
 containing within themselves the sum and substance of the whole. 
 
 " On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." 
 Love is the golden link that binds the whole together, and hangs 
 the whole upon the Throne of the Eternal Love is the fulfilling 
 of the law. No precept is or can be kept where it is wanting. If 
 love be present, obedience is at once rendered easy, and gets the 
 character that makes it pleasing in the sight of God. 
 
 The scribe's reply to our Lord's answer shows how thoroughly 
 he sympathised with it. He had admired the wisdom shown in 
 Christ's dealing with other questioners. He admires still more the 
 wisdom shown in the answer to his own question. It accords 
 entirely with what, after much thought bestowed upon the matter, 
 he had himself come to believe. " Well, Master, thou hast said the 
 truth ; for there is one God, and there is none other but he ; and 
 to love him with all the heart, and all the understanding, and with 
 all the soul, and with all the strength, and to love his neighbour as 
 himself, is more than all whole burnt-offerings and sacrifices." The 
 alacrity, the warmth, the vigour of this response, tell how intense 
 the conviction was of which it was the utterance. Born and brought 
 up though he had been in the very heart of a region where other 
 and very different sentiments prevailed, he had come to see the 
 comparative worthlessness of mere ceremonialism; that offerings 
 and sacrifices were worse than idle forms, mere solemn mockeries of 
 God, if that inner sentiment of the heart, whence only they could 
 have life and value, were wanting ; that the only true and animating 
 principle of all piety towards God, and of all right conduct towards 
 our fellow-men, was love ; that as the body without the spirit is 
 dead, so all the mass of outward service without love was dead also. 
 In our turn we wonder at the clear and just conception of the 
 relative importance of the moral and the ceremonial, to which, 
 placed as he had been, this man had reached. But far as he has 
 got, he yet lacked one thing. He had ceased to put that value 
 upon burnt-offerings and sacrifices that the mass of his countrymen 
 did. His searching eye had seen through the hollowness of that 
 2
 
 402 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 external sanctimoniousness which was cultivated all around him with 
 such sedulous care. But he had not yet come to see all that the first 
 and greatest of the law's commands required, nor to feel how far short 
 of its requirement his obedience had fallen. The hollowness of one 
 way of attempting to obey it he fully saw, but the imperfections of 
 that way which he had learned to put in its place, its impotence to 
 justify the sinner before the tribunal of the Most High, he Iiad not 
 perceived. He wanted the humble, broken, contrite heart ; and so 
 Jesus says; to him, " Thou art not far from the kingdom of God ;" 
 not far from, but yet not in ; nearer by many a step than those who 
 are going about in the rounds of a punctilious pietism to establish 
 a righteousness of their own before God, but still not across the 
 border-line which encompasses that kingdom which we must enter 
 in the spirit of penitence and faith, as knowing and feeling that by 
 the deeds of the law, how far soever our compliance with it be 
 carried, no flesh living can be justified in the sight of God. Let 
 the judgment passed upon this man's position by the unerring 
 Judge proclaim to us the truth, that it is not enough to have made 
 the discovery of the worthlessness of all service without love ; that 
 to get into the kingdom the further discovery must be made, that 
 in all things, and especially in that very love to God which primarily 
 and above all is required of us, we come so miserably short, have 
 so grievously offended, that our only resource is to throw ourselves 
 upon the rich mercy of our God revealed in Jesus Christ. 
 
 And was it not for the very purpose of turning the eyes of that 
 scribe, the eyes of those who then stood around him, and the eyes 
 of the men of all ages upon Himself, as the great revealer of the 
 Father, that Jesus, having put all to silence, so that no man durst 
 ask him any further question, in his turn becomes a questioner 1 
 The Law and the Prophets, whose sum and substance, so far as they 
 were a code of duty, he had just declared, had something more in 
 them than authoritative commands, were meant to accomplish 
 other purposes besides that of making known to men their duty to 
 God and to one another. There were promises and prophecies in 
 them as well as precepts ; prophecies and promises pointing to him 
 by whom the law was to be magnified and made honourable. The 
 law carried the gospel in its bosom. As to the one, the scribe put 
 a question to Jesus, which goes to the very heart of the matter : as 
 to the other, Jesus, seeing the Pharisees gathered around him, puts 
 a question to them which does the same. " What think ye," he 
 says, "of Christ? whose son is he?" The answer springs at once 
 to every lip. 
 
 " Son of David " was the familiar, the favourite title, by which 
 Christ, the expected Messiah, was known among them. When, 
 amazed by his miracles, the people began to conjecture that he was 
 indeed the Christ, they said to one another, " Is not this the son of
 
 DAVID'S SON AND DAVID'S LORD. 403 
 
 David 1" When the woman of Syrophenicia, and the two blind 
 beggars of Capernaum, Bartimeus of Jericho, and others, would 
 express their faith in his Messiahship, they did it by saying, " Have 
 mercy on us, thou son of David." When the multitude, translated 
 for the time out of incredulity into belief, surrounded him on his 
 late triumphal entry into Jerusalem, they exclaimed, " Hosanna to 
 the son of David !" a salutation that the very children in the Temple 
 next day repeated showing us how wide and general was the 
 knowledge of this name. The answer then to Christ's first question 
 is immediate and unhesitating. Not so the answer to the second : 
 " He saith unto them, How then doth David in spirit call him Lord, 
 saying, The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, till 
 I make thine enemies thy footstool ? If David then call him Lord, 
 how is he his son ?" Jesus quotes here the first verse of the 110th 
 Psalm, a psalm assumed by him, and acknowledged by the Jews, to 
 have been written by David, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. 
 Two great personages appear. in it, the one speaking of and to the 
 other. It is with the high position, the complex character, the 
 glorious destinies of the latter that the psalm is occupied through- 
 out. Addressed by the highest of all epithets, he is introduced as 
 sitting on the loftiest of all elevations. His kingly power, his 
 eternal priesthood, his vast and ever-widening sway, are successively 
 set forth. The Jews admitted that these were prophecies touching 
 the Messiah. But between them and any right apprehension of the 
 true character of the spiritual rule and empire of that Messiah there 
 hung an obscuring mist. The bright and gorgeous vision that had 
 floated for ages before the eyes of the Jewish people was that of the 
 future advent of a King, who was to raise the Jewish commonwealth 
 to supremacy over the nations; the vision of an earthly visible 
 world-wide monarchy to be set up by the son of David a vision 
 which, as their affairs grew dark and desperate, and their national 
 independence was more and more threatened, stood forth in brighter 
 and brighter colouring to gild the clouds that closed in darkness 
 above their heads ; a vision clung to with an enthusiastic devotion 
 which ennobled them as a nation, and led on to the deeds of 
 chivalrous heroism, which have crowned with glory their last wars 
 with the Romans, but which sunk them into spiritual blindness, 
 and kept them from understanding the very prophecies upon which 
 it ostensibly was founded. It was this vision, baseless as it was 
 bright, which Jesus seeks to dissipate by putting to them his 
 pointed inquiry : ' If Christ be David's son, how could he at the 
 same time be David's Lordf The true key to that announcement 
 in the 110th Psalm, and to many similar prophecies, was wanting 
 to the Jews so long as the true and proper divinity, as well as the 
 true and proper humanity, of their Messiah remained unperceived 
 aud unacknowledged.
 
 404 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 How often and how strikingly does Holy Writ set forth the 
 double, and as it might seem incongruous, relationship of Christ to 
 David, as being at once his son and his Sovereign, his successor and 
 yet his Lord, set forth the singular, and as it might seem incom- 
 patible, qualities or characteristics that belong to him! "And 
 there shall come forth," saith the prophet Isaiah, " a rod out of the 
 stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots." l He is 
 the rod, the branch growing up out of, hanging upon, and supported 
 by the parent stem. But anon the image changes, and the rod, the 
 branch, becomes the root by which the stem itself is supplied with 
 nourishment and strength : " And in that day there shall be a root 
 of Jesse, which shall stand for an ensign of the people ; to it shall 
 the Gentiles seek : and his rest shall be glorious." 2 " Behold," saith 
 Jeremiah, "the days come, saith the Lord, that I will raise unto 
 David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and 
 shall execute judgment and justice in the earth. In his days Judah 
 shall be saved, and Israel shall dwell safely ; and this is his name 
 whereby he shall be called, The Lord our Righteousness." 3 Here, 
 by an equal violence of figurative language, the helpless dependent 
 branch turns into a king, and that king is elevated, not to an 
 earthly, but to the Heavenly Throne. Similarly in Zechariah : 
 " Thus speaketh the Lord of hosts, saying, Behold the man whose 
 name is The Branch ; and he shall grow up out of his place, and he 
 shall build the temple of the Lord : even he shall build the temple 
 of the Lord ; and he shall bear the glory, and shall sit and rule 
 upon his throne ; and he shall be a priest upon his throne : and the 
 counsel of peace shall be between them both." 4 Here, by a curious 
 metamorphosis the Branch first becomes the builder of a temple, 
 then a ruler upon a throne, then a priest and king together, still 
 upon the throne, establishing in that twofold capacity, or by help 
 of the twofold prerogatives of prince and priest, the counsel or 
 covenant of peace for Israel. So is it in the ancient prophecies, and 
 so is it also in the visions of the Apocalypse. What is the first vision 
 that John gets of Jesus in the heavenly places ? A door is opened 
 in heaven, a throne is seen set there ; the right hand of him who sits 
 upon the throne holds out the book sealed with the seven seals. The 
 strong angel proclaims with the loud voice, " Who is worthy to open 
 the book, and to loose the seals thereof?" The challenge is made, 
 resounds through heaven, remains unanswered. The apostle begins 
 to weep, because no man is found worthy to open and to read the 
 book One of the elders says to him, " Weep not ; behold, the Lion 
 of the tribe of Judah, the Eoot of David, hath prevailed to open the 
 book, and to loose the seven seals thereof." John looks around for 
 this opener coming, and lo ! in the midst of the throne there stands 
 a Lamb as it had been slain, who takes the book and opens all ite 
 1 laa. xi 1. " Isa. xi. 10. Jer. xxiii. 5. 6. 4 Zecb. vi. 12, 13.
 
 THE WOES DENOUNCED UPON THE PHARISEES. 405 
 
 seals. He is told to look for a lion, and beheld a lamb. The lion and 
 the lamb : the strongest and the fiercest, the weakest and the gentlest 
 of animals ; in Jesus the qualities of both appear, blended in singular 
 yet most attractive combination. And in the last revelation of 
 himself he makes to John, Jesus says, 'I am the root and the offspring 
 the root and the branch of David, and the bright and morning star.' 
 ' What think ye of Christ ? whose son is he 1 How can he be 
 David's son and David's Lord?' These last words of our Lord's 
 public ministry, which filled the Temple courts of old, and found 
 there no reply, are they not still going forth wherever the gospel of 
 his grace is preached, waiting a response ? Nor can any fit response 
 be ever given till we see and be ready to acknowledge that in him, 
 our Saviour, there meet and mingle all Divine and human attributes 
 David's Lord in his divinity, David's son in his humanity ; till 
 we own him, and cleave to him, and hang upon him as at once our 
 elder brother, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, and our Lord 
 and our God ; the morning star on the brow of our dark night, that 
 heralds the bright, the cloudless, the unending day. 
 
 VII. 
 
 THE WOES DENOUNCED UPON THE PHARISEES. 
 MATT, xxiir. ; MARK xn. 38-40 ; LUKE xx. 45-47. 
 
 ADDRESSING himself specially to the Pharisees, Jesus asked 
 them how Christ could be at once David's son and David's Lord, 
 and they stood mute before him. 
 
 It is of this particular occasion that St. Mark says, " then the 
 common people heard him gladly." They have been looking on and 
 listening with intense curiosity as well they might, for it is truly 
 a marvellous scene that is before them. Here, on the one side, is 
 one of themselves, an obscure Galilean, with no rank, or office, or 
 acknowledged authority. There, on the other, stand the first men 
 of the land, the chief of the priesthood, the heads of the scribes. 
 It had long been known that the Pharisees repudiated and con- 
 demned the teaching of Christ. More recently their enmity had 
 come to a head. They had even offered a reward for his apprehen- 
 sion. Now they meet him face to face in the most public place in 
 all the city. Will they arrest him ? will they order their officers to 
 bind him and carry him off to prison ? No : in presence of the 
 people they will crush him with their words ; they will convict him 
 of ignorance, or incompetence, or sedition. And how shall this 
 untaught, unfriended, unprotected man be able to stand against
 
 406 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 such odds ? One can well enough imagine that when the strange 
 word-duel in the Temple courts commenced, the sympathy of the 
 people would be on Christ's side. Their sympathy deepens, wonder 
 grows into admiration, as in each succeeding encounter he comes off 
 more than conqueror, till at last his opponents stand silenced before 
 him. Still, however, with all the wonder and all the admiration 
 that Christ excites, other disturbing and perplexing emotions stir 
 the breasts of the spectators : for those opponents of Jesus are the 
 men to whom from infancy they have been taught to look up with 
 unbounded reverence ; to whose authority, especially in all matters 
 of religious faith and practice, they have been accustomed implicitly 
 to bow. The adversaries of Jesus have been baffled but not con- 
 vinced; an unquenched, an intensified hatred to him is obviously 
 burning within their breasts. How is it that none of their rulers 
 will receive him, that almost to a man they are so bitterly opposed 
 to him 1 
 
 May we not believe that in its immediate and direct object, at 
 addressed to the perplexed and excited crowd that then stood before 
 and around him, the discourse recorded in the 23d chapter of St. 
 Matthew was intended to take a stumbling-block out of their 
 way, and by the bold and fearless exposure that it made of the 
 character and conduct of the Pharisees, to emancipate the people 
 from that blind thraldom to their old religious leaders in which 
 they had so long been held ? But the discourse had a wider scope. 
 It was our Lord's last day in the Temple, his last time of openly 
 addressing the people, the closing hour of his public ministry. This 
 interest surrounds the words then spoken, that it was in them that 
 his last farewell to the Temple, his farewell to his countrymen, 
 was taken; words not spoken for that audience only, words of 
 solemn warning for his followers in all ages, for the men of every 
 generation. Eegarding it in this light, without entering into any 
 minute or consecutive exposition, let us offer one or two general 
 reflections upon this discourse of our Saviour. 
 
 1. It tells us what it was that chiefly kindled against it the 
 burning indignation of Jesus Christ. Against what are his terrible 
 denunciations pointed ? Not against either covert scepticism or 
 open infidelity. The Sadducees are here comparatively overlooked. 
 Not against those sins, to which one or other of the passions and 
 instincts of our nature prompt when allowed unbridled sway. A 
 very singular and instructive contrast shows itself throughout his 
 ministry betwixt our Lord's treatment of that class of offences, and 
 of the one which he here exposes. Compare, for instance, his 
 treatment of the woman who had been a sinner, and of her to whom 
 he said, " Neither do I condemn thee, go and sin no more," with 
 his treatment of the haughty Pharisee, at whose table he met the 
 one, and of the double-hearted men who brought to him the other.
 
 THE WOES DENOUNCED UPON THE PHARISEES. 407 
 
 It is among those making the largest professions of piety, priding 
 themselves on their social position and the outward respectability 
 of their lives, that Jesus discovers the materials for the severest 
 denunciations that ever came from his lips. He finds these 
 materials in that kind and form of religion which, under the guise 
 of great fervour and zeal for the cause of God, beneath the large 
 and broidered garment of a showy profession, gets ample room and 
 opportunity for the indulgence of vanity and pride, the lordly, 
 ambitious, despotic spirit ; in that kind and form of religion that 
 makes so much of the outward, the institutional, the ceremonial, 
 so little of the moral, the spiritual, the practical, which exalts 
 the letter above the spirit of the divine commands, which, finding 
 this old precept of Moses, " Thou shalt bind these commandments 
 of the Lord for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as a 
 frontlet between thine eyes," thought that this command was kept 
 by having strips of parchment with passages of Scripture on them 
 bound upon the forehead and the arm, and fancied that the broader 
 the parchment scrips, the more numerous the passages inscribed, 
 the larger the honour and the service rendered unto God : which, 
 finding another old law of Moses, that no unclean animal should be 
 saten, strained every sort of drink carefully through a linen cloth, 
 lest any gnat or the smallest unclean animalcule might be drunk : 
 which, meeting with the ancient Mosaic order that a tithe of all 
 produce should be offered to the Lord, was not content with 
 presenting a tithe of the wheat, and the barley, and the oil, the 
 common staple products of the land, but would give it of the mint, 
 and the anise, and the cumin, the smallest garden fruits and flowers : 
 which invented nice casuistical distinctions among oaths, making 
 out that some were binding, others not, some were sinful, others 
 not; which, notwithstanding all its punctilious attention to the 
 minutiae of certain outward observances, all its laborious cleansing 
 of the outside of the cup and the platter, was full within of 
 extortion and excess, a very strange compound of very heterogene- 
 ous elements, distasteful to all true-hearted men, infinitely distasteful 
 to our Lord and Master. We might have hoped that, with the 
 departure of that old ritualism of Judaism, with the coming in of 
 the simpler institute of Christianity, with the lessons and the life 
 of our Lord himself before us, that the temptation to and the 
 opportunity for such singular and such offensive developments of 
 human nature would depart. But no ; the spirit of Pharisaism lies 
 deep in that nature ; deepest where the superstitious and devo- 
 tional element is strong and the moral is comparatively weak, not 
 peculiar to certain times and places, or to be seen only in certain 
 churches under the drapery of ecclesiastical ceremonialism kindred 
 to that of the Jews. It is to be found everywhere, under all forms 
 of religious observance; where it has the least natural aliment
 
 408 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 making all the more of what it has, nay more, as if soured by its 
 meagre diet, nowhere will you see a more odious and repulsive 
 growth of it than in those very churches which have stripped 
 themselves the barest of all forms and ceremonies. 
 
 2. Let us notice the insidiousness and deceitfulness of that 
 spirit of Pharisaism which in this discourse Christ so fully exposes 
 and so heavily condemns. The men whom Christ had immediately 
 in his eye, whose hollowness and falsity he dissects with so unsparing 
 a hand, had a very different opinion of themselves from that which 
 he expresses. They believed themselves to be really the most 
 religious people in their own country, in the world. There may 
 have been a few of them utter and arrant hypocrites, who knew 
 themselves to be mere pretenders, with whom all the show of 
 devotion was intentionally and consciously assumed for selfish and 
 sinister purposes. But we should err egregiously if we thought 
 that such was the character of the majority. They imagined them- 
 selves to be sincere, and it was that imagination which was at the 
 bottom of their intense self-satisfaction, their eager and ostentatious 
 displays. Self-deception went so far with them that they actually 
 believed themselves to be the natural successors and representatives 
 of the prophets and righteous men of the old economy. The 
 memory of their martyred forefathers was so dear to them, that 
 they built their tombs and garnished their sepulchres, and said to 
 one another, " If we had lived in those old times, we should not 
 have been partakers with those who shed their blood." Yet at 
 this very time they are meditating the death of Jesus, are about 
 to imbrue their hands in the blood of God's own Son. Extraordi- 
 nary instance, you may say, of self-deception. You would not think 
 so if the eye of Omniscience were for a moment lent, and it were 
 given to you to discern how many there are presently alive busy, 
 bustling, pretentious religionists, builders of prophets' tombs, 
 garnishers of martyrs' sepulchres, the readiest to say, ' Had we lived 
 in the days of those odious Pharisees, we had been no partakers in 
 their guilt,' who if subjected to the same kinds of test with the 
 Pharisees, those tests altered according to the changes that the 
 world since then has undergone would do their deed over again in 
 the spirit, if not in the letter, would crucify Christ afresh. Among 
 all the spirits that have ever entered into and taken possession of 
 our nature, there is not one of such self-deceiving power as that of 
 Pharisaism. 
 
 3. You have a striking instance brought before you in this 
 discourse of a nation being reckoned with not individually but 
 collectively. The generation in which Jesus lived had sins enough 
 of its own to answer for. Had there stood against it but that one 
 charge of having despised, rejected, crucified the Lord, it had been 
 enough. But see how, in the spirit of sublime superiority to all
 
 THE WOES DENOUNCED UPON THE PHARISEES. 409 
 
 selfish considerations, Jesus makes no mention here of the treatment 
 given to himself. He looks backward, and lo ! all the righteous 
 blood that had been shed in the land lifts up its cry for vengeance ! 
 He looks backward, and lo ! in the hand of the Great Judge the cup 
 of wrath is seen getting fuller and fuller as the guilt of generation 
 after generation is poured into it ! He looks forward, and lo ! the 
 men of the generation then existing are beheld pouring the last 
 drops into that cup, and by doing so, about to bring down its whole 
 contents upon their devoted heads ! But in the brief prophecy of 
 what remained still to be done ere the treasured wrath of heaven 
 descended there is something altogether singular. It is not a bare 
 foretelling of the future by a commissioned agent of heaven. The 
 prophet here rises far above the rank of all who had gone before. 
 He speaks as the prophets' King and Lord. A greater than all 
 the prophets is here. " Behold, I send unto you prophets and wise 
 men, and scribes." 1 Christ's feet are upon the pavement of the 
 earthly Temple, but he speaks as from the Throne of Heaven. Let 
 those who deny the divinity of Jesus tell us with what propriety 
 any mortal man, any, even the greatest of the prophets, could have 
 spoken as he here does. 
 
 4. In this discourse, a phase of the character of Christ, and in him 
 of God, is set before us, from which we ought not to avert our eye. 
 Christ's voice, as heard on earth, was not always one of gentleness 
 and love. When occasion called for it, it could speak as the 
 thunder speaks, in volumed terror. Never were severer epithets 
 employed, never more terrible denunciations uttered, than those 
 hurled at and heaped upon the heads of the Pharisees. Yet nc 
 mingling here of sinful human passion, of malice or revenge, no 
 absence even of love. Has Jesus forgotten to be gracious ? Are 
 tenderness and compassion clean gone out of that most loving 
 heart ? We cannot believe so for a moment. Then let us believe 
 that the deep, the strong, the burning indignation that breaks 
 out here has a place and power of its own in the bosom of our 
 Lord, and dwells together in perfect harmony with the milder 
 and gentler attributes of his nature. Lightning lurks amid the 
 warm soft drops of the summer shower; a consuming fire may 
 come out of the very heart of love. Christ is the world's great 
 Saviour ; he is also the world's great Judge. It was as our Saviour 
 he came down to this earth, and gentle and still indeed was the 
 voice in which that office was discharged. He did not strive, nor 
 cry, nor cause his voice to be heard in the streets ; but lest we 
 should misinterpret, and imagine that his spirit was too soft ever 
 to kindle into wrath, his hand too gentle to do other services than 
 those of love, once and again, as here, he assumes the office of the 
 Judge, and speaks with a startling sternness. He began his teach- 
 1 Matt, xxiii. 34.
 
 410 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 ing on the mountain-side of Galilee ; he closed it in the courts of 
 the Temple at Jerusalem. Compare the two discourses the Ser- 
 mon on the Mount, this discourse in the Temple ; the one begins 
 with blessings, the other begins and ends with rebuke ; the one 
 pours its benedictions over the heads of the faithful, the other its 
 maledictions over the heads of the faithless ; the seven woes of 
 the one confront the seven beatitudes of the other. Or take for 
 contrast Christ's farewell to his friends, and his farewell to his 
 enemies : the one composed of words of comfort, closing in that 
 sublime intercessory prayer which he left behind him as a type or 
 specimen of his advocacy for us in the heavenly places ; the other 
 composed throughout of terrible denunciations, types and preludes 
 of those awful judgments which in his judicial character he shall 
 pronounce and execute upon the finally impenitent. And what 
 does all this teach us but that the religion of Jesus Christ has a 
 twofold aspect 1 It carries both the blessing and the curse in its 
 bosom. If here it speaks peace, there it speaks terror ; if to some 
 it has nothing but words of tenderness and encouragement, to others 
 it has nothing but words of warning and of woe. It stands as the 
 pillar-cloud stood between the Egyptians and the Israelites : with a 
 side of glowing brightness and a side of overshadowing gloom. 
 And yet, let us not fail to notice, that after all it is not in tones 
 of wrath that the last accents of this farewell of our Lord to his 
 enemies fall upon our ear. The fire of righteous indignation that 
 burns within him cannot but go forth. As flash after flash of the 
 lightning it falls upon the hypocrite and false devotee. But under 
 that fire the inner heart of Jesus at last dissolves into tenderness. 
 Pity, infinite pity, pours her quenching tears upon it, and with 
 another look, and in altered tone, a look and tone in which the 
 compassion of the Godhead reveals itself, he exclaims, "0 Jerusalem, 
 Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which 
 are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children 
 together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and 
 ye would not ! " 'I would, but ye would not.' The willingness is 
 all with him, the unwillingness with us. May the very thought of 
 this take our unwillingness away ; that at the last our house be 
 not left desolate, that it be no other than the home that he hath 
 prepared for all who love him !
 
 THE WIDOW'S MITE. 41] 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Tit we a bag. 
 
 THE WIDOW'S MITE CERTAIN GREEKS DESIRE TO 
 
 SEE JESUS. 
 MARK xn. 41-44 ; LUKE xxi. 1-4 ; JOHN xn. 20-36. 
 
 His terrible denunciation of the scribes and Pharisees having 
 been delivered, Jesus passes into a court of the Temple, the inner- 
 most to which they were admitted, called therefore the Court of the 
 Women. On one side of this court stood the thirteen large chests, 
 with openings shaped like trumpets, into which the freewill-offer- 
 ings of the people were thrown. Over against them Jesus seats 
 himself, watching the passers-by. He sees many rich approach, 
 and throw in, perhaps ostentatiously, their large contributions, but 
 he does not make any comment on their gifts. At last, however, a 
 poor woman approaches the place of deposit. Modestly, timidly, 
 almost furtively, as if ashamed of being seen, and hiding what she 
 gives, as all too small for public notice, she casts her farthing in, 
 and is in haste to depart. See how the eye of the watcher fastens 
 upon this woman. She is retreating in haste to hide herself in the 
 crowd without, but she must not go till other eyes than those of 
 Jesus have also been turned upon her. " He calls to him his 
 disciples," he bids them mark her well, and as their eyes are all 
 upon her, he says to them, " Verily I say unto you, that this poor 
 widow hath cast more in than they all." 
 
 How many were there in Jerusalem who, if their attention had 
 been directed to the poor widow's act, and it had been told them 
 that in casting these two mites she had cast in her all, would have 
 condemned that act ! What was cast into the treasury went either 
 to the poor or to the priests, to relief of the indigent or the uphold- 
 ing of the worship of the temple. But were there many poorer in 
 all the city than the poor widow herself ? Should she not have 
 kept the little which she had for the relieving of her own wants ? 
 As to the priests and the Temple, a large enough provision was 
 made for them by public and private charity, without her being 
 asked to add her trifling contribution. Who could tell, when it 
 came into their hands, what those well-fed priests would do with 
 her two mites ? And even if she had a better security that her 
 donation would be well applied, what need was there to give what 
 was so much to her and what was so little to them ? How many 
 sayings of this kind might her act have called forth ! and for one 
 that might have praised, probably there would have been ten who 
 would have condemned. But other eyes than those of a mere
 
 412 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 earthly prudence are on her, and another and very different sentence 
 than one of condemnation is passed. Broad and deep in that poor 
 widow's heart had the love of the God who was worshipped within 
 that Temple been shed. There, by the post of these gates, she had 
 often waited and worshipped, and there, in her hours of sorrow, in 
 that worship her burdened spirit had got relief. She would answer 
 to the call, that she knew that the Lord of that temple had given 
 to aid in the maintenance of its services. It was a debt of grati- 
 tude that she owed ; it was a privilege to take any share in such a 
 work. True, it was but the veriest trifle that she could afford ; 
 but it was willingly and gladly given. She would not have liked 
 that any of those rich people, who were throwing in their silver 
 and their gold as they went by, had seen her two mites drop out 
 of her fingers. But there were eyes from which she could not hide 
 them ; and little as she thought of it, there was one across the 
 court sitting in judgment upon her, who not only approved her 
 deed, but elevated her above all the donors of the day. She is not 
 only the greatest giver of them all, she has cast in more than they 
 all together, more, not in money value, but in moral worth. And 
 what else, by giving such world-wide circulation to this her act, 
 and this his sentence on it, did Jesus mean, than to give a world- 
 wide circulation to the truth, that in his sight, in his Father's sight, 
 it is the motive which gives its true character to the act; that 
 greatness in his estimate of things consists not in the doing of great 
 acts that every eye must see, and that every tongue may be ready 
 to praise, but in doing what may be little things, so small that 
 they shall escape all human notice, and so insignificant that there 
 may be none to think them worthy of any praise ; but doing them 
 in a great spirit, from a great motive, for a great and noble and holy 
 end ? He is not the largest giver who, out of his abundance, and 
 from many mixed motives, gives to this charity or to that, but he 
 who, impelled by the pure love of God, and the desire to help on a 
 good object, gives in largest relative proportion out of the surplus 
 that remains to him after his own and his family's wants have been 
 provided for. 
 
 The time and circumstances under which the approving verdict 
 was passed upon the widow's offering enhance its interest. Woe 
 after woe, in tones of terrible impressiveness, have pealed like 
 volleyed thunder over the heads of his adversaries, and are still 
 echoing in the courts of the temple. As if to show how quickly 
 and fully the strong emotions of righteous indignation have passed 
 out of his breast, he sits quietly down in the attitude of an un- 
 occupied observer, all trace of anger gone from his countenance, all 
 tones of anger from his voice, and asks his disciples to notice the 
 poor widow's act. 
 
 But there was another and still more interesting exhibition of
 
 CERTAIN GREEKS DESIRE TO SEE JESUS. 413 
 
 the state of our Lord's thoughts and feelings as he took his farewell 
 of the Temple. It is the high prerogative of genius to be able 
 vividly to realise and represent the thoughts, and sentiments, and 
 words appropriate to all kinds of characters, in all varieties of 
 positions. Who that has read the pages of our great English 
 dramatist has not remarked how true to nature each representation 
 is, whether it be monarch on the throne or clown in the closet, 
 statesman, warrior, prelate, or peasant that appears, and speaks, 
 and acts? It is by the exercise of this great faculty that the 
 personages and events of the past are reproduced and set forth 
 before our eye. There is one Being, however, who appeared upon 
 the stage of time, who stands beyond the reach of this faculty; 
 for, be his genius what it may, who shall put himself in the place, 
 or think the thoughts, or enter into the emotions of the Son of 
 God, as he passed through his earthly sojourn? And yet how 
 natural the desire to know the thoughts awakened in his mind, the 
 emotions kindled in his heart, by the incidents through which he 
 passed, the individuals with whom he was thrown into contact ? 
 Here, however, imagination is at fault. Conscious of its incapacity, 
 it reverently withdraws from the attempt either to conceive or 
 to express how Jesus was affected by the varying events of his 
 earthly pilgrimage. We cannot, dare not, go here beyond what is 
 revealed. And that is but little. No reader of the Gospels can 
 fail to have noticed how seldom it is that Christ gives us any 
 glimpse of what was passing in the interior of his own spirit. With 
 all the greater interest do we ponder over the few occasions in which 
 the mantle that was ordinarily so closely drawn round its inner shrine 
 is partially uplifted. Such is the interest which attaches to that 
 passage of his life which now comes under our review. 
 
 As Jesus is sitting over against the treasury, Andrew and 
 Philip come and tell him that in the outer court of the Gentiles 
 certain Greeks are standing, who have expressed a strong desire to 
 see him. Born and brought up as heathen men, they had been so 
 far convinced of the superiority of the Jewish faith, that they were 
 in the habit of coming up to Jerusalem to worship there the one 
 living and true God. Whether they had seen or heard much or 
 anything of Jesus before this time, what it was which inspired 
 them with such a strong desire to see him now, we do not know. 
 This may have been their first visit to Jerusalem. Their earliest 
 knowledge of Christ may have been derived from what they had 
 witnessed within the last few days. They must have heard of 
 the raising of Lazarus and the many miracles which had previously 
 been wrought. They must have seen our Lord's triumphal entry 
 into the city, and noticed how the whole community had been 
 moved. The cleansing of the Temple must have made a deep 
 impression on their minds It was the court of the Gentiles, the
 
 414 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 very part of the Temple appropriated to the use of that class to 
 which they belonged, which Jesus had sought to cleanse from its 
 impurities and profanations. Let us imagine that those devout 
 Greeks had themselves been scandalised by seeing the place conse- 
 crated to worship turned into a common market ground, by seeing 
 the priesthood more eager to make money than to win Gentiles to 
 their faith. Here, however, is one man, a Jew, animated by tome- 
 thing like the right spirit, who drives out these buyers and sellers, 
 whose aim and effort is that this place be made what it was meant 
 to be, a house of prayer for all nations. Who can this Jesus be ? 
 He calls the Temple his own house. He speaks of God as his own 
 Father. The chief priests and rulers are angry with him ; have even 
 put a price upon his head; have given orders that if any man 
 knew where he was, he should tell, in order that he might be taken 
 and put to death. Yet he walks openly in the midst ; the people 
 gaze on him with wonder ; the very children hail him with hosan- 
 nas as the Son of David. Who, those strangers ask again, can 
 this Jesus be ? In their curiosity they come to Philip, a Galilean, 
 a native of Bethsaida, one who knows their language, with whom 
 they may have had some previous acquaintance, or they come to 
 him because he is the one nearest them at the time, with whom 
 they can most readily communicate, and they say to him : " Sir, we 
 would see Jesus." Philip tells Andrew; Philip and Andrew, the 
 Greeks in all likelihood following them, tell Jesus. He has many 
 around him, when this message is conveyed to him, and the dis- 
 ciples and the Greeks stand waiting the result. He gives no direct 
 or immediate answer. He stands a moment, lost in thought, and 
 then breaks out into expressions, vague and dark enough to those 
 who listened to them at the time, yet full of the richest meaning, 
 and conveying, too, though neither the Greeks nor the disciples 
 nor any of those around may have then seen how it was so, one of 
 the best answers to the request which had just been made. 
 
 To understand this, let us remember that Jesus knew from the 
 beginning what was to be the broad issue of his mission to this 
 earth. The words of the Father, spoken of old by the prophet, 
 were familiar to his ear, " It is a light thing that thou shouldest be 
 my servant to restore the preserved of Israel. I will give thee to 
 be a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation to the 
 ends of the earth : a light to lighten the Gentiles, as well as the 
 glory of my people Israel" Knowing this, familiar with this from 
 the beginning as the end and object of his incarnation, one cannot 
 help believing that the narrowness of the bounds within which his 
 personal ministry was confined, and the smallness of the results 
 which, during its continuance, that ministry realised, were often as 
 a heavy burden pressing upon the ^Redeemer's spirit. As a son, 
 indeed, he learned obedience; he willingly submitted to the
 
 CERTAIN GREEKS DESIRE TO SEE JESUS. 415 
 
 restraints laid on him ; he cheerfully conformed to the will of Him 
 that sent him, and expended his personal labours upon the lost 
 sheep of the house of Israel, but not without many an inward 
 thought of the joy set before him, of the harvest yet to be 
 gathered in, of the glory yet to be revealed, thoughts kept buried 
 in his heart, not at first to be uttered, for who could understand or 
 sympathise ? But here, at last, on the very eve of his agony and 
 death, these Greeks, these Gentiles, come desiring to see him. He 
 hails them as the representatives of the vast community to which 
 they belong. In their coming to him he sees the first-fruits of that 
 rich harvest which the world in all its borders was to yield. The 
 great future of the Gospel times and ages, hidden from all others, 
 brightens into its full glory before his eye. The time, he knows, is 
 near, he takes this very message from these Greeks as the token 
 of its approach, when the mystery shall be revealed, and the 
 middle wall of partition between Jew and Gentile shall be broken 
 down, wide over all the earth the glad tidings of salvation in his 
 name go forth, and men of all peoples, and nations, and tongues, 
 and kindreds be gathered into that one fold, of which he is to be 
 the Shepherd. But between the present and this great result there 
 lay, now very near at hand, his own sufferings and death, the 
 lifting of him upon that cross which is to serve as the great means 
 of gathering all men unto him. 
 
 Connecting thus, as was most natural, the petition of the Greeks 
 with the gathering in of the Gentiles, and that gathering in with 
 his own approaching death, Jesus answered and said : " The hour 
 is come that the Son of Man should be glorified. Verily, I say 
 unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it 
 abideth alone, but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." Take a 
 single grain of seed-corn: there dwells within it the mysterious 
 principle of life, the gift of the Creator, that no man can bestow. 
 Keep it above the ground, preserve it carefully from the touch of 
 death and of corruption, it may abide for years, retaining its own 
 vitality ; but it so abides in solitary unfruitfulness no life comes 
 out of its life. Bury it, however, beneath the sod ; let it pass down 
 into what becomes to it the realm of corruption and of death ; let 
 it rot and die there, then from out that death the new life cometh, 
 fresh, abounding, multiplying life. So it is, and so only, that 
 it bringeth forth much fruit. And of the world's great spiritual 
 harvest Jesus is the one seed-corn. He had the life in himself, and 
 might have kept it for ever there. But to turn it into the source 
 of life to others he too must obey the law of life, propagating itself, 
 and spreading abroad through death. He too must die, that by 
 dying he may bring forth much fruit. 
 
 The death of the Eedeemer stands by itself; in a manner 
 peculiar to itself the source of spiritual life to all united to him by
 
 416 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 faith. And yet there is a sense, and that a most real and important 
 one, in which what was true of the head is true also of all the 
 members. They too must come under the operation of the great 
 principle and law which brings life out of death. They too must 
 die, as he their Saviour died ; must take up their cross in turn, and 
 in self-denial and self-sacrifice bear it ; they must have a fellowship 
 with his sufferings ; be planted in the likeness of his death ; be 
 crucified with Christ ; must fill up what remains of his sufferings 
 for his body the Church. " For," said Jesus, immediately after 
 having spoken of his own death and its great issues, " he that loveth 
 his life shall lose it, and he that hateth his life in this world shall 
 keep it unto life eternal." " If any man serve me " be willing to 
 become like-minded, like-hearted with me, look to my death as not 
 only the fountainhead of his own spiritual life, but the model after 
 which the whole temper, frame, and spirit of his being is to be 
 moulded, then, added Jesus, "let him follow me, and where I am 
 there shall also my servant be ; if any man serve me, him will my 
 Father honour." In the quick survey of the future that now en- 
 gages the Saviour's thoughts, he sees beyond his death, realises his 
 position as exalted to the Father's right hand in the heavenly places 
 the shame and the dishonour, the buffeting and the scourging, 
 the agony and the dying, exchanged for the glory he had with the 
 Father before the world was. A kindred elevation and like honours 
 awaited all who took up their cross daily, and in self-denial and 
 self-sacrifice bore it; sufferers with him here, they would be glorified 
 with him hereafter. 
 
 Such as I have thus tried to trace it was the current of thought 
 running through the first utterances of Jesus, given in answer to 
 the announcement that certain Greeks stood without, desiring to see 
 him. But now a sudden change comes over the spirit of the 
 Redeemer. His eye closes on the crowd around ; he ceases to 
 think of, to speak with man ; he is alone with the Father. A dark 
 cloud descends and wraps him in its folds ; he fears as he enters 
 into this cloud. From the midst of its thick darkness a trembling 
 agitated voice is heard telling of a spirit sorely troubled within. 
 Those of you who have watched by the bed of the dying must 
 often have noticed how as the great event drew near foreshadowings 
 of it came at measured intervals a struggle, a faintness, a pallor so 
 like the last that you held your breath as thinking that the spirit 
 was about to pass. Death often throws such shadows of itself 
 before, and the greatest of all deaths, the death of the Son of God, 
 was also thus prefigured. The agony of the garden, what was it ? 
 It was but the spiritual anguish of the cross let down beforehand 
 upon the soul of the Redeemer. The inward agony that wrung 
 from the lips of the dying Jesus the bitter cry, " My God, my God, 
 why hast thou forsaken me 1 " was the same in source, in character,
 
 CERTAIN GREEKS DESIRE TO SEE JESUS. 417 
 
 in object, with that which forced the thrice repeated prayer, " Father, 
 if it be possible, let this cup pass from me." And the closing utter- 
 ance of Gethsemane, " Not my will, God ; thy will be done," is it 
 not a softened echo of the last and loud triumphant exclamations, 
 " It is finished. Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit " ? Still 
 more striking, however, is the likeness between what took place 
 visibly, audibly here within the Temple, and what happened two 
 days afterwards in the solitude of the garden. The correspondence 
 is too close to be overlooked. You have in each case the struggle, 
 the prayer, the triumph, following each other in the same order. 
 " My soul," said Jesus to the three disciples as he passed into the 
 interior of the garden, "is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death." 
 " Now," in the hearing of the company within the Temple, he said, 
 " Now is my soul troubled." " my Father, if it be possible, let 
 this cup pass from me," is the prayer in the one case ; " Father, save 
 me from this hour," the prayer in the other. And the conflict is 
 hushed, and the troubled spirit sinks to rest in the one case, saying, 
 " Nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt ; " and in the other, 
 " But for this cause came I unto this hour ; Father, glorify thy name." 
 
 "Then came there a voice from heaven, saying, I have both 
 glorified it, and will glorify it again." Twice before at the Bap- 
 tism in the Jordan, and the Transfiguration on the Mount the 
 same voice had been heard. But this third instance has more of 
 publicity, if not of solemnity, attending it. At the baptism there 
 were few present, and we may reasonably doubt whether any but 
 John and Jesus saw the descending dove, and heard the voice from 
 heaven. At the Transfiguration there were present only the chosen 
 three ; but here, in the Temple before a listening crowd, in answer 
 to a public and solemn appeal, this voice gives its crowning accredit- 
 ing testimony. 
 
 This testimony given, the cloud disperses, the divine colloquy 
 between the Son and the Father ceases. Christ's thoughts return 
 to earth, to flow once more along the channel into which the appli- 
 cation of the Greeks had led them. First he turns aside for a 
 moment to correct the misapprehension of some of the spectators. 
 It had been here as it was on the occasion of Paul's conversion on 
 his way to Damascus. Some had heard but a confused noise, and 
 would have it that it was nothing more than a common peal of 
 thunder that had sounded above their heads ; others had made out 
 that it was a voice, but not catching the words, or not entering into 
 their meaning, would have it that it was an angel that in some 
 unknown tongue had been addressing him. Jesus tells them that 
 it was indeed a voice which they had heard, and that it had spoken 
 not so much on his account as on theirs. Then, taking up once 
 more the idea which runs as a connecting link through the whole of 
 this passage, that the time had come for the completion of his great 
 2D
 
 418 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 work, and the gathering up of its fruits, his eye glances over tne 
 whole realm of heathendom ; he sees that vast domain given over 
 to the great usurper, the prince of this world, the spirit of unright- 
 eousness sitting in the high places, and exercising an unhallowed 
 supremacy. The time had come, however, for a world given over 
 to wickedness to be judged, and for the usurper, who had so long 
 held dominion over it, to be cast out. But how, and by what 
 instrument 1 Not by might nor by power ; not by bolts of vengeance 
 flung at the ungodly ; not by the hand of violence laid upon the 
 usurper, and he dragged off with chains of iron binding him ; no, 
 but by another power mightier than his drawing men away from 
 him, dissolving their allegiance to him, linking them in love to God. 
 "And I," said Jesus, "if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me." 
 Such, as foreseen and pre-announced by our Lord himself, was 
 to be the effect of his crucifixion. It was to clothe him with a 
 power over the spirits of men, unlimited in its range, omnipotent 
 in its influence, designed and fitted to exert its benignant sway as 
 widely as the human family is scattered. From the time that he 
 was lifted up, by his cross, its triumphs and its attractions, by all 
 that it so willingly holds out for their acceptance and for their 
 imitation, Jesus has been drawing all men to him, men of every 
 age, of every country, of every character, of every condition ; the 
 wise and the simple, the rich and the poor, the honoured and the 
 despised, Jews, Greeks, Barbarians, Scythians, bond and free. He 
 puts this cross into our hands ; he bids us lift it up, he bids us 
 carry it abroad. Ours the outward work of letting all men know 
 and see who it was that died for them on Calvary, and what it was 
 that by dying for them he has done. His the inward power to 
 work upon the heart, and by that charm which neither space nor 
 time can ever weaken, to win it to peace, to love, to holiness, to 
 heaven. 
 
 IX. 
 
 THE PROPHECIES OF THE MOUNT. 
 MATT, xxrv., xxv; MARK xm. ; LUKE xxi. 5-36. 
 
 THE stormy collision between Christ and the chief priests at 
 length was over. Jesus, calling the twelve around him, left that 
 court of the Temple in which the conflict had been carried on, not 
 as one defeated or driven away by his adversaries, but elearly and 
 avowedly as the victor. It looks, from the two incidents which 
 followed, as if Jesus, his public teaching in the Temple over, lingered 
 yet a little while, reluctant to take what he knew would be his last
 
 THE PROPHECIES OF THE MOUNT. 419 
 
 sight of its sacred interior. At last, however, sadly and slowly he 
 departs. There was perhaps something marked and noticeable in 
 the earnest looks Jesus was bestowing on the buildings. There had 
 certainly been much in what they had just seen and heard to excite 
 the attention of his disciples. Those last words of his address to 
 the Pharisees ring heavily in their ears, "Behold, your house is left 
 unto you desolate. For I say unto you, Ye shall not see me hence- 
 forth, till ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the 
 Lord." What house is to be left so desolate? Is it this very 
 Temple in which they stand 1 What kind of desolation is to over- 
 take that house 1 Is it indeed, as some words of their Master, 
 spoken long before this time, might seem to imply, to be destroyed 1 
 A dark foreboding of some awful catastrophe hanging over that 
 sacred pile is upon their spirits ; and one of them, giving vague 
 expression to the common feeling, and with some dim hope that 
 something further, clearer, may be told, said, " Master, see what 
 manner of stones and what buildings are here !" " See ye not," is 
 our Lord's reply, "all these things] verily I say unto you, There 
 shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be 
 thrown down." Distinct and unambiguous announcement ! One 
 cloud of obscurity at least is rolled away. The solid, stately, 
 sumptuous fabric on which all thecr eyes are fastened is to perish, 
 from its very foundation to be overturned. But though this fact 
 be thus made certain, how many questions as to the time, the 
 manner, the causes, the consequences of it, would at once arise to 
 trouble the disciples' minds. Their Master, however, is already on 
 his way to the gate which leads out to Bethany, and they follow. 
 Silent all and thoughtful they follow him ; they descend into the 
 valley of Jehoshaphat, cross the Kedron, begin the ascent of Olivet, 
 have reached a height which commands the city, where Jesus pauses 
 and sits down, as that accurate narrator Mark informs us, " over 
 against the Temple." It must have been near the very spot where, 
 two or three days before, Jesus had beheld the city and wept over 
 it, and through his tears had seen that sad vision of Jerusalem be- 
 leaguered, and her enemies casting a trench around her, and com- 
 passing her about, and keeping her in on every side, and laying her 
 even with the ground, and leaving not one stone upon another. As 
 Jesus and his disciples sat down upon the ridge of Olivet, the eyes 
 of all would rest upon the sumptuous edifice before them there, 
 across the valley, glowing now beneath the beams of the setting sun. 
 The quiet spot, the evening hour, the serene attitude, his words so 
 lately spoken, all conspire to draw the disciples' thoughts upon the 
 dark and doubtful future. Gently approaching him, Peter and 
 James and John and Andrew put to Christ the question, " Tell us, 
 when shall these things be ? and what shall be the sign of thy 
 coming, and of the end of the world ?"
 
 420 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 It is of the utmost importance, as throwing light upon the 
 whole structure and meaning of Christ's answer, that we look into 
 the inquiry to which it was a response. Taking up that inquiry 
 with the information which we now possess, we should say that it 
 referred to three distinct and separate events : (1.) The destruc- 
 tion of the Temple; (2.) The coming of Christ; (3.) The end of 
 the world. But the men who made that inquiry had no clear idea 
 of these three events being distinct and separate from each other. 
 They had heard their Master, and that very recently, speak of his 
 impending sufferings and death, and of another coming of the Son 
 of man, when he should be revealed in his glory. They had heard 
 him say, " Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here which 
 shall not taste death till they see the Son of man coming in his 
 kingdom." What a mass of difficulties was here for these men with 
 their existing beliefs to unravel ! Christ's coming to his kingdom 
 they had always looked forward to as the issue speedily to be real- 
 ised, when he should ascend the throne of Israel and rule upon the 
 earth as earth's acknowledged sovereign. But somehow, between 
 them and that issue were interposed those sufferings and that death 
 the object of which they could not comprehend. They had always 
 associated Christ's coming to his kingdom with the elevation of 
 their country to the first place among the nations, and the restoring 
 and purifying of their great sanctuary at Jerusalem ; but now Jesus 
 speaks of coming not to restore but to destroy. He tells them of a 
 tune when of all those great buildings of the Temple not one stone 
 should be left upon another. Was that to be at the time of his 
 coming, and was the time of his coming to be the end of the world 1 
 Imagining that it must be so, and yet unable to see how it could be 
 so, incapable of dissociating the three events, yet unable to har- 
 monise what had been said about each, they come with all their 
 obscurity and confusion of thought to Jesus, and they say to him, 
 "Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign 
 of thy coming, and of the end of the world ? " 
 
 Look now at the reply of Jesus to this question, as given in the 
 24th and 25th chapters of St. Matthew, and ask yourselves how far 
 did Jesus go in clearing away the doubts or misapprehensions which 
 the complex question put to him involved. Did he at once, clearly 
 and unambiguously, inform his disciples that the destruction of 
 Jerusalem was at hand ? that it would happen within the' lifetime 
 of men then living 1 Did he, separating between different future 
 comings of his, some figurative, some personal, tell them that it was 
 to his first figurative coming he had referred, when he said that 
 there were some of those then standing before them who should 
 witness it 1 Did he proceed to separate by a long interval of many 
 centuries the coming to judge Jerusalem, from his coming to avenge 
 his own elect, to gather them from the four winds of heaven, and
 
 THE PKOPHECIES OF THE MOUNT. 421 
 
 set up his kingdom upon the earth ? or did he separate again that 
 personal advent at the beginning of the millennium, from the day of 
 the world's final judgment, and the passing away of these heavens 
 and this earth ? So far from this, the prophetic discourse of our 
 Lord is studiously and purposely so framed, that with no other 
 guidance than that which itself affords, we still might confound, as 
 the disciples confounded, the three advents of our Lord. With the 
 fulfilment of the first part in our hands, as an event long since gone 
 by, we are able to mark the separating line which divides the first 
 advent of Christ, that day of judgment of the Lord, from all others 
 that are to follow. Had we, however, stood where the apostles did, 
 had we had this great comprehensive draft or sketch of the future 
 held up to our eyes, as it was to theirs, would it have been possible 
 to discern even that dividing line ? For how is this prophetic pic- 
 ture framed ? Behind a foreground filled with signs and tokens of 
 impending woes, there rises as the first summit of a mountain range 
 the Lord's coming to visit Jerusalem in his anger ; then, right over 
 that summit, almost on the same level, but dimmer, appearing to 
 the eye quite close to it, the intervening valley quite hid from 
 sight, another summit is beheld, another judgment-advent of the 
 Lord, a second, and, as many believe, even farther back, yet a third. 
 What seems, however, especially to perplex the eye as it rests on 
 this prophetic picture, is not only that events are brought close 
 together which may be, some of which we now know are, actually 
 distant from each other by many centuries ; not only are marks and 
 tokens of these intervening spaces wanting here, not only are all the 
 events of the one class described in the same way, painted in the 
 same colours, but each is used as typical of those which come 
 behind, described accordingly in terms which appear to belong to 
 its successor rather than to itself ; and so it is that many readers 
 have felt it to be impossible to determine of many of the sayings of 
 the discourse, whether they are to be applied to the first or second 
 or third advent of Christ. 
 
 With the siege and overthrow of Jerusalem behind us as an 
 event long since gone by, we can understand the first part of our 
 Lord's prophetic discourse delivered upon this occasion, 1 and give 
 to it its obvious and only possible application, by separating that 
 first coming of Christ from all other after advents. But we stand 
 to the remainder of the discourse very much in the same position 
 in which the disciples at first stood to the whole of it. And there 
 is a question about that remainder which we now, I apprehend, are 
 as little able yet to solve as the disciples upon Mount Olivet were 
 able to conclude, from what Christ then said, that the destruction 
 of Jerusalem was nigh at hand, but that an interval of centuries 
 stretched out between it and the next great coming of theii Lord. 
 1 Matt. xxiv. 1-29.
 
 422 THE PASSION 
 
 The question to which I refer is this : Is there indicated in the 
 yet unfulfilled part of this prophecy a middle coming of Christ, 
 to be distinguished, on the one hand, from his coming to destroy 
 Jerusalem, and to be equally distinguished, on the other, from his 
 coming at the close of the present economy of things to judge the 
 world 1 
 
 I cannot think that there are sufficient materials in our hands 
 for arriving at any clear and definite conclusion as to the time and 
 the manner of the yet future advents of Christ. Nay more, I am 
 convinced that it was never meant by the framer of the prophecies 
 regarding them that any distinct vision of the future should, by 
 help of them, be obtained by us. They are couched in the lan- 
 guage peculiar to prophecy, of which this is a distinctive feature, 
 that you cannot, by mere inspection, positively say whether each 
 and every announcement is to be taken literally or figuratively; 
 and, if figuratively, how it is to be fulfilled. It is so far true that 
 the part already accomplished does put into our hand a key, by 
 help of which the part yet unaccomplished may be partially under- 
 stood. It is, however, but a little way that we can be thus helped 
 on ; for the prophecies are not framed throughout after one uniform 
 mould or pattern, so that if you can unlock one portion, you can 
 unlock the whole. There is such variety of construction in the 
 different parts that much must remain of double or doubtful import, 
 till the interpreting event occurs. It has been so with all that 
 section of the prophetic writings of which the fulfilments are already 
 before our eyes. It must be so with all that lies over to be accom- 
 plished in the future. Who then shall tell us beforehand what is 
 to be taken literally and what figuratively ? 
 
 On the whole, we are not only disposed to hold our judgment 
 in this matter in suspense, to wait till the event supplies the expla- 
 nation, but we are inclined to believe that the obscurities and 
 difficulties which now stand in the way of anything like a minute 
 interpretation of the prophecies beforehand were intentionally, and 
 of set purpose, thrown around them by their utterer, that while 
 there was enough to awaken inquiry and kindle hope, there might 
 not be enough to enable any one to draw out a chronological chart 
 of the future, or announce beforehand the exact dates of any of the 
 great occurrences foretold. More than once our Saviour said to the 
 disciples and in so saying did he not teach us the chief use of 
 prophecy ? "I have told you before it come to pass, that when it 
 is come to pass, ye might believe." 1 And did he not, in the very 
 midst of his foretellings of his own second coming, interject the 
 saying : " But of that day and hour knoweth no man ; no, not the 
 angels of heaven, neither the Son, but my Father only " ? Was the 
 man Christ Jesus in the days of his humiliation himself kept in 
 i John xiv. 29.
 
 THE WASHING OF THE DISCIPLES' FEET. 42$ 
 
 ignorance of that day and hour 1 It may have been so. As in 
 childhood he grew in wisdom, knowing things this year that he had 
 not known the year before, so in manhood revelations of the spiri- 
 tual world may have been gradually communicated, and the know- 
 ledge of that day and hour kept in reserve, kept in the Father's 
 own hand till after his death and resurrection. Or it may have 
 been, that though personally he knew, it was a knowledge not to 
 be communicated. Anyhow, that day and hour were to have a 
 cloud of obscurity thrown over them which neither men nor angels 
 were to be permitted to see through. 
 
 THE WASHING OF THE DISCIPLES' FEET. 
 MATT. xxvi. 1-5, 14-19 ; MARK xiv. 1, 2, 11-17 ; LUKE xxn. 1-30 ; JOHN xm. 1-20. 
 
 JESUS sat upon the Mount of Olives, over-against the Temple ; 
 and as the shadows of evening deepened in the valley of Kedron, 
 and crept up its sides, he addressed to his wondering disciples 
 the parables and prophecies preserved in the 24th and 25th 
 chapters of St. Matthew's Gospel It was after he had finished all 
 these sayings, either before he rose from his seat on the hill-side, 
 or on his way out afterwards to the village, that he said to his 
 disciples, " Ye know that after two days is the feast of the Passover, 
 and the Son of man is betrayed to be crucified." He had previously 
 in his discourse been dealing with a broad and distant future, been 
 sketching the world's history, describing its close, giving no dates, 
 leaving much as to the sequence of events shadowy and undefined. 
 Now he turns to a nearer future, to an event that was to happen 
 to himself ; and in terms free of all indistinctness and ambiguity he 
 announces that the day after the next he would be betrayed, and 
 afterwards crucified. 
 
 And now in the current of a narrative, which, ever since our 
 Lord's arrival in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem, has been getting 
 quicker and more disturbed, there is a stop, a stillness. The 
 troubled waters sink for a season out of sight, to rise again darker 
 and more vexed than ever. On the Tuesday evening Jesus retired 
 to Bethany, and we see nothing, know nothing of him for the next 
 day and a half. The intervening Wednesday would, no doubt, be 
 given to quiet and repose. There are hollows in our own Arthur 
 Seat not as far from Edinburgh as Bethany was from Jerusalem, 
 in which one feels as far away from the noise and bustle of city life 
 as if in the heart of the Highlands. Such was the hollow in which
 
 424 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 the favourite village lay, and there, in occupations unknown to us, 
 this one peaceful day was spent, and there at night he had where 
 to lay his head for his last sleep before his death the night and 
 day recruiting him in body and in spirit for Gethsemane and the 
 Cross. 
 
 On the Thursday afternoon he once more bent his steps towards 
 the holy city. He was to celebrate that evening the Passover with 
 his disciples. Much in the way of preparation had to be done, 
 the selection of a suitable apartment, the killing of the lamb, the 
 providing of the bread, the wine, and the salad of bitter herbs. 
 Nothing as yet had been arranged, and there was now but little 
 time to spare. The disciples come to him saying, " Where wilt thou 
 that we prepare for thee to eat the Passover 1" Our Lord does not 
 send them all at random to do the best they could ; he singles out 
 Peter and John. Though often singularly and closely associated 
 afterwards, this, I believe, was the only time that Christ separated 
 them from all the rest, and gave them a conjunct task to perform. 
 In sending them before the others, he could easily and at once have 
 indicated where the room was in which they were to meet in the 
 evening. Instead of this he gives them a sign, the following of 
 which was to conduct them to it. This way of ordering it, what- 
 ever was its real purpose, served effectually to conceal from the 
 others the locality of the guest-chamber, and may have been meant 
 to keep the traitor in the meantime in ignorance of a fact, his 
 earlier knowledge of which communicated to the chief priests, 
 might have precipitated the catastrophe, and cut off Gethsemane 
 from our Saviour's passion. 
 
 "Go into the city, and when you enter there shall meet you a 
 man bearing a pitcher of water : follow him. And wheresoever he 
 shall go in, say ye to the goodman of the house, The Master saith, 
 Where is the guest-chamber, where I shall eat the Passover with 
 my disciples ? " Upon these Passover occasions the inhabitants of 
 the metropolis opened their houses freely to strangers coming up 
 from the country ; but was there no danger, if it were known that 
 this accommodation was required for him whose life the authorities 
 were seeking, that it might be denied? The singular message 
 which Peter and John were to deliver would reveal the very thing 
 which, left to their own discretion, they might have wished to hide, 
 for could two men in Galilean garb and with Galilean accent speak 
 of the Master and his disciples, and it not be known of whom they 
 spoke ? Coming from such a quarter, carrying with it such a tone 
 of authority, being, in fact, a command rather than a request, might 
 not the goodman of the house be offended and refuse ? The 
 instructions, however, are precise, and Peter and John follow them. 
 All happens as Christ had indicated. They go into the city, they 
 meet the man with the pitcher, they follow him, they deliver the
 
 THE WASHING OF THE DISCIPLES' FEET. 425 
 
 message ; and whether it was that the man himself was a disciple of 
 Jesus, or that he was otherwise influenced, not only is there a ready 
 and cordial compliance on his part, but when Peter and John are 
 shown into the apartment, they find it, as was not always the case, 
 already furnished and prepared. It was a momentous meeting 
 which on this last night of our Redeemer's life was to take place in 
 this room, one never to be forgotten, to be had in memory by 
 generation after generation, through all the after history of the 
 Church; and everything about it, even to the indicating of the 
 place and the providing of the needful furniture, was matter of 
 divine foresight and care 
 
 The accounts of the different Evangelists are so broken and 
 confused that it is impossible to give anything like a regular 
 connected narrative of what happened that night within the guest- 
 chamber. At an early stage a strife broke out among the apostles 
 as to which of them should be accounted the greatest. This may 
 have happened after the Passover celebration had commenced. The 
 first thing done, when the company had assembled and sat down, 
 was to pass round a cup of wine, the first of the four that were 
 circulated in the course of the feast. It may have been in doing 
 so that our Lord's first words after sitting down were uttered : 
 " With desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you before 
 I suffer : for I say unto you, I will not eat any more thereof, until 
 it be fulfilled in the kingdom of God. And he took the cup, and 
 gave thanks, and said, Take this and divide it among yourselves : 
 for I say unto you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine, until 
 the kingdom of God shall come." 1 
 
 Never before had they sat down in such a formal manner 
 with their Master at their head. The circumstance of taking 
 their places around this board suggests to their narrow minds 
 thoughts of the places and the dignities that, as they fancied, were 
 afterwards to be theirs ; and when, almost as soon as he had sat 
 down, Jesus began to speak of the kingdom as if he was just 
 about to enter on it, the strife as to which of them should be 
 greatest in that kingdom arose. 
 
 But this strife has been attributed to another origin, one which 
 links it in a manner so natural to the washing of the disciples' feet 
 as to predispose us to adopt it. The master of the house had 
 relinquished for the strangers the best apartment of his dwelling, 
 and furnished it as well as he could. There was one duty of the 
 host, however, that he failed to discharge. He did not personally 
 receive the guests, nor preside at the washing of the feet, which 
 always preceded the beginning of a feast. He and his family and 
 his domestics were all themselves elsewhere engaged in the keeping 
 of the Passover. He saw that in the room the necessary apparatus 
 1 Luke xxii. 15-18.
 
 426 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 for the washing, the basin and the water and the towel, were all 
 provided, but he left it to the guests themselves to see that it was 
 done. But which of the twelve will do it for the others ? It is 
 the office of the servant, the slave ; which of them will acknowledge 
 that he stands in any such relationship to the rest 1 Besides the 
 settlement of their respective places around the table, here was 
 another root of bitterness springing up to trouble, raising the 
 question of precedency among them. 
 
 Spring up how it might, we have the fact that around the first 
 communion-table, among the apostles, in presence of their Master, 
 in the critical and solemn position in which he and they stood, 
 there was actually a quarrel about their individual rights and 
 privileges ; a petty ambition, the love of place and power, finding 
 its way into the hearts of those so honoured of the Lord, entering 
 to defile the most sacred season and solemnity. There is some 
 excuse for the twelve untaught Galilean fishermen, with all their 
 vulgar conceptions at this time of what was coming when their 
 Master's kingdom should be instituted. But what shall we say of 
 those who have had the full light of the after revelations given, 
 and who, in front of our Lord's most solemn declaration that his 
 kingdom is not of this world, that the kind of authority and 
 lordship that kings and princes assume and exercise should not 
 have place within his Church, under the garb of a glowing zeal 
 harbour as strong a love of place and power, as much vanity and 
 pride, as much irritation of temper, as much severity and uncharit- 
 ableness, as is ever to be seen in the world of common life 1 Alas 
 for the strife of the first communion-table ! Alas for the strifes 
 and debates of almost every ecclesiastical body which since the days 
 of Jesus Christ has been embodied in his name ! You might have 
 thought that in those churches where the distinctions were the 
 fewest and of the least value, where there was least of that kind of 
 food upon which the pride and vanity and ambition of our nature 
 feed, there would have been proportionally less of their presence 
 and power. The fact, I think, rather lies the other way, for a 
 reason not difficult to divine. 
 
 None of the twelve would do the part of the minister or the 
 servant to the others ; and so, grumbling among themselves, they 
 sit down with unwashed feet. Jesus rises from the table, lays 
 aside his upper garment, pours water into the basin, takes the towel, 
 girds himself with it, and begins himself to do what none of them 
 would undertake. One of the first before whose feet the Saviour 
 stooped may have been Judas. We shall see presently that he had 
 thrust himself into a seat very near to, if not the next to that of Christ. 
 He allows his feet to be washed, not without a certain strange feeling 
 in heart, but without word spoken or remonstrance made. But 
 when Jesus approaches Peter, the impetuous apostle cannot remain
 
 THE WASHING OF THE DISCIPLES' FEET. 427 
 
 silent. " Lord," he says, lost in wonder, full of reverence, profoundly 
 sensible of the great gulf that separated himself and all the rest 
 from Jesus, "Lord, dost thou wash my feet 1" He gets the calm 
 reply, "What I do thou knowest not now;" 'thou hast not 
 yet discerned though it needed no quick eye to see it the purpose 
 of my act; but thou shalt know hereafter, shalt know presently.' 
 But the impatient apostle will not submit and wait. Strong in his 
 sense of the unseemliness, the unsuitableness of the act, fancying 
 that the very love and reverence he bore to Jesus forbade him to 
 permit it, he declares, " Thou shalt never wash my feet. " " If I wash 
 thee not, thou hast no part with me," is Christ's reply, a single 
 slender beam of light upon the darkness, enough to point to some 
 higher spiritual meaning of the act, not enough to reveal the whole 
 significance of the transaction to Peter's mind, but quite enough to 
 turn at once into quite an opposite channel the current of his feelings. 
 ' No part with thee if thou wash me not ! then, Lord, not my feet 
 only, but also my hands and my head,' Taking up once more his 
 act in its symbolic character, as representative of the spiritual 
 washing by regeneration, Jesus saith to him, " He that is washed 
 needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit." For 
 even as he who in the ordinary roadway cleanses himself from 
 outward defilement is clean every whit, and needs no after washing 
 save that of the feet for go where he may upon the dusty roads, 
 every hour, and at all times, the feet are being soiled, and need 
 renewed, repeated washings, so is it true of him who hath gone 
 down into the great laver, and washed all sins away in the blood of 
 the atonement, that he is clean every whit, has all his sins forgiven, 
 all the guilt of them removed, and needs no after washing, saving 
 that which consisteth in the removal of the daily stains that are 
 ever afresh, by our converse with this world, being contracted. 
 " And ye are clean," added Jesus, " but not all." The words, but 
 faintly understood, yet so calmly and authoritatively uttered, effect 
 their immediate object. Peter silently submits ; the work goes on ; 
 the circle is completed. The feet of all are washed, no one after 
 Peter venturing to resist or remonstrate. 
 
 The feet-washing in the guest-chamber by our Lord himself we 
 are inclined to regard j.s the greatest instance of his humiliation as 
 a man in the common intercourse of life, in the discharge of its 
 ordinary duties. He was at pains himself to guard it against 
 misinterpretation : " So, after he had washed their feet, and had 
 taken his garments, and was set down again, he said unto them, 
 Know ye what I have done to you ? Ye call me Master and Lord : 
 and ye say well ; for so I am." It was his being so infinitely their 
 superior that lent its grace and full significance to the act. And 
 this superiority, so far from cloaking, or with false humility pre- 
 tending to disown, he asserts. This is what makes the whole
 
 428 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 ministry of our Lord on earth so utterly unlike that of any other 
 man who has ever trodden it. No one ever made pretensions so 
 high; no one ever executed offices more humble. No one ever 
 claimed to stand so far above the ordinary level of our humanity ; 
 speaking of himself as the light of the world, having rest and peace 
 and life for all at his disposal, to dispense as truly royal gifts to all 
 who owned him as their spiritual King. No one ever made himself 
 more thoroughly one with every human being whom he met, or 
 was so ready with all the services that in his need one man may 
 claim from his brother. 
 
 " If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye 
 ought also to wash one another's feet. For I have given you an 
 example, that ye should do as I have done unto you." With that 
 greatest of all examples before us, what act, what office of human 
 kindness naturally laid upon us should we ever count too low, too 
 mean, should we shrink from, because of any idea that it would 
 be a humiliating of ourselves before our fellow-men to undertake 
 it? It is indeed an utter mistaking of this example to suppose 
 that it calls us to a repetition of the very act of Christ. Only if 
 there be feet needing to be washed, which the custom of the time 
 and country requires to be so, while there is no one else upon whom 
 the duty properly devolves, only then does the example of Jesus 
 call to a literal imitation of what he did. His own act stands 
 before us not as a model act to be exactly copied, but as an act 
 representative to us of the whole circle of kindly offices that we are 
 called upon to render to one another, and as illustrative of the 
 humble self-denying spirit in which all these offices should be dis- 
 charged. You are all aware that, on each returning Maundy 
 Thursday, the day before Easter, the Pope washes the feet of 
 twelve poor men. A better comment has never been made upon 
 the act than the one made long ago by Bengel. " In our day," he 
 says, " popes and princes imitate the feet-washing to the letter, but 
 a greater subject for admiration would be, for instance, a Pope in 
 unaffected humility washing the feet of one king (his own equal in 
 rank, and so the exact analogue to the disciples' mutual washing of 
 each other as brethren), than the feet of twelve paupers." So true 
 were the Saviour's words that went to indicate the difficulty which 
 lay in a faithful following of the example that he had just been 
 setting, "If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them." 
 So easy is it to violate the spirit by sticking to the letter of a 
 precept ; so easy for pride to take the form of humility.
 
 THE EXPOSURE OF JUDAS. 429 
 
 XI. 
 
 THE EXPOSURE OF JUDAS. 
 MATT. xxvi. 21-25 ; MARK xiv. 18-21 ; LUKE xxn. 21-23 ; JOHN xm. 21-35. 
 
 THE four Evangelists agree in stating that it was upon a Sunday, 
 the day after the Jewish Sabbath, that our Lord rose from the 
 grave, and that it was on the day preceding this Sabbath that he 
 was crucified. They all assign the same events to the same days of 
 the week : the last supper to Thursday evening, the crucifixion to 
 Friday, the lying in the tomb to Saturday, the resurrection to 
 Sunday. But there is an apparent discrepancy in the accounts of 
 the three earlier Evangelists as compared with that of St. John, as 
 to the relation of these days of the week to the Jewish days of the 
 month and of the feast. If we had only the narratives of St. 
 Matthew, St. Mark, and St. Luke before us, we must at once have 
 concluded that our Lord partook of the Passover supper at the same 
 time with the Jews. On the other hand, if we had only the nar- 
 rative of St. John before us, we should as naturally have concluded 
 that it was upon the evening after the crucifixion, that the Paschal 
 supper was observed generally by the Jews, and that Jesus must 
 have antedated his observance of it, partaking of it a day before 
 the usual one, on the evening of the 13th day of the month Nisan. 
 The removal of this discrepancy is one of the most difficult pro- 
 blems with which harmonists of the Gospels have had to deal, nor 
 is there any single question touching the chronology of our Saviour's 
 life upon which more labour and learning have been bestowed. 
 The success has not been equal to the pains bestowed. The 
 matter still remains in doubt. No doubt whatever exists as to 
 the fact, that, whether he anticipated the ordinary time or not, 
 it was that he might observe the Jewish Passover with his disciples, 
 that our Lord, on the night of his betrayal, sat down with his 
 twelve apostles in the guest-chamber at Jerusalem. 
 
 In the Paschal supper, as then observed (and we cannot well 
 imagine that our Lord would deviate to any great degree from the 
 customary manner of its observance), four, and on some occasions 
 five, cups of wine were circulated among the guests, marking dif- 
 ferent stages of the feast. When the company, which ordinarily 
 was not less than ten, nor more than twenty, 1 had assembled and 
 ranged themselves round the tables, the first cup of wine was filled, 
 and the head of the family (for we are to look upon this ordinance 
 
 1 It might be one hundred, if each could have a piece of the lamb as large as an 
 olive.
 
 430 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 as essentially a family gathering) pronounced a blessing on the feast 
 and on the cup, using the expression, " Praise be to thee, O Lord 
 our God, the King of the world, who hast created the fruit of the 
 vine." After the blessing, the cup was passed round, and the hands 
 were washed. The bitter herbs dipped in vinegar were then placed 
 upon the table, and a portion of them eaten in remembrance of the 
 sorrows of the Egyptian bondage. After this the other Paschal 
 dishes were brought in : the charoseth or sop, a liquid compounded 
 of various fruits and mingled with wine or vinegar, into which 
 pieces of bread were dipped ; the cake of unleavened bread ; and 
 finally the roasted lamb placed before the head of the company. 
 Then followed the questions and explanations put and given in 
 accordance with the instructions of Moses : " And it shall come to 
 pass, when your children shall say unto you, What mean ye by this 
 service ? that ye shall say, It is the sacrifice of the Lord's Passover, 
 who passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt, when 
 he smote the Egyptians, and delivered our houses." 1 They sang 
 then together the first part of the Hallel or song of praise, embrac- 
 ing the 113th and 114th Psalms, and the second cup of wine was 
 drunk Then began the feast proper : the householder, taking two 
 small loaves, breaking one of them in two, laying the pieces upon 
 the whole loaf, wrapping the whole in bitter herbs, dipping it in 
 the sop, and eating it, with the words, " This is the bread of afflic- 
 tion which our fathers ate in Egypt." Next came the blessing upon 
 each kind of food as it was partaken of, the Paschal lamb being 
 eaten last, and the third cup, called the cup of blessing, was drunk. 
 The remainder of the Hallel, the Psalms from the 115th to the 118th, 
 were sung or chanted, with which the celebration ordinarily con- 
 cluded. Occasionally a fifth cup was added, and what was called 
 the Great Hallel (Psalms cxx.-cxxxvii.) was repeated. 
 
 It was after the strife and the feet-washing, and coincident with 
 the circulation of the first of these Passover cups, that our Lord 
 used the words recorded in the 15th, 16th, 17th, and 18th verses 
 of the 22d chapter of St. Luke : " And he said unto them, With 
 desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer." 
 Clear before the Saviour's eye were all the scenes of the impending 
 midnight hour in the garden, the next forenoon in the judgment- 
 hall, the afternoon upon the cross. He stood touching the very 
 edge of these great sufferings. The baptism that he had to be 
 baptized with was now at hand and how was he straitened till it 
 was accomplished ! a few quiet hours lay between him and his 
 entrance into the cloud. With a desire more earnest and vehement 
 than on any other occasion, he wished to spend those hours with 
 his apostles, to take his last leave of them, to give his farewell 
 instructions to them. He had never before partaken of the Pass- 
 1 Exodus xii. 26, 27.
 
 THE EXPOSURE OF JUDAS. 431 
 
 over with them. He desired to do it this once. He knew that it 
 could never be repeated. He knew that this was virtually the last 
 Jewish Passover, that with the offering up of himself in the great 
 sacrifice of the following day that long line of Passover celebrations 
 that had run now through fifteen hundred years, down from the 
 night in Egypt when the first-born were slain, was to be brought 
 to its close. He knew that all which this rite prefigured was then 
 to be fulfilled, and that that fulfilment was to issue in the erection 
 of a spiritual kingdom, in which other kind of tables were to be 
 spread, and other kind of wine to be drunk. " With desire I have 
 desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer : for I say unto 
 you, I will not any more eat thereof, until it be fulfilled in the 
 kingdom of God. And he took the cup and gave thanks, and said, 
 Take this, and divide it among yourselves : for I say unto you, I 
 will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God 
 shall come." Emphatic here the double repetition of the words, 
 "for I say unto you," calling special attention to the words that 
 followed. Eesponding to this call, we fix our thoughts upon these 
 words ; but beyond the intimation they contain of that being our 
 Lord's last Passover, and of his speedy entering into an estate alto- 
 gether higher, yet in some respects alike, they remain almost as 
 mysterious to us as they must have been to those who heard them 
 for the first time at the supper-table. 
 
 In washing the disciples' feet, Jesus had said, "Ye are clean, but 
 not all. For he knew who should betray him ; therefore said he, 
 Ye are not all clean." 1 So early, from the very first, did the thought 
 of Judas and his meditated deed press upon the Saviour's spirit. 
 When the washing of the feet was over, and Jesus sat down, and 
 the repast began, they all noticed that there was a cloud upon their 
 Master's countenance, and the disciple who, sitting next to him, 
 could best read the expression of his face, saw that he "was troubled 
 in spirit." What was vexing him? what was marring the joy of 
 such a meeting ? They are not left long in doubt as to the cause. 
 Christ breaks the silence into which, in the sadness of his spirit, he 
 had fallen; he speaks in tone and manner quite different from 
 that of his ordinary colloquial address. And he " testified and said, 
 Verily, verily, I say unto you, that one of you which eateth with 
 me shall betray me ! " Betray him ! how 1 for what 1 to what ? 
 Betray such a Master at such a time ! Bad enough for any common 
 disciple to use the means and opportunities that acquaintance gave 
 to effect his ruin ; but for one of them, his own familiar friends, 
 whom he has drawn so closely round his person, upon whom he has 
 lavished such affection, for one of those admitted to this most 
 sacred of meals, the holiest seal of the nearest earthly bond ; for 
 one of the twelve to betray him ! No wonder, as the thought of 
 i John xiii. 10, 11.
 
 432 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 all the guilt which such an act involved sprung up within their 
 breasts, that they should be, as they were, " exceeding sorrowful ; " 
 that they should look " one on another, doubting of whom he spake," 
 fixing searching looks on all round, to see whether any counte- 
 nance showed the confusion of felt guilt, that, after inquiring among 
 themselves which of them it was that " should do this thing," they 
 should begin, " every one of them, to say unto him, one by one, Is 
 it I ? and another, Is it 1 1 " You like the men who met such an 
 announcement in such a way. You like them for the burning sense 
 of shame they show at the very thought of there being one among 
 them capable of such a deed. You like them for the strong desire 
 that each man shows to clear himself from the charge. You like them 
 for the prompt appeal that each man makes to Jesus. Above all, 
 you like them that there is none so bold and over-confident, not even 
 Peter, as at once to think and say of himself that there was no 
 possibility it could be he, but that all, not without some secret wonder 
 and self-distrust, put in turn the question, " Lord, is it I ? " All but 
 one ! He did not at first dare to put this question to his Master. 
 In the confusion, his having omitted to do so would not be noticed. 
 He had returned look for look, as they at first scanned each other ; 
 no face calmer or less confused ; no one suspecting Judas. 
 
 To the many questions coming so eagerly from all sides and 
 ends of the table, Jesus made the general reply : "He that dippeth 
 liis hand with me in the dish, the same shall betray me." Had 
 there been but one vessel containing the Paschal sauce into which 
 all dipped, this would have been nothing more than a repetition of 
 the first announcement that it was one of them now eating with 
 him at the same table that should betray him. But if, as we have 
 every reason to believe, there were more than one dish upon the 
 table, this second saying of our Lord would limit the betrayal to 
 that smaller circle of which he was himself the centre, the three 
 or four all of whom dipped into the same vessel. Within that circle 
 was Judas, who, when he heard the terrible words that followed, 
 " The Son of man goeth as it is written of him, but woe unto that 
 man by whom the Son of man is betrayed ! It had been good for 
 that man if he had not been born," whether from the circle 
 having been drawn so much the narrower taking him in among the 
 few one of whom must be the man, or from the look of his Master 
 being fixed on him, the spell of which he could not resist, or from 
 the very burden and terror of a denunciation which sent a thrill 
 through every heart, could no longer remain silent, but said to 
 Jesus, as the others had done before : " Master, is it I ? Jesus said 
 unto him : Thou hast said ; " that is, ' Yes, thou art the man.' 
 
 We have the express testimony of the fourth Evangelist that no 
 man at the table but himself knew for what purpose Judas at last 
 went out, that none of them at this time suspected him as the
 
 THE EXPOSURE OF JUDAS. 433 
 
 betrayer. No man at the table then could have heard that answer 
 of our Lord ; a thing that we can scarcely imagine how it could be 
 but by supposing that Judas lay upon the seat immediately next to 
 Jesus on the one side, as John lay upon the one nearest to him on 
 the other. Assuming this, Jesus might easily have spoken to one 
 so near in such an under tone, that none could overhear. 
 
 Let us imagine now, that close to Judas, on the same side, or 
 one or two off from John, upon the other side, Peter was sitting, 
 and the last incident in the strange story becomes intelligible. 
 None have heard our Saviour's specific designation of the traitor to 
 himself. The terrible malediction, however, pronounced upon him 
 has whetted their curiosity to know who he is. Peter sees that 
 John is the most likely one to find it out. If the Master will tell 
 it to any one, it will be to him, he couching so close to Jesus that 
 he has only to throw back his head for it to rest upon his Master's 
 bosom. Into his ear, therefore, any secret may be easily and safely 
 whispered. As Peter is so placed that he cannot well do it other- 
 wise without his object revealing itself, by signs rather than by 
 words he tells John to ask. John does so, and gets an answer that 
 was specific and unambiguous ; one, however, that no one at table 
 but himself could have had any knowledge of. " He it is," said 
 Jesus, " to whom I shall give a sop, when I have dipped it. And 
 when he had dipped the sop, he gave it to Judas Iscariot, the son 
 of Simon." Two men of the twelve now knew to whom the Lord 
 referred, Judas, on the one side, to whom Jesus had directly said, 
 " Thou art the man," and John, now, on the other, to whom the 
 sign was as explicit as any words could be, a sign, however, only to 
 John himself, the others not having heard the words that gave the 
 act its meaning. The giving of the sop to him decided the course 
 of the betrayer. "That thou doest," said Jesus to him, "do 
 quickly." He rose and went out immediately; and it was night. 
 And into that night he went carrying a blacker night within his 
 own dark breast. And now, how are we to interpret this striking 
 passage in the history of our Lord 1 
 
 1. This exposure and denunciation of the traitor may have 
 been one of the needful steps in the accomplishment of the divine 
 designs. Judas had already made a compact with the chief priests 
 to deliver Jesus into their hands. But of the time and manner of 
 that deliverance nothing had been said. As to these, nothing had 
 been resolved on. We may well believe that Judas entered the 
 guest-chamber without any premeditated purpose of executing his 
 design that night. The discovery, however, that his Master already 
 knew all that he had done, all that he meant to do, the judgment 
 passed, the terrible woe denounced on him, instead of checking him 
 in his career, served but to spur him on, and form within him, 
 and fix the purpose to go and do that very night the thing he had 
 2 E
 
 434 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 engaged to do. Operating in this way, what was said and done by 
 Jesus may have contributed to the accomplishment within the 
 appointed time of the predetermined counsel and purpose of the 
 Most High. 
 
 2. We have Christ's own authority for saying that one of his 
 reasons for acting as he did toward Judas was to afford to the 
 other apostles an evidence of his Messiahship. " I speak not of you 
 all," he had said; "I know whom I have chosen: but that the 
 Scripture may be fulfilled, He that eateth bread with me hath 
 lifted up his heel against me. Now I tell you before it come, that, 
 when it is come to pass, ye may believe that I am he." Had nothing 
 been said beforehand by Jesus, had everything run the course 
 it did, their Master remaining apparently in profound ignorance of 
 how his arrest in the garden was to be brought about, then to the 
 apostles' eyes this mystery would have hung around the whole 
 procedure, that Jesus had been deceived, had suffered a traitor to 
 enter unknown and undetected into the innermost circle of his 
 friends, had fallen by an unexpected blow from the hand of one 
 fancied to be friendly. As it was, what a proof had the apostles set 
 before their eyes, that Jesus knew what was in man, and needed 
 not that any one should tell him what was in man ! None of them 
 had distrusted Judas. He could have given no patent proof of his 
 false-heartedness. He had kept up the appearance of true friendship 
 to the last, so as to deceive every other eye. Yet when all is over, 
 and they recall what their Master had said a year before his death, 
 that one of them was a devil, and remember especially the sayings 
 of the guest-chamber, how vividly would the conviction come home 
 to the minds of the apostles, that they had to do with one 
 from whom no secrets were hidden, before whose all-seeing eye 
 every heart lay naked and bare ! 
 
 3. Let us see here an exhibition of the humanity of Jesus, his 
 being truly one of us, with all the common sensibility of our nature, 
 moral and emotional. There is nothing that the human heart so 
 shrinks from and shudders at as treachery in a friend ; the wearing 
 of a mask, the acceptance of all the tokens and pledges of affection, 
 the profession of admiration, attachment, love, yet deep within 
 coldness, sullenness, selfishness, a waiting for and seeking for 
 opportunity to make gain of the cultivated friendship, and a readi- 
 ness, when the time comes, to sacrifice the friend on the altar of 
 pride, or covetousness, or ambition. And if Jesus resented the 
 hypocrisy and treachery of Judas, if his spirit recoiled from near 
 contact with the traitor, if when these last hours had come which 
 he wished to spend alone with those he had loved so well and 
 was loving now, if that could be, better than ever the nearer the 
 hour of his departure came, he felt as if that guest-chamber were 
 defiled by such a presence as that of Judas, and felt burdened and
 
 THE EXPOSURE OF JUDAS. 435 
 
 restrained till he was gone, what is this but saying that there beat 
 in him the same heart that beats in all of us, when that heart is 
 right within 1 One object of the Saviour in so soon introducing 
 the topic of his betrayal may have been to get rid of a presence 
 felt to be incongruous, felt to be a restraint. He had much to say 
 that was for the ear of friendship alone. He had to open up his 
 heart in a way that no one would seek to do before the cold and 
 the unsympatlrising, much less before the alienated and the hostile. 
 It may have been with the feeling that the sooner he was gone the 
 better, that Jesus said to Judas, " What thou doest, do quickly." 
 One thing at least is evident, that it was with a burst of elation 
 and joy, as one escaping from under a dull and heavy pressure that 
 crushed the spirit into sadness, that Jesus spoke to the others 
 instantly on Judas being gone. " Therefore, when he was gone out, 
 Jesus said, Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in 
 him. If God be glorified in him, God shall also glorify him in 
 himself, and shall straightway glorify him. Little children, yet a 
 little while I am with you," and so on throughout all the remainder 
 of the feast he speaks and acts with a free unburdened heart. 
 
 4. There is more than the humanity here ; there is the divinity of 
 our Lord. He assumes and exercises the office of the Judge. He 
 is a God to Judas. He takes this man into his 'hands, and deals 
 with him as none but God had a right to do. I speak not of that 
 knowledge which laid bare to him all that he had in his heart to 
 do, but of his dooming him as he did ; his pronouncing over him 
 the most terrible sentence that was ever pronounced over a human 
 being on this side eternity : " Woe to that man ; it had been good 
 for that man if he had not been born ! " That there was tenderness 
 and pity, infinite pity, and infinite tenderness in the heart of Jesus 
 for Judas, who can doubt 1 That in dealing with him as he did 
 in the guest-chamber, he was giving him another and last oppor- 
 tunity of repentance I do most thoroughly believe. What way 
 could you take more fitted to turn any man from a crime that you 
 knew he meditated, than the telling him beforehand that you knew 
 all that he intended and had planned to do, and by denouncing the 
 crime contemplated in the strongest terms you could employ? 
 That a purpose of mercy lay embedded in our Lord's treatment of 
 Judas is not disproved by the fact, that instead of working anything 
 like repentance, it stirred up the malicious feelings to an intenser 
 activity. That fact, like the thousand others of like kind that are 
 daily, hourly happening in God's moral government of our race, 
 only shows that the very goodness and grace of the Most High, the 
 wisdom, purity, and holiness of his law, are too often turned by the 
 perverse spirit that is in us into incitements to a bolder and more 
 determined resistance to his authority. The case of Judas, in this 
 stage of it, is but another instance of what is a very common
 
 436 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 experience, that if a man have once fairly committed himself to a 
 certain course, have resolved to brave all its perils in order to realise its 
 fancied gains, he becomes so self-blinded, so impetuous, so impatient 
 of all check or hindrance, that anything whatever thrown in his 
 way, however fitted in itself to warn and check, becomes but as a 
 goad in the side of a fiery steed, driving him the more fiercely on 
 his career. But is it over one whom mercy and love have followed 
 to the farthest limits, and have been obliged at last to let go, that 
 the fearful sentence is pronounced : " "Woe to that man ; it had been 
 better for him that he had never been born ! " Does he who says 
 that know it to be true ? He can know it only by his being one 
 with God. Has he who pronounces this doom a title to do so 1 
 He can have it only by challenging to himself the prerogatives of 
 the Supreme Judge of all mankind. 
 
 5. Let us look on with wonder and awe as there is opened here 
 to our view in one of its depths, the great mystery of this world 
 and of God's wise and holy government of it. " It had been better 
 for that man that he had never been," but why then was he born ? 
 A great crime is made to minister to the greatest act and instance 
 of the divine love, yet the criminal is stripped of no part of his 
 guilt. " The Son of man goeth as it is written ; " that writing is 
 but the expression of the divine will ; that will is sovereign, just, 
 and good ; yet woe to the man by whom the Son of man is betrayed ! 
 human freedom, human agency, human guilt taken up into that 
 vast and complicated machinery by which the counsels of the Most 
 High God are carried out. " the depth of the riches, both of the 
 wisdom and knowledge of God ! how unsearchable are his judg- 
 ments, and his ways past finding out ! " " Thou wilt say unto me, 
 Why doth he yet find fault ? for who hath resisted his will ? Nay 
 but, man, who art thou that repliest against Godl Shall the 
 thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me 
 thus ? For who hath known the mind of the Lord, or who hath 
 been his counsellor ? For of him, and through him, and to him, 
 are all things, to whom be glory for ever. Amen." 
 
 After Judas left the room, our Lord said, " Little children, yet 
 a little while I am with you. Ye shall seek me : and as I said 
 unto the Jews, Whither I go, ye cannot come ; so say 1 now to you." 
 The words struck upon Peter's ear, and set his quick spirit working. 
 Another intimation this of some mysterious movement about to be 
 made. Keeping the words before him, so soon as a convenient 
 pause occurred, Peter said unto Jesus, " Lord, whither goest thou 1 
 Jesus answered him, Whither I go, thou canst not follow me now ; 
 but thou shalt follow me afterwards." The answer should have 
 satisfied him, should have repressed at least the curiosity which it 
 was obviously not Christ's purpose to satisfy. But the pertinacious 
 apostle will not accept the mild rebuke that it contains ; he will
 
 PETER'S PROFESSIONS. 437 
 
 still go on, be still more urgent. He had already got one check at 
 the feet- washing, from which it cost him little to recover. He may 
 have been somewhat tremulous when with the rest he put the 
 question to Jesus, "Lord, is it I?" But he has recovered himself, 
 and is ready now to say almost anything to his Master, almost any- 
 thing of himself. "Lord," he replies, "why cannot I follow thee now ? 
 I will lay down my life for thy ",ake." Let us do Peter the justice to 
 believe that this was not altogether a vain and empty boast ; let us 
 believe that if his Master's life had been threatened by open violence 
 he would have stood by him to the last, and perilled or lost his own 
 life in his defence. He was one of the two, who, strangely enough, 
 perhaps suspecting something from the temper of the rulers, had 
 brought a sword with him into the guest-chamber. And he proved 
 in the garden that he was ready to meet the risks that the use of 
 that weapon brought with it. It was in another kind of courage 
 than the physical one that he was to prove himself so bankrupt. 
 Still there was no small measure of presumption in his being so free 
 with the expression of his readiness to lay down his life, a pre- 
 sumption which Jesus met by saying first, with gentle irony, " Wilt 
 thou lay down thy life for my sake?" and then adding, "Verily, 
 verily, I say unto thee, The cock shall not crow " (the time of the 
 cock-crowing, a division of the Jewish night, shall not be past), 
 " till thou hast denied me thrice." 
 
 The feast goes on. Some unrecorded observation has been made 
 by Peter in the name of the others as well as of himself, when our 
 Lord turns to him and says, " Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath 
 desired to have you;" to have you all (the word here used took in 
 the others as well as Peter), " that he may sift you as wheat ; but I 
 have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not : and when thou art 
 converted, strengthen thy brethren," another and most impressive 
 warning which should have sent his thoughts into another channel, 
 but he is back again to his first position. Jesus had said nothing 
 openly of any peril to himself, but the apostle cannot get it out of his 
 thoughts. " Lord," he says, " I am ready to go with thee to prison 
 and to death." He gets in answer the same distinct prediction, 
 that before the dawn he should thrice deny his Lord. 
 
 The feast is over. They are on the way out to Gethsemane, 
 when Jesus says to the group around him, " All ye shall be offended 
 because of me this night : for it is written, I will smite the Shepherd, 
 and the sheep of the flock shall be scattered." There was nothing 
 to call for Peter's intervention here. But he cannot be silent ; he 
 must step forward and put himself above all the others. " Though 
 all shall be offended because of thee, yet will I never be offended." 
 Once more, for the third time, the prediction of his three denials is 
 rung in his ears, but with no effect " But he spake the more 
 vehemently, If I should die with thee, I will not deny thee. Like-
 
 438 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 wise also said they all." Yet within an hour they all had fled, and 
 within three hours the three denials had taken place. How are we 
 to look upon so singular a display of such sustained, reiterated, most 
 obstinate, and boastful self-confidence ? Something we must attri- 
 bute to the excitement of the occasion, but more to the natural 
 temper of the man. The last few days had been SAvelling the tide 
 of Pharisaic indignation as it rose around Jesus in the Tempie, till 
 its proudest, darkest waves seemed ready to burst upon and swallow 
 him up. New and strange impressions of some great impending 
 calamity, which all their Master's words and actions deepened, 
 seized upon the apostles. There were some quiet hours for him 
 and them in the guest-chamber ; but calm as he was, there was a 
 mournfulness in their Master's calmness, as if he sat under the 
 shadow of some terrible catastrophe, and such a constant throwing 
 out of hints as to its approach, that one can well believe that the 
 spirits of the apostles were wrought up to a high pitch of excite- 
 ment, so that whatever each man had in him of weakness or of 
 strength was just in the condition to come out in all its fulness ; 
 and so in all its fulness came out that rash, presumptuous, overtrust- 
 fulness in self, in which lay Peter's peculiar weakness. 
 
 But something, too, we must attribute to another agency, which 
 took advantage of all the excitement of the occasion, and wrought 
 upon the temper of the man. I have already spoken of the evidence 
 which, within the walls of this supper-chamber, Jesus gave of his 
 eye being one that could see into the future of earthly events. But 
 now the proof meets us of that eye being one that pierces beyond 
 the bounds of the outward and earthly, scans the secrets of the 
 world of spirits, and sees all that is there going on. It is but a 
 glimpse he gives us of what he knew and saw ; but how strange, 
 how awful, how full of warning, how full of encouragement, that 
 glimpse ! Looking at the scene in the supper-chamber with the eye 
 of sense, you see twelve men with their Master at their head, in 
 trying, startling circumstances ; first one and then another acting 
 out their natural dispositions and characters. Looking with the 
 eye of faith as Jesus lifts the veil, you see Satan tempting, Jesus 
 praying, the Father hearing, the sifting suffered, the son of perdition 
 lost, the boastful disciple tried, his fall permitted, the invisible 
 shield held over him, his faith not suffered wholly to fail, his very 
 fall turned to good account, and he by it made all the fitter to be a 
 comforter and strengthener of others. 
 
 Such was the first communion-table : around it the play of these 
 spiritual agencies ; by the men who sat at it the exhibitions of such 
 weakness, presumption, guilt, one betraying, one denying, all 
 forsaking. With such a spectacle before our eyes let us not be high- 
 minded, but fear. We come to our tables of communion with the 
 same weak nature that was in Judas, and Peter, and the rest ; and
 
 THE LORD'S SUPPER. 439 
 
 Satan may be ready to enter into our heart and may be desirous to 
 have us that he may sift us as wheat. The nearer we stand to 
 Jesus, the greater his efforts to throw the snare around our feet by 
 which our fall may be effected. Let the self-ignorance and want of 
 faith and failure in attachment that all the twelve showed that night 
 shine as a beacon before our eyes, and under a trembling sense of 
 our own weakness and liability to forsake or deny, or even to betray 
 our Master, let us cast ourselves upon him, that for us, too, he may 
 pray the Father, that in the coming hours of trial our faith fail not, 
 but that through all of temptation and danger that yet awaits us in 
 this world we may be safely borne, through the might of his 
 strengthening presence, and to the praise of his great name. 
 
 XII. 
 
 THE LORD'S SUPPER. 
 
 MATT. xxvi. 26-29 ; MARK xiv. 22-25 ; LUKE xxn. 19-20 ; 1 COB. xi. 23-25. 
 
 LET us imagine that one previously ignorant of the history of 
 our religion were to set himself, in the first instance, to investigate 
 the origin of the institution of the Lord's Supper. The fact that 
 the entire Christian Church, however its various sections may other- 
 wise differ, all agree in observing this rite, is before his eyes, and he 
 finds upon inquiry that it has done so for many generations past. 
 Guided simply by the lights of common history, he ascertains that 
 as far back as till about 130 years after the time when Christ is said 
 to have lived, there was a society calling itself by his name, in 
 which this ordinance was kept. There is then put into his hand a 
 copy of the New Testament, in which an account of its first insti- 
 tution is given. He finds in this book, however, so much that is 
 extraordinary, that he is disposed at first to be incredulous, 
 incredulous, among other things, as to this account. Might not this 
 rite have taken its rise somewhat differently, at some after period, 
 the narrative contrived and adapted by those who wished to bestow 
 upon it as interesting a birth as possible 1 ? A slight reflection 
 resolves this difficulty. How could the men of any after period, say 
 fifty or a hundred years after the death of Christ, begin then for 
 the first time to keep a rite which bore upon the very front of it 
 that it was kept in obedience to a command of the Saviour given on 
 the night before he died 1 Had this command not been given at 
 that time, and had the observance not at that time commenced, one 
 cannot see how, without a falsehood in their hands which they could 
 not but detect, any body of men could at any posterior period have
 
 440 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 commenced the celebration. Besides, it is expressly asserted in the 
 Acts of the Apostles that the first disciples of Jesus did actually 
 begin the breaking of bread in remembrance of their Master a few 
 days after the resurrection, and continued it weekly thereafter. 
 How could a record containing such a statement have been at any 
 subsequent time foisted upon the faith of those who had never before 
 seen or heard of such an ordinance 't It would have been utterly 
 impossible to have gained credit for a narrative containing such a 
 statement, had the statement not in point of fact been true. 
 
 Simply and by itself, therefore, the continuous observance of 
 this sacred ordinance carries with it a separate and independent 
 proof that it must have commenced at the time specified in the 
 Gospel narrative. Assuming, then, that narrative as authentic, as 
 being a trustworthy account of what was said and done by Jesus 
 Christ within the chamber where he assembled with the twelve, 
 what might such an inquirer as we have imagined gather from that 
 narrative alone, and without going beyond its limits, as to the 
 character of Christ ? 
 
 1. Would he not be struck with the manifold evidence given 
 within the compass of these few hours of the prescience of Jesus, 
 his minute foreknowledge of the future ? All throughout he speaks 
 and acts as one who knew that this was to be his parting interview 
 with the men around him, his last meeting with them before his 
 death. He knew that his hour was come, that he should depart 
 out of this world unto the Father. He spoke of that departure as 
 at hand. Externally there was nothing to indicate that his death 
 was so near, that his body was so soon to be broken, his blood to be 
 shed. Such private information might have been conveyed to him 
 as to the plans and purposes of the rulers, and of the compact of the 
 betrayer with them, as to satisfy him that the earliest opportunity 
 would be taken to cut him off. A presentiment that his end was 
 near might thus have been created, but such a presentiment could 
 not have exhibited the clearness and the certainty of that conviction 
 upon which he acted. Besides, it was not his own future alone 
 which was mapped out so distinctly before his eye. It was the 
 future, near and remote, of every man around him. He tells Judas 
 beforehand that he was to betray him, Peter that he was to deny 
 him, the whole of them that they were that night to be offended at 
 him and forsake him, that he was to be left alone. Looking still 
 further on, he dimly intimates to Peter that in his death he was 
 to resemble his Master, and distinctly tells the rest that for a little 
 while they should be sorrowful, but that their sorrow should be 
 turned into joy ; that the time was coming when they should be 
 put out of the synagogues, and that whosoever killed them should 
 think that he did God service. Three times in the course of his 
 addresses, whilst pre-announcing one or another of these events, he
 
 THE LORD'S SUPPEB. 441 
 
 emphatically declares that he told them these things beforehand, 
 that when all came to pass they might remember that he had told 
 them, and believe that he was the Messiah promised to their 
 fathers. Pondering over the form and manner of the evidence thus 
 afforded of Christ's prescience, might not our inquirer say, Surely 
 a greater than any of the old prophets is here ! Their knowledge 
 of the future was derived from another, was communicated as so 
 derived. It was as the Lord revealed that they declared and 
 described. To their eye there was so much light upon the future 
 as God was pleased to throw upon it, but all around was darkness. 
 They never assumed, and they never exercised, a power of fore- 
 knowing and foretelling in their own name, and without any limits. 
 But here is one upon whom the power sits easily, as a natural 
 inherent gift, who exercises it without token of its being in any 
 way limited, without any recognition of his indebtedness to another 
 for the foresight he displays. 
 
 2. Opening his mind and heart to the first impressions of the 
 scene, our inquirer could not fail to be greatly struck with the 
 strong considerate affection shown by Jesus to his disciples. There 
 hangs around the incidents and sayings of the upper chamber the 
 touching and tender interest which attaches to the last words 
 and acts of the dying. When a man knows that he is speaking to 
 his family or friends around him for the last time, that it is his 
 last opportunity of addressing to them words of counsel and 
 encouragement, what a solemnity attaches to the interview ! And 
 if he be a man of ardent affections, what love and sympathy will 
 breathe out in his parting words ! The world of common life is 
 not void of instances in which men so placed have risen to a heroic 
 height of self-forgetfulness, and have spent their last moments in 
 the effort to comfort and strengthen those they left behind. There 
 is much, however, to distinguish this instance of a parting farewell 
 from all others of a like kind. It is given to no man to foresee his 
 impending sufferings, and the exact manner of his death, as Jesus 
 foresaw them ; nor is it given to any to foresee, as he did, all the 
 after trials of those from whom he was to part. He knows, as he 
 is speaking to the twelve in the guest-chamber, that within an hour 
 or two|he shall be lying in the great agony of the garden ; that 
 he shall never close his eyes again till he closes them in death ; 
 that to-morrow there await him all the mockeries of the judgment- 
 hall, all the shame and suffering of the cross ; that the shades of 
 the next day shall darken round his sepulchre. But the prospect 
 of all this, though so near, so vividly seen, so awfully dark, has not 
 power to withdraw his thoughts from his disciples, or keep him 
 from bestowing upon them those last hours given for earthly 
 intercourse. As he speaks to them his whole heart seems absorbed 
 with the one desire, to soothe, to comfort, to warn, to fortify, tc
 
 412 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 encourage. If he speak of his own departure, it is as if the thing 
 about it that grieved him most was, that they should be left 
 exposed to so many difficulties and trials when he was gone. Their 
 very ignorance of what was awaiting them quickens his compassion 
 and gives deeper pathos to his words. As he looks round upon 
 the little flock so soon to be scattered as sheep without a shepherd, 
 the coming history of each rises before his eye. There is James, 
 who so soon is to seal his testimony with his blood ; Peter, who, 
 like his Lord, is to be crucified ; John, who is to be left survivor of 
 them all. How little do these men know the kind of life that is 
 before them ! How shall he best prepare them for it 1 The 
 very frailties and faults that he knew they were to exhibit seem 
 but to have added to the gentleness and tenderness of his love. 
 How else shall we account for the manner in which he speaks of 
 them and to them upon this occasion ? Of them to his Father : 
 " Thine they were, and thou gavest them me, and they have kept 
 thy word ; they have known surely that I came out from thee, they 
 have believed that thou didst send me." To themselves : "Ye are 
 they Avhich have continued with me in my temptations. And I 
 appoint unto you a kingdom, as my Father hath appointed unto 
 me." To speak in such a way as this of men who at the time knew 
 so little of the real character of their Master, and had so little faith ; 
 to speak thus of the very men who, instead of continuing with him, 
 were all that very night to forsake him, what shall we say of it but 
 that there was the very rarest exhibition here of that charity which 
 believeth all things, thinketh no evil, hopeth all things ; which, 
 wherever faith, though it be but as a grain of mustard-seed, is genu- 
 ine ; wherever devotion, though it be weak, is true, is ready to 
 acknowledge and approve ? 
 
 3. After being struck generally with the singular manifestations 
 of a deep-rooted self-forgetting attachment to the twelve shown by 
 Jesus all through this interview, we may imagine the attention of 
 our supposed inquirer to be concentrated upon that act by which 
 he instituted an observance to be kept for ever after in remembrance 
 of him. As the author of a great religious revolution, the head of 
 a great religious society, it is remarkable that this is the one 
 religious ceremony instituted and observed by our Lord himself. 
 After his death and resurrection, he issued the command that, on 
 being enrolled as his followers, all were to be baptized ; but this 
 meeting together, this breaking of bread and drinking of wine in 
 remembrance of him, was the single ordinance that in his lifetime 
 he set up, and by his own first observance hallowed. Is there 
 anything peculiar in his having done so 1 There is nothing peculiar 
 certainly in the cherishing and expressing a desire to be remembered 
 when we are gone by those we loved; nothing peculiar in our 
 leaving behind some remembrancers by which our memory may be
 
 THE LORD'S SUPPER. 443 
 
 kept green and fresh within their hearts. But there is something 
 more here than the expression of such a desire, the bequeathing of 
 such a remembrancer. There is the appointment of a particular 
 mode by which for ever afterwards the remembrance of Christ, and 
 more particularly of his death for them, was to be sustained in the 
 breasts of all his followers. It is common enough in human history 
 to meet with periodical celebrations, anniversaries of the day of 
 their birth, or of their death, held in honour of those who have 
 greatly distinguished themselves by their virtues, their genius, their 
 high services to their country or to mankind. But where except 
 here do we read of any one in* his own lifetime originating and 
 appointing the method by which he was to be remembered, himself 
 presiding at the first celebration of the rite, and laying as his 
 injunction upon all his followers, regularly to meet for its observ- 
 ance ? Who among all those who have been the greatest ornaments 
 of our race, the greatest benefactors of humanity, would ever have 
 risked his reputation, his prospect of being remembered by the 
 ages that were to come, by exhibiting such an eager and premature 
 desire to preserve and perpetuate the remembrance of his name, his 
 character, his deeds? They have left it to others after them to 
 devise the means for doing so ; neither vain enough, nor bold enough, 
 nor foolish enough to be themselves the framers of these means. 
 Who then is he who ventures to do what none else ever did ? Who 
 is this, who, ere he dies, by his own act and deed sets up the 
 memorial institution by which his death is to be shown forth? 
 Surely he must be one who knows and feels that he has claims to 
 be remembered such as none other ever had, claims of such a kind 
 that, in pressing them in such a way upon the notice of his followers 
 he has no fear whatever of what he does being attributed to any 
 other, any lesser motive than the purest, deepest, most unselfish 
 love ? Does not Jesus Christ in the very act of instituting in his 
 own lifetime this memorial rite, step at once above the level of 
 ordinary humanity, and assert for himself a position toward man- 
 kind utterly and absolutely unique ? 
 
 And if, by the mere fact of Jesus Christ having erected with 
 his own hand the institute by which his name and memory were 
 to be kept alive, the impression might thus, and naturally enough, 
 have been conveyed into the mind of our supposed inquirer, of 
 there being something superhuman about him, would not this 
 impression be sustained and enhanced as he ran his eye over the 
 words which, on this occasion, Christ was represented as having 
 addressed to his disciples ? Something surely quite original, 
 belonging to himself alone, was the way in which he spoke of his 
 relationship to his own disciples, to all mankind, to the Divine 
 Being whom he called his Father. To his own disciples you hear 
 him saying, "I am the vine, ye are the branches." "Abide in me
 
 444 THE PASSION 
 
 and I in you." " Without me ye can do nothing." " Because I live, 
 ye shall live also. " " If ye shall ask anything in my name, I will 
 do it." As to all men you hear him saying, " I am the way, and the 
 truth, and the life : no man cometh unto the Father, but by me." 
 And as to God, " He that hath seen me, hath seen the Father." "Ye 
 believe in God, believe also in me." " And this is life eternal, to 
 know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast 
 sent. I have glorified thee on the earth : I have finished the work 
 which thou gavest me to do. And now, O Father, glorify thou 
 me, with the glory which I had with thee before the world was." 
 "All mine are thine, and "thine are mine." "Father, I will that 
 they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am ; that 
 they may behold my glory, which thou hast given me : for thou 
 lovedst me before the foundation of the world." Out of those few 
 hours which Jesus spent with the twelve within the walls of the 
 guest-chamber at Jerusalem, from what he did there, and what he 
 said, how much would there be to awaken in the spirit of such an 
 inquirer as we have imagined, the most intense curiosity as to the 
 real character of him who appears as president in this Passover 
 celebration ; how much to carry the conviction home either that he 
 was a vain presumptuous egotist, taking a place among his fellows 
 and before God to which he had no right, or he was other than 
 an ordinary child of Adam, one who stood in quite a different posi- 
 tion both to God and to man from that which any one before, or 
 any one since in the history of our race has occupied. 
 
 With these remarks upon the general impressions which a first 
 reading of the narrative of all that happened in the guest-chamber 
 might be supposed to make on the mind of an intelligent and 
 candid reader, let us look with our own eyes at the different 
 accounts which have been transmitted to us of the institution of 
 the Lord's Supper. They are four in number. The one first 
 written and published was that of St. Paul, remarkable not only as 
 coming from one who was not an eye-witness, but who received it 
 by immediate revelation from our Lord himself. Springing from 
 such a peculiar and independent source, its concurrence with those 
 of the three Evangelists is striking and satisfactory; for all the 
 four accounts do thoroughly and substantially agree. There are 
 indeed many verbal differences between them. No two of the 
 narrators put exactly the same words in Christ's lips. We might 
 have expected that if any words of our Lord were to be reported 
 with exact and literal fidelity, they would have been those uttered 
 by him on this occasion. That it is not so is one of the many 
 proofs that it was the general meaning and substance of what Christ 
 said, rather than the exact expressions which he employed, that 
 the sacred writers were instructed to preserve. Three of the four 
 accounts agree in telling us that there was a double blessing or
 
 THE LORD'S SUPPER. 445 
 
 giving of thanks, the first at the breaking of the bread, the second 
 at the giving of the cup. But no record whatever is preserved of 
 the words in which these benedictions or prayers were couched ; a 
 silence, not perhaps without reason, considering that it is in and by 
 the consecration prayer of the priest, regarded as corresponding to 
 these benedictions, that the mysterious change in the elements is 
 by some supposed to be effected. Two of the four accounts agree 
 in telling us that there was an interval how occupied is not told 
 between the two acts, that of breaking the bread and handing 
 round the cup ; the one taking place while the Supper was in pro- 
 gress, the other not till it was ended. Two also of the four accounts 
 agree in telling us that it was as they were eating, i.e. partaking in 
 the ordinary way of the Paschal supper, that the bread of the new 
 Christian rite was blessed and broken. 
 
 It is not possible, indeed, with the broken and imperfect lights 
 that we have here in hand, to have anything like a distinct concep- 
 tion of the exact order of events. It is, however, almost certain, 
 that it was after the Paschal Lamb was eaten, and towards the 
 close therefore of the Jewish ordinance, that Christ either inter- 
 rupted the ordinary course of the feast, or turned that which had 
 been the final distribution of a portion of the unleavened bread to 
 a new and peculiar use. Anyhow, we may well believe that there 
 was something in our Lord's manner when he took the loaf in hand 
 and lifted up his voice in prayer, and blessed and brake, that closed 
 every lip and fixed on him every eye. The wonder heightened 
 when he said, " Take, eat ; this is my body which is broken for you : 
 this do in remembrance of me." It may have been, we presume it 
 was, a silent interval which occurred, till the time came for the last 
 cup of the feast, of the cup of blessing, to be handed round. 
 Having blessed it also, he gave it to them, saying, "Drink ye all of 
 it : for this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for 
 many for the remission of sins." 
 
 How, then, we ask ourselves, after having studied as minutely 
 as we can all that has been told us of the first observance of this 
 ordinance, how, at what times, and in what manner, did our Lord 
 intend that it should be celebrated in his Church? The first 
 disciples, the apostles themselves, had to put the same question, 
 and we know something of the way in which they answered it. 
 They could not. of course, connect it any more, as Christ had done, 
 with the Paschal supper, but, following so far, as they thought, 
 their Lord's example, they did connect it with a social meal ; and 
 so full of love were they, so anxious to have the memory of their 
 risen Saviour ever before them, they continued daily breaking the 
 bread from house to house. The associating, however, of the 
 religious rite with a common supper led speedily to abuse. The 
 secular and the social vitiated the spiritual, till, in such a case as
 
 446 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 that which occurred at Corinth, all the sacredness and awe and 
 tender love with which the bread of this ordinance had at first 
 been broken, were lost amid the tumult of a riotous entertainment, 
 in which some ate as the hungry eat, and in which others were 
 drunken. The strong hand of St. Paul was put forth to check so 
 glaring an outrage on all the decencies of Christian worship. Under 
 his rebuke the churches began to discountenance the practice which 
 had opened the door to this abuse. The social meal, under the 
 name of Agape, or love-feast, was dissociated altogether from the 
 religious observance. The Lord's Supper ceased to be a supper. 
 It was celebrated in the morning or mid-day, and not in the even- 
 ing. The daily changed into the weekly observance, where it long 
 stood ; the weekly into the monthly, where it still stands in many 
 churches ; the monthly, in some cases, into the yearly, as was long 
 the custom in our own country. 
 
 Does not all this teach us how free in this matter the Church 
 has been left by its great Founder, how little he cared about the 
 form as compared with the spirit in which the memory of his dying 
 love was to be preserved and perpetuated 1 As to time, and place, 
 and order, and outward circumstance, he left all loose. He framed 
 no directory ; he did not even leave behind any example that 
 could be exactly copied. .It has been so ordered, both as to the 
 original words and actions of our Lord, and the accounts that we 
 have of them, that all attempts to re-enact, as it were, the scene in 
 the guest-chamber are futile and vain. 
 
 Two things, indeed, appear to be essential to a right conception 
 of it. First, that in some way or other we recognise this ordinance 
 as a social meeting. It is by sitting down at one table, and par- 
 taking together of the food spread thereon, that the ties of brother- 
 hood and friendship are, in common life, expressed and maintained. 
 And that all true believers are without distinction and on equal 
 terms, invited to sit down at the tables of the Christian communion, 
 to be partakers of that one bread, is not this designed to teach 
 them that they form one body, one brotherhood, all whose mem- 
 bers should be bound together by the spirit of love and sympathy, 
 and readiness to bear each other's burdens, and to give each other 
 hejp? The existing state of matters in our large Christian 
 societies, when so many who know nothing of one another associ- 
 ate in this holy ordinance, stands in the way of this being realised. 
 Nevertheless, it ought ever to be regarded as one part of its inten- 
 tion, to impress upon us the unity of the Christian brotherhood, 
 their oneness with one another, and the duties of universal charity 
 which this unity, this oneness, involves. 
 
 Still more striking, however, and still more important is it, to 
 notice what the source, and bond, and seal of this union of all true 
 Christians with one another is, as symbolised and represented in
 
 GETHSEMANE. 447 
 
 this chief rite of our religion. Christ would unite us to one 
 another by bringing us to the same table, and dividing out to us 
 the same bread and wine. But that bread and wine, what are 
 they 1 His own body, his own blood ; no true union with each 
 other, but by and through such a union with himself as is repre- 
 sented by the image almost too strong, we might think, and 
 somewhat rude and harsh, yet one of the aptest that could be used 
 of our taking him and feeding upon him eating his flesh and 
 drinking his blood. 
 
 XIII. 
 
 GETHSEMANE. 
 MATT. xxvi. 36-46 ; MARK xiv. 32-42 ; LTJKB xxn. 39-46. 
 
 THE Paschal celebration over and his own Supper instituted, 
 Jesus and his disciples united in singing a hymn. We should like 
 to have known certainly what the words were, in singing which 
 the voices of Jesus and the eleven blended. If, as there is much 
 reason to believe, they were those of the 115th, 116th, 117th, and 
 118th Psalms, with what singular emotion must our Lord have re- 
 peated the verses : " The sorrows of death compassed me, and the 
 pains of hell gat hold upon me : I found trouble and sorrow. 
 Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints. The 
 Lord is on my side ; I will not fear : what can man do unto me ? 
 The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of 
 the corner." 
 
 The hymn having been sung, and the words recorded in the 
 14th chapter of the Gospel of St. John having been spoken, Jesus 
 said to his disciples, "Arise, let us go hence." At his command 
 they rise and are ready to follow him. But he does not immedi- 
 ately go forth. It grieves him to break up the interview. He will 
 prolong it to the uttermost ; give to them the last moments that 
 can be spared. As they cluster round him, he continues his ad- 
 dress. At last it closes with these comforting words : " These 
 things have I spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. 
 In the world ye shall have tribulation : but be of good cheer ; I 
 have overcome tne world." So ended that discourse, which, spoken 
 originally to a small and undistinguished company in a rude upper 
 chamber at Jerusalem, has already won for itself an audience vaster 
 and more varied than ever listened to the words of any other 
 speaker upon earth, and which has rendered but a small part of 
 the wide service of instruction and comfort which it is destined to 
 discharge to the sinful and sorrowful children of our race.
 
 448 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 Our Lord's last act of intercourse with his own in the upper 
 chamber was to bear them upon the arms of faith before his Father, 
 in the offering of that sublime intercessory prayer which he has left 
 behind him as a specimen of the advocacy which, as their great 
 High Priest, he conducts for his people before the Throne. 
 
 From the room rendered so sacred by all that had been said 
 and done in it, Jesus and the eleven at last depart. It was near 
 midnight, but the full moon lighted them on their way. They 
 passed out of one of the city gates, descended into the valley of 
 Jehoshaphat, crossed the Kedron, and made their way to the garden 
 of Gethsemane, 1 the well-known retreat where Jesus had often 
 lately spent the night; consecrating beforehand the scene of his 
 great agony by seasons of solitary prayer. At the entrance to this 
 garden Jesus said to his disciples generally, " Sit ye here, while I 
 go and pray yonder." There was nothing strange in his desiring 
 to be alone. He had often before severed himself in like manner 
 from the twelve. But there was something singular in it, show- 
 ing that he was looking forward to something more than an ordinary 
 night of solitary rest or prayer, when, instructing the others to 
 remain where they were, he took Peter, and James, and John along 
 with him farther into the interior of the garden. They had been 
 the three chosen and honoured witnesses of his Transfiguration on 
 the Mount. Was it to behold some new display of his power and 
 glory that they were taken now again apart ? Was the Father 
 about to answer the petition so lately offered, and in their presence, 
 to glorify his Son 1 Were they again to gaze upon their Master 
 clothed in light, shining all over with a brightness that would 
 throw into shadow the moonlight which bathed them ? Wonder- 
 ing what was to come, Peter, James, and John follow their Master 
 as he leads them into the recesses of Gethsemane, towards some 
 spot perhaps which overhanging olive-branches or the swelling hill- 
 side shaded, intercepting the moonbeams. Ere they reach that spot 
 he turns to speak to them. There is a great change upon his counte- 
 nance, but it is into gloom, not into glory. He looks as one " sore 
 amazed and very heavy," upon whose spirit the horror of some 
 great darkness, the pressure of some great burden, has fallen. He 
 speaks, but the calmness and serenity which had breathed in every 
 tone of his voice are gone. " My soul," he says to them, " is ex- 
 ceeding sorrowful, even unto death." Strange aspect for their 
 Master to wear ; strange words for him to speak ! They had never 
 seen that countenance so overshadowed. They had never heard 
 
 1 However ready to do so, we could not, when in its neighbourhood, persuade 
 ourselves that the traditional is the real Gethsemane. It is too close to the city and 
 too near a road which, at least in Passover times, must have been a very public 
 thoroughfare. Higher up the valley of Jehoshaphat there is a recess in the western 
 slopes of Mount Olivet which seemed to us much more likely to have been the scene 
 of our Lord's agony.
 
 GETH8EMANE. 449 
 
 him utter such mournful language. What can it be that has 
 wrought so sudden a change ? What deep trouble of the soul is it 
 that vents itself in these words 1 Peter perhaps might have put 
 some question to his Master, but the time is not given him. " Tarry 
 ye here," Christ adds, " and watch with me." Leaving them in 
 their turn amazed, he withdraws from them about a stone-cast (forty 
 or fifty yards), not so far off but that they can see, and even hear 
 him. He reaches the shaded spot, he kneels, he falls upon his face, 
 and from the prostrate form the prayer goes up to heaven : "0 my 
 Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me : nevertheless, 
 not as I will, but as thou Avilt." It may have been but a short 
 time that Jesus remained in this posture of prayer. Brief as it was, 
 on rising and returning to where he had left the three disciples, he 
 found them sleeping. Waking them, and singling out Peter, the 
 one of whom this should have been least expected, he says to him, 
 "Simon, sleepest thou?" 1 After all your late professions of being 
 so willing to follow me to prison and to death, " what ! couldst not 
 thou watch with me one hour 1 " Then to him and to the others 
 he says, " Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation : the 
 spirit indeed is willing but the flesh is weak" How did the Saviour 
 look, on this his first return from the place of his agony 1 Was the 
 trouble gone from his countenance ? did nothing but the shadow 
 of it remain ? The interval must have brought some relief. When 
 he rose from the ground, retraced his steps, bent over his disciples, 
 stirred them up from their slumbers, spoke to them as he did, is it 
 not evident that for the time the current of his thoughts was 
 changed ; a temporary calm was spread over his troubled spirit ; 
 the inward conflict was not such as that which had cast him on the 
 ground, and drawn from him the prayer to his Father? Again, 
 however, our Lord leaves the three and retires to the same spot. 
 As he reaches it, the heavy agony is again upon his soul heavier, 
 if that could be, than before. Again it bows him to the earth ; 
 again he prays as before, but now still more earnestly, the inward 
 pressure telling so upon the outward form, that his sweat is "as it 
 were great drops of blood falling down to the ground." The human 
 power to bear, strained to its utmost limits, seems ready to give 
 way. There appears " an angel from heaven strengthening him." 
 And now there is a second pause or interval of respite, in which 
 the three are visited a second time, and a second time found sleep 
 ing. But he does not waken them as he had done before ; or if he 
 does, he does not stay to speak to those whose eyes are heavy, and 
 who " wist not what to answer him." He is content to stand for a 
 moment, bending on them a look of compassion and unutterable 
 love. The call to the struggle comes again. A third time he is on 
 the cold, bare earth : a third time the same words, expressive of 
 i Mark xiv. 37. 
 2 F
 
 450 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 the same inward conflict and suffering, go up to heaven. The 
 thrice-repeated prayer is so far answered. The strength is given, 
 the conflict is over. " Then he cometh to his disciples and saith 
 unto them, Sleep on now, and take your rest : behold, the hour is 
 at hand, and the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners." 
 Even as he speaks he hears the sound of approaching footsteps, or 
 catches sight of the high priest's band, with the traitor at its head, 
 and so he adds, " Rise, let us be going : behold, he is at hand that 
 doth betray me." From face and form and voice and spirit every 
 trace of the inward tumult and agony is gone. Never perhaps in 
 all his life did the Saviour appear in calmer, serener dignity than 
 when he stepped forth to meet the betrayer ; nor did the calmness 
 and serenity for a moment forsake him, all through the trial, and 
 the mocking, and the scourging, and the crowning him with thorns, 
 and the nailing him to the cross. Nor did the soul-conflict and 
 soul-agony return till, from the midst of the darkness that for three 
 hours wrapped the cross, we hear a cry, kindred to those which 
 cleft the midnight air within Gethsemane, " My God, my God ! 
 why hast thou forsaken me ?" 
 
 Passing with Jesus from the upper chamber into the garden, 
 one of the first impressions made upon us is that of the suddenness 
 and greatness of the transition. Delivered within the compass of 
 the same hour, what a contrast between the prayers of the one 
 place and of the other, the one so calm, so serene, so elevated ; 
 the others so dark and troubled 1 Look first at him as, with eyes 
 uplift to heaven, he offers up the one ; look at him again as, pro- 
 strate on the earth, in garments moist with sweat and blood, he 
 offers up the other. Listen to him as, speaking on a level with the 
 throne itself, he says, " Father, I will that they also whom thou 
 hast given me be with me where I am, that they may behold my 
 glory." Listen to him as, in petitions brief and broken, wrung from 
 a spirit torn with most intense sorrow, he says, " Father, if it be 
 possible, let this cup pass from me." What a mighty and mysteri- 
 ous descent from that height above to these depths beneath ! And 
 how rapidly described ; the transition so quick, with nothing out 
 ward to account for it. If it be, as we know it is, a severe trial foi 
 our humanity to pass rapidly from one extreme of emotion to 
 another, if the trial be greater the stronger the contrast between 
 the two states of feeling, and the quicker the change takes place 
 if rapid passage from extreme joy to extreme grief, or the reverse, 
 have been known even to loose the silver cord and break the golden 
 bowl of life, let us ask ourselves to what a trial, apart from all 
 consideration of the depth or intensity of the emotions themselves, 
 must the humanity of our Lord have been exposed during the last 
 twelve hours before his death, arising from the very suddenness 
 and greatness of those alternations through which he passed.
 
 GETHSEMANE. 451 
 
 But wherein did the great sorrow which came upon him in 
 Gethsemane consist ] It is inconceivable and inadmissible that it 
 was the prospect of those outward sufferings and that bodily death 
 which lay between him and the grave in which he was next day to 
 be laid, that agitated to such an extreme degree the spirit of our 
 Saviour, and wrung from him the thrice repeated prayer. Admit- 
 ting to the fullest extent that our nature shrinks from suffering, 
 recoils from death; that suffering and dying are those strange 
 things " for which human nature in the beginning was not created ;" 
 that the purer, fuller, more perfect that nature is the more 
 abhorrent to it they must be, and that, consequently, the intensity 
 of the shrinking, the depth of the recoil, would be at its maximum 
 point in the sinless humanity of our Lord, yet are there over- 
 balancing considerations which forbid the idea that had it been 
 mere ordinary sufferings, such as any other man placed in the same 
 circumstances might have felt, and a mere ordinary death that 
 Jesus had before him, he would or could have shrunk in such a 
 way beneath the prospect. For let us remember, that if, on the 
 one hand, we attribute to Christ every sinless infirmity to which 
 our nature is liable, on the other hand we must attribute to him 
 every virtue, and that in its highest quality and degree of which 
 that nature is capable, and among these patience and fortitude. 
 Other men have endured as much physical suffering, have passed 
 through as ignominious and as torturing deaths, without the slight- 
 est ruffling of spirit, with the calmest and most heroic fortitude, 
 mingling even ecstatic songs of praise with the sounds of the crack- 
 ling fagots by which their bodies were consumed. Are we to 
 degrade our Saviour beneath the common martyr-level, or believe 
 that a burden that others bore so easily prostrated him in the 
 garden, forced from him those prayers, and wrapped him in that 
 bloody sweat 1 
 
 It is true indeed that Christ had a clear and perfect vision 
 beforehand of all that he was to endure, such as no other can have, 
 and this may have heightened the power of the dark prospect that 
 lay before him. But such a vision was his from the beginning. 
 Why was it only now, here at Gethsemane, that it so specially and 
 deeply affected him 1 Besides, his complete and accurate foreknow- 
 ledge extended beyond the cross, embraced the resurrection and 
 ascension. If in the foreground there were humiliation, suffering, 
 and death, in the background were exaltation and triumph. 
 Should not the depression produced by the vivid foresight of the 
 one, have been relieved by the hope and joy excited by the as vivid 
 foresight of the other 1 
 
 Eelinquishing the idea that it was the prospect of the physical 
 sufferings of the cross that induced the agony of the garden, it may 
 be thought that this agony was due to the presentiment of that
 
 452 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 deeper inward woe which wrung with such bitter anguish the spirit 
 of our Lord, from the hidden depths of which there went up the 
 mysterious utterance, " My God, my God ! why hast thou forsaken 
 me ? " But is this likely ? With us imagination may swell out 
 some threatening and impending calamity into such false propor- 
 tions, that we may actually suffer more from the anticipation than 
 from the reality. Could it have been so with Christ ? In a mind 
 like his, where all the faculties and feelings of our nature existed 
 in perfect balance, we should naturally expect that the due pro- 
 portion would be observed between the pressure j produced by 
 anticipation and that produced by the actual event ; that the one 
 should be but a shadow of the other. Is it so here? Is the 
 Gethsemane sorrow a mere shadow of the sorrow of the cross ? All 
 that is told us of it testifies that under it, whatever it was, the 
 whole power of endurance that was in our Lord's humanity was 
 tried and tested to the very last degree. It was a purely mental 
 anguish, yet such a strain did it exert upon the body that it forced 
 the life-current of the blood out of its accustomed channels, and 
 sent it forth to mingle with the drops of sweat that fell to the 
 ground. It was an agony so intense that three times, with the 
 utmost vehemence of desire, the request went up to heaven, "Father, 
 if it be possible, let this cup pass from me." We can readily under- 
 stand that from a quarter of which we shall presently have to speak, 
 our Saviour's spirit might, and did, lie open to an anguish of such 
 a peculiar nature and intensity that it is saying nothing more of 
 him than that he was a man, to say that such strong crying for 
 relief issued from his lips; the vehemence of the desire for this 
 relief offering a gauge and measure of the pressure that produced 
 it. But we cannot understand, if it were not the actual endurance 
 itself, but only the foresight of it that was operating on him, how 
 he who had all along been looking forward to the decease he was 
 to accomplish at Jerusalem, who was so straitened till it was accom- 
 plished, who knew so well that it was for that very end he came 
 into the world, should at this one time be so moved by the mere 
 prospect of the cup being put into his hand, that he should so 
 vehemently recoil from it, and so ardently desire that it might pass 
 from him. 
 
 We feel ourselves shut up to the conclusion that the agony of the 
 garden was inward, unique, mysterious, impossible to fathom ; the 
 same in source, the same in ingredients, the same in design, the 
 same in effect with our Lord's spiritual sufferings on the cross ; an 
 integral and constituent part of the endurance to which, as our 
 spiritual head and representative, he submitted, and which sprang 
 from our iniquities being laid upon him, in a way and manner that 
 is not open to us to comprehend. " He bare our sins in his own 
 body on the tree," offering there, not merely or mainly his body to
 
 GETHSEMA.NE. 453 
 
 the Roman executioner, but his soul in sacrifice to God. Consum- 
 mated upon the cross, this soul-offering was made also in the garden. 
 Jesus spake of an hour and a cup which became so identified in the 
 minds of the Evangelists, that they are used interchangeably in the 
 narrative of the Passion. The hour and the cup were one, embrac- 
 ing the entire suffering unto death. The hour was on him, and he 
 passed through it ; the cup was in his hand, he put it to his lips 
 and drank it equally in the garden and on the cross. In passing 
 through that hour, in drinking that bitter cup, he made the great 
 atonement for our transgressions. Some great obstacle there must 
 have been in the way of our restoration to the Divine favour. 
 Whatever it was, by the obedience unto death of God's dear Son it 
 has been wholly removed. " Father," he said, " if it be possible let 
 this cup pass from me." If ever from this earth a cry for relief 
 from suffering went up to God to which his ear was open, surely it 
 was this ; whom should the Father shield from sorrow if not his 
 own dear Son t Yet the cup did not pass away. The prayer was 
 answered in the strength to endure being given, but not in the 
 endurance being removed. To that endurance we are to look as 
 furnishing the ground of our forgiveness and acceptance. It has 
 taken every obstruction which our guilt, the holiness and justice of 
 the Divine character, the integrity and majesty of the Divine law, 
 the stability and prosperity of God's great spiritual empire, inter- 
 posed between us and the immediate and entire blotting out of all 
 our iniquities. 
 
 Spread over the whole of our Lord's suffering life, it was con- 
 densed in the agony of the garden and the anguish of the cross. 
 But why broken into these two great sections, of which we can 
 scarcely tell which was the larger, or in which the suffering was the 
 more intense 1 Why but that in the sight of such a sorrow descend- 
 ing upon the Saviour's spirit, in the absence of all inflictions from 
 without, in the quiet of the garden, in the loneliness of the mid- 
 night hour, before a hand had been laid on him, before thorn had 
 touched his brow, or scourge his back, or nail his hands and feet, 
 we might learn to separate in our thoughts the mental and spiritual 
 from the bodily sufferings of Christ; to recognise the truth of 
 the saying, that the sufferings of his soul formed the soul of his 
 sufferings. 
 
 But while the breaking of the great endurance into these two. 
 portions the one borne in -the garden, and the other upon the 
 cross carries with it this instructive lesson, is nothing to be learned 
 from the subdivision of the former into those three parts which 
 were separated so distinctly from one another ? Does this subdivi- 
 sion not carry with it an indication of the perfect voluntariness on 
 Christ's part of the sufferings of Gethsemane ? To give them their 
 vicarious and atoning virtue, it was necessary that Christ's suffer-
 
 454 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 ings should throughout possess this character. Many things about 
 the time and manner and circumstances of his death were obvi- 
 ously so ordered as to make it evident that he laid down his life 
 of himself, that no man took it from him. Much also about 
 the agony of the garden evinces that it was voluntarily undergone, 
 and might easily, had Christ so willed, have been avoided. Do not 
 those three breaks and pauses, his taking up and laying down the 
 cup, his coming to and going from his disciples, correspond best 
 with the idea of the agony being one not laid upon him from with- 
 out or endured by compulsion, but one which he could and did take 
 on or lay off, into which he entered by an act and effort of thought 
 and will; by the vivid realising of the spiritual relationship in 
 which he stood to the great world of transgressors ; his voluntary 
 susception of their sins ? 
 
 Apart from any such view of it, let us look at the manner of his 
 dealing with the disciples in the course of his agony. Why did 
 Jesus, in planting the three at the entrance of the garden, say to 
 them, " Tarry ye here and watch with me" ? It may have been, to 
 assign to them the post of watchful sentinels, the duty of guarding 
 him against surprise, of giving him timely notice of approaching 
 danger. He had already distinctly warned them of some impend- 
 ing peril, of a storm that was about to burst on him, of such force 
 and pressure that it would drive every one of them from his side. 
 He had told them that one of themselves was that night to betray 
 him. Although at the time none but John knew about the traitor, 
 the abrupt departure of Judas must have excited their attention, 
 and John had time and opportunity on their way out to the garden 
 to tell them on what errand he had gone. Jesus knew when he 
 dismissed him that prompt action was needed ; and what he did, 
 Judas must have done quickly. He had to go to some of the men 
 with whom he had made his compact, and tell them that he was 
 ready instantly to fulfil it. He knew where Jesus would go. They 
 might seize him there at dead of night, without danger of popular 
 tumult. They had not intended to arrest him during the feast, but 
 the opportunity now offered is too tempting for them to resist. 
 He may be in their hands before day dawn. His trial and condem- 
 nation can quickly be despatched. Let instant execution follow, and 
 before the people gather for the morning sacrifice the hated Galilean 
 may be removed. They at once agree with the proposal of the 
 traitor, and as the small company in the upper chamber is breaking 
 up, in another part of the city a larger one is assembling to move 
 under the leadership of the betrayer. 
 
 Nothing of this was known to the disciples, yet something 
 might have been suspected. When Jesus placed them at their 
 posts, and bade them watch with him, might they not naturally 
 enough have regarded this as a summons to them to guard his
 
 GETHSEMANE. 455 
 
 hours of prayer and rest from the approach of the enemy 1 Nor 
 does the fact that it was the fixed and predetermined purpose of 
 Christ to wait for and voluntarily surrender himself to the high 
 priest's band, militate against the idea that this duty was laid on 
 them. And had they proved true to such a charge, scattered as 
 they were like outlying pickets, first the three, and then farther off 
 the eight, had they kept a strict look-out upon the path that led 
 out from the city, each eye searching the shady places, each ear 
 open to catch the sound of approaching footsteps, long ere it reached 
 the spot the betrayer's company might have been detected, 
 the warning given, and a timely flight effected. But the sentinels 
 slept at their posts, till their Master came and roused them with 
 the words, " Rise, let us be going : behold, he that betrayeth me is 
 at hand." 
 
 Christ's call to watchfulness and prayer was not so much for his 
 sake as for theirs. It was that they might not enter into, so as to 
 be overcome by temptation. Thick-coming and heavy woes were 
 impending over himself, the arrest, the trial, the condemnation, 
 the crucifixion. He would prepare for all by prayer. When Judas 
 comes he will find his Master just risen from his knees, the fitter 
 thereby to pass in serene composure through all that lay before him. 
 And he knows that trials await his disciples as well as himself : 
 they will have to pass through the shame and the reproach of being 
 recognised as his followers ; they will have tests applied to their 
 fidelity needing more strength than they now possess. He bids 
 them watch and pray that the needed strength may be imparted. 
 They neglect the counsel, they waste the precious interval. The 
 betrayer is upon them and their Master ; upon him fresh from 
 prayer, upon them all unprepared, roused from their heavy sleep. 
 
 In our lesser sorrows we throw ourselves upon the sympathy of 
 others ; in our greater we seek solitude and wrap otirselves in 
 silence. The solitude breeds selfishness. In bearing our heavy 
 burdens we are apt to become self-engrossed and careless about 
 others. How did the Saviour act in the hour of his so bitter grief 1 ? 
 The strong instinct of humanity was upon him, and he would be 
 alone,'yet not alone. Had absolute solitude been sought for, he would 
 have planted the whole eleven at the entrance into Gethsemane, 
 and himself gone so far into the interior that no human eye had 
 been on him, no earthly witness near. In taking Peter, and James, 
 and John so far along with him, and placing them where they may 
 have seen and heard, does not a craving for human sympathy reveal 
 itself ? He will not have them close beside him when the mysterious 
 agony is experienced. Into it, from its nature as well as from its 
 depth, he knows they cannot enter. But he would have them near, 
 looking on at a distance, following him with such broken sympathy 
 as they can give. It will be a solace and a support to him ; and
 
 456 THE PASSION WEEK. 
 
 had they watched and given him the sympathy he craved, no angel 
 from heaven might have been needed ; theirs might have been the 
 honour and the happiness of strengthening him in the hour of weak- 
 ness. But whatever solace or support they might have given was 
 withheld. They sleep on all the time, roused but for a moment to 
 relapse into repose. And when he comes to them at last, is there 
 not something like mournful irony and reproach in his words, 
 " Sleep on now, and take your rest " 1 The time for watching, 
 praying, sympathising is past ; no longer can your sleeping do any 
 harm, your watching do any good. The opportunity is for ever 
 gone, the good is irrecoverably lost, the evil irreparably done. 
 
 It does not so much surprise us that at the first Peter, and 
 James, and John should have fallen asleep. It had been a long, 
 exciting evening, and by the strange sorrow that had filled their 
 breasts they were weakened for watchfulness. But that after 
 the first visit and the pointed rebuke, Christ should come a second 
 and a third time and find them sleeping still, it needed his 
 own Divine compassion to forgive and overlook. His comings 
 and goings, his mingling of these repeated visits to the disciples 
 with the great atoning grief, how high in our esteem should this 
 raise our Lord and Saviour; how near to our hearts should it 
 bring him ! 
 
 And ere we leave Gethsemane, let a parting thought be bestowed 
 on the great example Christ has left us of the spirit in which all 
 heavy trials and sorrows should be met and borne. A stone-cast 
 measured the distance in the garden which separated him from the 
 nearest of his followers ; but who shall measure for us that distance 
 in the spiritual world which then separated the Man of Sorrows 
 from every other sufferer of our race ? His outward separation and 
 solitude, how imperfect an emblem of the inner solitude of his soul ! 
 From the depths of that lonely agony do we not hear a voice saying 
 to us, "Behold ! and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow " 1 
 But though so far removed from us, there is a sense in which we 
 must have fellowship with this suffering of Christ, must drink of 
 the same cup, and be baptized with the same baptism. With us 
 also thfere come times when all the strength we have is strained to 
 the uttermost and is ready to give way. There are Gethsemanes in 
 the followers' as in the Master's life. When they come, let us look 
 at and try to copy his example. Being in agony, he prayed simply, 
 earnestly, repeatedly, using the same words again and again. Is 
 any cup of more than usual bitterness put into our hands, let us too 
 pray in the same spirit and in the same manner. He mingled care 
 and thought for others with his own intensest sorrow. In his 
 weakness he accepted an angel's help. Let not the heaviest grief 
 that ever conies upon us shut our heart to gentle pity. And who- 
 ever they be that come to sympathise with and to help us, let us
 
 GETHSEMANE. 457 
 
 count them as angels sent from heaven, and give them an angel's 
 welcome. " Let this cup pass from me ; nevertheless, not as I will, 
 but as thou wilt." It was not sinful in him to desire relief from 
 poignant grief, nor is it so in us. But with us as with him, let the 
 desire for relief mingle with and be lost in the spirit of an entire 
 submission to the will of our Father in heaven. 

 
 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION 
 
 I. THE BETRAYAL AND THE BETRAYER. 
 
 MATT. xxvi. 47-56 ; MARK xiv. 43-50 ; LUKE xxii. 47-53 ; JOHN xvm. 2-11. 
 
 "THE night on which he was betrayed" that long, sleepless, 
 checkered, troubled night the last night of our Lord's suffering 
 life that one and only night in which we can follow him through- 
 out, and trace his footsteps from hour to hour, through what 
 strange vicissitudes of scene and incident, of thought and feeling, 
 did our Saviour on that night pass ! The meeting in the upper 
 chamber, the washing of the disciples' feet, the keeping of the 
 Hebrew passover ; the cloud that gathered round his brow, the sad 
 warnings to Peter, and the terrible ones to Judas ; the institution 
 of his own Supper, the tender consolatory discourse, the sublime 
 intercessory prayer ; the Garden ; its brief and broken prayers, its 
 deep and awful agony ; the approach of the High Priest's band, the 
 arrest, the desertion by all, the denials by one ; the private examina- 
 tion before Annas, the public arraignment before the Sanhedrim ; 
 the silence as to all minor charges, the great confession, the final 
 and formal condemnation to death ; all these between the time 
 that the sun of that Thursday evening set, and the sun of Friday 
 morning rose upon Jerusalem. We are all, perhaps, more familiar 
 with the incidents of the first half of that night, than with those of 
 the second. Of its manifold sorrows, the agony in the Garden 
 formed the fitting climax. Both outwardly and inwardly, it was 
 to the great Sufferer its hour of darkest, deepest midnight. Let us 
 join him now as he rises from his last struggle in Gethsemane, and 
 follow till we see him laid in Joseph's sepulchre. 
 
 The sore amazement is past. Some voice has said to the troubled 
 waters of his spirit, Peace, be still ! Instead of the stir and tumult 
 of the soul, there is a calm and dignified composure, which never 
 once forsakes him, till the same strange internal agony once more 
 comes upon him on the cross. " Eise," says Jesus, as for the third 
 and last time he bends over the slumbering disciples in the Garden, 
 "Rise, let us be going. Lo, he that betrayeth is at hand !" Wake-
 
 THE BETRAYAL AND THE BETRAYER. 459 
 
 ful as he has been whilst the others were sleeping, has he heard 
 the noise of approaching footsteps? has he seen the shadows of 
 advancing forms, the flickering light of torch and lantern glimmering 
 through the olive leaves? It was not necessary that eye or ear 
 should give him notice of the approach. He knew all that the 
 betrayer meditated when, a few hours before, he had said to him, 
 " That thou doest, do quickly." He had seen and known, as though 
 he had been present, the immediate resort of Judas to those with 
 whom he had so recently made his unhallowed bargain, telling them 
 that the hour had come for carrying the projected arrangement into 
 execution, and that he was quite sure that Jesus, as his custom all 
 that week had been, would go out to Gethsemane so soon as the 
 meeting in the upper chamber had broken up, and that there they 
 could easily and surely, without any fear of popular disturbance, 
 lay hold of him. The proposal was hailed and adopted with eager 
 haste, for there was no time to be lost, : they had but a single day 
 for action left. The band for seizing him was instantly assembled 
 "a great multitude," quite needlessly numerous, even though 
 resistance had been contemplated by the eleven ; a band curiously 
 composed, some Roman soldiers in it from the garrison of Fort 
 Antonia, excited on being summoned to take part in a midnight 
 enterprise of some difficulty and danger; the captain of the 
 Temple guard, accompanied by some private servants of Annas 
 and Caiaphas, the High Priests, with some members even of the 
 Sanhedrim among them; 1 a band curiously accoutred, with staves 
 as well as swords, with lanterns and torches, that, clear though the 
 night was the moon being at the full, 2 they might hunt their 
 victim out through all the shady retreats of the olive gardens, and 
 prevent the possibility of escape. Stealthily they cross the Kedron, 
 with Judas at then* head, and come to the very place where all this 
 while Jesus has been enduring his great agony. Yes ; this is the 
 place where Judas tells them they will be so sure to find him. Now, 
 then, is the time for the lanterns and the torches. They are saved 
 the search. Stepping out suddenly into the clear moonlight, Jesus 
 himself stands before them, and calmly says, "Whom seek ye?" 
 There are many in that band who know him well enough, but 
 there is not one of them who has courage to answer "Thee." 
 A creeping awe is already on their spirits. They leave it to others, 
 to those who know him but by name, to say, Jesus of Nazareth. 
 Jesus says to them, I am he ; and as soon as he has said it, they go 
 backward, and fall every one to the ground. Has some strange 
 sight met their eye, has Jesus been momentarily transfigured as on 
 the Mount, have some stray beams from the concealed glory burst 
 
 i See Luke xxii. 52. 
 
 8 We know it was so from the day of the month on which the Passover was 
 celebrated.
 
 460 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 forth upon them, or is it some inward terror shot by a hand invisible 
 through their hearts'? Whatever the spell be that has stripped 
 them of all strength, and driven them backwards to the ground, it 
 lasts but for a brief season. He who suddenly laid it on as quickly 
 lifts it off. But for that short time, what a picture does the scene 
 present ! Jesus standing in the quiet moonlight, calmly waiting till 
 the prostrate men shall rise again; or turning, perhaps, a p3nsive 
 look upon his disciples cowering under the shade of the olive-trees, 
 and gazing with wonder at the sight of that whole band lying flat 
 upon the ground. For a moment or two, how still it is ! you could 
 have heard the falling of an olive-leaf. But now the spell is over, 
 and they rise. The Roman soldier starts to his feet again, as more 
 than half ashamed, not knowing what should have so frightened 
 him. The Jewish officer gathers up his scattered strength, wonder- 
 ing that it had not gone for ever. Again the quiet question comes 
 from the lips of Jesus, Whom seek ye ? They say to him, Jesus 
 of Nazareth. Jesus answers, " I have told you that I am he. If 
 therefore ye seek me, let these go their way : that the saying might 
 be fulfilled which he spake, Of them which thou hast given me I 
 have lost none." 
 
 Perfectly spontaneous, then, on the part of our Divine Redeemer, 
 was the delivering of himself up into the hands of his enemies. 
 He who by a word and look sent that rough hireling band reeling 
 backwards to the ground, how easily could he have kept it there ; or 
 how easily, though they had been standing all around him, could 
 he have passed out through the midst of them, every eye so blinded 
 that it could not see him, every arm so paralysed that it could not 
 touch him ! Judas knew how in such a manner he had previously 
 escaped. He must have had a strong impression that it would not 
 be so easy a thing to accomplish the arrest, when he told the men, 
 " Whomsoever I shall kiss, that same is he ; take him and hold him 
 fast." Take him ; hold him ! it will only be if he please to be taken 
 and to be held that they will have any power to do it. This perfect 
 freedom from all outward compulsion, this entirely voluntary sur- 
 render of himself to suffering and death, enter as necessary elements 
 into the great Atonement. And is not its essential element its 
 being made for others shadowed forth in this outward incident of 
 the Redeemer's life ? " Take me," he said, " but let these go their 
 way." It was to throw a protecting shield over this little flock, that 
 he put forth his great power over that mixed multitude before him, 
 and made them feel how wholly they were within his grasp. It 
 was to acquire for the time such a mastery over them that they 
 should consent to let his disciples go. It was no part of their pur- 
 pose beforehand to have done so. They proved this, when, the 
 temporary impression over, they seized the young man by the way, 
 whom curiosity had drawn out of the city, whom they took to be
 
 THE BETRAYAL AND THE BETRAYER. 461 
 
 one of his disciples, and who with difficulty escaped out of their 
 hands. 
 
 " Take me, but let these go their way." John saw, in the freedom 
 and safety of the disciples thus secured, a fulfilment of the Lord's 
 own saying in the prayer of the Supper-chamber, " Them that thou 
 gavest me I have kept, and none of them is lost." We cannot imagine 
 that the beloved disciple saw nothing beyond protection from com- 
 mon earthly danger in the expression which he quotes ; but that he 
 saw, in the very manner in which that kind of protection had been 
 extended, a type or emblem of the higher and spiritual deliverance 
 that Christ has accomplished for his people by his deliverance unto 
 death. Freedom for us, by his suffering himself to be bound ; safety 
 for us, by the sacrifice of himself ; life for us, by the death which 
 he endured : have we not much of the very soul and spirit of the 
 atonement in those few words, " Take me, but let these go their 
 way " ? It is the spiritual David, the great good Shepherd, saying, 
 " Let thine hand be laid upon me ; but as for these sheep, not, 
 Lord my God, on them." 
 
 Judas stood with those to whom Jesus said, Whom seek ye 1 
 Along with them he reeled back and fell to the ground. Along 
 with them he speedily regained his standing posture, and was a 
 listener as the Lord said, I have told you that I am he ; inviting 
 them to do with him as they wished. There is a pause, a hesita- 
 tion ; for who will be the first to lay hand upon him 1 Judas will 
 relieve them of any lingering fear. He will show them how safe it 
 is to approach this Jesus. Though the stepping forth of Christ, 
 and the questions and answers which followed, have done away 
 with all need of the preconcerted signal, he will yet go through all 
 that he had engaged to do ; or, perhaps, it is almost a mechanical 
 impulse upon which he acts, for he had fixed on the thing that he 
 was to do toward accomplishing the arrest ; he had conned his 
 part well beforehand, and braced himself up to go through with it. 
 Hence, when the time for action comes, he stops not to reflect, but 
 lets the momentum of his predetermined purpose carry him along. 
 He salutes Jesus with a kiss. If ever a righteous indignation might 
 legitimately be felt, surely it was here. And if that burning sense 
 of wrong had gone no further in its expression than simply the 
 refusal of such a salutation, would not Christ have acted with 
 unimpeachable propriety ? but it is far above this level that Jesus 
 will now rise. He will give an example of gentleness, of for- 
 bearance, of long-suffering kindness without a parallel. Jesus 
 accepts the betrayer's salutation. He does more. He says a word 
 or two to this deluded man : " Friend, wherefore art thou come 1" 
 'Is it possible that thou canst imagine, after all that passed 
 between us at the supper-table, that I am ignorant of thy purpose 
 in this visit 1 I know that purpose well ; thou knowest that I do ;
 
 462 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 if not, I will make a last attempt to make thee know and feel it 
 now. Thought of, cared for, warned in so many ways, art thou 
 really come to betray such a Master as I have ever been to thee ? 
 But though thou hast made up thy mind to such a deed, how is it 
 that thou choosest such a cloak as this beneath which to conceal 
 thy purpose ? The deed is bad enough itself without crowning it 
 with the lie of the hypocrite,' "Judas, betrayest thou tho Son 
 of man with a kiss 1" the last complaint of wounded love, the last 
 of the many and most touching appeals made to the conscience and 
 heart of the betrayer ; rebuke and remonstrance in the words, but 
 surely their tone is one more of pity than of anger ; surely the 
 wish of the speaker was to arrest the traitor, if it were not yet too 
 late. Had Judas yielded even at that last moment ; with^a broken and 
 a contrite heart had he thrown himself at his Master's feet, to bathe 
 with tears the feet of him whose cheek he had just polluted with 
 his unhallowed kiss ; looking up through those tears of penitence, 
 had he sought mercy of the Lord, how freely would that mercy 
 have been extended to him ! who can doubt that he would have 
 been at once forgiven ? But he did not, he would not yield ; and 
 so on he went, till there was nothing left to him but the horror of 
 that remorse which dug for him the grave of the suicide. 
 
 We often wonder as we read his story, how it was ever 
 possible that, in the face of so many, such explicit, solemn, 
 affectionate appeals, this man should have so obstinately pursued 
 his course. We should wonder, perhaps, the less, if we only 
 reflected what a blinding, hardening power any one fixed idea, any 
 one settled purpose, any one dominant passion, in the full flush 
 and fervour of its ascendency, exerts upon the human spirit ; how 
 it blinds to consequences that are then staring us in the very face ; 
 how it deadens to remonstrances to which, in other circumstances, 
 we should at once have yielded ; how it carries us over obstacles 
 that at other times would at once have stopped us ; nay, more, and 
 what perhaps is the most striking feature of the whole, how the 
 very interferences, for which otherwise we should have been 
 grateful, are resented; how the very appeals intended and fitted 
 to arrest, become as so many goads driving us on the more deter- 
 minedly upon our path. So it was with Judas. And let us not 
 think that we have in him a monstrous specimen of almost super- 
 human wickedness. We should be nearer the truth, I suspect, if 
 we took him as an average specimen of what the passion of avarice, 
 or any like passion, when once it has got the mastery, may lead 
 any man to be and do. For we have no reason to believe of Judas, 
 that from the first he was an utter reprobate. Our Lord we 
 scarcely can believe would have admitted such a man to the 
 number of the twelve. Can it be believed of him that when he 
 nrst joined himself to Jesus, it was to make gain of that connection ?
 
 THE BETRAYAL AND THE BETRAYER. 463 
 
 There was but little prospect of worldly gain in following the 
 Nazarene. Nor can we fairly attribute that obstinacy which Judas 
 showed in the last great crisis of his life, to utter deadness of 
 conscience, utter hardness of heart. The man who no sooner heard 
 the death-sentence given against his Master, than without even 
 waiting to see if it would be executed he rushed before the men 
 by whom that sentence had been pronounced the very men with 
 whom he had made his unholy covenant, from whom he had got but 
 an hour or two before the price of blood exclaiming in the bitterness 
 of his heart, "I have sinned, in that I have betrayed innocent 
 blood ;" the man who took those thirty pieces of silver, which his 
 itching palm had so longed to clutch, but which now were burning 
 like scorching lead the hand that grasped them, and flung them 
 ringing on the temple floor, and hurried to a lonely field without 
 the city walls and hanged himself, dying in all likelihood before 
 his Master, let us not think of him that he was utterly heartless 
 that he had a conscience seared as with a hot iron. 
 
 What, then, is the true explanation of his character and career 1 
 Let us assume that, when he first united himself to Christ, it was 
 not of deliberate design to turn that connection into a source of 
 profit. He found, however, as time ran on, that to some small 
 extent it could be so employed. The little company that he had 
 joined had chosen him to be their treasurer, to hold and to 
 dispense the slender funds which they possessed. Those who are 
 fond of money, as he was, are generally careful in the keeping, 
 thrifty in their use of it. Judas had those faculties in perfection, 
 and they won for him that office of trust, to him so terribly 
 dangerous. The temptation was greater than he could resist 
 He became a pilferer from that small bag. Little as it had to 
 feed upon, his passion grew. It grew, for he had no higher 
 principle, no better feeling, to subdue it. It grew, till he began 
 to picture to himself what untold wealth was in store for him when 
 his Master should throw off that reserve and disguise which he had 
 so long and so studiously preserved, and take to himself his power, 
 and set up his kingdom a kingdom which he, in common with 
 all the apostles, believed was to be a visible and temporal one. It 
 grew, till delay became intolerable. At the supper in Bethany, it 
 vexed him to see that box of ointment of spikenard, which might 
 have been sold for three hundred pence, wasted on what seemed 
 to him an idle piece of premature and romantic homage. It vexed 
 him still more to hear his Master rebuke the irritation he had 
 displayed, and speak now once again, as he had been doing so often 
 lately, of his death and burial, as if the splendid vision of his 
 kingdom were never to be realised. Could nothing be done to 
 force his Master on to exercise his kingly power 1 The Scribes and 
 Pharisees, who hated him so bitterly, desired nothing so much as
 
 464 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 to get him into their hands. If once they did so, would he not, 
 in self-defence, be obliged to put forth that power which Judas 
 knew that he possessed 1 And were he to do so, things could not 
 remain any longer as they were. The Passover this great 
 gathering of the people would soon go past, and he, Judas, and 
 the rest, have to resume their weary journeyings on foot through- 
 out Judea. Thus and then it was, that, in all likelihood, the 
 thought flashed into the mind of the betrayer to go and ask the 
 chief priests what they would give him if he delivered Jesus into 
 their hands. They offered him thirty pieces of silver, a very paltry 
 bribe the price in the old Hebrew code of a slave that was gored 
 by an ox less than 5 of our money ; a bribe insufficient of itself 
 to have tempted even a grossly avaricious man, in the position in 
 which Judas was, to betray his Master, knowing or believing that 
 it was unto death. Why, in a year or two Judas might have 
 realised as much as that by petty pilferings from the apostolic bag. 
 But this scheme of his would bring his Master to the test. It 
 would expedite what, to his covetous, ambitious heart, had seemed 
 to be that slow and meaningless course to a throne and kingdom 
 which his Master had been pursuing. Not suspecting what the 
 immediate and actual issue was to be, he made his unholy compact 
 with the High Priests. He made it on the Wednesday of the 
 Passion week. Next evening he sat with Jesus in the supper- 
 chamber. He found himself detected ; more than one terrible 
 warning was sounded in his ears. Strange, you may think, that 
 instead of stopping him in his course, these warnings suggested, 
 perhaps for the first time, the thought that what he had engaged 
 to do might be done that very night. The words, " What thou 
 doest do quickly," themselves gave eagerness and firmness to his 
 purpose ; for, after all, though Jesus seemed for the time so much 
 displeased, let this scheme but prosper, let the kingdom be set 
 up, and would he not be sure to forgive the offence that had 
 hastened so happy a result ? 
 
 Have we any grounds for interpreting in this way the betrayal 1 
 Are we right in attributing such motives to Judas 1 If not, then 
 how are we to explain his surprise when he saw his Master, though 
 still possessing all his wonderful power, as he showed by the healing 
 of the servant's ear, allow himself to be bound and led away like a 
 felon ? How are we to explain the consternation of Judas when he 
 learned that though Jesus publicly, before the Sanhedrim, claimed 
 to be the Christ, the Son of God, the King of Israel, yet, instead of 
 there being any acquiescence in that claim, a universal horror was 
 expressed, and on the very ground of his making it, he was doomed 
 to the death of a blasphemer ? Then it was, when all turned out 
 so differently from what he had anticipated, that the idea of his 
 having been the instrument of his Master's death entered like iron
 
 THE BETRAYAL AND THE BETRAYER. 465 
 
 into the soul of Judas. Then it was, that, overwhelmed with name- 
 less, countless disappointments, vexations, self-reproaches, his very 
 living to see his Master die became intolerable to him and in his 
 despair he flung his ill-used life away. 
 
 Accept such solution, and the story of the betrayal of our Lord 
 becomes natural and consistent ; reject it, and have you not diffi- 
 culties in your way not to be got over by any amount of villainy 
 that you may attribute to the traitor ? But does not this solution 
 take down the crime of Judas from that pinnacle of almost super- 
 human and unapproachable guilt on which many seem inclined to 
 place it ? It does ; but it renders it all the more available as a 
 beacon of warning to us all. For if we are right in the idea we 
 have formed of the character and conduct of Judas, there have 
 been many since his time, there may be many still, in the same 
 way, and from the operation of the same motives, betrayers of 
 Christ. For everywhere he is a Judas, with whom his worldly 
 interests, his worldly ambition, prevail over his attachment to 
 Christ and to Christ's cause ; who joins the Christian society, it 
 may not be to make gain thereby, but who, when the occasion 
 presents itself, scruples not to make what gain he can of that con- 
 nection ; who, beneath the garb of the Christian calling, pursues a 
 dishonest traffic ; who, when the gain and the godliness come into 
 collision, sacrifices the godliness for the gain. How many such 
 Judases the world has seen, how much of that Judas spirit there 
 may be in our own hearts, I leave it to your knowledge of your- 
 selves and your knowledge of the world to determine. 
 
 Let us now resume our narrative of the arrest. Whatever 
 lingering reluctance to touch Christ had been felt, that kiss of 
 Judas removed. They laid their hands upon him instantly there- 
 after, grasping him as if he were a vulgar villain of the highway, 
 and binding him after the merciless fashion of the Eomans. This 
 is what one, at least, of his followers cannot bear. Peter springs 
 forth from the darkness, draws his sword, and aims at the head of 
 the first person he sees ; who, however, bends to the side, and his 
 ear only is lopped off. To Christ an unwelcome act of friendship. 
 It ruffles his composure, it impairs the dignity of his patience. For 
 the first and only time a human creature suffers that he may be 
 protected. The injury thus done he must instantly repair. They 
 have his hand within their hold, when, gently saying to them, 
 " Suffer ye thus far," he releases it from their grasp, and, stretching 
 it out, touches the bleeding ear, and heals it : the only act of heal- 
 ing wrought on one who neither asked it of him, nor had any faith 
 in his healing virtue ; but an act which showed how full of almighty 
 power that hand was which yet gave itself up to ignominious bonds. 
 Then said Jesus to Peter, "Put up again thy sword into his place: 
 for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword. 
 2r,
 
 466 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall 
 presently give me more than twelve legions of angels 1 But how 
 then shall the Scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be 1 The 
 cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it ] " He 
 was drinking then, even at that time, of the same cup in regard to 
 which he had been praying in the Garden. Not only his agonies 
 in Gethsemane and on the Cross, but all his griefs, internal and 
 external, were ingredients in that cup which, for us and for our 
 salvation, he took, and drank to the very dregs a cup put by his 
 Father's hand into his, and by him voluntarily taken, that the 
 will of- his Father might be done, and that the Scriptures might 
 be fulfilled. All this about the cup, and his Father, and the 
 Scriptures, spoken for the instruction and reproof of Peter, must 
 have sounded not a little strange to those Chief Priests and scribes 
 and elders who have come out to be present, at least, if not to take 
 part in the apprehension, and who are now standing by his side. 
 But for them, too, there must be a word, to show them that he 
 is after all a very brother of our race, who feels as any other 
 innocent man would feel if bound thus, and led away as a malefactor. 
 " And Jesus said unto the chief priests, and captains of the temple, 
 and the elders, which were come to him, Be ye come out, as 
 against a thief, with swords and staves ? When I was daily with 
 you in the temple, ye stretched forth no hands against me : but this 
 is your hour, and the power of darkness." A short hour of fancied 
 triumph theirs; the powers of darkness permitted for a short 
 season to prevail : but beyond that hour, light, and a full, glorious, 
 eternal triumph his. 
 
 " Then all the disciples forsook him and fled." That utter deser- 
 tion had been one of the incidents of this night of sorrows upon 
 which his foreseeing eye had already fixed. " The hour cometh," 
 he had said to them in the upper chamber, " yea, is now come, that 
 ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave me 
 alone : and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me." It 
 was only during that hurried march from the garden to the judg- 
 ment-hall that Jesus was left literally and absolutely alone : not one 
 friendly eye upon him; not one friendly arm within his reach. 
 But this temporary solitude, was it not the type of the inner, deeper 
 solitude, in which his whole earthly work was carried on? not 
 the solitude of the hermit or the monk, he lived ever with and 
 among his fellow-men ; not the solitude of pride, sullenly refusing 
 all sympathy and aid ; not the solitude of selfishness, creating around 
 its icy centre a cold, bleak, barren wilderness ; not the solitude of 
 sickly sentimentality, for ever crying out that it can find no one to 
 understand or appreciate. No ; but the solitude of a pure, holy, 
 heavenly spirit, into all whose deeper thoughts there was not a 
 single human being near him or around him who could enter; with
 
 THE DENIALS OP ST. PETKR. 467 
 
 all whose deeper feelings there was not one who could sympathise ; 
 whose truest, deepest motives, ends, and objects, in living and dying 
 as he did, not one could comprehend. Spiritually, and all through- 
 out, the loneliest man that ever lived was Jesus Christ. But there 
 were hours when that solitude deepened upon his soul. So was it 
 in the garden, when but a stone-cast from the nearest to him upon 
 earth, even that broken, imperfect sympathy which their looking 
 on him and watching with him in his great sorrow might have sup- 
 plied, was denied to him, and an angel had to be sent from heaven 
 to cheer the forsaken one of earth. So was it upon the cross, in 
 that dread moment, when he could no longer even say, " I am not 
 alone, for my Father is with me ;" when there burst from his dying 
 lips that cry a cry from the darkest, deepest, dreariest loneliness 
 into which a pure and holy spirit ever passed " My God, my God ! 
 why hast thou forsaken me ? " 
 
 Shall we pity him, in that lonely life, these lonely sufferings, 
 that lonely death ? Our pity he does not ask. Shall we sympa- 
 thise with him ? Our sympathy he does not need. But let us 
 stand by the brink of that deep and awful gulf into which he 
 descended, and through which he passed; and let wonder, awe, 
 gratitude, love, enter into and fill all our hearts, as we remember 
 that that descent and that passage were made to redeem our souls 
 from death, and to open up a way for us into a sinless and sorrow- 
 less heaven. 
 
 II. 
 
 THE DENIALS, REPENTANCE, AND RESTORATION OF ST. PETER. 
 
 MATT. xxvi. 57-59, 69-75 ; MARK xiv. 54, 55, 66-72 ; LUKE xxn. 54-62 ; 
 JOHN xvni. 15-27 ; MARK xvi. 7 ; JOHN xxi. ]5-17. 
 
 WHEN they saw their Master bound and borne away, all the 
 disciples forsook him and fled. Two of them, however, recovered 
 speedily from their panic. Foremost now, and bravest of them all, 
 John first regained his self-possession, and returning on his footsteps 
 followed the band which conveyed Jesus to the residence of the 
 High Priest. Coming alone, and so far behind the others, he might 
 have found some difficulty in getting admission. The day had not 
 yet dawned ; and at so early an hour, and upon so unusual an occa- 
 sion, the keeper of the outer door might have hesitated to admit a 
 stranger; but John had some acquaintance with the domestics of the 
 High Priest, and so got entrance ; an entrance which Peter might 
 not have ventured to ask, or asking, might have failed to get, had 
 not John noticed him following in the distance, and, on looking 
 back as he entered, seen him standing outside the door. He went,
 
 408 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 therefore, and spoke to the porteress, who at his instance allowed 
 Peter to pass in. The two disciples made their way together into 
 the interior quadrangular hall, at the upper and raised end of which 
 Jesus was being cross-examined by Annas. It was the coldest hour 
 of the night, the hour that precedes the dawn, and the servants and 
 officers had kindled a fire in that end of the hall where they were 
 gathered. Peter did not wish to be recognised, and the best way 
 he thought to preserve his incognito was to put at once the boldest 
 face he could upon it, act as if he had been one of the capturing 
 band and had as good a right to be there as others of that mixed 
 company, as little known in this palace as himself. So stepping 
 boldly forward, and sitting down among the men who were warming 
 themselves around the fire, he made himself one of them. The 
 woman who kept the door was standing near. The strong light of 
 the kindling fire, falling upon that group of faces, her eye fell upon 
 Peter's. That surely, it occurred to her as she looked at it, was the 
 face of the man whom she had admitted a few minutes ago, of 
 whose features she had caught a glimpse as he passed by. She 
 looks again, and looks more earnestly. 1 Her first impression is 
 confirmed. It is John's friend; that Galilean's friend; some friend 
 too, no doubt, of this same Jesus. She says so to a companion by 
 her side ; but not satisfied with that, wondering, perhaps, at the 
 way in which Peter was comporting himself, she waits till she has 
 caught his eye, and going up to him she says : " Art not thou also 
 one of this man's disciples'?" a short, abrupt, peremptory, unex- 
 pected challenge. It takes Peter entirely by surprise. It throws 
 him wholly off his guard. There they are, the eyes of all those men 
 around now turned inquiringly upon him; and there she is a woman 
 he knows nothing of perhaps had scarcely noticed as he passed 
 quickly through the porch, a woman who can know nothing about 
 him, yet putting that pert question, to which, if he is to keep up the 
 character he has assumed, there must be a quick and positive reply. 
 And so the first hasty falsehood escapes his lips. The woman, 
 however, won't believe him when he says that he does not under- 
 stand her question. Both to himself and to others around her, she 
 re-affirms her first belief. Peter has to back his first falsehood by 
 a second and a third : " Woman, I am not one of this man's dis- 
 ciples ; I know him not." Peter's first denial of his Master. 
 
 He has now openly committed himself, and he must carry the 
 thing through as best he can. He is not at ease, however, in his 
 seat with the others around the fire. The glare of that light is too 
 strong. Those prying eyes disturb. As soon as conveniently he 
 can, without attracting notice, he rises and retires into the shadow 
 of the porch, through which in entering he had passed. A cock 
 now crows without. He hears but heeds it not. Perhaps he might 
 1 See John xviii. 17 ; Mark xiv. 67 ; Luke xxii. 56.
 
 THE DENIALS OF ST. PETER. 469 
 
 have done so, had not another woman some friend in all likelihood 
 of the porteress with whom she had been conversing been over- 
 heard by him affirming most positively, as she pointed him out, 
 " This fellow also was with Jesus of Nazareth." And she too comes 
 up to him and repeats the saying to himself. The falsehood of the 
 first denial he has now to repeat and justify. He does so with an 
 oath, declaring, "I do not know the man." Peter's second denial 
 of his Master. 
 
 A full hour has passed. The examination going on at the other 
 end of the hall has been engrossing the attention of the onlookers. 
 Peter's lost composure and self-confidence have in a measure been 
 regained. He is out in the hall again, standing talking with the 
 others ; no glare of light upon his, face, yet little thinking all the 
 while that by his very talking he is supplying another mode of 
 recognition. And now for the third time, and from many quarters, 
 he is challenged. One said, " Of a truth this fellow was with him." 
 A second : " Did I not see thee with him in the garden ?" A third : 
 " Thy speech bewray eth thee." Beset and badgered thus, Peter 
 begins to curse and to swear, as he affirms, "I know not the man 
 of whom ye speak." Peter's third and last denial of his Lord. 
 
 Truly a very sad and humbling exhibition this of human frailty. 
 But is it one so rare ? Has it seldom been repeated since ? Have 
 we never ourselves been guilty of a like offence against our Saviour 1 
 Is there no danger that we may again be guilty of it 1 That we 
 may be prepared to give a true answer to such questions, let us 
 consider wherein the essence of this offence of the Apostle consisted, 
 and by what steps he was led to its commission. His sin against 
 his Master lay in his being ashamed and afraid to confess his con- 
 nection with him, when taunted with it at a time when apparently 
 confession could do Christ no good, and might damage greatly the 
 confessor. It was rather shame than fear, let us believe, which 
 led to the first denial. It was in moral courage, not physical, 
 that Peter failed. By nature he was brave as he was honest. It 
 was no idle boast of his, " Lord, I will follow thee to prison and to 
 death." Had there been any open danger to be faced, can we doubt 
 that he would gallantly have faced it ? Had his Master called him 
 to stand by his side in some open conflict with his enemies, would 
 Peter have forsaken him 1 His was one of but two swords in the 
 garden ; those two against all the swords and other weapons of that 
 multitude. But even against such odds, Peter, bold as a lion, drew 
 his sword, and had the use of it been allowed would have fought 
 it out till he had died by his Master's side. But it is altogether a 
 new and unexpected state of things, this willing surrender of him- 
 self by Jesus into the hands of his enemies ; this refusal, almost 
 rebuke, of any attempt at rescue or defence. It unsettles, it over- 
 turns all Peter's former ideas of his Master's power, and of the
 
 470 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 manner in which that power was to be put forth. He can make 
 nothing of it It looks as if all those fond hopes about the coming 
 kingdom were indeed to perish. Confused, bewildered, Peter 
 enters the High Priest's hall. Why should he acknowledge who 
 he is, or wherefore he is there ? What harm can there be in his 
 appearing for the time as indifferent to Christ's fate as any of these 
 officers and servants among whom he sits? That free and easy 
 gait of theirs he assumes ; goes in with all they say ; perhaps trys 
 to join with them in their coarse untimely mirth. First easy yet 
 fatal step, this taking on a character not his own. He is false to 
 himself before he proves false to his Master. The acted lie precedes 
 the spoken one ; prepares for it, almost necessitates it. It was the 
 rash act of sitting down with those men at that fireside, that 
 assumption of the mask, the attempt to appear to be what he was 
 not, which set Peter upon the slippery edge of that slope, down 
 which to such a depth he afterwards descended. Why is it we think 
 so ? Because we have asked ourselves the question, Where all this 
 while was his companion John, and how was it faring with him ? 
 He too was within the hall, yet there is no challenging or badgering 
 of him. The domestics indeed know him, and he may be safe from 
 any interference on their part ; Jbut there are many here besides who 
 know as little about him as they do about Peter. Yet never once 
 is John questioned or disturbed. And why, but because he had 
 joined none of their companies, had attempted no disguise; his 
 speech was not heard bewraying him. Had you looked for him, you 
 would have found him in some quiet shaded nook of that quad- 
 rangle, as near his Master as he could get, yet inviting no scrutiny, 
 exposing himself to no detection. 
 
 That first false act committed, how natural with Peter was all 
 that followed ! His position, once taken, had to be supported, had 
 to be made stronger and stronger to meet the renewed and more 
 impetuous assaults. So is it with all courses of iniquity. The 
 fatal step is the first one, taken often thoughtlessly, almost uncon- 
 sciously. But our feet get hopelessly entangled ; the weight that 
 drags us along the incline gets at every step the heavier, till 
 onward, downward we go into depths that at the first we would 
 have shuddered to contemplate. In this matter, then, of denying 
 our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, let us not be high-minded, but 
 fear ; and, taking our special warning from that first false step of 
 Peter, should we ever happen to be thrown into the society of those 
 who bear no liking to the name or the cause of the Redeemer, let 
 us beware lest, hiding in inglorious shame our faces from him, we 
 be tempted to say or to do what for us, with our knowledge, would 
 be a far worse thing to say or do than what was said and done by 
 Peter, in his ignorance, within the High Priest's hall. 
 
 The oaths with which he sealed his third denial were yet fresh
 
 THE DENIALS OF ST. PETER. 471 
 
 on Peter's lips, 1 when a second time the cock crew. And that 
 shrill sound was yet ringing in his ears when " the Lord turned 
 and looked upon Peter." How singularly well-timed that look ! 
 The Lord is waiting till the fit moment come, and instantly seizes 
 it. It might be wrong in us to say that but for the look, the 
 second cock-crowing would have been as little heeded as the first. 
 It might be wrong in us to say that, but for the awakening sound, 
 the look would of itself have failed in its effect. But we cannot 
 be wrong in saying that the look and the sound each helped the 
 other, and that it was the striking and designed coincidence of the 
 two their conjunction at the very time when Peter was confirming 
 his third denial by oaths that formed the external agency which 
 our Lord was pleased to contrive and employ for stirring the 
 sluggish memory and quickening the dead conscience of the apostle. 
 And sluggish memories, dead consciences, are they not often thus 
 awakened by striking outward providences co-operating with the 
 Word and with the Spirit 1 Have none of us been startled thus, 
 as Peter was, amid our denials or betrayals of our Master ? Let 
 us bless the instrument, whatever it may be, by which so valuable 
 a service is rendered, and see in its employment only another proof 
 of the thoughtful, loving care of him who would not let us be 
 guilty of such offences without some means being taken to alarm 
 and to recover. 
 
 Let us believe, however, that of the two the sound and the 
 look the chief power and virtue lay in the latter. " The Lord 
 turned." He turned from facing those scowling judges; from 
 listening to all the false testimony brought forward against him ; 
 from bearing all the insults that masters and servants were heaping 
 upon him ; from all the excitements of a trial which he knew was 
 to end in his condemnation unto death. Forgetful of self, still 
 thoughtful of his own, "he turned and looked upon Peter." Was 
 that a look of anger ; of unmingled, unmitigated rebuke ? Such a 
 look might have sent Peter away to hang himself as Judas did ; but 
 never to shed such tears of penitence as he went out to weep. The 
 naked eye of the very Godhead might be on us ; but if from that 
 eye there looked out nothing but stern, rebuking, relentless wrath, 
 the look of such an eye might scorch and wither, but never melt 
 and subdue hearts like ours. Doubtless there was reproach in the 
 look which Jesus bent upon Peter ; gentle reproach, all the more 
 powerful because of its gentleness. But that reproach, quickly as 
 it was perceived, and keenly as it was felt, formed but a veil to 
 the tender, forgiving, sympathising love which the Master felt for the 
 erring disciple. Volumes of pity and compassion lay unfolded in that 
 look. It told the apostle how well He, of whom he had just been 
 
 1 "Immediately, while he yet spake, the cock crew." Luke xxii. GO. See also 
 Matt. xxvi. 74.
 
 472 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 saying that he knew him not, knew him ; how thoroughly he knew 
 him when he forewarned him of his fall. But it told Peter at the 
 same time, that it was no thought or feeling of the injury or .wrong 
 that had been done personally to himself, which made Jesus fix 
 such an earnest gaze upon him. Not so much of himself as of 
 Peter was he thinking : not for himself, but for Peter was he caring. 
 It was the thought of that wrong which Peter had been doing to 
 himself which winged the look, and sent it on its hallowed errand 
 into Peter's heart. He felt, as it fell upon him, that it was the 
 look of one, not angrily complaining of injury, not indignantly 
 demanding redress, but only desiring that Peter might feel how 
 unkindly, ungratefully, ungenerously, he had acted towards such a 
 Master ; of one who wished him above all things to be assured that 
 if he but saw and felt his error, there was readiness and room 
 enough in his heart to receive him back at once and fully into 
 favour, to forgive all, forget all, be all to him he had ever been. 
 Another kind of look the apostle might have encountered unflinch- 
 ingly, but not a look like that. Instantly there flashed upon his 
 memory those words of prophetic warning, spoken a few hours 
 before in the guest-chamber. Thrice had Jesus forewarned him, 
 that before the cock crew twice, he should thrice deny him. Had 
 he never thought of these words till now 1 In the distraction of 
 the moment he might have allowed the first cock-crowing to pass 
 unheeded, but how, during the whole hour 1 which followed his 
 first two denials, should that striking warning never once have 
 occurred to his memory ? Very strange it seems to us ; but very 
 strange are the moods and passions of the mind what is remem- 
 bered by it, and what forgotten, when some new strong tide of 
 thought and feeling rushes in, and fills, and agitates the soul. In 
 the strange, unexpected, perilous position in which he had so 
 suddenly been placed, Peter had forgotten all ; the meeting of the 
 upper chamber, the triple warning, the " Verily, verily, I say unto 
 you," which had then sounded in his ears. But now, as if the 
 awakened memory, by the very fulness and vividness of their recall, 
 would repair the past forgetfulness, he sees all, hears all again. 
 Those words of warning are anew ringing in his ears, and as he 
 thinks how fearfully exact the fulfilment of those forgotten pre- 
 dictions of his Master has been, a sense of guilt and shame oppresses 
 him. He can bear that look no longer ; he turns and hurries out 
 of the hall, seeking a place to shed his bitter tears tears not like 
 those of Judas, of dismal and hopeless remorse, but of genuine and 
 unaffected repentance. He goes out alone, but whither ? It was 
 still dark. The day had not yet dawned. He would not surely 
 at such an hour, and in such a state of feeling, go back at once 
 into the city, to seek out and join the others who had fled, 
 i Luke xxii. 59.
 
 THE REPENTANCE OF ST. PETER. 473 
 
 Such deep and bitter grief as his seeks solitude ; and where could 
 he find a solitude so suitable as that which his Lord and Master 
 had so loved 1 We picture him as visiting alone the Garden of 
 Gethsemane, not now to sleep while his Lord is suffering ; but to 
 seek out the spot which Jesus had hallowed by his agony, to mingle 
 his tears with the great drops of blood which had fallen down to 
 the ground. 
 
 Where and how he spent the two dismal days which followed 
 we do not know. After that look from Him in the judgment-hall 
 he never saw his Lord alive again. But as on the third morning 
 we find John and him together, we may believe that it was from 
 the lips of the beloved disciple the only one of all the twelve who 
 was present at the trial before Pilate, and who stood before the 
 cross that Peter heard the narrative of that day's sad doings; 
 how they bound and scourged, and mocked and spat upon the 
 Lord ; how they nailed him to the cross, and set him up in agony, 
 to die. And at each part of the sad recital, how would that heart, 
 softened by penitence, be touched ; how would it grieve Peter to 
 remember that he too had had a share in laying such heavy burdens 
 on the last hours of his Lord's suffering life ! That Master whom 
 he had so dishonourably and ungratefully denied, was now sleeping 
 in the grave. but for one short hour with him a single inter- 
 view that he might tell him how bitterly he repented what he had 
 done, and get from his Master's living, loving lips the assurance 
 that he had been forgiven ! But that never was to be. He should 
 never see him more. Never ! grief-blinded man ] Thine eye it 
 sees not, thine ear it hears not, neither can that sorrow-burdened 
 heart of thine conceive what even now Jesus is preparing for thee. 
 The third morning dawns. The Saviour rises triumphant from the 
 grave ; in rising sets the angels as sentries before the empty tomb ; 
 gives to them the order that, to the first visitants of the sepulchre, 
 this message shall be given : " Go, tell the disciples and Peter, that 
 he is risen from the dead." This message from the angel Peter 
 had not heard 1 when he and John ran out together to the 
 sepulchre, and found it empty. But he heard it not long after. 
 Who may tell what strange thoughts that singling out of him 
 that special mention of his name by those angelic watchers of the 
 sepulchre excited in Peter's heart ? How came those angels to 
 know or think of him at such a time as this ? It could not have 
 been their own doing. They must have got that message from the 
 Lord himself, been told by him particularly to name Peter to the 
 women. But was -it not a thing most wonderful, that, in the very 
 act of bursting the barriers of the grave, there should be such a 
 remembrance of him on the part of that Master whom he had so 
 
 1 Mary Magdalene, on whose report they acted, had seen no angel on her first 
 visit to the sepulchre.
 
 474 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 lately denied? Was it not an omen for good? Peter had his 
 rising hopes confirmed, his doubts and fears all quenched, when, 
 some time in the course of that forenoon, waiting till John and he 
 had parted waiting till he could meet him alone, and speak to 
 him with all the greater freedom and fulness Jesus showed himself 
 to Peter. Before he met the others to speak peace, he hastened to 
 meet Peter to speak pardon. One of the first offices of the risen 
 Saviour was to wipe away the tears of the penitent. 
 
 " Go your way," said the angel to the women at the sepulchre, 
 tell his disciples and Peter, that he goeth before you into Galilee ; 
 there shall ye see him, as he said unto you." The Paschal festival, 
 and Christ's own presence, kept the apostles for eight days and more 
 in the holy city. But as, after those two interviews in the evenings 
 of the first two Lord's days of the Christian Church, Jesus did not 
 appear to them again, the eleven, presuming that he had gone before 
 them to Galilee, also went thither. The return to their old homes 
 and haunts, the sight of their nets and fishing-boats, the absence of 
 any specific instructions as to the future, suggest to some of them 
 the thought of taking up again their earlier occupation. Seven of 
 them are walking together one evening by the side of the lake. It 
 looks tempting ; the boats and the nets are near, and it is the best 
 hour of all the day for fishing. Peter the very one from whom we 
 should have expected a first proposal of this kind to come says to 
 them, " I go a fishing." They all go with him. They toil all the 
 night, but catch nothing. As morning breaks, they see a man 
 standing on the shore, seen but dimly through the haze, but near 
 enough for his voice to be heard across the water. " Children," he 
 says, " have ye any meat ?" They tell him they have none. " Cast 
 the net," he replies, " on the right side of the ship, and ye shall 
 find. And now they are not able to draw it for the multitude of 
 fishes." This could scarcely fail to recall to the memory of some at 
 least within the boat, that other miraculous draught of fishes, by 
 which, now nearly three years before, three out of the twelve apostles 
 were taught to forsake all and follow Jesus, that he might make 
 them fishers of men. This repetition of the miracle was nothing 
 else than a symbolic renewal of that first commission, intended to 
 teach the twelve that their apostolic calling still held good. There 
 was one, however, of the seven Avho gathered round Jesus at the 
 morning meal which he spread for them on the shore, when their 
 fisher's toil was over, whose position towards that commission and 
 apostleship had become peculiar. He had been in the habit of 
 taking a very prominent place among the twelve, and often acted as 
 their representative and spokesman. But on the night of the 
 betrayal, he had played a singularly shameful and inconsistent part. 
 They had all, indeed, forsaken their Master ; but who would have 
 thought that the very one of them who that night had been so
 
 THE RESTORATION OF ST. PETER. 475 
 
 vehement in his assertions that though all men, all his fellow- 
 disciples, should forsake his Master, he never would, should yet so 
 often, and with such superfluous oaths, have denied that he ever 
 knew, or had anything to do with Jesus ? True it was that Jesus 
 had forgiven Peter. His fellow-disciples, also, had forgiven that 
 overboastful magnifying of himself above the others. There was 
 something so frank about him, and so genuine ; such outgoings of 
 an honest, manly, kindly, generous nature, that they could not bear 
 against him any grudge. They were all now on their old terms 
 with one another. But how will it stand with Peter if that 
 apostolic work has to be taken up again 1 How will he feel as to 
 resuming his old position among the twelve ? Will he not, in the 
 depth of that humility and self-distrust taught him by his great 
 fall, shrink now from placing himself even on the same level with 
 the others ? And how will his Lord and Master feel and act as to his 
 reinstatement in that office from which by his transgression he might 
 be regarded as having fallen ] To all these questions there were 
 answers given, when Jesus, once more singling Peter out, said to him, 
 " Simon, son of Jonas," the very giving him his old and double nam 
 sounding as a note of preparation for the important question which 
 was to follow, "Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me more than 
 these," thy brethren, my other disciples, do ? a gentle yet distinct 
 enough reminder of that former saying : " Though all men should . 
 be offended, I never will;" a delicate yet searching probe, pressed 
 kindly but firmly home into the depths of Peter's heart a skilful 
 method of testing and exhibiting the truth and depth of- Peter's 
 repentance, without subjecting him to the painful humiliation of 
 having the terrible denials of his Master brought up and dwelt upon, 
 either by Jesus in the way of charge, or by himself in the way of 
 confession. The best way of trying any man whether he has 'really 
 repented of any sinful deed is to place him again in the like circum- 
 stances, and see if he will act in the like manner. This is the way 
 in which the Lord now tries Peter. Will he again compare himself 
 with the others ; will he set himself above them ; will he say as 
 much now about his love being greater than theirs, as he did then 
 about his courage; will he repeat that boasting which was the 
 precursor of his fall 1 How touchingly does his answer show that 
 he perfectly understood the involved reference to the past ; that he 
 had thoroughly learned its humbling lessons 1 No longer any 
 comparing himself with or setting himself above others, the old 
 Peter-like frankness and fervour in the " Yea, Lord, I love thee," 
 but a new humility in it, for he will not say how much he loves, 
 still less will venture to say that he loves more than others ; and a 
 deeper humility still, for he will not offer his own testimony as to 
 the love he feels, he will trust no more his own deceitful heart, nor 
 ask his Lord to trust it, but throwing himself upon another know-
 
 476 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 ledge of that heart which had proved to be better than his, he says, 
 " Yea, Lord, thou knowest that I love thee." Our Lord's reply is a 
 most emphatic affirmative response to this appeal. It is as if he had 
 said at large, ' Yes, Simon Barjona, I do know that thou lovest me. 
 I know, too, that thou wouldst make no boast of thy love, nor in 
 that or anything else set thyself any longer above thy fellows ; and 
 now, that these thy brethren might know and see it too. how hearty 
 thy penitence has been, how thoroughly it has done its humbling 
 work, and how readily I own and acknowledge thee as being all to 
 me thou ever wert ; therefore now, in presence of these brethren, 
 I renew to thee the apostolic commission publicly reinstate thee 
 in the apostolic office "Feed my sheep." 'I need not ask thee 
 again whether thou lovest me more than others. I will prove thee 
 no more by that allusion to the past; but I have once, twice, 
 thrice to put that other general question to thee, that as three times 
 I warned thee, and three times thou didst deny me, even so I may 
 three times restore thee.' Can we wonder that Peter was grieved, 
 when for the third time that question, Lovest thou me 1 was put 
 to him. It was not the grief of doubt, as if he suspected that Jesus 
 only half-believed his word; but the grief of contrition, a grief 
 which grew into a deeper sadness at the distinct allusion which the 
 thrice-repeated question evidently bore to his three denials. And 
 yet even in that sadness there is comfort ; the comfort of feeling 
 that his affectionate Master is giving him the opportunity of wiping 
 away his threefold denial by threefold confession. And so, with a 
 fuller heart, and in stronger words than ever, will he make avowal 
 of his love : "Lord, thou knowest all things; thou knowest that I 
 love thee." 
 
 III. 
 
 THE TRIAL BEFORE THE SANHEDRIM. 
 JOHN xvm. 19-24 ; LUKE xxn. 66-71 ; MATT. xxvi. 59-68 ; MARK xiv. 53-65. 
 
 THE Jews regarded their day as beginning at one sunset and 
 ending with the next. This interval was not divided into twenty- 
 four parts or hours of equal and invariable length. They took each 
 day by itself, from sunrise to sunset, and each night by itself, from 
 sunset to sunrise, and divided each into twelve equal parts or hours ; 
 so that a Jewish hour, instead of being, as it is with us, a fixed 
 measure of time, varied in its length as each successive day and 
 night varied in theirs at different seasons of the year. Neither did 
 the Jews begin as we do, reckoning the twelve hours, into which 
 the day and night were respectively divided, from midday and mid- 
 night, but from sunset and sunrise ; their sixth hour of the night
 
 THE TRIAL BEFORE THE SANHEDKIM. 477 
 
 corresponding thus with our twelve o'clock, our midnight; their 
 sixth hour of the day with our twelve o'clock, our midday. There 
 were but two periods of the year, those of the autumnal and vernal 
 equinox, when, day and night being exactly equal, the length of the 
 hours in both was precisely the same with our own. It was at one 
 of these periods, that of the vernal equinox, that the Jewish Pass- 
 over was celebrated, and it was on the day which preceded its 
 celebration that our Lord was crucified. It was close upon the 
 hour of sunrise on that day that Jesus was carried to the Praetorium, 
 to be examined by the Eoman Governor. Assuming that he entered 
 Gethsemane about midnight, and remained there about an hour, 
 the interval between the Jewish seventh and twelfth hour of the 
 night, or between our one and six o'clock of the morning, was spent 
 in the trial before Annas and Caiaphas, both reckoned as High 
 Priests, the one being such de jure, the other de facto. They seem 
 to have been living at this time in the same palace into the hall of 
 which Jesus was carried immediately after his arrest. It was in 
 this hall, and before Annas, that Jesus was subjected to that pre- 
 liminary informal examination recorded in the eighteenth chapter 
 of the Gospel of St. John. 1 He was to be formally tried, with show 
 at least of law, before the Sanhedrim, the highest of the Jewish 
 courts, but this could not be done at once. Some time was needed 
 to call the members of that court together, and to consult as to the 
 conduct of the trial. Annas was there from the first, awaiting the 
 return of the band sent out to arrest the Saviour. His son-in-law 
 Caiaphas was in all likelihood by his side, eager both and ready to 
 proceed. But they could not act without their colleagues, nor 
 pronounce any sentence which they might call upon the Roman 
 Governor at once to ratify and execute. Whilst the messengers, 
 however, are despatched to summon them, and the members of the 
 Sanhedrim are gathering, Annas may prepare the way by sounding 
 Christ, in a far-off, unofficial, conversational manner, and may per- 
 haps extract from his replies some good material upon which the 
 court may afterward proceed. Calling Jesus before him, he puts to 
 him some questions about his disciples, and his doctrine ; questions 
 fair enough, and proper enough as to their outward form, yet 
 captious and inquisitorial, intended to entangle, and pointing not 
 obscurely to the two main charges to be afterwards brought against 
 him, of being a disturber of the public peace, and a teacher of 
 blasphemous doctrines. 
 
 First, then, about his disciples : Annas would like to know, 
 what this gathering of men around him meant ; this forming them 
 into a distinct society. By what bond or pledge to one another 
 were the members of this new society united ; what secret instruc- 
 tions had they got ; what hidden objects had they in view ? Though 
 i John xviii. 19-24.
 
 478 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 Christ might not reveal the secrets of this combination, yet, let it 
 but appear as by his very refusal to give the required information 
 it might be made to do that an attempt was here being made to 
 organise a confederation all over the country, how easy would it be 
 to awaken the jealousy of the Eoman authorities, and get them to 
 believe that some insurrectionary plot was being hatched which it 
 was most desirable at once to crush, by cutting off the ringleader. 
 Such we know to have been the impression so diligently sought to 
 be conveyed into the mind of Pontius Pilate. And Annas began 
 by trying whether he could get Jesus to say anything that should 
 give a colour of truth to such an imputation. Penetrating at once 
 his design, knowing thoroughly what his real meaning and purposes 
 were, our Lord utterly and indignantly denies the charge that was 
 attempted thus to be fastened on him. Neither as to his disciples, 
 nor as to his doctrine, neither as to the instructions given to his 
 followers, nor as to the bonds of their union and fellowship with 
 one another, had there been anything of the concealed or the sinis- 
 ter ; not one doctrine for the people without, and another for the 
 initiated within ; no meetings under cloud of night in hidden places 
 for doubtful or dangerous objects. " I spake," said Jesus, " openly 
 to the world ; I ever taught in the synagogue and in the temple, 
 whither the Jews always resort ; and in secret " that is, in the 
 sense in which I know that you mean and use the term secret 
 " have I said nothing ; why askest thou me ?" 
 
 This question tells the judge how naked and bare that hypo- 
 critical heart of his lies to the inspection of his prisoner : " Why 
 askest thou me V Put that question, Annas, to thy heart, and let 
 it answer thee, if it be not so deceitful as to hide its secrets from 
 thine own eyes. "Why askest thou me?" Art thou really so 
 ignorant as thou pretendest to be ; thou, who hast had thy spies 
 about me for well-nigh three years, tracking my footsteps, watching 
 my actions, reporting my words 1 " Why askest thou me 1 " Dost 
 thou really care to know, as these questions of thine would seem to 
 indicate 1 then go, " ask them which heard me, what I have said unto 
 them : behold, they know what I said." A boldness here, a touch 
 of irony, a stroke of rebuke, which, perhaps, our Lord might not 
 have used, had it been upon his seat and in his office as President 
 of the Sanhedrim that the High Priest was speaking to him ; had it 
 not been for the mean advantage which he was trying to take of him ; 
 had it not been for the cloak of hypocrisy which, in trying to take 
 that advantage, he had assumed. We shall see presently, at least, 
 that our Lord's tone and manner were somewhat different when his 
 more formal trial came on. Christ's sharp sententious answer to 
 Annas protected him and perhaps that was one of its chief purposes 
 from the repetition and prolongation of the annoyance. It seems 
 to have silenced the High Priest. He had made but little by that
 
 THE TRIAL BEFORE THE SANHEDRIM. 479 
 
 way of interrogating his prisoner, and he wisely gives it up. What- 
 ever resentment he cherished at being checked and spoken to in such 
 a manner, he refrained from any expression of it, biding the hour 
 when all his bitter pent-up hatred of the Nazarene might find fitter 
 and fuller vent. 
 
 But there was one of his officers who could not so restrain him- 
 self, who could not bear to see his master thus as he thought 
 insulted, and who, in the heat of his indignation, struck Christ 
 with the palm of his hand, some forward official, who thought in 
 this way to earn his master's favour, but who only earned for him- 
 self the unenviable notoriety of having been the first to begin those 
 acts of inhuman violence with which the trial and condemnation of 
 Jesus were so largely and disgracefully interspersed. Others after- 
 wards came forward to mock and jostle and blindfold, and to smite, 
 to spit upon our Lord, to whom he answered nothing ; but when 
 that first stroke was inflicted, with the question, " Answerest thou 
 the High Priest so 1 ?" Jesus did not receive it in silence. He 
 answered the question by another : " If I have spoken evil, bear 
 witness of the evil ; but if well, why smitest thou me 1" Best 
 comment this on our Lord's own precept : " If thy brother smite 
 thee on the one cheek, turn to him the other also ;" and a general 
 key to all like Scripture precepts, teaching us that the true 
 observance of them lies not in the fulfilment of them as to the 
 letter, but in the possession and exhibition of the spirit which they 
 prescribe. How much easier would it be when smitten upon the 
 one cheek, to turn the other for a second stroke, than to be alto- 
 gether like our Lord in temper and spirit under the infliction of the 
 stroke ! More difficult, also, than any silence, to imitate that 
 gentle answer. The lips might be sealed, while the heart was burn- 
 ing with anger. But it was out of the depths of a perfect patience, 
 a gentleness which nothing could irritate, that the saying came : " If 
 I have spoken evil, bear witness of the evil ; but if well, why smitest 
 thou me?" "Think," says Chrysostom, "on him who said these 
 words, on him to whom they were said, and on the reason why 
 they were said, and these words will, with divine power, cast down 
 all wrath which may rise within thy soul." 
 
 But now at last the whole Council has assembled, Caiaphas has 
 taken his seat as President, and they go more formally to work. 
 Their object is to convict him of some crime which shall warrant 
 their pronouncing upon him the severest sentence of the law. That 
 the appearance of justice may be preserved, 1 they must have wit- 
 nesses ; these witnesses must testify to some speech or act of Christ, 
 
 1 It would appear that in holding their Council during the night, and in condemn- 
 ing Christ solely upon his own confession, the Jews violated express enactments of 
 their own code. See " Jesus devant Cai'phe et PilateRefutation du chapitre de M. 
 Salvador, intitule ' Jugement et Condanmalion de J^sus,' " par M. Dupin.
 
 480 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 which would involve him in that doom; and as to any specific 
 charge, two of these witnesses must agree before they can condemn. 
 They could have got plenty of witnesses to testify as to Christ's 
 having within the last few days openly denounced themselves, the 
 members of the Sanhedrim, as fools and blind, hypocrites, a very 
 generation of vipers ; but to have convicted Christ upon that 
 count or charge would have given to their proceeding againbt him 
 the aspect of personal revenge. They could have got plenty of 
 witnesses to testify as to Christ's having often broken and spoken 
 slightingly of ordinances and traditions of the Pharisees, but 
 there were Sadducees among their own members, and the Council 
 might thus have been divided. They could have got plenty of 
 witnesses to testify as to Christ's frequent profanation of the 
 Sabbath ; but how should they deal with those miracles, in or 
 connected with the performance of which so many of these cases of 
 profanation of the Sabbath had occurred 1 They are in difficulty 
 about their witnesses. They bring forth many; but either the 
 charge which it is proposed to establish against Christ comes not 
 up to the required degree of criminality, or the clumsy witnesses, 
 brought hastily forward, undrilled beforehand, break down in their 
 testimony. Two, however, do at last appear, who seem at first 
 sight to agree; but when minutely questioned as to the words 
 which they allege that more than two years before they had heard 
 him utter about the destruction of the Temple, they report them 
 differently, so that " neither did their witness agree." The prosecu^ 
 tion is in danger of breaking down for want of proof. 
 
 All this time, the accused has observed a strange to his judges 
 an unaccountable and provoking silence. He hears as though he 
 heard not cared not were indifferent about the result. It is 
 more than the presiding judge can stand. He rises from his seat, 
 and, fixing his eyes on Jesus, says to him, "Answerest thou 
 nothing 1 " Hast thou nothing to say 1 no question to put, no 
 explanation to offer, as to what these witnesses testify against thee 1 
 Jesus returns the look, but there is no reply : he stands as silent, 
 as unmoved as ever. Baffled, perplexed, irritated, the High Priest 
 will try yet another way with him. Using the accustomed Jewish 
 formula for administering an oath a formula recited by the judge, 
 and accepted without repetition by the respondent "I adjure thee," 
 said the High Priest, " by the living God, that thou tell us whether 
 thou be the Christ, the Son of God." Appealed to thus solemnly, 
 by the first magistrate of his nation, sitting in presidency over the 
 highest of its courts, our Lord keeps silence no longer. But it is 
 in words that must have struck every auditor with wonder that he 
 replies to the High Priest's adjuration. He sees quite through the 
 purpose of the High Priest. He knows quite well what will be the 
 immediate issue of his reply. Yet he says, " I am ; " I am the Christ,
 
 THE TRIAL BEFORE THE SANHEDRIM. 481 
 
 the Son of the Blessed; "and ye" ye who are sitting there 
 now as my judges, "ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the 
 right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven." It 
 is our Lord's own public and solemn assertion of his claim to the 
 Messiahship, and Sonship to God. The time for all concealment 
 or reserve is past. Jesus will now openly, not only take to 
 himself his own name, assume his office, and assert his Divine 
 prerogatives, but in doing so, -he will let those earthly dignitaries, 
 who have dragged him thus to their tribunal, before whose judg- 
 ment-seat he stands, know that the hour is coming which shall 
 witness a strange reversal in their relative positions, he being 
 seen sitting on the seat of power, and they, with all the world 
 beside, seen standing before his bar as on the clouds of heaven 
 he comes to judge all mankind. 
 
 The effect of this unfolding of his true character, and prophecy 
 of his second coming, was immediate, and, though extraordi- 
 nary, not unnatural. The High Priest, as soon as he drank in 
 the real meaning of the words which fell on his astonished 
 ear, grasped his mantle, and rent it in real or feigned horror, 
 exclaiming, "He hath spoken blasphemy." Then rose up also 
 the other judges who were sitting round him, excited to the 
 highest pitch, each more eager than the other, to put this ques- 
 tion to the accused, "Art thou then the Son of God?" to all 
 of whom there is the same answer as to Caiaphas, "I am." 
 " What further need, then," says the President of the Court to his 
 brother judges, " have we of witnesses ? Now ye have heard his 
 blasphemy. What think ye ? " " What need we," they say to 
 him, taking up his own words, "any further witnesses? for we 
 ourselves have heard it out of his own mouth." And they 
 "answered and said, He is guilty of death." 1 The unanimous 
 judgment of the Court is delivered, 2 and the sentence of death 
 pronounced. 
 
 Is there not one among all those judges within whose heart 
 there rise some strange misgivings as he dooms this man to die ; 
 not one whom the calmness, the serenity, the dignified bearing 
 of the Lord, as he made the great revelation of himself before them, 
 have impressed with wonder and with awe? Perhaps there is; 
 but the tumult of that vehement condemnation carries him away ; or 
 if any inward voice be pleading for the accused, he quenches it 
 by saying that if Jesus really submit to such a sentence being exe- 
 cuted upon him, he cannot be the Messiah, he must be a deceiver ; 
 and so he lets the matter take its course. 
 
 The pronouncing of the sentence from the bench was the signal 
 
 for a horrible outburst of violence in the hall below. As if all 
 
 license was theirs to do with him what they liked as if they knew 
 
 1 See Deut. xiii. 5 ; xviii. 20. 2 M ark xiv. 64. 
 
 2H
 
 482 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 they could not go too far; could do nothing that their masters 
 would not approve, perhaps enjoy the men who held Jesus l (for 
 it would seem they could not trust him, bound though he was, to 
 stand free before them) began to mock him, to buffet him, to spit 
 upon him, and to cover his eyes with their hands, saying, as they 
 struck at him, " Prophesy to us who it is that smiteth thee." "And 
 many other things blasphemously spake they against him." How 
 long all this went on we know not. They had to wait till the 
 proper hour arrived for carrying Jesus before the Roman Governor, 
 and it was thus that the interval was filled up ; the meek and the 
 patient One, who was the object of all this scorn and cruelty, neither 
 answering, nor murmuring, nor resisting, nor reproaching. There 
 was but one man in that hall to look with loving, pitying eyes on 
 him who was being treated thus; and, in the words which that 
 spectator penned long years thereafter in his distant lonely island, 
 we may see some trace of the impression which the sight of the 
 great sufferer made " I, John, who also am your brother and com- 
 panion in tribulation, and in the kingdom and patience of Jesus 
 Christ." 
 
 The malignant antipathy to Christ cherished by the hierarchical 
 party at Jerusalem had early ripened into an intention to cut him 
 off by death. It was at the beginning of the second year of his 
 ministry that he healed the impotent man at the pool of Bethesda. 
 " The man departed, and told the Jews that it was Jesus which had 
 made him whole. And therefore did the Jews persecute Jesus, and 
 seek to slay him, because he had done these things on the Sabbath- 
 day. But Jesus answered them, My Father worketh hitherto, and 
 I work. Therefore the Jews sought the more to kill him, because 
 he not only had broken the Sabbath, but said also that God was his 
 Father, making himself equal with God." 2 So far from repudiating 
 this interpretation of his words, Jesus accepted and confirmed it ; 
 enlarging the scope, without altering the nature of what he had 
 said about the Father, claiming not only unity in action, but unity 
 in honour with him. 3 So vengeful in their hatred did the Jews of 
 Jerusalem become, that Jesus had to seek safety by retiring from 
 Judea. In the course of the two years which followed, Jesus paid 
 only two visits to the metropolis, and both were marked by out- 
 breaks of the same implacable animosity. His appearance in 
 Jerusalem at the Feast of Tabernacles excited such an instant and 
 
 1 Luke xxii. 63. 
 
 2 John v. 15-18. When, on a succeeding Sabbath, Christ healed the man who had 
 a withered hand, the Pharisees " were filled with madness, and straightway took 
 counsel with the Herodians against him how they might destroy him." Luke vi. 
 11 ; Mark iii. 6. Christ's movements were, from the beginning and throughout, 
 more regulated by the pressure of the persecution to which he was exposed, than a 
 cursory reading of the Gospel narrative might lead us to imagine. See John ii. 24 ; 
 iv. 1-3 : Mark i. 45; Luke v. 17 ; xi. 53-56. * John v. 33.
 
 THE TTTA.L BEFORE THE SANHEDRIM. 483 
 
 intense spirit of vindictiveness, that one of our Lord's first sayings 
 to the Jews in the Temple was, " Why go ye about to kill me ?" So 
 well known was the purpose of the rulers that it was currently said, 
 "Is not this he whom they seek to kill? But, lo, he speaketh 
 boldly, and they say nothing unto him. Do the rulers know indeed 
 that this is the very Christ I" 1 Hearing that such things were said, 
 the rulers sent their officers to seize him, but failed in the attempt 
 to get him into their hands. They then confronted him in the 
 Temple, and openly charged him with bearing a false record about 
 himself. A strange dialogue ensued, in the course of which, instead 
 of retracting anything which he had formerly said, or attempting to 
 explain it away, Jesus not only exalted himself above Abraham, in 
 whom they boasted, but declared, in language which they could 
 only understand as an assumption by him of Divine prerogatives : 
 " Before Abraham was, I am." So exasperated were they when he 
 said this, that they took up stones to cast at him ; and had he not 
 made himself invisible, and so passed through the midst of them, 
 they would, in the heat of the moment, and without troubling 
 themselves about any formal trial, have inflicted on him the doom 
 of the blasphemer. Having lingered for a few days longer in the 
 neighbourhood of Jerusalem, wrought a memorable cure on the man 
 born blind, and delivered that memorable discourse which John has 
 preserved to us in the tenth chapter of his Gospel, Jesus again 
 retired from the capital On his return, two months afterwards, at 
 the Feast of Dedication, he was met as he walked in the Temple in 
 Solomon's Porch, and with some show of candour and anxiety, the 
 question was put to him, " How long dost thou make us to doubt ? 
 if thou be the Christ, tell us plainly." Jesus did not tell them so 
 plainly as they desired, about his being the Christ, but he told them 
 plainly enough, as he had done before, that he was the Son of God. 
 " I," said he, " and my Father are one. Then the Jews took up 
 stones again to stone him. Jesus answered them, Many good works 
 have I showed you from my Father : for which of those works do 
 ye stone me ? The Jews answered him, saying, For a good work 
 we stone thee not, but for blasphemy ; and because that thou, being 
 a man, makest thyself God." Again our Lord had to protect him- 
 self from the storm of their wrath by retreating to Persea. The 
 message from the mourning sisters recalled him from this retreat. 
 The raising from the dead of a man so well known as Lazarus, in a 
 village so near to Jerusalem as Bethany, produced such an effect 
 that a meeting of the Sanhedrim was summoned to deliberate as to 
 what should be done. The design which they had so long cherished, 
 they now more deliberately than ever determined to accomplish : 
 "From that day forth they took counsel together to put him to 
 death." 2 
 
 i John vii. 25, 26. * John xi. 53.
 
 484 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 Though hurried at last in the time and manner of its execution, 
 it was no hasty purpose on the part of the members of the Jewish 
 Council to put our Lord to death. The proposal of Judas did not 
 take them by surprise, the arrest in the garden did not find them 
 unprepared. They must often have deliberated how they should 
 proceed if they once had him in their hands. And when he was at 
 last before them for formal trial, and they were eager to get him 
 condemned, they had not for the first time to consider what charges 
 they should bring against him, and by what evidence the charges 
 might be sustained. Witnesses enough of all kinds were within 
 their easy reach, nor had they any scruple as to the means they 
 took to get from them the evidence they wanted. But with all 
 their facilities, and all their bribery, they could not substantiate a 
 single charge against Jesus which would justify them in condemn- 
 ing him. Why, when they found themselves in such difficulty, did 
 they not summon into their presence some of those who had heard 
 Jesus commit that kind of blasphemy, upon the ground of which 
 they had twice, upon the spur of the moment, attempted to stone 
 him to death ? Testimony in abundance to that effect must have 
 been lying ready to their hands. It seems clear to us that the first 
 and earnest desire of the members of the Sanhedrim was to convict 
 Christ of some other breach of their law, sufficient to justify the 
 infliction of death ; and that it was not till every attempt of this 
 kind had failed, that, as a last resort, the High Priest put our Lord 
 himself upon his oath. In the form of adjuration which he 
 employed, two separate questions were put to Christ: the one, 
 Whether he claimed to be the Christ; the other, Whether he 
 claimed to be the Son of God. These were not identical. The 
 latter title was not one which either Scripture or Jewish usage had 
 attached to the Messiah. The patent act of blasphemy which our 
 Lord was considered as having perpetrated in presence of the Council 
 was not his having asserted his Messiahship, but his having appro- 
 priated the other title to himself. When, after Christ had given his 
 first affirmative reply to the complex challenge of Caiaphas, the 
 other judges interfered to interrogate the prisoner, they dropped all 
 allusion to the Messiahship. " Then said they all, Art thou then 
 the Son of God?" and it was upon our Lord's re-assertion that he 
 was, upon that, and that alone, that he was doomed to death as a 
 blasphemer. For it was perfectly understood between the judges 
 and the judged, that, in thus speaking of himself, Jesus claimed a 
 peculiar, an intrinsic affinity, oneness in essence, knowledge, power, 
 and glory, with the Father. His judges took Jesus to be only man, 
 and looking upon him as such, they were so far right in regarding 
 him as guilty of blasphemous presumption. In this, then, one of 
 the most solemn moments of his existence, when his character was 
 at stake, when life and death were trembling in the balance, Jesus,
 
 CHRIST'S FIRST APPEARANCE BEFORE PILATE. 485 
 
 fully aware of the meaning attached by his judges to the expression, 
 claimed to be the Son of God. He heard, and heard without 
 explanation or remonstrance, sentence of death passed upon him, 
 for no other reason whatever but his making that claim. On any 
 other supposition than that of his having been really that which his 
 judges regarded him as asserting that he was, on any other suppo- 
 sition than that of his true and proper Divinity, this passage of the 
 Redeemer's life becomes worse than unmeaning in our eyes. There 
 would be something more here than the needless flinging away of a 
 life, by the absence of all attempt to remove the misconception (if 
 misconception it had been), upon which the death-sentence had been 
 based. If only a man, if not the co-eternal, co-equal Son of the 
 Father, in speaking of himself as he did before that Jewish Council, 
 Jesus was guilty of an extent, an audacity, an effrontery of preten- 
 sion, which the blindest, wildest, most arrogant religious enthusiast 
 has never exceeded. The only way to free his character as a man 
 from the stain of such egregious vanity and presumption, is to recog- 
 nise him as the Son of the Highest. If the Divinity that was in 
 him be denied, the humanity no longer stands stainless. 
 
 But we believe in both, and see both manifested in the very 
 scene that is here before our eyes. Now, with the eye of sense we 
 look on Jesus as he stands before this Jewish tribunal. It is the 
 Man of sorrows, despised and rejected of men ; treated by those 
 lordly judges, and the brutal band of servitors, as the vilest of 
 felons, the very refuse of the earth. Again, with the eye of faith 
 we look on him, and he seems as if transfigured before us, when 
 breaking the long-kept silence, he. declares, "I am the Son of God, 
 and hereafter ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand 
 of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven." From what a depth 
 of earthly degradation, to what a height of superhuman dignity does 
 Jesus at once ascend ! And is it not striking to notice how he him- 
 self blends his humiliation and exaltation, his humanity and divinity, 
 as he takes to himself the double title, and binds it to his suffering 
 brow : The Son of man; The Son of God. 
 
 IV. 
 
 CHRIST'S FIRST APPEARANCE BEFORE PILATE. 
 
 MARK xv. 1 ; LUKE xxm. 1-4 ; JOHN xvm. 28-39. 
 
 CHRIST'S trial before the Jewish Sanhedrim closed in his conviction 
 and condemnation. The strange commotion on the bench, in the 
 midst of which the sentence was pronounced, and the outbreak of 
 brutal violence on the part of the menials in the hall, being over,
 
 486 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 there was an eager and hurried consultation as to how that sentence 
 could most speedily be executed. Had the full power of carrying 
 out their own sentence been in their own hands, there had been no 
 difficulty; Jesus would have been led out instantly to execution. 
 But Judea was now under the Roman yoke ; one bond and badge 
 of its servitude being this, that while the old Jewish courts were 
 permitted to try and to punish minor offences, the final judgment of 
 all capital offences was reserved for the Roman tribunals. A Roman 
 judge must pass the sentence, or, at least, must sign the warrant 
 that consigned the criminal to execution. At Jerusalem, these 
 reserved cases were brought up for adjudication at the time of the 
 great festivals, when the Roman Procurator, who resided ordinarily 
 at Caesarea, visited the capital. For the last six years, Pontius 
 Pilate had held this office in Judea, and he was now on occasion of 
 this Passover in the city. His order, therefore, for the execution 
 must be obtained that forenoon, or perhaps not at all. It was now 
 the last day before the Passover on which a court of justice could 
 be held ; and if not held before six o'clock that evening, when the 
 Passover period began, then not for seven days thereafter. To keep 
 Christ so long in bonds, awaiting his presentation to the Roman 
 judge, with an uncertainty, besides, whether Pilate would take up 
 the case after the Passover, were a risk too perilous to run. They 
 had, indeed, the whole day before them, and there was time enough 
 to get Pilate's judgment before the Passover commenced ; but to 
 keep Jesus not only bound, but bound with the order for his 
 crucifixion hanging over him ; to keep him so for eight days to 
 come : to keep him so till not only citizens of Jerusalem, but the 
 inhabitants of the whole region round about, had heard all the 
 particulars of his apprehension and condemnation, that also were 
 peril which must, if possible, be avoided. And it could only be 
 avoided by getting the crucifixion over before that sun which was 
 just about to rise had set. 
 
 Obviously there was urgent need of haste. The consultation, 
 therefore, was a brief and a hurried one. The resolution was taken 
 to bind Jesus once more bind him as men condemned to death 
 were wont to be bound and to carry him at once to Pilate, and get 
 from him the authority to proceed. Thither, therefore, to the 
 official residence of the Procurator, accompanied by the whole 
 multitude that had assembled in and around the hall of Caiaphas, 
 Jesus is conveyed. It is a house which the Gentile has occupied 
 and polluted ; a house from which the leaven has not been cast out ; 
 a house to cross whose threshold at such a time as this, on the 
 very eve of the Passover, was to disqualify the entrant from all 
 participation in the holy rite. And, though there be among their 
 number those who, from their position and previous acquaintance, 
 might well have claimed the privilege of access, and asked a private
 
 CHRIST'S FIRST APPEARANCE BEFORE PILA.TE. 487 
 
 audience of Pilate, to explain to him the nature of the case in 
 which his interference at such an unseasonable hour was required, 
 yet will not one of these precise, punctilious chief priests, scribes, 
 and councillors venture into that dwelling, lest they should be 
 defiled. They send in their message by some of Pilate's officers or 
 servants. At once, with Roman courtesy, he comes out to them 
 to where they are all standing around the bound and sentenced 
 Jesus. The glance of a quick eye at once revealed to Pilate the 
 general object of this early visit. These, he knew, as his eye ran 
 round the leaders of the crowd, were the Jewish judges, and this, 
 as that eye rested upon Jesus, some one whom they were anxious 
 to get punished. But why all this haste ? What can it have been 
 that has brought together, at such an unusual hour, all these city 
 magnates, and drawn them as suppliants to his door? What 
 extraordinary crime can this man, whom they have borne to him, 
 have committed, that they are so impatient to see him punished ? 
 He looks at Christ again. He had tried many ; he had condemned 
 many ; his practised eye was familiar with the features which great 
 guilt ordinarily wears, but he had never seen a great criminal look 
 as this man looks ; nothing here either of that sunk and hollow 
 aspect that those convicted of great crimes sometimes show ; nothing 
 here of that bold and brazen front with which they still more 
 frequently are wont to face their doom : he looks so gentle, so meek, 
 so innocent, yet so calm, so self-possessed, so dignified. It does not 
 seem that Pilate knew at first who this bound one was that now 
 stood before him. He must have heard something, perhaps much, 
 of Jesus of Nazareth before. He had been governor of the country 
 all through the years of our Lord's public ministry, and it could 
 scarcely be but that some report of his great sayings and doings 
 had reached his ear; but no more, perhaps, than Herod had 
 he ever met him ever seen him face to face ; nor does he yet know 
 that this is he. He only knows and feels that never has his eye 
 rested upon one more unlike a hardened reprobate than this. His 
 curiosity roused, his interest excited, the favourable impression 
 which this first sight of the accused has made, co-operating with the 
 instinctive and official sense of justice, Pilate's first words to these 
 judges and heads of the Jewish people are, " What accusation bring 
 ye against this man ?" Was that question put in such a way, was 
 it spoken in such a tone, or accompanied by such a look as to convey 
 the idea that he who put it was not at once ready to believe that 
 any very heinous offence had been committed by that man ? 
 Perhaps it did carry with it some indication of that kind. But 
 whether so or not, it indicated this, that Pilate meant to open up 
 or re-try the case, or, at least, to get at and go over, upon his own 
 account, the ground of their condemnation ere he ratified it. He 
 could not but know if he had not been distinctly told by the
 
 488 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 messengers whom the Jews sent to him, he saw it plainly enough 
 in all the attendant circumstances what it was that these Jews 
 were expecting him to do. But he will do it in his own way. 
 He will not sign off-hand, and at their bidding, the death- 
 warrant of a man like this. Had he been a judge of the purest 
 and strictest honour, he would not have signed in such a hurried 
 way the death-warrant of any one; but we know it from other 
 sources, and the Jews who stood before him knew it too, that he 
 was not such a judge, that he had often condemned without a hearing. 
 And it is this which inclines us to believe that there was something 
 in the very first impression that our Lord's appearance made upon 
 Pilate which touched the better part of his nature, and not 
 only stirred within his heart the wish to know what it was of 
 which they accused such a man, but also the desire to ascertain, 
 for his own satisfaction, whether or not that accusation was well 
 founded. 
 
 Obviously to the men to whom it was addressed, Pilate's question 
 was a disappointing one. They did not want, they had not expected, 
 to be summoned thus to adduce and to substantiate some charge 
 against Jesus, which, in Pilate's judgment, might be sufficient to 
 doom him to death. They had hoped that to save himself the 
 trouble of investigation, and in compliment to them at this Passover 
 season a compliment which, when it cost him nothing, they knew 
 that he was quite willing to pay he would take their judgment on 
 trust and proceed upon it. And they still hope so. They will let 
 Pilate know how good a right they have to expect this service at 
 his hand ; how much they will be offended if he refuse it. When 
 the question, then, is put to them, " What accusation bring ye 
 against this man?" they content themselves with saying, "If he 
 were not a malefactor, we would not have delivered him up to thee," 
 words of haughtiness and injured pride. ' Do you think that we, 
 the whole assembled Sanhedrim ; we, the very first men in this 
 Jewish community over which you happen to have been placed ; we, 
 who have come to you, as we are not often wont to do, and are here 
 before your gates to ask a very easy act of compliance with our will, 
 do you think that we would have brought this man to you, if we 
 had not already ascertained his guilt 1 Do you think that we would 
 either have ventured to offer such an insult to you, or ourselves 
 perpetrate such injustice 1 ?' A very high tone this to take, which 
 they have some hope will yet carry their point for them with the weak 
 and vacillating Governor. They are disappointed. They have stirred 
 a pride that is equal to their own. If those Jews won't tell him what 
 kind or degree of criminality it is that they attribute to this man, 
 he, Pilate, won't put himself as a blind tool into their hands. If 
 it be yoi'.r judgment, and your judgment alone, that is to rule this 
 man's case, "Take ye him, then," said Pilate, "and judge him
 
 CHRIST'S FIRST APPEARANCE BEFORE PILATE. 489 
 
 according to your own law ;" a refusal on Pilate's part to do the 
 thing which they first hoped that they might get him to do off- 
 hand ; a refusal to countersign their sentence, whatever it was, and 
 by whatever evidence supported. It was as much as saying, that so 
 far as he had yet heard or known anything of this case, it was one 
 which their own law, as administered by themselves, was quite 
 competent to deal with. 
 
 Let them take this man, and judge him and punish him as they 
 pleased, provided only that they kept strictly within the limits that 
 their conquerors had laid down. This were wholly to miss their 
 mark. Their tone changes ; their pride humbles itself. They are 
 obliged to explain to the Governor, what he had known well enough 
 from the first, but what they had not been candid enough to tell 
 him, that it was a sentence unto death which they wished to get 
 executed, a sentence which they were not at liberty to carry out. 
 This determination of Pilate to make personal inquiry into the 
 grounds of that sentence, obliged them also to lodge some distinct 
 and specific charge against Jesus; one of such a kind that the 
 Governor would be forced to deal with it; one too of sufficient 
 magnitude to draw down upon it the punishment of death. Now 
 mark the deep hypocrisy and utter falseness of these men. It 
 won't do now to say that it was solely as a blasphemer, as calling 
 himself the Son of God, that Jesus had been condemned before 
 their bar. It won't do to let Pilate know anything of the only piece 
 of evidence upon which their sentence has been founded. What 
 cares he about that kind of blasphemy of which Jesus has been 
 convicted 1 what cares that Eoman law, of which he is the adminis- 
 trator, who or what any man thinks himself to be, or claims to be, 
 in his relationship with God ? Let any Jew be but a good and 
 faithful subject to Caesar, and, so far as Caesar or Caesar's represen- 
 tatives are concerned, he may claim any rank he pleases among the 
 gods. It was necessary, therefore, to draw the thickest veil of 
 concealment over their own procedure as judges, although before 
 the examination at this new bar was over, it oozed out that Jesus 
 had made himself the Son of God, with what strange effect upon 
 Pilate's mind we shall presently see. But, in the first instance, 
 some civil or political offence, some crime against the common law 
 of the land, must be sought for to charge against Jesus. It was 
 not easy to find or fabricate such a crime. Our Saviour had through- 
 out most carefully and cautiously avoided everything like inter- 
 ference or intermeddling with, condemning or resisting, the ordinary 
 administration of law, the policy and procedure of the government. 
 He refused to entertain a question about the rights of inheritance 
 between two brothers, saying to him who sought his interference, 
 "Man, who made me a judge or a ruler over you?" These very 
 men, who are now about to framo, their first accusation of him before
 
 490 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 Pilate, had tried to get him to pass his judgment upon the ques- 
 tion as to whether it was lawful to pay tribute to Caesar or not, 
 and had failed in their attempt to entangle him. What conceal- 
 ment, then, what deception, what effrontery of falsehood was in it, 
 it shows to what extremity they were driven, that when forced 
 to adduce some specific accusation, they said, " We found this fellow 
 perverting the nation, and forbidding to give tribute to Caesar, 
 saying that he himself is Christ a King !" They here bring three 
 different accusations against him, not one of which in that sense 
 in which alone they desire that Pilate should understand them 
 they know is true; and one of which, the second, they know is 
 absolutely, and in every sense of it, false. But it suits their object 
 to represent the accused to Pilate as stirring up sedition, refusing 
 to pay custom, denying the Eoman right to reign over Judea, 
 claiming to be king of the country, in his own person and of his own 
 right. These, however, were charges which they knew that a 
 Roman governor, whose chief business in their country was to see 
 that the rights of the Emperor whom he represented should suffer 
 no damage, could not pass by ; charges by no means unlikely to be 
 true, for Judea was at this time in a most unsettled state. There 
 were multitudes of Jews who questioned Caesar's right to tax them ; 
 multitudes who regarded him as a foreign usurper. Give them but 
 a chance of success, and the great majority of the people would have 
 risen then, as they rose afterwards, and risked their lives to regain 
 their national liberties. One thing alone was suspicious that such 
 an accusation should come from such a quarter ; that those leaders 
 of the Jews should be so very eager to get a man punished for such 
 a crime. It surely could not be so mighty an offence in their eyes. 
 They were not themselves so very loyal to Rome as to be anxious to 
 see an enemy to the Roman power cut off. Never before, at least, 
 had they displayed any great zeal in that direction. Pilate had no 
 faith in their sincerity. He saw through their designs. Perhaps 
 it was now that, for the first time, he recognised that it was with 
 Jesus of Nazareth, of whom he had heard so much, that he had to do. 
 He did not entertain, because he did not believe, the charge of his 
 being a seditious and rebellious subject. But there was one part of 
 the accusation which was quite new to him, which sounded ridiculous 
 in his ears, that this poor Nazarene should say that he was a king, the 
 king of the Jews, a very preposterous pretension ; one sufficient 
 of itself, if there was any real ground for saying that it ever had 
 actually been set forth, to suggest a doubt as to whether Jesus was 
 a fit subject for any judicial procedure whatever being taken against 
 him. Overlooking all else that had been said against him, Pilate 
 turns to Christ, and says to him, " Artthou the King of the Jews ?" 
 He expected nothing else than to get an immediate disclaimer of 
 the absurd pretension. To his surprise, however, Jesus calmly and
 
 CHRIST'S FIRST APPEARANCE BEFORE PILATE. 491 
 
 deliberately replies, " Thou sayest it, I am the King of the Jews." 
 Very curious this, to hear such a man, in such a condition, and in 
 such circumstances, speak in such a way. He must be some egre- 
 gious, designing, perhaps dangerous impostor, or, more likely, some 
 wretched, ignorant, half-mad enthusiast or fanatic. He would like 
 to search a little into the matter, and find out how it really stood. 
 The man himself would in all likelihood be the first to supply the 
 clue ; he had so willingly and so calmly answered that first question 
 that he would answer others. But it would be better to interrogate 
 him alone, away from these accusers. He might not be so ready to 
 answer further questions in their hearing, or they might interfere 
 and prevent Pilate prosecuting the inquiry in his own way. He 
 retires, therefore, to his own dwelling, into that part of it called and 
 used generally as the Judgment Hall, and calls upon Christ to follow 
 him. Jesus at once consents. He makes no scruple about crossing 
 that threshold : he fears no contagion from contact with the Gentile ; 
 his passover has been already held. And now, when they are alone, 
 out of sight and out of hearing of those Jews, Pilate says again to 
 Him in a subdued and under-tone, as of one really anxious to get 
 at the truth, " Art thou the King of the Jews ?" Waiving in the 
 meantime anything like a direct reply, Jesus said to him, " Sayest 
 thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it thee of me ? " ' Art 
 thou but repeating the words of others, or art thou asking out of 
 the depths of thine own inquiring spirit ? Hast thou, too, Pilate, 
 felt the inward need of some one to be the Governor and Lord of 
 thine unruled, unruly spirit ? Lies there behind the outward form 
 and meaning of that question of thine, the indistinct, the inarticu- 
 late longing after another king and another kingdom than either 
 Jews or Komans own V "Was there indeed, for one passing moment, 
 far down in the depths of Pilate's struggling thoughts, an element 
 of this kind at work 1 and did Jesus, knowing that it was there, try 
 thus to bring it up, that he might proceed to satisfy it ? If so, 
 what a moment of transcendent interest to the Eoman judge, of 
 which had he but known how to take advantage, he too might 
 have entered the kingdom, and shared its securities and blessed- 
 ness ! But he does not, he will not stoop to acknowledge, what we 
 suspect was true, that there did mingle in the thoughts and feelings 
 of that moment some element of the kind described. This is too 
 personal, too bold, too home a question of the Nazarene. The pride 
 of the Roman, the judge, swells up within his breast, overbearing 
 his eternal interests as a man, a sinner and so he haughtily replies : 
 "Am I a Jew? Thine own nation, and the chief priests, have 
 delivered thee unto me: what hast thou done?" The chance of 
 reaching the individual conscience of this man has passed away ; 
 the trial has been made, and it has failed ; Jesus must take up the 
 question not as one between him and Pilate between Pilate's
 
 492 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 conscience and Pilate's God, but as one simply between himself 
 as a sentenced criminal, and those Jews without, who are his 
 accusers. He will not answer the last question of the Governor, 
 "What hast thou done?" upon that he will not enter; it would 
 be of no avail ; but he will satisfy Pilate upon one point. He will 
 convince him that he has committed no political offence ; that he 
 never meant to set himself in opposition to any of this world's 
 governments. " My kingdom," said he, " is not of this world. If 
 my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that 
 I should not be delivered to the Jews : but now is my kingdom not 
 from hence :" a kingdom rising up and extending itself, by earthly 
 weapons, by outward force of any kind, not such is that kingdom 
 which I Jesus call my own. 
 
 But if not, what kind of kingdom can it be ? what kind of king 
 is he who rules it ? So far satisfied, yet still wondering and per- 
 plexed, Pilate puts his question, not in its first specific form, but in 
 a more general one: "Art thou a king then?" 'If not a king, 
 like our own Csesars or your own Herods, if not a king to fight with 
 rival sovereigns, or ask thy subjects to fight for thee, then in what 
 sense a king ?' Our Lord's reply, we can perceive, was particularly 
 adapted to the position, character, acquirements, experience, of him 
 before whom he stood a Eoman official of high rank, educated, 
 cultivated ; a man of affairs, of large experience of men men in 
 different countries and of different creeds ; not given much, perhaps, 
 to any deep or serious thought about religious matters, yet suffi- 
 ciently acquainted with the rival schools of philosophy and religion 
 by which the then great living Eoman commonwealth was divided 
 and distracted. Truth, moral truth, religious truth, was the one 
 proclaimed object of research, of which some were saying, Lo, here 
 it is, and others, Lo, there it is ; but of which he, Pilate, in pursuit 
 of quite a different object, had learned to think that neither here 
 nor there nor anywhere was it to be found. It is to this man that 
 Jesus says, speaking in the language that would be most intelligible 
 to him : " Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, 
 and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness 
 unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice." 
 As these words fell upon the ear of Pilate, one can well enough 
 imagine that the current of his thoughts ran thus : ' It is even as 
 I suspected ; here is another of these pretenders, who each would 
 have us to believe that he alone had discovered the undiscoverable, 
 that he alone had found out and got exclusive possession of the 
 truth ; here is a new Jewish rival of those old Stoics of our own, 
 who were ever teaching us that every wise man was a king, the 
 setter up of a new system, which he imagines is to dethrone every 
 other one that the world before has seen, whose fancy is that 
 he himself is already upon the throne of this kingdom, some
 
 CHRIST'S APPEARANCE BEFORE HEROD. 493 
 
 poor egotistical, yet quite harmless enthusiast, whose day-dream 
 who would wish to break ! One thing, at least, is clear enough, 
 that it is a quite empty, hollow charge these Jews are urging here 
 against him. He may sit as long as he likes upon that ideal throne 
 of his, without the throne of Tiberius being endangered ; he may 
 get as many subjects as he can to enter that ideal kingdom of his, 
 and my master, the Emperor, have not a loyal subject the less.' 
 And so with that passing question to Jesus, "What is truth?" a 
 question he does not stay to get answered, as he has no faith that 
 any answer to it can be given ; a question not uttered sneeringly 
 or scoffingly, but rather sadly and bitterly, so far as he himself is 
 concerned, having come to regard all truth as a phantom ; and with 
 a kindly, tolerant, half-pitying, half-envious feeling towards Jesus, 
 with that question put to Jesus by the way, Pilate goes out to the 
 Jews, and says to them boldly and emphatically, " I find in him no 
 fault at all;" the faultlessness of Christ acknowledged, his kingly 
 claims scarcely comprehended and so far as comprehended, rejected, 
 perhaps despised. 
 
 V. 
 
 CHRIST'S APPEARANCE BEFORE HEROD. 
 
 MATT. xxvn. 12, 13 ; MABK vi. 14-16 ; LUKE ix. 7-9 ; xni. 31, 32 ; xxm. 4-12. 
 
 JESUS had spoken quite frankly and openly to Pilate when 
 they were together, out of sight and hearing of the Jews, alone in 
 the Judgment Hall. It was quite different when, accompanied by 
 Christ, Pilate came out again to the attendant crowd, and boldly 
 said to them, "I find no fault in this man." So far, then, the 
 Chief Priests and Elders have failed. Failure always embitters. 
 Failure here was what these men were by no means disposed to 
 submit to. Pilate's assertion of his belief in the innocence of Jesus 
 only made them the more vehement in their assertion of his guilt. 
 They became the more fierce. They accused him, Mark tells us, 
 of many things. But the waves and the billows of this swelling 
 wrath of theirs broke harmlessly upon Christ. So absent, so 
 unmoved, so indifferent did he appear, that it seemed as if he had 
 not heard what they were saying against him, or hearing had not 
 understood, or understanding had not heeded. Very different 
 this retirement into himself, this unruffled composure, this 
 unbroken silence, from those frank utterances to which the 
 Governor had just been listening in the hall within. To men 
 animated by such a bitter personal hostility to him, exhausting 
 every epithet of vituperation, heaping upon him all kinds of charges,
 
 494 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 Jesus may not condescend to give any answer. But he has not 
 treated, will not treat, the Eoman Governor in the same way ; at 
 least he will surely tell him why it is that he preserves this silence. 
 Pilate says to him, "Hearest thou not how many things they 
 witness against thee?" There is no reply. The lips are as shut 
 at the question of Pilate as at the accusation of the Jews. Christ 
 has said all that he meant to say, done all that he meant to do, so 
 far as those charges were concerned that they were now bringing 
 against him. He had answered to the Roman judge that the king- 
 ship which he claimed was not of a kind in any way to interfere 
 with this world's governments ; he had satisfied him of his perfect 
 innocence as a subject of the State; and, having done that, he 
 would say and do no more. 
 
 One observes an almost exact parallel as to his silences and his 
 speakings in our Lord's conduct before the Jewish and the Gentile 
 courts of justice. In that preliminary unofficial conversation he 
 held with Annas before the Sanhedrim sat in judgment on his case, 
 Jesus had spoken without reserve, had answered the High Priest's 
 questions but too fully, and had brought down upon himself the 
 Stroke of the officer who stood by. But when the regular trial 
 commenced, and charges were formally brought forward, and 
 attempted by many witnesses to be substantiated, Jesus held his 
 peace, so long and so resolutely, manifesting so little disposition or 
 desire to meddle in any way with the procedure that was going on, 
 that the High Priest rose from his seat, and put to him a question 
 of the same import with that which Pilate afterwards put ; and the 
 two questions met with the very same treatment, to neither of 
 them a single word of reply was given. But when the High Priest 
 rose, and solemnly adjured Jesus to tell whether he was the Christ 
 the Son of God, just as when Pilate asked whether he was the 
 King of the Jews, and what kind of king he was, our Lord made 
 instant and distinct reply. So far as we can see or understand the 
 principle ruling here the Saviour's conduct, determining the time 
 to speak and the time to be silent, it was this : that when the 
 matter immediately and directly concerns his Divine Sonship and 
 Kingship, he will help his judges in every way he can ; nay, he 
 will himself supply the evidence they want. Upon that count he 
 will allow himself to be condemned ; he will co-operate with his 
 enemies in bringing about his condemnation; but of all these 
 other lesser charges he will take no account, but leave the mani- 
 fold attempts to fasten on him any other kind of charge to break 
 down of themselves, that, his enemies themselves being witnesses, 
 it might be solely and alone as the Son of God, the King of Israel, 
 that he should be convicted, condemned, and crucified. 
 
 Among the many things that the Chief Priests were now 
 accusing Jesus of in the presence of the Governor, hoping still to
 
 CHRIST'S APPEARANCE BEFORE HEROD. 495 
 
 convince Pilate that he was not the guiltless man that he had taken 
 him to be, there was one thing that they put prominently forward, 
 presented in every form, amplified in every way, on which they 
 mainly relied in their dealings with Pilate, the setting forth of 
 Christ as a ringleader of sedition. " He stirreth up the people," 
 stirreth them up against the constituted authorities, preaching 
 rebellion through the whole country, not here in Judea alone, but 
 there also in Galilee where he began this work. This allusion to 
 Galilee as the birthplace of the alleged seditious movement may 
 have been accidental; they may have meant merely thereby to 
 signify how widespread the evil had been which they were calling 
 
 ri Pilate to check ; or it may have been done designedly, with 
 art which was to leave nothing unsaid or unsuggested, by 
 which the Governor could possibly be influenced. Galilee might 
 have been named by them, to suggest to Pilate how difficult it was 
 to produce proof of crime committed in so remote a district ; or to 
 remind him that this Galilee, upon which so much of Christ's time 
 and labour had been spent, was the chosen haunt of the resisters 
 of the Koman authority, the cradle of most of the seditious plots 
 concocted against the Emperor's government; or they might have 
 known of the bad feeling that there was at this time between Pilate 
 and the King of Galilee, and might have imagined that it would be 
 rather gratifying to Pilate than otherwise to lay his hand judicially 
 upon one who might be regarded as a subject of that prince. 
 
 However it was, no sooner had the words escaped their lips, 
 than a happy thought suggests itself to Pilate. He is in great 
 difficulty with this case ; he knows not how to deal with it. He 
 had never been so importuned as he now was by those Chief Priests 
 and elders ; he never saw them more bent on anything than on the 
 death of this man whom they had brought to him ; it would be 
 easy to give him up to their vengeance he had done as much as 
 that before ! but he was convinced of this man's innocence ; there 
 was something too so peculiar about his whole look, bearing, and 
 conduct, that he could not make up his mind to have any share in 
 sending him to be executed as a common criminal. But now he 
 hears that part at least, perhaps the greater part, of the offence 
 alleged against him had taken place in Galilee, in that part of 
 the country which was not under his jurisdiction, but belonged to 
 that of Herod. This Herod happened at this very time to be 
 in Jerusalem. Pilate will send the case to him ; and thus get 
 the responsibility of deciding it shifted from his own shoulders, 
 by laying it upon one who not only may be quite willing to 
 assume it, but may regard as a compliment the reference of the 
 case to his adjudication. There was a misunderstanding between 
 the two the Eoman Procurator and the Galilean King which the 
 sending of Jesus to the latter for trial might serve to heal. Pilate
 
 496 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 had done something to displease Herod, somethingj in all likeli- 
 hood, in the very way of interfering with what Herod regarded as 
 his rights, and the rights of his subjects. Some Galileans had been 
 up lately at Jerusalem, offering sacrifice there. There had been a 
 riot, winch Pilate had promptly and summarily quelled ; but in doing 
 so he havl mingled the blood of some of these Galileans with their 
 sacrifices cut them down without inquiring whose subjects they 
 were, or what right they might have to demand a trial in one or 
 other of the Herodian courts. For this, or some such fancied inter- 
 ference with his jurisdiction, Herod had taken offence at Pilate. 
 The recognition of his jurisdiction, then, by sending to him for 
 trial such a notorious person as Jesus, would be the very kind of 
 compliment most soothing to his kingly vanity. Herod recognised 
 and appreciated the compliment ; and whatever else Pilate lost by 
 the line of conduct he pursued that day, he at least gained this 
 he got the quarrel between himself and Herod healed. 
 
 The happy thought no sooner occurs to Pilate than he acts 
 upon it. And now, guarded by some Roman soldiers, accompanied 
 by the whole crowd of his accusers, Jesus is despatched to Herod. 
 To enter into the scene that follows, we must go back a little upon 
 this Herod's history. How John the Baptist and he became first 
 acquainted we are not told. A part of the territory (Peraea) over 
 which Herod's jurisdiction extended, ran down along the eastern 
 shore of the Dead Sea, and it is probable that it was in some of the 
 circuits that he made of this district that he first fell in with the 
 Baptist, engaged in his great ministry of repentance. Herod was 
 greatly struck alike with the man and with his teaching. There 
 was a strange fascination about both which drew the attention of 
 the King. As there was nothing about John's ministry to excite 
 or gratify either the intellect or the fancy, no miracles wrought, 
 no new doctrines propounded, no vivid picturing employed ; as all 
 was so purely moral, so plain, so pointed, so practical in his teach- 
 ing, we must believe that what at first drew Herod to John, and 
 made him listen with such pleasure, was that it was a faithful 
 portraiture of men that John was drawing, an honest and fearless 
 exposure of their sins he made. Herod both admired and approved ; 
 but the pleasure that he had in observing John, and in listening to 
 his instruction, was by no means a pure or untroubled one. He 
 feared John, we are told, knowing that he was a just man and a 
 holy. This fear was the fruit of guilt. He knew and felt what a 
 different man John was from himself. The very presence of the 
 Baptist was a rebuke, and he was not yet so hardened as to receive 
 that rebuke without alarm. Nor did this first connection of the 
 King with the Baptist terminate in the mere excitement of certain 
 emotions, whether of respect, or admiration, or fear. Herod did 
 many things, we are told, at John's bidding. I imagine that, in
 
 CHRIST'S APPEAEANCE BEFORE HEROD. 497 
 
 the first stage of their intercourse, John dealt with Herod as he 
 dealt with the Pharisees, and the soldiers, and the publicans ; that 
 he laid his hand upon those open and patent offences of which, in 
 common with other rulers, Herod notoriously was guilty. The 
 King not only suffered him to do so, but even went the length 
 of reforming his conduct in some respects, in obedience to the 
 Baptist's instructions. But John did not stop there did not stop 
 where Herod would have liked ; but stepping boldly into the inner 
 circle of his private life, and laying his hand upon the stain which 
 disfigured it, he said to him, " It is not lawful for thee to have thy 
 brother's wife." 
 
 In all likelihood Herodias was not with Herod when first he met 
 the Baptist, and heard him so gladly, and did many things at his 
 bidding. This meeting may have happened in the wilderness, 
 where Herod ranked but as one of John's large and public audience. 
 But the King invited the Baptist to his court, and it was there, 
 perhaps in presence of Herodias, that the rebuke of that particular 
 transgression was given. Herod's anger was kindled at what 
 appeared an impertinent and officious intermeddling with his private 
 conduct, his family affairs. And there was one beside him who 
 resented that intermeddling still more than he, and was at pains to 
 excite and to nurse his wrath. Herodias would have made short 
 work of it with this sharp reprover ; she would have sealed his 
 lips at once in death, so that she should no more be troubled with 
 their unwelcome rebukes; and Herod, notwithstanding all his 
 earlier readiness to hear and to obey, would have yielded to her 
 desire ; but he feared the multitude, and, yielding to that fear, he 
 made a compromise he cast John into prison, and kept him there 
 for months. But months could not quench the thirst for his blood 
 that had been stirred in the heart of that second Jezebel; still 
 she was asking for the head of the Baptist, but Herod would not 
 yield and took no little credit to himself, we may believe, for 
 being so firm. Forgetting that it was the fear of the multitude 
 that overbalanced the influence of his consort, he might even have 
 come to persuade himself that he was dealing very gently and 
 tenderly with the Baptist. But Herodias knew him better than 
 he knew himself, and so with diabolic art contrived the plot that 
 was to bring another and still weightier fear, to overbalance in its 
 turn the fear of tb.3 multitude. 
 
 All went as she desired. The evening for the royal supper 
 came ; the chief men of Galilee, with Herod in high good-humour 
 at their head, sat down at the banqueting-table. Salome entered, 
 and danced before them ; the guests, heated with wine, broke out 
 into rapturous applause. In a transport of delight, Herod made 
 the fatal promise, and confirmed it with an oath, that he would 
 give her whatsoever she should ask. Salome went out to consult 
 2i
 
 498 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 her mother as to what her request should be. There was little 
 time spent in deliberation. The Queen's reply was all ready, for 
 she had conjectured what would occur, and so, Mark tells, Salome 
 came in straightway unto the King, and said, Give me here John 
 the Baptist's head upon a charger. The King was taken in the 
 snare ; no time for thought was given, no way of escape left open. 
 There was the oath which he had taken ; there were the witnesses 
 of that oath around the board. He could not break his oath with- 
 out standing dishonoured before those witnesses. The fear of the 
 multitude is overborne by a still higher fear. He gives the order, 
 and the deed is done. Unhappy man ! entangled, betrayed by his 
 own rash vow ; his very sense of honour turned into the instru- 
 ment that makes him a murderer ! Herod was exceeding sorry ; 
 he knew well how wrong a thing it was that he was doing ; it was 
 with bitter self-reproach that the order for the execution was given. 
 For a short time there were the stings of remorse, but these soon 
 lost their power. John was beheaded, and no manifestation of 
 popular displeasure made. John was beheaded; Herodias and 
 Salome were satisfied, and Herod must have felt it a kind of relief 
 to know that, as to him, he should be troubled by them no more. 
 Remorse died out, but a strange kind of superstitious fear haunted 
 Herod's spirit. Reports are brought to him of another strange 
 teacher who has arisen, and to whom all men are now flocking, as 
 they had flocked to the Baptist at the first. And Herod says, 
 " John have I beheaded, but who is this of whom I hear such 
 things?" . 
 
 What perplexed him was, that it was said by some that John 
 was risen from the dead, by some that Elias had appeared, by others 
 that one of the old prophets had arisen. Herod hesitated for a 
 time which of these suppositions he should adopt ; but at last he 
 decided, and said to his servants, " This is John the Baptist ; he is 
 risen from the dead, and therefore mighty works do show forth 
 themselves in him. " He desired to see him ; a desire in which 
 there mingled at first so much of awe and dread, that he rather 
 shunned than courted an interview ; so much so, that when Christ 
 came afterwards into Galilee, and there was some prospect they 
 might meet, he had in a very artful way, by working on Christ's 
 fears, persuaded him to withdraw from that part of the country. 
 He sent some Phari&ees, who said to Jesus, " Get thee out, and 
 depart hence, for Herod will kill thee." Herod never could have 
 really meditated such a deed. We know that afterwards when it 
 was in his power, he declined taking any part in the condemnation 
 and crucifixion of Jesus. It was a cunning device to get Herod 
 out of the embarrassments in which he found that Christ's resi- 
 dence and teaching within his territory might involve him. And 
 o Jesus seems to have dealt with it, when he said to the Pharisees,
 
 CHRIST'S APPEARANCE BEFORE HEROD. 499 
 
 whom he at once recognised as the agents of the King, " Go," said 
 he, " and tell that fox, Behold, I cast out devils, and I do cures to- 
 day and to-morrow, and the third day I shall be perfected," ' my 
 times and places for working and for finishing my work are all 
 definitely arranged, and that quite independently of any stratagem 
 of this cunning king.' 
 
 At last, at an unexpected time and place, and in an unexpected 
 way, Jesus is presented to him by Pilate ; presented as a criminal 
 at the bar, with whom he may use the greatest freedom, as one 
 who will surely be anxious to say and do all he can in order to 
 obtain his release. Herod, therefore, when he sees Jesus thus 
 placed before him, is exceedingly glad, he had heard so much 
 about him, had desired so long to see him. But now, as indicating 
 at once the state of mind and heart into which worldliness and 
 levity and licentiousness have sunk this man, and as supplying to 
 us the key that explains our Lord's singular conduct to him, let us 
 particularly notice, that in the gladness which Herod feels in having 
 the desire to see Christ thus gratified, there mingles no wish to be 
 instructed, no alarm of a guilty conscience, no dread of meeting 
 another Baptist to rebuke him for his iniquities. He has got over 
 whatever compunction he may at one time have felt. He has 
 quenched the risings of remorse within his heart. He has come to 
 be once more on such good terms with himself ; so much at ease, 
 that when he looks at Jesus, it is with no disturbing remembrances 
 of that bloody head once brought to him upon the charger, no 
 shrinking dread that he may see again the Baptist's form, and hear 
 again the Baptist's voice. It is with an eager, idle, prurient curio- 
 sity having a tinge, perhaps, of superstitious wonder in it, that 
 he looks upon Jesus, and proceeds to question him. As compared 
 with John, this new teacher had been distinguished by the working 
 of miracles. And if he wrought them to save others, surely he will 
 do so to save himself. Herod tries in every way he can think of 
 to induce him to work some wonder in his presence. How does 
 Jesus act when addressed and treated thus by such a man ? Shall 
 it be as if the Baptist had indeed risen from the dead 1 "Will Jesus 
 seize upon the opportunity now given, to take up, reiterate, and re- 
 double upon the profligate prince the rebuke of his great forerunner 1 
 Shall Herod hear it said to him now, in tones more piercing than 
 ever John employed, It was not lawful for thee to take the Baptist's 
 life 1 Not thus does Jesus act. Herod puts question after question 
 to him. Jesus looks at him, but opens not his lips. Herod asks 
 and asks again, that some sign may be shown, some token of his 
 alleged power exhibited. Jesus never lifts a finger, makes not a 
 single movement to comply. Herod is the only one of all his 
 judges whom Jesus deals with in this way, the only one before 
 whom, however spoken to, he preserves a continuous and unbroken
 
 500 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 silence. It does not appear that, from the time when he was pre- 
 sented to Herod, to the time when he was sent away from him, a 
 single word ever passed the Saviour's lips. 
 
 That deep and death-like silence, the silence of those lips which 
 opened with such pliant readiness when any word of gentle entreaty 
 or hopeful warning was to be spoken, how shall we interpret it 1 
 Was it indignation that sealed those lips ? Would Christ 1 old no 
 intercourse with the man who had dipped his hands in such blood 
 as that of the Baptist 1 Did he mean to mark off Herod as the 
 one and only man so deeply stained with guilt that he will not 
 stoop to exchange with him a single word ? It had been human 
 this, but not divine; and it is a divine meaning that we must 
 look for in this dread and awful silence. There lived not, there 
 breathed not upon the earth the man, however steeped in guilt, from 
 whom that loving Saviour would have turned away, had but the 
 slightest sign of penitence been shown, the slightest symptom of a 
 readiness to listen and be saved. It was no bygone act of Herod's 
 life that drew down upon him the doom of that silence though 
 doom it little seemed to him to be ; it was the temper and the spirit 
 of the man as he stood there before the Lord, after all that he had 
 passed through ; it was that which did it. Why, the very sight 
 of Jesus, connected, as he knew or fancied him to be in some 
 mysterious way, with John, should have been to Herod as though 
 one risen from the dead had actually appeared in his presence. It 
 was he, not Jesus, that should have been speechless when they met ; 
 or, if he spake at all, it should have been to ask whether, in that 
 world of spirits from which Christ came, there was mercy for a 
 sinner such as he. But, instead of this, instead of anything like 
 this, instead of deep or earnest or anxious feeling of any kind, there 
 is nothing but a vain-glorious wish to have some talk with this 
 strange man, with whose name and fame all the country has been 
 ringing, the cravings of an empty curiosity, the thirst for some 
 showy exhibition of knowledge or of power. Let not that man 
 think that he shall hear anything of the Lord. Christ could have 
 spoken such a word as Herod never would have liked to hear again ; 
 he could have wrought such a miracle as would have turned the 
 curiosity of the King into terror, his pride into abasement But 
 he is now to reap the fruit of his own doings, and that fruit is even 
 this, that he is left unspoken to by the Lord from heaven. This 
 silence, had he but interpreted it aright, was perhaps the very thing 
 most fitted to speak home to his conscience and his heart. But 
 he did not understand it, did not enter into the reason of it, never 
 thought of his own past conduct, his own present character, as the 
 cause of it ; it stirred him to no inquiry, it awakened in him no 
 remorse. The only feeling that it appears to have produced was 
 irritation; the irritation of mortified vanity. Greatly galled, yet
 
 CHRIST'S SECOND APPEARANCE BEFORE PILATE. 501 
 
 in no way softened, when he could make nothing of this mysterious " 
 man who mantled himself in such obstinate silence, he and his men 
 of war found nothing else to do than to set Christ at naught, and 
 mock him, and array him in a white robe, and send him back to 
 Pilate. 
 
 A wonderful instance this of the onward, downward course of 
 crime, particularly of that peculiar course of crime, levity, and licen- 
 tiousness which Herod had pursued ; an instance how speedily and 
 how thoroughly a human heart may harden itself against reproof, 
 quench its convictions, get over its fears, and bring down upontoself 
 that doom, than which there is none more awful, Ephraim is 
 joined to his idols ; let him alone. To be left utterly and absolutely 
 alone ; to have all the voices that speak to us of God and duty, 
 the voice of conscience from within, the voice of Providence from 
 without, the voice which comes from the lips of Jesus, to have 
 all these voices hushed, hushed into an unbroken, perhaps eternal 
 stillness ; can one conceive any condition of a human spirit sadder 
 or more awful? Yet this is the very condition to which the 
 abuse of opportunity, the indulgence of passion, the drowning of 
 the voices when they do speak to us, is naturally and continually 
 tending. 
 
 VI 
 
 CHRIST'S SECOND APPEARANCE BEFORE PILATE. 
 
 LUKE xxm. 13-16 ; MATT. xxvn. 15-23 ; LUKE xxm. 20-23 ; 
 MATT. xxvn. 26-30 ; JOHN xix. 1-16. 
 
 " THIS child," said good old Simeon, as he took up the infant 
 Jesus into his arms to bless him " this child is set for the fall and 
 rising again of many in Israel ; and for a sign that shall be spoken 
 against; that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed." 
 Never were those words more strikingly fulfilled than in these 
 closing scenes of the Saviour's life which we are now engaged in 
 tracing. Then many fell, those forsaking, despairing disciples of 
 Jesus, but fell to rise again ; then was that sign set up, against 
 which so many shafts of so many kinds were launched ; and then 
 were the thoughts of many hearts revealed among others those of 
 Judas, and Peter, and Caiaphas, and Herod, and Pilate revealed 
 by the very closeness of their contact with Christ, by the peculiarity 
 of those relationships to him into which they were then thrown. 
 Last Sunday our attention was concentrated upon Herod ; to day 
 let us fix our eyes on Pilate, and, taking him up at that stage where 
 we left him, let us try to understand and to follow the working of
 
 502 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 his thoughts and feelings during those two hours of their earthly 
 lives in which he and Jesus had to do with one another he in the 
 character of judge, Jesus in the character of one accused and 
 condemned by the Sanhedrim. 
 
 You will remember that when first he heard, among the other 
 accusations which the High Priests lodged against him, that Jesus 
 had said that he himself was Christ a King, struck at once with 
 the singularity of the pretension, and with the appearance of the man 
 who made it, Pilate called on Christ to follow him into the inner 
 hall of his residence ; that there, when alone with him, omitting all 
 reference to any other charge, he asked him particularly about this 
 one; that Christ fully satisfied him as to there being nothing 
 politically dangerous or offensive in the claim to a kingdom which 
 he had put forth ; that, bringing Christ out along with him to the 
 Jews, he said at once and decidedly, " I find no fault in this man ;" 
 and that then, taking advantage of a reference to Galilee, he had 
 sent Jesus off to Herod, to see what that Galilean king and judge 
 might think and do. In this way he hoped to be relieved from 
 the painful and embarrassing position in which he felt himself to 
 be placed. 
 
 He was disappointed in this hope. Jesus was sent back to 
 him by Herod ; sent back without any judgment having been 
 pronounced ; sent back in such a way as to indicate that Herod as 
 well as he made light of this poor Galilean's pretension to be a 
 king, thought it, in fact, more a matter for mockery and ridicule 
 than for serious judicial entertainment. Although a considerable 
 body, of the High Priests and of the people, had accompanied Jesus 
 to and from the bar of Herod, yet in that interval there had been 
 to some extent a scattering of the crowd. Pilate, therefore, called 
 together afresh the Chief Priests, and the rulers, and the people 
 the latter particularly mentioned, as Pilate had now begun to think 
 that his best chance of gaining the end upon which his heart was 
 set, the deliverance of Christ out of the hands of his enemies, 
 would be by appealing, over the heads of their rulers, to the 
 humanity of the common people. When all, then, were again 
 assembled, he made a short speech to them, reiterating his own con- 
 viction of Christ's innocence, confirming it by the testimony of 
 Herod, and closing by a proposal that he hoped would be at once 
 accepted, I will therefore chastise him, and release him. But 
 why, if he were innocent, chastise him at all ? Why not at once 
 acquit the culprit, and send him away absolved from the bar of 
 Roman judgment 1 It was a weak and unworthy concession, the 
 first faltering of Pilate's footstep. He cannot but say that he has 
 found nothing worthy of death in this man ; he is himself thoroughly 
 satisfied that there is nothing in him worthy of any punishment ; 
 but it will please his accusers, it will conciliate the people, it may
 
 CHRIST'S SECOND APPEARANCE BEFORE PILATE. 503 
 
 open the way to their readier acquiescence in his after dismissal, to 
 inflict on him some punishment, a proposal not dictated by any 
 spirit of cruelty, springing rather from the wish to protect Jesus 
 from the greater penalty, by inflicting on him the less; yet one 
 that weakened his position, that made those sharp-sighted Jews at 
 once perceive that he could be moved, that he was not ready to 
 take up and stand firmly and fixedly upon the ground of Christ's 
 innocence. In deference to them, he has gone so far against his 
 own convictions; he may go further. He has yielded the inch, 
 they may force him to yield the ell. The proposal, therefore, of 
 chastising Jesus, and letting him go, is rejected, and rejected so as 
 to throw Pilate back upon some other, some new device. 
 
 He recollected that at this time of the Passover it was a 
 customary thing, in compliment to the great assembly of the Jews 
 in their metropolis, for the Procurator to arrest in a single instance 
 the ordinary course of justice, and to release whatever prisoner the 
 people might ask to be given up. He recollected at the same time 
 that there was a notable prisoner who then lay bound at Jerusalem, 
 one Barabbas, who for sedition and murder had been cast into 
 prison ; and the idea occurred to Pilate that if instead either of 
 asking them broadly and generally who it was that they wished 
 him to release, or whether they would let him choose for them and 
 release Jesus he narrowed in this instance the choice, and pre- 
 sented to them the alternative of taking Barabbas or Jesus, they 
 could scarcely fail to choose the latter. To give the greater effect 
 to this proposal, Pilate ascended the movable rostrum or judgment- 
 seat, which stood upon the tesselated pavement that ran before the 
 vestibule of the Palace, and addressing himself to the multitude, said 
 to them, " Whom will ye that I release unto you ? Barabbas, or 
 Jesus who is called Christ ? " 
 
 While waiting their answer, a message was brought to him, the 
 messenger having been instructed to deliver it immediately, where- 
 ever he was, and however he might be engaged. It came from 
 his wife ; was distinct and somewhat authoritative, " Have thou 
 nothing to do with that just man, for I have suffered many things 
 this day in a dream because of him." Pilate's wife was not a Jew, 
 nor did she mix much with the common people of the land. That 
 she should have learned so much of Jesus as to think and speak of 
 him as " that just man," that she should have been so much con- 
 cerned when she heard that her husband had been asked to try 
 him, as to take this uncommon step of sending a warning to him 
 on the judgment-seat, may be regarded as a proof how wide-spread 
 and how deep the impression was that Christ had made. 
 
 The time occupied by the hearing and considering this message, 
 whose warning knell rung in strange harmony with the alarm 
 that was already pealing in Pilate's spirit, gave to the Chief
 
 504 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 Priests and the rulers the opportunity they were so quick to seize, 
 to prompt the crowd as to the answer they should give to Pilate's 
 proposal. We do not know what kind of stimulants were employed 
 upon this occasion ; but we all do know what a flexible, impressible, 
 excitable a thing a city mob is, when composed, as this one mainly 
 was, of the lowest of the people ; and we can at least easily conjec- 
 ture what the firebrands were which the expert hands of the priest- 
 hood threw in among that mob, inflaming its passions to the highest 
 pitch, and giving the burning mass into their hands, to be directed 
 as they desired. Recovered a little from the disturbance which 
 his wife's message cost him, Pilate turns again to the people, and 
 says to them, " Which of the two, then, will ye that I release unto 
 you?" They say, "Barabbas." Surprised and annoyed at the reply, 
 almost willing to believe there has been some mistake, he puts 
 it to them in another form : " Will ye that I release unto you the 
 King of the Jews?" using the epithet, in the belief that they, as 
 well as he, will look upon its claimant more as an object of pity 
 than of condemnation. But now they leave him in no doubt as to 
 what their will and pleasure is : "Away with this man," they all cry 
 out at once, " and release unto us Barabbas !" "What shall I then 
 do with Jesus, which is called Christ?" This weak and almost 
 pitiful asking of them what he should do, ends, as all such yielding 
 to popular prejudices, cringing to popular passions, ever does : it 
 makes the multitude more confident, more imperious. The Gover- 
 nor has put himself into their hands, and they will make him do 
 their wiU. "What shall I do, then, with Jesus?" Let him be 
 crucified, they say. Crucified ! It is the first time the word has 
 been named in Pilate's hearing, the first time they tell him articu- 
 lately what it is they desire to have done with. Jesus. Crucify him ! 
 give up to that worst and most ignominious of all deaths this 
 meek and gentle man, who he is sure has done no wrong ; whom 
 he sees well enough that the Chief Priests seek to get rid of from 
 some religious antipathy that they have taken against him : can 
 the people mean it ? He had fancied, whatever the Chief Priests 
 thought, that they had a different feeling towards him. " Why," in 
 his surprise, he says to them, " what evil hath he done ? " But this 
 now excited and uproarious crowd is far past the point of answering 
 or arguing with the Governor. Its one and only cry is, " Let him 
 be crucified ! " Twice Pilate asks them to tell him what crime he 
 had committed, that they should doom him to a felon's death. He 
 gets but that cry repeated, with louder, angrier voice. Yet a third 
 time, clinging to the hope that he may still succeed in extricating 
 Jesus from their grasp, without putting himself entirely wrong with 
 them, he puts the query, " Why, what evil hath he done ? " and 
 gathering up a little strength, as if he were determined to take his 
 own way, and act upon the suggestion that he had thrown out a
 
 CHRIST'S SECOND APPEARANCE BEFORE PILATE. 505 
 
 few moments before, he adds, "I have found no cause of death 
 in him. I will therefore chastise him, and let him go." The 
 very mention of letting him go stirs the crowd to a tenfold 
 frenzy, and now the voices of the Chief Priests themselves are 
 heard swelling and intensifying the cry, " Crucify him ! crucify 
 him ! " 
 
 Before a storm like this who can stand ? He has done so 
 Pilate thinks the most he can. If he go further, he will .raise 
 another city tumult which it will cost many lives to quell, and the 
 quelling of which by force may expose him to the very same charges 
 of tyranny and cruelty which, upon more than one occasion of the 
 kind before, had actually been transmitted to Eome against him, 
 and drawn down upon him the rebuke and displeasure of the 
 Emperor. The yielding is but the sacrifice of a single life, which 
 may be made without involving the Governor in any danger. But 
 the resisting ; who can tell in what that might land ? Still, how- 
 ever, he is not at ease. He himself scarce knows the reason why; 
 but somehow he never saw the man whose blood he would like so 
 ill to have resting upon him as the blood of Jesus. The private 
 interview they had together in the Hall had raised some strange 
 misgivings in Pilate's heart. What is it about this man that has 
 given him so strong a hold upon Pilate, and makes him struggle so 
 hard to get him released ? Pilate himself could not have told ; but 
 even now, though he has at last resolved to give him up, he will 
 not, cannot do it without trying in some way to throw off his 
 shoulders the responsibility of his death. " When Pilate saw that 
 he could prevail nothing, but rather that a tumult was made, he 
 took water and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, ' I 
 am innocent of the blood of this just person ; see ye to it.' Then 
 answered all the people and said, ' His blood be on us, and on our 
 children.' And he delivered Jesus to their will." 
 
 Now, let us pause a moment here in the narrative to mark the 
 inner workings of conscience and of humanity in the heart of 
 Pilate. It seemed an ingenious device to give the people their 
 choice. It was resorted to from a desire on his part to rescue 
 Jesus. It would gain, as it first seemed to him, a double object, 
 it would prevent the Jews from saying that he had screened a sedi- 
 tious man, and yet it would rescue an innocent one from death. 
 But to what did it amount ? It proceeded on the assumption that 
 Christ was guilty ; it asked that as one righteously condemned, he 
 might by an act of grace be released. There lay one fatal flaw in 
 the proposition. But, still worse, it put the matter out of Pilate's 
 hands into those of the people. It was a virtual renunciation, on 
 Pilate's part, of the rights and prerogatives of the judge. And by 
 thus denuding himself of his own proper official position, Pilate put 
 himself at the mercy of a fickle and infuriated populace, and gave
 
 506 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 them that hold and power over him which they so mercilessly 
 
 This crying out "Crucify, crucify him!" as contrasted with 
 the hosannas that a few days before had greeted Christ's entrance 
 into Jerusalem, has been often quoted to prove how rapid the 
 changes in popular sentiment sometimes are, how little a multitude 
 can be trusted. But was it the same crowd which raised the 
 hosannas of the one day, that uttered the " Crucify him, crucify 
 him!" of the other? I rather think that had we been present upon 
 both occasions, and intimately acquainted with the inhabitants of 
 Jerusalem, we should have seen that the two crowds were differently 
 constituted ; and that, however true it may be that tides of public 
 feeling often take suddenly opposite directions, this can scarcely be 
 quoted as an instance exactly in point. 
 
 But very curious is it to mark the expedient to which Pilate had 
 recourse, in that public washing of his hands. He delivers Jesus 
 up to be crucified. Therein lay his guilt ; he might, and should 
 have refused to become a party to his crucifixion. Believing Jesus 
 to be innocent, to give him up to death was to take a large share 
 of the criminality upon himself. And yet he thinks that when he 
 gets the Jews to take it upon them that he has relieved himself, if 
 not entirely, yet in great measure, of the responsibility. He re- 
 gards himself as one coerced by others : and when these others are 
 quite willing to take on themselves the entire weight of the deed, 
 he imagines that this will go a great length in clearing him. And 
 if ever, placed under strong compulsion from without, urged on to a 
 certain course of conduct which in our conscience we disapprove, we 
 yield, and in yielding take comfort to ourselves from others say- 
 ing that they are quite ready to incur the whole responsibility of 
 the affair, then let us remember that we are acting over again the 
 part of Pilate ; and that just as little as that outward washing of 
 his hands did anything to clear him of the stain he was contracting, 
 so little can we hope that the guilt contracted by our being a con- 
 senting and co-operating party in any deed of injustice or dishonour, 
 may be thus mitigated or wiped away. 
 
 Pilate has given up Jesus to the will of the multitude ; given 
 him up to be crucified. The judge's work is done ; there remains 
 only the work of the executioner. Over that it is no part of the 
 Procurator's office to preside. Why, then, does Pilate not with- 
 draw? We might have thought that, wearied with his conflict 
 with the rabble, and oppressed with painful feelings as to its issue, 
 he would have been only too glad to retire but he cannot; a 
 singular fascination still binds him to the spot, perhaps the 
 lingering hope that he may yet succeed in rescuing the victim from 
 his bloodthirsty enemies. He hands Christ over to his soldiers, to 
 have that scourging inflicted which was the ordinary precursor and
 
 CHRIST'S SECOND APPEARANCE BEFORE PILATE. 507 
 
 preliminary to crucifixion. It might not be difficult from the 
 narratives of eye-witnesses to give you some idea of what a military 
 scourging was, what kind of instrument they used in it, what kind 
 of wounds that instrument made, what terrible torture was inflicted, 
 to what length that torture was often carried ; but we would rather 
 have a veil drawn over the purely physical sufferings of our Saviour, 
 than have them pressed prominently upon our eye. We recoil 
 from the attempts so often made to excite a sympathetic horror by 
 vivid details of our Lord's bodily sufferings. We feel as if it were 
 degrading him to present him in that character, in which so many, 
 equal, nay superior, in their claims upon our sympathy, might be put 
 beside him. 
 
 But the scourging did not satisfy the rude and brutal soldiers 
 who had got Christ into their hands. As Eomans, these men 
 knew little, cared little, about any kingship that Christ might claim. 
 With them it could not be, as with the Jews, a subject of religious 
 hate or scorn. It was a topic alone of ribald mirth, of Gentile 
 mockery. This Koman cohort takes the hint that Herod's men of 
 war had given them ; who had thrown a white robe over Jesus, 
 clothing him with something like the garment that their own kings 
 wore, that they might set at naught his vain pretensions to be a 
 king. And now, when the scourging is over, these Roman soldiers 
 will outdo their Jewish comrades ; they will make a more perfect 
 pantomime of this poor Galilean's royalty. They take some old 
 military cloak, of the same colour with the robes of their emperors ; 
 they throw it over his bloody shoulders; they plait a crown of thorns, 
 and put it on his head ; they thrust a reed, as a mock sceptre, into 
 his right hand ; and then, when they have got him robed, and 
 crowned, and sceptred thus, they bow the knee, and hail him as a 
 king. But they tire even of that mock homage ; the demon spirit 
 that is in them inspires the merriment with a savage cruelty ; and 
 so, as if ashamed even of that kind of homage they had rendered, 
 they snatch impatiently the reed out of his hand, and smite with it 
 the crown of thorns, and drive it down upon his pierced and 
 bleeding brow, and spit upon him, and smite him with their 
 hands. 
 
 All this is done in an inner court or guard-room, out of sight of 
 the crowd that is still waiting without. Pilate sees it all ; makes 
 no attempt to mitigate the suffering or the mockery ; is absorbed in 
 wonder as he gazes upon Jesus such a picture of silent, gentle, 
 meek, unmurmuring, uncomplaining patience ! standing there, 
 and taking all that treatment as though no strange thing were 
 happening, as if he had expected all, were prepared for all, found 
 no difficulty in submitting to all. There is no weakness in that 
 patience ; but a strength, a power, a dignity. The sight moves 
 Pilate's heart : it would move any heart, he thinks ; may it not
 
 508 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 move even the hearts of those people without ? may it not satisfy 
 their thirst for vengeance to see the suffering Jesus reduced to such 
 a pitiable plight as this ? He will try at least what the sight can 
 do in the way of stirring such sympathy. He goes forth, with Jesus 
 following, and says to the multitude, " Behold I bring him forth to 
 you, that ye may know that I find no fault in him ; " then, turning 
 and pointing to Jesus, as he stood wearing still the purp ] e robe 
 and the crown of thorns, bearing on his face and person the marks 
 of all the sufferings and indignities of the guard-house, Pilate says, 
 "Behold the man!" behold and pity, behold and be satisfied, 
 behold, and suffer me, now that I have thus chastised him, to let 
 him go ! Alas ! he knew not the intensity of such fanatic hatred 
 as that which those High Priests and rulers cherished, and had, for 
 the time, infused into the obedient crowd ; how it quenches every 
 impulse of kindliness in the human heart, and nerves the human 
 hands for deeds of utmost cruelty. That sight to which he points, 
 instead of moving any pity, only evokes fresh outbreaks of ferocious 
 violence ; with unabated breath, the same wild cry from every side 
 salutes the ear of the Governor " Crucify him, crucify him ! " It 
 not only disappoints, it provokes Pilate to be baffled thus again, 
 and baffled by such a display of immovable and unappeasable malig- 
 nity. " Take ye him and crucify him," he says ; ' crucify him as 
 best you can, but do not expect that I shall countenance the deed 
 by any countersigning of your sentence in condemning the man, as 
 if I thought he deserved to die take ye him and crucify him, for I 
 find no fault in him.' 
 
 But the yielding Governor is not in this way to slip out of their 
 hands ; he, too, must be a party ; and now, at last, they tell him 
 what hitherto they had concealed to show him that theirs was not 
 such a groundless sentence as he imagined it to be "We have a 
 law," they said, " and by our law he ought to die, because he made 
 himself the Son of God." It is impossible to say what ideas that 
 phrase, " the Son of God," excited in the mind of Pilate. He was 
 familiar with all the legends of the heathen mythologies, which told 
 of gods and demigods descending and living upon the earth. Like 
 so many of the educated Eomans of his day, he had thrown off all 
 faith in their divinity, and yet somehow there still lingered within, 
 a faith in something higher than humanity, some beings superior to 
 our race. And what if this Jesus were one of these ! never in all 
 his intercourse with men had he met one the least like this, one 
 who looked so kinglike, so Godlike : Kinglike, Godlike, even there 
 as he now stands with a robe of faded purple and a crown of plaited 
 thorns. Never in kingly garments, never beneath imperial crown, 
 did he see a sceptred sovereign stand so serene, so dignified, so far 
 above the men that stood round him. Whatever the ideas were 
 which passed through Pilate's mind when he heard that Jesus had
 
 CHRIST'S SECOND APPEARANCE BEFORE PILATE. 509 
 
 made himself the Son of God, they deepened that awe which from 
 the first had been creeping in upon and taking possession of his 
 spirit ; he was the more afraid. Once again, therefore, he takes 
 Christ apart, and says to him, " Whence art thmi ?" ' In that first 
 interview, you told me that your kingdom was not of this world, 
 but whence art thou thyself ? art thou of this earth, I mean like the 
 rest of us, or art thou other than thou seemest, comest thou indeed 
 from heaven ?' But Jesus gave him no answer. Of all the silences 
 of our Lord that day, of which this in number was the fifth, it 
 seems the most difficult to understand. Was it that Pilate, by the 
 way in which he had then put the question, "What is truth?" 
 without pausing for a reply, had forfeited his right to an answer 
 now ? Was it that Pilate was wholly unprepared to receive the 
 answer ; that it would have been a casting of pearls before swine to 
 have told him whence Jesus was ? Was it that the information, 
 had it been given, while ineffectual to stop his course, might have 
 aggravated Pilate's guilt, and therefore, in mercy, was withheld 1 
 We cannot tell ; but we can perceive that the very silence was in 
 itself an answer ; for, supposing Jesus had been a mere man, had 
 come into this world even as we all come, would he, had he been 
 sincere and upright, have hesitated to say whence he came 1 would 
 he have allowed Pilate to remain in doubt 1 would he have suffered 
 him, as his question evidently implied, to cherish the impression 
 that he was something more than human ? We can scarcely think 
 he would. By his very silence, therefore, our Lord would throw 
 Pilate back upon that incipient impression of his Divine origin, that 
 it might be confirmed and strengthened in his breast. 
 
 But here again, even as in the first interview, the haughtiness of 
 the man comes in to quench all deeper thought. Annoyed by this 
 silence, this calmness, this apparent indifference of Jesus, Pilate, in 
 all the pride of office, says, " Speakest thou not to me ? knowest 
 thou not that I have power to crucify thee, and power to release 
 thee ?" a very idle attempt to work upon the mere selfish fears of 
 Christ; a question that brings a speedy answer, one in which 
 rebuke and sympathy are singularly blended : " Thou couldest have 
 no power against me, except it were given thee from above." 
 'That power of thine, to crucify me or release, which I do not 
 dispute, which thou mayest exercise as thou pleasest, do not think 
 that it is a power original, underived, independent. Thou hast it, 
 thou exercisest it but as Heaven permits; thou little knowest, 
 indeed, what thou doest ; it is as a mere holder of the power that 
 thou art acting, acting at others' bidding; therefore that Jewish 
 Judge, who knowing far better at least than thou what it was he 
 did, and who it was that he was giving up to death,' "therefore 
 he that delivered me unto thee hath the greater sin." There is 
 something surely very impressive here ; that, sunk as Jesus was
 
 510 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 beneath the weight of his own sufferings sufferings so acute that 
 they well might have engrossed his thoughts and feelings, he yet 
 so calmly weighs in the judicial balance the comparative guilt of the 
 actors in this sad scene, and excuses, as far as he is able, the actings 
 of Pilate. It had something of its proper effect upon the Procurator. 
 Instead of diminishing, it but increased the desire he already had 
 to deliver him. He tried again ; tried with still greater earnestness 
 to effect his object. But again he failed, for now the last arrow in 
 that quiver of his adversaries is shot at him : " If thou let this man 
 go, thou art not Caesar's friend); whosoever maketh himself a king, 
 speaketh against Caesar." Pilate knew that already he stood upon 
 uncertain ground with the imperial authorities; he knew that a 
 fresh report of anything like unfaithfulness to Caesar would cost him 
 his office. The risk of losing all that by occupying that office he had 
 hoped to gain he was not prepared to face, and so, yielding to this 
 last pressure, he gives way, and delivers up Jesus to be crucified. 
 
 Now, let us look a moment at the faults and at the virtues of this 
 man. The fact that it fell to his lot to be Governor of Judea at 
 this time, and to consign the Saviour to the cross, inclines us to 
 form exaggerated notions of his criminality. He was not, let us 
 believe, a worse governor than many who preceded and who followed 
 him in that office. We know from other sources that he frequently 
 showed but little regard to human life recklessly, indeed, shed 
 human blood, when the shedding of it ministered to the objects of 
 his ambition; but we have no reason to believe that he was a 
 wantonly cruel man, or a particularly oppressive and tyrannical 
 governor, as governors then went. His treatment of Christ was 
 marked by anything but a contempt for justice and an absence of 
 all human feeling. He showed a respect, a pity, a tenderness to 
 Jesus Christ that, considering the little that he knew of him, ex- 
 cites our wonder. He struggled hard to evade the conclusion to 
 which, with such unrelenting malignity, the Jewish leaders drove 
 him. No other king, no other ruler with whom Christ or his 
 Apostles had to do, acted half as conscientiously or half as tenderly 
 as Pilate did. Herod, Felix, Agrippa, compare their conduct 
 in like circumstances with that of Pilate, and does he not in your 
 estimate rise superior to them all? There is something in the 
 compunctions, the relentings, the hesitations, the embarrassments of 
 Pilate those reiterated attempts of his to find a way of escape for 
 himself and for Christ, that takes a strong hold upon our sympathy. 
 We cannot but pity, even while forced to condemn. Condemn, 
 indeed, we must ; for 
 
 1. He was false to his own convictions; he was satisfied that 
 Christ was innocent. Instead of acting at once and decidedly upon 
 that conviction, he dallied and he parleyed with it ; sought to find 
 some way by which he might get rid of that clear and imperative
 
 THE DAUGHTERS OF JERUSALEM WEEPING. 511 
 
 duty which it laid upon him ; and by so doing he weakened and 
 unsettled this conviction, and prepared for its being overborne. 
 
 2. He exhibited a sad degree of vacillation, inconsistency, in- 
 decision. Now he throws all blame upon the priests : " I am 
 innocent of his blood; see ye to it." Again he takes the entire 
 responsibility upon himself : " Knowest thou not that I have power 
 to crucify thee, and power to release V Now he pronounces Jesus 
 innocent, yet with the same breath proposes to have him punished 
 as guilty : now he gives him up, and then he has recourse to every 
 kind of expedient to rescue. Unstable as water, he does not, he 
 cannot succeed. 
 
 3. He allowed others to dictate to him. Carelessly and incon- 
 siderately he submits that to their judgment which he should have 
 kept wholly within his own hold. He becomes thus as a wave of 
 the sea, as a feather in the air, which every breeze of heaven 
 bloweth about as it listeth. 
 
 4. He allowed worldly interest to predominate over the sense 
 of duty. Such was the plain and simple issue to which it came at 
 last : Do the thing he knew was right acquit the Saviour do 
 that, and run all risks ; or do the thing he knew was wrong do 
 that, and escape all danger. Such was the alternative which was 
 at last presented to him. Alas for Pilate ! he chose the latter. 
 But let each of us now ask himself, Had I been placed exactly in 
 his position, with those lights only to guide me that he then had, 
 should I have acted a better and bolder part ? We may think and 
 hope we should ; but, in thinking so and hoping so, let us remember 
 how often, when conscience and duty pointed in the one direction, 
 and passion and self-interest pointed in the other, we have acted 
 over and over again the very part of Pilate ; hesitated and wavered, 
 and argued and debated, and opened our ears to what others told 
 us, or allowed ourselves to be borne away by some strong tide that 
 was running in the wrong direction. Nay more, how often have 
 we, knowing as we do, or profess to do, who Christ was, whence 
 he came, what he did for us, and whither he has gone, how often 
 have we given him up into unfriendly hands, to do with him what 
 they would, without even the washing of our own, or the saying 
 what we thought of him. 
 
 VII. 
 
 THE DAUGHTERS OF JERUSALEM WEEPING. 
 MATT, xxvn. 31-34 ; LUKE xxm. 27-32. 
 
 THE mockeries of the Judgment Hall ended, Jesus is delivered 
 into the hands of the officers, to be led away to the place of execu-
 
 512 TIIE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 tion. It cannot now be settled with certainty or exactness where 
 this hill of Calvary was situated, nor how far it was from the 
 residence of Pilate. It lay, we know, without the city gate, and a 
 very ancient tradition points us to a low, bare, rounded elevation, 
 outside and near the walls, which resembled somewhat in its form 
 a human skull, and is supposed to have got from that resemblance 
 the name it bore, of Golgotha. If that indeed was Calvary, the 
 way was but a short one which the sad procession had to traverse. 
 First, however, ere beginning the mournful march, they strip our 
 Lord of the purple robe they had thrown around his bleeding 
 shoulders, and put his own raiment on him. It is not said that 
 they took the crown of thorns from his bleeding brow; he may 
 have worn that to the last. It was part of the degradation of a 
 public crucifixion that the doomed one should assist in carrying to 
 the place of crucifixion the instrument of death. They might have 
 spared this indignity to Jesus ; they might have had some compas- 
 sion as they saw with what a faint and weary step he walked. But 
 compassion has no place in the hearts of these crucifiers, and so 
 they lay the common burden on him. He sinks beneath the load. 
 They must relieve him of it ; but who will bear it instead 1 not 
 one of themselves will stoop to the low office. A stranger, a man 
 from Africa, Simon the Cyrenian, coming in from the country, 
 meets them by the way. He would willingly have let the crowd 
 go by that presses on to Calvary. But he is the very kind of man 
 whom they can turn into a tool to do this piece of drudgery. They 
 lay hold of him and compel him to take up what Jesus was too 
 weak to bear. Unwillingly he had to obey, to turn upon his steps, 
 and follow Jesus, bearing after him the cross ; a reluctant instru- 
 ment of an overbearing soldiery and a haughty priesthood. 
 
 So far as we can learn, Simon had no previous knowledge of, 
 had no special interest in Christ ; instead of any great sympathy 
 with him at the moment, he may rather have felt and resented it 
 as a hardship, that such a service should have been exacted of him, 
 and in such imperious fashion. But this compulsory companion- 
 ship with Jesus in the bearing of the cross carried him to Calvary ; 
 the sad tragedy enacted there fixed him with so many other idle 
 spectators to the spot. He stood there gazing upon the scene ; he 
 heard the words that came from the lips of Jesus ; he felt the three 
 hours' darkness come down, and wrap them all around. As the 
 darkness cleared away, he saw the centurion standing transfixed 
 before the central cross, as Jesus cried with a loud voice, and gave 
 up the ghost. He heard that Eoman officer, a stranger like him- 
 self, break forth with the exclamation : " Truly this was the Son 
 of God !" What impression all that he saw and heard then made 
 upon him we are not informed. From its being said, however, that 
 he was the father of Alexander and Rufus, whom Mark speaks of
 
 THE DAUGHTERS OF JERUSALEM WEEPING. 513 
 
 as being well-known disciples of the Lord, may we not indulge the 
 belief that he who, when he was lifted up, was to draw all men 
 unto him, that day drew this Cyrenian to himself ; that the sight 
 of those sufferings and of that death led Simon to inquire ; that 
 the inquiry conducted to discipleship ; and that ever after he had 
 to thank the Lord for the strange arrangement of his providence, 
 which led him along that way into the city, at the very time when 
 they were leading Jesus out to be crucified ; that he met the crowd 
 at the very moment that they were wanting some one to do that 
 menial service which in so rough a manner they pressed him to 
 undertake ? 
 
 Another incident marked the sorrowful procession to Calvary. 
 Some women of the city, looking at him, as first he bends beneath 
 the cross, and then, with aspect so meek and gentle, yet so sad and 
 sorrow-stricken, moves onward to be crucified, have their feelings 
 so deeply touched, that, unable to restrain their emotions, they 
 openly bewail and lament his doom. These are not the women 
 who had followed him from Galilee, and been in the habit of 
 ministering to him. No more than Simon, were they numbered 
 with his disciples. It was not with such grief as any of the Marys 
 would have felt, had they been in the crowd, that these women 
 were affected. They were not lamenting the loss of a teacher, a 
 master, a friend they had learned to revere and love. They had 
 joined the crowd as it gathered in the city thoroughfares through 
 which it passed. The singular but common curiosity to look at 
 men who are soon to die, and to see how they comport themselves 
 in front of death, has drawn them on. Soon, however, out of the 
 three who are going forth to be crucified, their attention fixes upon 
 Jesus. Something of him they may have known before ; some part 
 of his story they may have picked up by the way. They hear 
 nothing friendly to him from any who are there around them. 
 The spirit of the crowd they mingle with is one of rude and bitter 
 hatred towards him. But woman's loving eye looks on him, 
 woman's tender heart is melted at the sight ; and, despite of all 
 the restraint that might have been imposed on them by the tone 
 and temper of that crowd, revelling with savage delight at the 
 prospect of his crucifixion, and led on by some of the chief men of 
 the city, they give free vent to that generous pity which swells 
 their bosoms. They weep as they follow him. This weeping 
 the only circumstance, so far as we know, attending his passage 
 out to Calvary, that attracted the special notice of our Lord was 
 the only one which induced him to break the patient silence he all 
 along observed. But how does he notice it 1 What does he say ] 
 He stops; he turns; he fixes his eye upon the weepers; and he 
 says, "Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for 
 yourselves, and for your children." 
 2K
 
 514 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 " Weep not for me." Does he reject that simple tribute of 
 sympathy which they are rendering ? Is he in any sense displeased 
 at the tears they shed? Does he blame or forbid such tears'? 
 Not thus are we to interpret our Saviour's words. It may be quite 
 true that it was not from any very deep, much less from any very 
 pure or holy fountain, that those tears were flowing. It may have 
 been nothing about him but the shame and the agony he had to 
 suffer which drew them out. Still, they are tears of kindly pity, 
 and such tears it never could have been his meaning or intention 
 to condemn. He had freely shed such tears himself. They fell 
 before the tomb of Lazarus, fell simply at sight of the weeping 
 sisters, and of the Jews weeping along with them. Sympathy 
 with human suffering, simply and purely as such, claims the sanc- 
 tion of the tears which upon that occasion the Saviour shed ; and 
 that sanction covers the bewailing of these daughters of Jerusalem. 
 Jesus is not displeased with, Jesus does not reject, the expression 
 of their pity. So far from this, the tender sympathy that they 
 show for him stirs a still deeper sympathy for them within his 
 heart. This is the way that he acknowledges and thanks them for 
 their tears. He thinks of them, he feels for them ; he forgets his 
 own impending griefs as he contemplates theirs. It had been but 
 an hour or so before, that all the people who gathered round the 
 bar of Pilate had cried out, " His blood be on us, and on our 
 children !" How little did they know what a doom it was they 
 thus invoked upon themselves ; how near and how terrible ! But 
 Jesus knew it ; had thought of it perhaps when that wild cry arose ; 
 was thinking of it still. He had those scenes of famine, fire, and 
 slaughter, when that ill-fated city of his crucifiers should see the 
 execution of the sentence they had called down upon their own 
 heads, he had them all before his eye when he turned to those 
 women by the way, and said to them, " Daughters of Jerusalem, 
 weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children. 
 For, behold, the days are coming, in the which they shall say, 
 Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare, and the 
 paps which never gave suck. Then shall they begin to say to the 
 mountains, Fall on us; and to the hills, Cover us." 
 
 Many of the very women who were lamenting Jesus by the way 
 may have perished in the siege of Jerusalem. That siege took 
 place within less than forty years from the day of our Lord's cruci- 
 fixion. Some of the younger mothers of that weeping band would 
 not have then seen out the threescore years and ten of human life. 
 Their children would be all in middle life, constituting the genera- 
 tion upon which those woes were to descend which, three days 
 before, while sitting quietly on the Mount of Olives with his 
 disciples, looking across the valley upon the Holy City, Jesus had 
 described by saying, that in those days there should be great
 
 THE DAUGHTEES OF JERUSALEM WEEPING. 515 
 
 tribulation, such as was uot from the beginning of the world to 
 that time, no, nor ever should be again. When in the straitness 
 of that terrible siege, before the terrors of the last assault, they 
 crept into the underground passages and sewers of the city ; when 
 those who escaped out of the city hid themselves in the dens and 
 rocks of the mountains, then were those prophecies of Isaiah and 
 Hosea, which our Saviour had obviously before him some of whose 
 words, indeed, he quotes in part fulfilled. But just as, in that 
 more lengthened discourse which our Lord had so recently delivered 
 to his disciples, he mixed up, in a way that it is impossible wholly 
 to unravel, the destruction of Jerusalem, his second coming, and 
 the end of the world ; so also, even within the compass of this 
 short speech to the daughters of Jerusalem, it is easy enough to 
 perceive that, beyond that nearer and more limited event, of which 
 these women and their children were to be spectators, our Lord 
 looks forward to the wider judgment, which at the close of all was 
 to enfold the whole world of the impenitent in its embrace. 
 
 It cannot be thought that all sympathy with the Man of sorrows 
 is forbidden. The recital, especially of his last sufferings, would 
 not have been so full and so minute as it is in the sacred page, had 
 it not been intended to take hold thereby of that sympathy. But 
 the contemplation of Christ merely as a sufferer, if it terminate in 
 nothing else than the excitement of sympathy, is a barren contem- 
 plation. Offer him nothing besides your compassion, he repudiates 
 and rejects it. It is to dishonour the Redeemer to class him with 
 those unfortunates, those unwilling victims of distress, whose unex- 
 ampled sorrows knock hard at the heart of pity. Our pity he does 
 not ask, he does not need. He spreads out before us his unparalleled 
 griefs; he says, "Behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto 
 my sorrow ; " but he does so not to win from us compassion, but to 
 prove how he has loved us, loved us even to the death, suffering 
 and dying for our redemption. His sorrows should set us thinking 
 of our own sins. Those sufferings which rested upon him when he 
 took his place as our great Head and Representative, should bring 
 up before our minds the sufferings which hang suspended over the 
 heads of the finally impenitent and unbelieving. 
 
 " Weep not for me, but weep for yourselves : for if these things 
 be done in a green tree, what shall be done in the dry 1 " He was 
 himself the Green Tree ; the fresh, the vigorous Vine, its stock 
 full of sap, its branches all nourished by union with that parent life- 
 giving Stem. Was he, then in condition so unlike to that of fuel 
 ready for the fire cast into that great furnace of affliction 1 Had 
 he to endure all its scorching, though to him unconsuming, flames 1 
 What shall be done with him whose heart softens not at the sight 
 of this divine and all-enduring love : whose heart closes up and 
 hardens against God and Christ, till it becomes like one of those
 
 16 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 dry and withered branches which men gather and cast into the fire 1 
 If God spared not his own Son, but gave him up to the death for 
 us all, who is there, among the rejecters and despisers of such a 
 Saviour, that he will spare ? Or if you would have the same argu- 
 ment set before you in yet another form, take it as presented by 
 Peter : " For the time is come that judgment must begin at the 
 house of God : and if it first begin at us, what shall the end be of 
 them that obey not the gospel of God? And if the righteous 
 scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear 1" 
 I shall make no attempt either to expand or enforce the argument 
 thus employed. Let me only remind you, that it was by these 
 strange and solemn words of warning, " If they do these things in 
 a green tree, what shall be done in the dry 1 " that our Lord closed 
 the public teaching of his ministry upon earth. Quiet as our skies 
 now look, and secure and stable as all things around us seem, the 
 days are coming, he has told us among his latest sayings, when 
 those who resist the approaches of his love shall see him in other 
 guise, and when at the sight they " shall cry to the mountains, Fall 
 on us, and to the hills, Cover us ; hide us from the face of him that 
 sitteth upon the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb : for the 
 great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand 1" 
 How wise and good a thing were it for us all, in prospect of such 
 days coming, to hide ourselves even now in the clefts of the smitten 
 Eock ; to hide ourselves in Jesus Christ as our loving Lord and 
 Saviour ; that, safe within that covert, the tribulation of those days 
 may not reach us ! 
 
 And now let me crave your attention, for a moment or two, to 
 that singular tie of thought which so quickly linked together in the 
 mind of the Saviour the sight of those sorrowful daughters of 
 Jerusalem with the fearful doom that was impending over their 
 city. It is very remarkable how frequently and how vividly, in all 
 its minute details, the coming destruction of Jerusalem was present 
 to his thoughts during the last days and hours of his earthly 
 ministry. From the day that he raised Lazarus /rom the grave, 
 knowing that his enemies had taken counsel together to put him to 
 death, Jesus walked no more openly among the Jews. He retired 
 to the country beyond Jordan, near to the wilderness. His hour at last 
 approached, and he set his face to go up to Jerusalem to be crucified. 
 He was in a part of the country that was under Herod's jurisdiction, 
 and they told him that Herod sought to kill him. It cannot b, he 
 said, that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem. The naming of the 
 holy city, the thought of all the blood of all the prophets that was 
 to cry out against her, and to seal her doom, filled his heart with 
 sadness, and instantly he broke out into the exclamation : " Jeru- 
 salem, Jerusalem ! thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them 
 which are sent unto thee, how often would 1 have gathered thy
 
 TIIE DAUGHTERS OF JERUSALEM WEEPING. 617 
 
 children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under 
 her wings, and ye would not ! Behold, your house is left unto you 
 desolate!" 
 
 On the Saturday before his death he arrives at Bethany. Next 
 day he ascends the Mount of Olives. In the city they have heard 
 of his coming. They go out to meet him, they hail him as they 
 had never done before. Garments and palm-branches are spread 
 upon the ground that he is to tread. Before him and around him 
 the voices of the multitude are shouting "Hosanna ! Blessed is he 
 that cometh in the name of the Lord. Hosanna to the Son of 
 David ! Hosanna in the highest ! " The ridge of the hill is reached, 
 and Jerusalem bursts upon the view, lying across the valley spread 
 out before the eye. He pauses ; he gazes ; his eyes they fill with 
 tears. How strange it looks to that jubilant multitude ! Ah ! 
 other sounds than their hosannas are falling on the Saviour's inner 
 ear; other sights than that of their waving palm-branches are rising 
 before his prophetic eye. He weeps ; and without naming it, looking 
 at the doomed city, and pointing to it, he says : "If thou hadst known, 
 even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto 
 thy peace ! but now they are hid from thine eyes. For the days 
 shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench about 
 thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side, and 
 shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within 
 thee ; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another ; 
 because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation." 
 
 Christ's last day in the Temple and in Jerusalem was one of 
 great excitement, of varied incident. Question after question about 
 his authority to teach, about the payment of tribute-money, about 
 the resurrection of the dead, is put to him. Attempt after attempt 
 is made to entangle him in his talk. At last from being the 
 assailed, Jesus in his turn becomes the assailant, puts the question 
 about Christ being David's Son and David's Lord, which none of 
 them can answer, and then proceeds to launch his terrible denuncia- 
 tions at the Scribes and Pharisees. "Woe is heaped upon woe, till 
 all the righteous" blood shed upon the earth seems coming on the 
 men of that generation, and concentratedly upon that city of Jeru- 
 salem. Again, as when he first turned his face towards the holy 
 city, the thought melts his spirit into tenderness ; the indignation 
 dissolves and passes away, as, taking up the same words he had 
 used before, he exclaims, "0 Jerusalem, Jerusalem! thou that 
 killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, 
 how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a 
 hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not ! 
 Behold, your house is left unto you desolate," our Lord's last 
 words within the Temple. 
 
 As they went out in the afternoon of that day, " Master," said
 
 518 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 one of his disciples to him, " see what manner of stones and what 
 buildings are here ! Jesus answering said unto him, Seest thou these 
 great buildings ? Verily I say unto you, there shall not be left here 
 one stone upon another that shall not be thrown down." Later in 
 the evening of that day two days before his crucifixion he sat upon 
 the Mount of Olives over-against the Temple, looking once again at 
 these great buildings, and in answer to an inquiry of his disciples, 
 tired though he must have been with all the incidents of a most 
 harassing day, he entered upon that lengthened prophecy in which 
 he told how Jerusalem should be trodden down of the Gentiles. And 
 now again, in this last stage of his way to Calvary, the days that he 
 had spoken of so particularly in that prophecy are once more before 
 his eyes. How shall we explain all this ? How was it that the city 
 of Jerusalem had such a hold upon the heart of Jesus Christ ? How 
 was it that the joys and the sorrows, the provocations and the 
 sympathies of his latest days, all alike, by some mysterious link of 
 association, called up before his thoughts the terrible calamities 
 which Jerusalem was to endure ? Grant all that can be claimed for 
 Jerusalem in the way of pre-eminence both as to character and 
 destiny over all the cities of this earth ; acknowledge the power 
 that the close connection between our Lord's own death and its 
 destruction must have exerted upon his mind ; but beside all this, 
 may we not believe that in the human heart of Jesus, as we know 
 that there was room for special affection, individual attachment, 
 so also was there room for the patriotic sentiment, that love of 
 country by which every true man of woman born is characterised ? 
 Jesug was a Jew. Judea was the land of his birth. Jerusalem 
 was the chief city of that land. Around its earlier and its later 
 history there gathered all of joyful and of sorrowful interest 
 that could touch a Jewish heart. And it touched the spirit of 
 Jesus to contemplate its downfall. Are we wrong in thinking that 
 with that which was divine and that which was broadly human there 
 mingled a Jewish, a patriotic element in the grief which shed tears 
 over its destruction ? If love of country form par^ of a perfect man, 
 shall we not believe that, purified from all imperfection, its narrow- 
 ness, its exclusiveness, its selfishness, that affection had a place 
 and found a home in the bosom of our Lord 1 
 
 VIII. 
 
 THE PENITENT THIEF. 
 MATT. xxvn. 35-37 ; JOHN xix. 20-22 ; LUKE xxm. 23-43. 
 
 ONE of the first things done by the Roman soldiers to whom the 
 execution of the sentence was committed was to strip our Saviour 
 and to nail him to the cross. "We do not know whether that cruel
 
 THE PENITENT THIEF. 519 
 
 operation of transfixing the hands and feet was performed while the 
 cross yet lay upon the ground, or after it was erected. They offered 
 him in kindness let us believe rather than in scorn wine mingled 
 with myrrh, an anodyne or soothing draught, fitted to dull or deaden 
 the sense of pain, but he waved it away ; he would do nothing that 
 might lull the senses, but might at the same time impair the full 
 clear, mental consciousness. The clothing of the criminal was in 
 all such instances a legal perquisite of the executioners, and the 
 soldiers proceeded to divide it among them. The other parts of 
 his outer raiment they found it comparatively easy to divide \ but 
 when they came to his inner coat, finding it of somewhat unusual 
 texture, woven from the top throughout it may have been his 
 mother's workmanship, or the gift of some of those kind women 
 who had ministered to his wants and comforts they found no way 
 of disposing of it so easy as to cast lots among them whose it should 
 be, fulfilling thus, but all unconsciously, that scripture which, apart 
 from this manner of disposal of the clothing, we might not well 
 have understood how it could be verified "They parted my 
 raiment among them, and for my vesture they did cast lots." 
 
 Pilate's last act that morning, after he had given up Jesus to be 
 crucified, was to have the ground of his sentence declared in a 
 writing which he directed should be placed conspicuously upon the 
 cross above his head. To secure that this writing shoiild be seen 
 and read of all men, Pilate further ordered that it should be written 
 in Greek, and Latin, and Hebrew, the three chief languages of the 
 time. All the four evangelists record what this writing or super- 
 scription was, yet in each the words of which it was composed are 
 differently reported. No two of them agree as to the precise terms 
 of the title, though all of them are perfectly at one as to its meaning 
 and intent. It does not in the least surprise us when four different 
 narrators of some spoken, and it may be lengthened, discourse vary 
 here and there in the exact words imputed to the speaker. It is 
 somewhat different when it is a short written public document, like 
 that placed over the Saviour's head on this occasion, the contents 
 of which are given. Here we might naturally have expected that 
 the very words literatim et verbatim would have been preserved. 
 And if it be not so, in this case as well as in others equally if not 
 more remarkable, such as that of the few words spoken by the voice 
 from heaven at the time of the Saviour's baptism, and those spoken 
 by our Lord himself at the institution of his own Supper, if it be 
 the general sense, and not the exact words which the sacred writers 
 present to us, is there no warning in this against the expectation 
 of finding a minute and literal exactness everywhere in the gospel 
 narrative ] no warning against our treating that narrative as if such 
 kind of exactness had been intended, and is to be found therein ? 
 The sight of this title, posted up so prominently above the head
 
 520 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSIOX. 
 
 of Jesus, annoyed the Jews. The Chief Priests were especially 
 provoked ; nor have we far to go to discover the reason of their 
 provocation. Among the last things Pilate said to them, when he 
 brought out Jesus, had been, "Behold your king!" And among 
 the last things they said to Pilate, in the heat of their exasperation, 
 and the urgency of their desire to have Jesus ordered off to instant 
 crucifixion, was, " Away, away with him ! crucify him ! we have no 
 king but Ccesar" this man is not only a false pretender, but he and 
 all others except Caesar are traitors who make any such pretension. 
 Thus, in that unguarded hour, did they absolutely renounce all 
 desire or hope of having a king of their own. Pilate took them at 
 their word, and put over Christ's head such a title as implied that 
 any one claiming to be king of the Jews might, on that ground 
 alone, whatever his rights and claims on the ground simply of the 
 allegiance which the Jews owed, and which the Chief Priests had 
 avowed, to the Roman Emperor be justly condemned to death. 
 When they looked at that legal declaration of his crime placed 
 above Christ's head, and thought of all that it implied, the Chief 
 Priests hurried back to Pilate, and asked him to make a modification 
 of it, which should leave it open that there might be another king 
 of the Jews besides Caesar. " Write not," they said to Pilate, " The 
 King of the Jews ; but that he said, I am King of the Jews." Let 
 it be made patent, that it was as an illegitimate claimant that he 
 was put to death. In ill humour with himself, in worse humour 
 with them, Pilate is in no mood to listen to their proposal. He 
 will hold them tightly to their own denial and disavowal of any 
 king but Caesar ; and so, with a somewhat sharp and surly decisive- 
 ness, he dismisses them by saying, " What I have written I have 
 written." 
 
 Meanwhile, the soldiers have completed their cruel^ork It was 
 when in their hands, or soon after, that Jesus said, "Father, 
 forgive them, for they know not what they do." Such rough 
 handling as that to which our Lord had been subjected, such acute 
 bodily suffering as it had inflicted, have a strong tendency to 
 irritate, and to render the sufferer indifferent to everything beyond 
 his own injuries and pains. But how far above this does Jesus 
 rise ! No murmuring ; no threatening ; no accusation ; no lament ; 
 no cry for help ; no invoking of vengeance ; no care for, or thought 
 of self ; no obtruding of his own forgiveness. It is not, / forgive 
 you ; but, "Father, forgive them." NO sidelong glance even at his 
 own wrongs and sufferings, in stating for what the forgiveness is 
 solicited. "They know not what they do;" in this simple and 
 sublime petition, not the slightest, most shadowy trace of self- 
 consideration. It is from a heart occupied with thought for others, 
 and not with its own woes ; it is out of the depths of an infinite 
 love and pity, which no waters can quench, that there comes forth
 
 THE PENITENT THIEF. 521 
 
 the purest and highest petition for mercy that ever ascended to the 
 Father of mercies in the heavens. It is from the lips of a Brother- 
 Man that this petition comes, yet from One who can speak to God 
 as to his own Father. It is from Jesus on the cross it comes; from 
 him who submits to all the shame and agony of crucifixion, that as 
 the Lamb that once was slain for us, he might earn, as it were, the 
 right thus to pray, and furnish himself with a plea in praying, such 
 as none but he possesseth and can employ. As a Prophet, he had 
 spoken to the daughters of Jerusalem by the way ; as the great 
 High Priest, he intercedes for his crucifiers from the cross. 
 
 Nor are we to confine that intercession to those for whom in the 
 first instance it was exerted. Wide over the whole range of sinful 
 humanity does that prayer of our Eedeemer extend. For every 
 sinner of our race, if it be true of him that he knew not what he 
 did, that prayer of Jesus goes up to the throne of mercy. It was 
 in comparative ignorance that those soldiers and those Jews cruci- 
 fied Jesus. Had they known what they did, we have an apostle's 
 testimony for believing they would not have crucified the Lord of 
 glory. But their ignorance did not take away their guilt. Had it 
 done so, there had been no need of an intercessor in their behalf. It 
 was with wicked hands they did that deed. Nor did their ignorance 
 in any way entitle them to forgiveness ; then might it have been left 
 to the Father to deal with them without any intercession of the 
 Son. But their ignorance brought them and their doings within 
 the pale of that Divine mercy for which the prayer of the great 
 Mediator was presented. How far we are entitled to carry this 
 idea, I shall not presume to say. Was it because of that element 
 the element of an imperfect knowledge of what was done that for 
 the transgression of man a Saviour and a, sacrifice were provided, 
 not provided for the sin of fallen angels, of whom it could not, in 
 the same sense, be said that they knew not what they did 1 Is it 
 to that degree in which a partial ignorance of what we do prevails 
 that ignorance not being of itself entirely our own fault that 
 our transgression comes within the scope and power of the inter- 
 cession of the Redeemer 1 To questions such as these we venture 
 no reply. Only let us remember that sins rise in magnitude as 
 they are committed against light, and that the clearer and fuller 
 that light is, and the greater and more determined and obstinate 
 our resistance to it, the nearer we approach to that condition which 
 the apostle had in his eye when he wrote these words of warning : 
 r 'For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and 
 have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the 
 Holy Ghost, and have tasted the good word of God, and the powers 
 of the world to come, if they shall fall away, to renew them a^ain 
 unto repentance, seeing they crucify to themselves the Son oi God 
 afresh, and put him to an open shame ; for if we sin wilfully after
 
 522 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no 
 more sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful looking for of judgment 
 and fiery indignation, which shall devour the adversaries." 
 
 Their cruel work completed, the soldiers sit down before the 
 cross to watch. Behind them the people stand beholding. There 
 is a momentary stillness. It is broken by some passers-by for the 
 cross was raised near some public thoroughfare who, stopping for 
 a moment as they pass, look up, and wag their heads at Jesus, 
 saying contemptuously to him, " Ah ! thou that destroyest the 
 Temple, and buildest it in three days, save thyself ! If thou be the 
 Son of God, come down from the cross." That ribald speech 
 strikes the key-note for other like fiendish taunts and gibes. The 
 Chief Priests, the scribes, the elders their dignity forgotten 
 hasten to join the mockery; to deaden perhaps some unwelcome voices 
 rising within their hearts. They do not act, however, like the 
 honest common people, who in their passing by look up at or speak 
 directly to Jesus, they do not, they dare not. They stand repeat- 
 ing, as Mark tells us, among themselves ; saying of him, not to him : 
 " He saved others, himself he cannot save ; let him save himself if 
 he be Christ, the chosen of God. If he be the King of Israel, let 
 him come down from the cross, and we will believe him. He 
 trusted in God (strange that they should thus blasphemously use 
 the very words of the twenty-second Psalm), let him deliver him 
 now if he will have him, for he said, I am the Son of God." The 
 Roman soldiers get excited by the talk they hear going on around. 
 They rise, and they offer him some vinegar to drink, repeating one 
 of the current taunts, till at last one of the malefactors, hanging 
 on the cross beside him, does the same. 
 
 Strange, certainly, that among those who rail at Jesus at such 
 a time, one of those crucified along with him should be numbered. 
 Those brought out to share together the shame and agony of a 
 public execution have generally looked on each other with a kindly 
 and indulgent eye. Outcasts from the world's sympathy, they have 
 drawn largely upon the sympathy of one another. Since they were 
 to die thus together, they have desired to die at peace. Many an 
 old deep grudge has been buried at the gallows-foot. But here, 
 where there is nothing to be mutually forgotten, nothing to be 
 forgiven, nothing whatever to check the operation of that common 
 law by which community in suffering begets sympathy ; here instead 
 of sympathy, there is scorn; instead of pity, reproach. What 
 called forth such feelings at such a time and from such a quarter 1 
 In part it may have been due to the circumstance that it was upon 
 Jesus that the main burden of the public reproach was flung. Bad 
 men like to join with others in blaming those who either are, or 
 are supposed to be, worse men than themselves. And so it may have 
 brought something like relief, may even have ministered something
 
 THE PENITENT THIEF. 523 
 
 like gratification to this man to find that when brought out for 
 execution, the tide of public indignation directed itself so exclusively 
 against Jesus by making so much more of whose criminality, he 
 thinks to make so much less of his own. Or is it the spirit of the 
 religious scoffer that vents here its expiring breath ? All he sees, 
 and all he hears those pouting lips, those wagging heads, those 
 upbraiding speeches tell him what it was in Jesus that had 
 kindled such enmity against him, and too thoroughly does he go in 
 with that spirit which is rife around the cross, not to join in the 
 expression of it, and so whilst others are railing at Jesus, he too 
 will rail. It is difficult to give any more satisfactory explanation 
 of his conduct, difficult in any case like this to fathom the depths 
 even of a single human spirit ; but explain it as you may, it was one 
 drop added to the cup of bitterness which our Lord that day took 
 into his hands, and drank to the very dregs, that not only were his 
 enemies permitted to do with him what they would, but the very 
 criminal who is crucified by his side deems himself entitled to cast 
 such reproachful sayings in his teeth. 
 
 But he is not suffered to rail at Jesus unrebuked, and the rebuke 
 comes most appropriately from his brother malefactor, who, turn- 
 ing upon him, says, " Dost not thou fear God, seeing thou art in 
 the same condemnation ? " " Dost not thou fear God 1 " he does 
 not need to say, Dost thou not fear man 1 for man has already done 
 all that man can do. But, Dost not thou fear God ? He knows 
 then that there is a God to fear, a God before whose bar he and 
 his brother sufferer are soon to appear ; a God to whom they shall 
 have to give account, not only for every evil action that in their 
 past lives they have done, but for every idle word that in dying 
 they shall speak. He knows it now, he feels it now, had he 
 known and felt it sooner, it might have saved him from hanging on 
 that cross, that over and above the condemnation of man which 
 he had so lightly thought of, and so fearlessly had braved, there is 
 another and weightier condemnation, even that of the great God, 
 into whose hands, as a God of judgment, it is a fearful thing for 
 the impenitent to fall. 
 
 "And we indeed justly." No questioning of the proof, no 
 quarrelling with the law, no reproaching of the judge. He neither 
 thinks that his crime was less heinous than the law made it, nor 
 his punishment greater than the crime deserved. Nor do you hear 
 from this man's lips what you so often hear from men placed in like 
 circumstances, the complaint that he had been taken, and he must 
 die, whilst so many others, greater criminals than himself, are 
 suffered to go at large unpunished. At once and unreservedly he 
 acknowledges the justice of the sentence, and in so doing shows a 
 spirit penetrated with a sense of guilt. And not only is he thoroughly 
 convinced of his own guilt, he is as thoroughly convinced of Christ's
 
 524 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 innocence. " We indeed justly, for we receive the due reward of 
 our deeds ; but this man hath done nothing amiss. " Little as he 
 may have seen or known before of Jesus, what he had witnessed 
 had entirely convinced him that His was a case of unmerited and 
 unprovoked persecution : that he was an innocent man whom these 
 Jews, to gratify their own spleen, to avenge themselves in their 
 own ignoble quarrel with him, were hounding to the death. 
 
 But he goes much further than to give expression merely to his 
 conviction of Christ's innocence, and it is here we touch upon the 
 spiritual marvels of this extraordinary incident. Turning from 
 speaking to his brother malefactor, fixing his eye upon and address- 
 ing himself to Jesus, as he hangs upon the neighbouring cross, he 
 says, "Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom." 
 How came he, at such a time and in such circumstances, to call 
 Jesus Lord ? how came he to believe in the coming of his kingdom? 
 It is going the utmost length to which supposition can be carried, 
 to imagine that he had never met with Jesus till he had met him 
 that morning to be led out in company with him to Calvary. He 
 saw the daughters of Jerusalem weeping by the way ; he heard 
 those words of Jesus which told of the speaker's having power to 
 withdraw the veil which hides the future ; he had seen and read the 
 title nailed above the Saviour's head, proclaiming him to be the 
 King of the Jews; from the lips of the passers-by, of the Chief 
 Priests, the elders, the soldiers, he had gathered that this Jesus, 
 now dying by his side, had saved others from that very death he is 
 himself about to die, had professed a supreme trust in God, had 
 claimed to be the Christ, the Chosen, the Son of God, and he had 
 seen and heard enough to satisfy him that all which Jesus had 
 claimed to be he truly was. Such were some of the materials put 
 by Divine Providence into this man's hands whereon to build his 
 faith ; such the broken fragments of the truth loosely scattered in 
 his way. He takes them up, collects, combines ; the Enlightening 
 Spirit shines upon the evidence thus afforded, shines in upon his 
 quickened soul ; and there brightly dawns upon his spirit the sub- 
 lime belief that in that strange Sufferer by his side he sees the long- 
 promised Messiah, the Saviour of mankind, the Son and equal of 
 the Father, who now, at the very time that his mind has opened to 
 a sense of his great iniquity, and he stands trembling on the brink 
 of eternity, reveals himself as so near at hand, so easy of access. 
 His faith, thus quickly formed, goes forth into instant exercise, and, 
 turning to Jesus, he breathes into his convenient ear the simple but 
 ardent prayer, "Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy 
 kingdom." 
 
 The hostile multitude around are looking forward to Christ's 
 approaching death, as to that decisive event which shall at once, 
 and for ever, scatter to the winds all the idle rumours that have
 
 THE PENITENT THIEF. 525 
 
 been rife about him; all his vain pretensions to the Messiahship. 
 The faith of Christ's own immediate followers is ready to give way 
 before that same event ; they bury it in his grave, and have only to 
 say of him afterwards, "We hoped that it had been he that should 
 have redeemed Israel." Yet here, amid the triumph of enemies, 
 and the failure of the faith of friends, is one who, conquering all 
 the difficulties that sense opposes to its recognition, discerns, even 
 through the dark envelope which covers it, the hidden glory of the 
 Redeemer, and openly hails him as his Lord and King. Marvellous, 
 indeed, the faith in our Lord's divinity which sprang up so suddenly 
 in such an unlikely region, which shone out so brightly in the very 
 midnight of the world's unbelief. Are we wrong in saying that, at 
 the particular moment when that testimony to Christ's divinity was 
 borne, there was not another full believer in that divinity but this 
 dying thief? If so, was it not a fitting thing, that he who was 
 never to be left without a witness, now when there was but one 
 witness left, should have had this solitary testimony given to his 
 divinity at the very time when it was passing into almost total 
 eclipse ; so nearly wholly shrouded from mortal vision ? There 
 were many to call him Lord when he rose triumphant from the 
 tomb ; there is but one to call him Lord as he hangs dying on the 
 cross. 
 
 But let us look upon the prayer of the dying thief not only as a 
 public testimony to the kingly character and prerogative of Jesus, 
 but as the prayer of individual, appropriating faith ; the earnest, 
 hopeful, trustful application of a dying sinner to a dying Saviour. 
 His ideas of Christ's character and office may have been obscure ; the 
 nature of that kingdom into possession of which he was about to 
 enter, he may have but imperfectly understood. He knew it, how- 
 ever, to be a spiritual kingdom ; he felt that individually he had 
 forfeited his right of admission to its privileges and its joys ; he 
 believed that it lay with Jesus to admit him into that kingdom. 
 Not with a spirit void of apprehension may he have made his last 
 appeal It may have seemed to him a very doubtful thing, whether, 
 when relieved from the sharp pains of crucifixion, the suffering 
 over, and the throne of the kingdom reached, Jesus would think of 
 him amid the splendours and the joys of his new kingly state. 
 Doubts of a kindred character have often haunted the hearts of the 
 penitent, the hearts of the best and the holiest ; but there were two 
 things of which he had no doubt, that Jesus could save him if he 
 would, and that if he did not, he should perish. And it is out of 
 these two simple elements that genuine faith is always formed, a 
 deep, pervading, subduing consciousness of our unworthiness, a 
 simple and entire trust in Christ 
 
 It has been often and well said, that whilst this one instance of 
 faith in Jesus formed at the eleventh hour is recorded in the New
 
 526 THE LAST DAY OP THE PASSION. 
 
 Testament, in order that none, even to the last moment of their 
 being, should despair, there is but this one instance, that none 
 may presume upon a death-bed repentance. And even this instance 
 teaches most impressively that the faith which justifies always 
 sanctifies; that the faith which brings forgiveness and opens the 
 gates of Paradise to the dying sinner carries with it a renovating 
 power ; that the faith which conveys the title works at the same 
 time the meetness for the heavenly inheritance. Let a man die 
 that hour in which he truly and cordially believes, that hour his 
 passage into the heavenly kingdom is made secure ; but let a win- 
 dow be opened that hour into his soul, let us see into all the secrets 
 thereof, and we shall discover that morally and spiritually there has 
 been a change in inward character corresponding to the change in 
 legal standing or relationship with God. It was so with this dying 
 thief. True, we have but a short period of his life before us, and 
 in that period only two short sayings to go upon; happily, however, 
 sayings of such a kind, and spoken in such circumstances, as to 
 preclude all doubt of their entire honesty and truthfulness; and 
 what do they reveal of the condition of that man's mind and heart ? 
 What tenderness of conscience is here; what deep reverence for 
 God ; what devout submission to the divine will ; what entire relin- 
 quishment of all personal grounds of confidence before God ; what a 
 vivid realising of the world of spirits ; what a humble trust in Jesus; 
 what a zeal for the Saviour's honour ; what an indignation at the 
 unworthy treatment he was receiving ! May we not take that 
 catalogue of the fruits of genuine repentance which an apostle has 
 drawn up for us, and applying it here, say of this man's repentance, 
 Behold what carefulness it wrought in him ; yea, what clearing 
 of himself; yea, what indignation; yea, what fear; yea, what 
 vehement desire ; yea, what zeal ; yea, what revenge ! In all things 
 he approved himself to be a changed man, in the desires and disposi- 
 tions and purposes of his heart. The belief has been expressed, 
 that in all the earth there was not at that particular moment such 
 a believer in the Lord's divinity as he ; would it be going too far to 
 couple with that belief this other, that in all the earth, and at that 
 moment, there was not another man inwardly riper and readier for 
 entrance into Paradise ? 
 
 "Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom." 
 Loud and angry voices have for hours been ringing in the vexed ear 
 of Jesus, voices whose blasphemy and inhumanity wounded him 
 far more than the mere personal antipathy they breathed. Amid 
 these harsh and grating sounds, how new, how welcome, how grate- 
 ful, this soft and gentle utterance of desire, and trust, and love ! It 
 dropped like a cordial upon the fainting spirit of our Lord, the only 
 balm that earth came forth to lay upon his wounded spirit. Let us, 
 too, be grateful for that one soothing word addressed to the dying
 
 THE PENITENT THIEF. 527 
 
 Jesus, and wherever the gospel is declared let these words which 
 that man spake be repeated in memorial of him. 
 
 "Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom." 
 He will not ask to be remembered now ; he will not break in upon 
 this season of his Lord's bitter anguish. He only asks that, when 
 the sharp pains of his passion shall be over, the passage made, and 
 the throne of the kingdom won, Jesus will, in his great mercy, then 
 think of him. Jesus will let him know that he does not need to 
 wait so long ; he will let him know that the Son of man hath power, 
 even on earth, to forgive sin ; that the hour never cometh when his 
 ear is so heavy that it cannot hear, his hand so shortened that it 
 cannot save; and the prayer has scarce been offered when the 
 answer comes, " Verily, I say unto thee, To-day shalt thou be with 
 me in paradise." 
 
 The lips may have trembled that spake these words ; soft and 
 low may have been the tone in which they were uttered ; but they 
 were words of power, words which only one Being who ever wore 
 human form could have spoken. His divinity is acknowledged : 
 the moment it is so, it breaks forth into bright and beautiful 
 manifestation. The hidden glory bursts through the dark cloud 
 that veiled it, and, in all his omnipotence to save, Jesus stands 
 revealed. What a rebuke to his crucifiers ! They may strip his 
 mortal body of its outward raiment, which these soldiers may divide 
 among them as they please ; his human soul they may strip of its 
 outer garment of the flesh, and send it forth unclothed into the 
 world of spirits. But his kingly right to dispense the royal gift of 
 pardon, his power to save, can they strip him of that ? Nay, little 
 as they know it, they are helping to clothe him with that power, at 
 the very time when they think they are laying all his kingly pre- 
 tensions in the dust. He will not do what they had so often in 
 derision asked him that day to do ; he will not come down from 
 the cross ; he will not give that proof of his divinity ; he will not 
 put forth his almighty power by exerting it upon the world of 
 matter. But on this very cross he will give a higher proof of his 
 divinity : he will exert that power, not over the world of matter, 
 but over the world of spirits, by stretching forth his hand and 
 delivering a soul from death, and carrying it with him that day into 
 paradise. 
 
 "Verily I say unto thee, To-day shalt thou be with me in 
 paradise." Jesus would not rise from the sepulchre alone ; he would 
 have others rise along with him. And so, even as he dies, the 
 earthquake does its allotted work, work so strange for an earthquake 
 to do, it opens not a new grave for the living, it opens the old 
 graves of the dead ; and as the third morning dawns, from the 
 opened graves the bodies of the saints arise with the rising body 
 of the Lord, types and pledges of the general resurrection of
 
 528 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 the dead, verifying, by their appearance in the Holy City, the 
 words of ancient prophecy : " Thy dead men shall live, together 
 with my dead body shall they arise. Awake and sing, ye that 
 dwell in the dust ; for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the 
 earth shall cast out her dead." And as Jesus would not rise 
 from the sepulchre alone, so neither will he enter Paradise alone. 
 He will carry one companion spirit with him to the place of the 
 blessed ; thus early giving proof of his having died upon that cross 
 that others through his death might live, and live for ever. See, 
 then, in the ransomed spirit borne that day to Paradise, the 
 primal trophy of the power of the uplifted cross of Jesus ! What 
 saved this penitent thief 1 ? No water of baptism was ever sprinkled 
 upon him ; at no table of communion did he ever sit ; of the virtue 
 said to lie in sacramental rites he knew nothing. It was a simple 
 belifmng look of a dying sinner upon a dying Saviour that did it. 
 AndPthat sight has lost nothing of its power. Too many, alas ! 
 have passed, are still passing, by that spectacle of Jesus upon the 
 cross ; going, one to his farm, another to his merchandise, and not 
 suffering it to make its due impression on their hearts ; but 
 thousands upon thousands of the human race we bless God for 
 this have gazed upon it with a look kindred to that of the dying 
 thief, and have felt it exert upon them a kindred power. Around 
 it, once more, let me ask you all to gather. Many here, I trust, as 
 they look at it, can say, with adoring gratitude, He loved me ; he' 
 gave himself for me ; he was wounded for my transgression, he was 
 bruised for mine iniquity ; he is all my salvation, he is all my desire. 
 Some may not be able to go so far ; yet there is one step that all 
 of us, who are in any degree alive to our obligations to redeeming 
 love, can take one prayer that we all may offer ; and surely, if 
 that petition got so ready audience when addressed to Jesus in the 
 midst of his dying agonies, with certain hope of not less favourable 
 audience may we take it up, and, shaping it to meet our case, 
 may say, Now that thou hast gone into thy kingdom^ Lord, 
 remember me. 
 
 Yet once more let the words of our Lord be repeated, " To-day 
 shalt thou be with me in paradise." But where this Paradise ? 
 what this Paradise ? We can say, in answer to these questions, 
 that with this heavenly Paradise into which the redeemed at death 
 do enter, the ancient, the earthly Paradise is not fit to be compared. 
 In the one, the direct intercourse with God was but occasional ; in 
 the other it shall be constant. In the one, the Deity was known 
 only as he revealed himself in the works of creation and in the 
 ways of his providence ; in the other, it will be as the God of our 
 redemption, the God and Father of our Lord and Saviour Jesus, 
 that he will be recognised, adored, obeyed all the higher moral 
 attributes of his nature shining forth in harmonious and illustrious
 
 THE PENITENT THIEF. 529 
 
 display. Into the earthly Paradise the Tempter entered ; from the 
 heavenly he will be shut out. From the earthly Paradise sad exiles 
 once were driven ; from the heavenly we shall go no more out for 
 ever. Still, however, after all such imperfect and unsatisfying 
 comparisons, the questions return upon us, Where, and what is this 
 Paradise of the redeemed ? Our simplest and our best answers to 
 those questions perhaps are these Where is Paradise 1 wherever 
 Jesus is. What is Paradise 1 to be for ever with, and to be fully 
 like, our Lord. We know for God has told us so, of that Paradise 
 of the redeemed that it is a land of perfect light ; the day has 
 dawned there ; the shadows have for ever fled away. It is a land 
 of perfect blessedness ; no tears fall there ; no sighs rise there ; up 
 to the measure of its capacity, each spirit filled with a pure, never- 
 ending joy. It is a land of perfect holiness ; nothing that defileth 
 shall enter there, neither whatsoever loveth or maketh a lie. But 
 what gives to that land its light, its joy, its holiness in the siglU of 
 the redeemed ? it is the presence of Jesus. If there be no night 
 there, it is because the Lamb is the light of that place ; if there be 
 no tears there, it is because from every eye his hand has wiped off 
 every tear. The holiness that reigneth there, is a holiness caught 
 from the seeing him as he is. And trace the tide of joy that 
 circulates through the hosts of the blessed to its fountain-head, you 
 will find it within that throne on which the Lamb that once was 
 slain is sitting. To be with Jesus, to be like Jesus, to love and 
 serve him purely, deeply, unfailingly, unfalteringly that is the 
 Christian's heaven. 
 
 I love, says one, in words that will find an echo in each Chris- 
 tian heart 
 
 " I love to think of heaven ; its cloudless light, 
 Its tearless joys, its recognitions, and its fellowships 
 Of love and joy unending ; but when my mind anticipates 
 The sight of God incarnate, wearing on his hands 
 And feet and side marks of the wounds 
 Which he for me on Calvary endured, 
 All heaven beside is swallowed up in this ; 
 And he who was my hope of heaven below 
 Becomes the glory of my heaven above." 
 
 Yet once again let the memorable words of our Lord be repeated, 
 "To-day shalt thou be with me in paradise." What a day to that 
 dying man ! How strange the contrast between its opening and 
 its close, its morning and its night ! Its morning saw him a culprit 
 condemned before the bar of earthly judgment ; before evening 
 shadowed the hill of Zion, he stood accepted at the bar of heaven. 
 The morning saw him led out through an earthly city's gates in 
 company with one who was hooted at by the crowd that gathered 
 round him ; before night fell upon Jerusalem, the gates of another 
 city, even the heavenly, were lifted up, and he went up through 
 2L
 
 530 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 them in company with one around whom all the hosts of heaven 
 were bowing down, as he passed on to take his place beside the 
 Father on his everlasting throne. Humblest believer in the Saviour, 
 a like marvellous contrast is in store for you. This hour, it may 
 be, weak and burdened, tossing on the bed of agony, in that 
 darkened chamber of stifled sobs and dropping tears ; the next 
 hour, up and away in the Paradise of God, mingling with the spirits 
 of the just made perfect, renewing death-broken friendships, gazing 
 on the unveiled glories of the Lamb. Be thou then but faithful 
 unto death ; struggle on for a few more of those numbered days, or 
 months, or years, and on that day of your departure hence, in his 
 name I have to say it to you, Verily, thou too shalt be with him in 
 Paradise. 
 
 IX. 
 
 THE MOTHER OF OUR LORD. 
 JOHN xix. 25-27. 
 
 THE last sight we got of the disciple whom Jesus loved was 
 when he and Peter entered together into the Hall of the High 
 Priest. Silent and in the shade, he escaped the scrutiny that his 
 rash companion drew upon himself. Of the sad scene that ensued, 
 John was the sorrowful witness. He saw the Lord turn and look 
 upon Peter ; he saw Peter turn and leave the hall. It is not likely 
 that he followed him. A stronger attraction kept him where he 
 was. He waited to see what the issue of these strange proceedings 
 should be; waited till he heard the judgment of the Sanhedrim 
 given ; waited till he saw the weak and sorely-badgered Govemor 
 at last give way ; waited perhaps till the preparations for the cruci- 
 fixion had commenced. Then may he have gone in haste into the 
 city ; gone to seek out those who, he knew, would be most interested 
 to hear; especially to seek out and to comfort her upon whose 
 wounded heart the burden of these terrible tidings would fall most 
 heavily. Most likely it was from the lips of the beloved disciple 
 that Mary first heard that morning of the fate which awaited Jesus. 
 But where and when did she first see him ? Not in the palace of 
 the High Priest ; not in the Judgment-Hall of Pilate. Although 
 she had got the tidings soon enough to be there, these were not 
 places for such a visitant. Nor was she one of those daughters of 
 Jerusalem that lamented and bewailed him by the way. The first 
 sight she gets of him is when, mocked by the soldiers, derided by 
 the passers-by, insulted by the Chief Priests, he hangs upon the 
 cross. She has her own sister Mary with her, and that other faith- 
 ful Mary of Magdala, with John beside them, making up that little
 
 THE MOTHER OF OUR LORD. 531 
 
 group, who, with feelings so different from those of all the others, 
 gaze upon the scene. 
 
 The prayer for his crucifiers has been offered. The penitent 
 thief has heard the declaration that opens to him that day the gates 
 of Paradise, when the eye of the Crucified, wandering over the 
 motley crowd, fixes upon that little group standing quietly but sadly, 
 near enough to be spoken to. John is addressing some word, or 
 doing some act of kindness to Mary. They are at least so close to 
 one another, that though Jesus names neither, neither can mistake 
 of whom and to whom he speaks, as, bending a tender look upon 
 them, he says, " Woman, behold thy Son !" " Son, behold thy 
 mother !" John acts at once on the direction given, and withdraws 
 Mary from the spot, and takes her to his own home in Jerusalem. 
 Amid the dark and tumultuous, solemn and awful incidents of the 
 crucifixion, this incident has so much of peaceful repose that we 
 feel tempted to dwell upon it. At once, and very naturally, it 
 suggests to us a review of the previous relationship and intercourse 
 between Mary and her mysterious Son. We cannot, indeed, rightly 
 appreciate our Lord's notice of her from the cross without taking 
 it in connection with that relationship and intercourse. 
 
 The angelic annunciation, the salutation of Elizabeth, the visits 
 of the Bethlehem shepherds and the Eastern Magi, had all prepared 
 Mary to see, in her first-born Son, One greater than the children 
 of men. All those sayings about his greatness and glory, his 
 being called the Son of the Highest, his sitting upon the throne 
 of David his father, his reigning over the house of Jacob for ever 
 she kept and pondered in her heart, wondering exceedingly what 
 manner of man that child of hers should be, in whom those sayings 
 should be fulfilled. As she listened to all those prophecies of his 
 future greatness, by which his birth was foretold and celebrated, 
 what bright and glowing anticipations must have filled Mary's 
 heart ! One discordant word alone at this time fell upon her ear, 
 one saying differing from all the rest, the meaning of which she 
 could not understand. " This child," said the aged Simeon, as he 
 took up the babe into his arms at his presentation within the 
 Temple, "this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in 
 Israel, and for a sign that shall be spoken against. Yea," added 
 the aged prophet, as he looked sadly and sympathisingly at Mary, 
 "a sword shall pierce through thine own soul also." Was it to 
 temper her new-born joy; was it to teach her to mingle some 
 apprehension with her hopes ; was it to prepare and fortify her for 
 the actual future that lay before her so different from the imagined 
 one that these words were spoken? Beyond exciting a fresh 
 wonder and perplexity, they could, however, have had but little 
 effect on Mary at the time. She did not, she could not understand 
 them then; therefore, with those bright and joyous anticipations
 
 532 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 still within her heart, she retired to Nazareth. The child grew, 
 the Evangelist tells us, waxed strong in spirit, was filled with 
 wisdom, the grace of God was upon him ; but beyond that gentle- 
 ness which nothing could ruffle, that meekness which nothing could 
 provoke, that wisdom which was daily deepening and widening, 
 giving ever new and more wonderful, yet ever natural and child-like 
 exhibitions of itself, that dutiful submission to his reputed parents, 
 that love to all around him upon earth, that deeper love to his 
 Father in heaven, beyond that rare and unexampled assemblage 
 of all the virtues and graces by which a human childhood could be 
 adorned, there was nothing outwardly to distinguish him from any 
 child of his own age, nothing outwardly to mark him out as the heir 
 of such a glorious destiny. 
 
 Twelve years of that childhood pass. Jesus has been to Mary 
 so like what any other son might have been to his mother, that, 
 unconscious of any difference, she assumes and exercises over him 
 all ordinary maternal rights. But now, again, just as it was with 
 that speech of Simeon among the other prophecies that heralded 
 the Redeemer's birth, so is it with an act and speech of Christ him- 
 self among the quiet incidents out of which, for thirty years, his life 
 at Nazareth was made up. When twelve years old, they take Jesus 
 up to Jerusalem, the days of the festival are fulfilled, the village 
 company to which Jesus and his family were attached, leave the 
 Holy City on their return. Joseph and Mary never for a moment 
 doubt that, acting with his accustomed wisdom and dutifulness, 
 their son will be with the other youths from Nazareth and its 
 neighbourhood, along with whom he had made the journey up to 
 the Holy City. Not till the usual resting-place for the night is 
 reached do they miss him. Something must have happened to 
 hinder him from joining the company at Jerusalem. Full of 
 anxiety, Joseph and Mary return into the city. Three days are 
 spent in the sorrowful search. At last they find him, sitting quietly 
 among the doctors, as if the temple were his home. Imagine 
 Mary's feelings at this sight. No accident, then, had happened to 
 him ; no restraint had been laid upon him. It had been voluntarily 
 and deliberately that her son had remained thus behind for four 
 days after her departure. Never before had Jesus acted in such a 
 way, never said or done anything fitted to give her pain. Never 
 before had she occasion to reproach or rebuke him, but now, in her 
 surprise and grief, she cannot help speaking to him as she had never 
 done before. " Son," said she, when at last she found him, " Son, 
 why h ast thou dealt thus with us ? Thy father and I have sought thee 
 sorrowing." Now, mark the Son's reply when spoken to as if he 
 had been forgetful of the duty that a child owes to his parents. 
 Mary had called him Son ; he does not call her Mother ; he never 
 does, never in any conversation related in the Gospels. Mary
 
 THE MOTHER OF OUR LORD. 53S 
 
 had spoken of Joseph as his father; he nowise recognises that 
 relationship. The full consciousness of another, higher Sonship 
 than that to Mary has entered his youthful heart ; and, under the 
 inspiration of this consciousness, his only reply to the maternal 
 appeal is, " How is it that ye sought me ? wist ye not that I must 
 be about my Father's business?" a very strange and altogether 
 unexpected answer ; one which, we are distinctly told, neither Mary 
 nor Joseph understood. It offered no explanation or excuse for his 
 conduct. It denied all need for any such explanation or excuse. 
 In the matter of his heavenly Father's business, it repudiated their 
 interference. Mary had never heard her own or Joseph's authority 
 over him questioned by Jesus. Had this visit to Jerusalem 
 weakened in his heart the sense of subjection to them 1 Was he 
 going to throw it off 1 ? Will he refuse to accompany them 1 Must 
 he still continue to be thus engaged about his Father's business ? 
 No ! Having said thus much, to teach them that he knew how 
 special his earthly relationship to them was, he rose, he left the 
 temple, and returning with them to Nazareth, was subject to them 
 as before, yet not without having deposited another seed of wonder 
 in Mary's heart, wonder as to what that other Father's business 
 was, with her son's mode of doing which she, as his mother, must 
 not interfere. 
 
 Jesus is, as before, Mary's dutiful and submissive Son. Joseph 
 dies, and he, who had been sharer of his reputed father's earthly 
 labours, becomes perhaps the chief support and solace of his mother 
 in her widowhood. Eighteen years go past. Jesus leaves his home 
 at Nazareth, alone, for none of his own family believe in him. He 
 presents himself on the banks of the Jordan, and asks baptism at 
 the hands of John. The sign from heaven is given ; the voice from 
 heaven is heard ; the Baptist points to him as the Lamb of God. 
 Philip hails him as the Messiah promised to the fathers. Nathanael 
 recognises him as the Son of God, the King of Israel. All this is 
 told to Mary. A few weeks later her Son returns, and finds her at 
 the marriage-feast at Cana ; returns now with public vouchers of his 
 Messiahship, and with five followers, who acknowledge him as their 
 Master. Once more, as at his birth, the hopes of Mary's heart rise 
 high. It is at the house of a friend of a near relative, it has been 
 conjectured that this marriage-feast is held. The guests, swelled 
 by Christ's disciples, are more numerous than had been anticipated. 
 The wine provided fails. If her Son be indeed that great Prophet 
 who is to appear, might he not take this public opportunity of 
 partially, at least, revealing himself 1 ? Might he not interfere to 
 shield this family from discredit 1 Might he not, with the wine 
 that still remained, do something like to what Elijah had done with 
 the cruse of oil and the barrel of meal ? Filled with such hopes, 
 she calls his attention to the deficiency, trusting that he may pos-
 
 534 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 sibly, in his new character and office, remove it. " She saith to 
 him, They have no wine. Jesus saith to her, Woman, what have I 
 to do with thee ? (or, what hast thou to do with me ?) mine hour is 
 not yet come." Soften it as we may, relieve it from all that may 
 seem disrespectful, there was discouragement and reproof in this 
 reply. Presuming upon her motherly relationship, on the privileges 
 that her thirty years of maternal control have given her, M.ITJ ven- 
 tures to suggest, and she does it in the most delicate manner, what 
 his course of action might be, now that he enters upon the public 
 walk of the great Prophet. Upon all such interference on her part, 
 an instant, gentle, but firm check must be imposed. Mary must be 
 taught the limits of that influence and authority which her earthly 
 relationship to him had hitherto permitted her to exercise. She 
 must be taught that in the new and higher path upon which he was 
 now about to enter, that motherly relationship gave her no place 
 nor right to direct or to control. 
 
 Mary felt and acted upon the reproof. She never afterwards, 
 at least that we know of, in any way obtruded herself. In the 
 history of our Lord s three years' ministry, she never once appears 
 in direct intercourse with her Son. She may sometimes have been 
 with him in his many circuits of Galilee, but you will search in vain 
 for her name among the women who accompanied him, and who 
 ministered to him. Between the words spoken to her at Cana, and 
 those addressed to her from the cross, not another word, addressed 
 by Jesus to his mother, is recorded in the Gospels. True, indeed, 
 he speaks of her ; and in such instances what was said seems to 
 have been intended to moderate in the minds of his hearers their 
 estimate of her position, as his mother. From the outskirts of a 
 crowd that had gathered round him as he taught, the message was 
 once sent in to him, " Behold, thy mother and thy brothers stand 
 without, desiring to speak with thee." What they wanted with him 
 we do not know : it was on no friendly errand that his brothers 
 came; they disliked his public preaching on the hillsides to the 
 multitude ; they thought him beside himself. They expected, on 
 this occasion, that so soon as he got their message, he would give 
 up the work in which he was engaged, and come to them, that he 
 would feel that his mother and they had a claim upon his attention, 
 superior to that of the motley company that was pressing in upon 
 him. It was a case in many respects like that in the Temple, of a 
 competition between two kinds or classes of obligations. Very 
 striking was the way in which Jesus in this instance acted. As 
 soon as he heard the message, he exclaimed, " Who is my mother 
 or my brethren?" Then, looking around, he stretches forth his 
 hands to his disciples (and it is but rarely that any gesture of our 
 Lord is chronicled in the Gospel story), and said, "Behold my 
 mother and my brethren ; for whosoever shall do the will of my
 
 THE MOTHER OF OUR LORD. 535 
 
 Father which is iu heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and 
 mother." Another time, as he was speaking with great power and 
 effect, one of his hearers, struck with admiration, broke forth with 
 the exclamation, " Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps 
 that gave thee suck !" "Yea," said Jesus, checking instantly and 
 emphatically that spirit which had prompted the exclamation, 
 "yea, rather blessed is he that heareth the word of God, and doeth it." 
 Mary was highly favoured. With Gabriel and with all genera- 
 tions of our race, we are prepared to call her blessed. We are pre- 
 pared to render all due honour to that relationship in which she 
 stood to the Redeemer of mankind. Among all the earthly distinc- 
 tions and dignities that could have been bestowed upon a woman, 
 the very greatest, we believe, was that which was thus conferred on 
 Mary. And to the reverential regard which this relationship 
 demands, we are prepared to add the still higher regard due to her 
 genuine modesty, her simple faith. Nor are we sure but that, in 
 the depth of our recoil from the superstitious reverence that has 
 gathered round her name, we have overlooked and failed to do full 
 justice to the simplicity, the beauty, the retiringness of that piety 
 which makes her among the pious women of the Gospels what John 
 was among the apostles of our Lord. But when asked to worship 
 her, to pray to her as the mother of the Lord, to entreat that she 
 will exert her influence with her Divine Son, is it possible to over- 
 look that treatment which she met with at our Lord's own hands 
 when here upon earth; is it possible to put away from us the 
 thought that, in that very treatment, he was prophetically uttering 
 his own solemn protest against any such idolatrous magnifying of 
 the position and relationship in which it pleased God that she should 
 stand to him 1 We say this in the spirit of no mere ecclesiastical 
 quarrel with the worship of the Virgin. We know how soon it 
 was that Paganism mingled its superstitions with the simple wor- 
 ship of the Crucified ; and we can well, therefore, understand how, 
 in virtue of all the gentle and sacred associations that linked them- 
 selves with her name, her character, her peculiar connection with 
 Jesus, Mary should have come to be regarded with an idolatrous 
 regard. Nay, further, looking back upon those dark ages when, 
 under the grinding tread of Northern barbarism, the civilisation of 
 Southern Europe was wellnigh obliterated, we can see a beauty, a 
 tenderness, a power in the worship of Mary ; in the prayers and the 
 hymns addressed to her, which turned them into a softening and 
 civilising element. Nay, further still, were we asked, among all the 
 idolatries that have prevailed upon this idol-loving, idol- worshipping 
 world of ours, to say which one of them it was that touched the 
 finest chords of the human heart, awoke the purest and tenderest 
 emotions, had the best and most humanising effect, we do not know 
 but that we should fix upon this worship of the Virgin. But
 
 536 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 delivered, as we have been, from the bondage of the Middle- Age 
 superstitions ; with that narrative in our hands which tells us how 
 our Lord himself dealt with Mary ; standing as we do, or ought to 
 do, in the full light of that great truth, that " there is one God, and 
 one Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus," it 
 cannot but be matter of surprise, that this worship of the Virgin 
 should still prevail in so many of the enlightened countries of 
 Christendom ; suggesting the reflection, how slowly it is that the 
 human spirit emancipates itself from any natural, long-continued, 
 and fondly cherished superstition. 
 
 Keeping now the whole history of Mary's previous connection 
 with our Lord before our eye, and especially their intercourse dur- 
 ing the three years of his public ministry, let us dwell for a moment 
 or two upon Christ's recognition of her from the cross. This affec- 
 tionate recognition in his dying agonies, must have been peculiarly 
 grateful to Mary. His departure from Nazarith, to which he seems 
 to have paid only one short visit afterwards ; his separation from 
 the members of his own family; his engrossment with the great 
 objects of his public life ; the checks he had imposed upon her 
 interference ; the manner in which he had publicly spoken of her ; 
 all these must have created something like a feeling of estrange- 
 ment in Mary's breast, as if he had ceased to be to her all that he 
 once was. How pleasing to her then to learn from that look and 
 speech of kindness, that his love for her remained unchanged ! How 
 soothing to her motherly affection to receive this last, this parting 
 token of his undying affection for her ! She may banish all her 
 fears, bury all her suspicions ; that Son of hers, he loves her still, 
 loves her as he had ever done ; he cannot die without assuring her 
 of that love. But it is more than a simple expression of affection 
 that comes here from the Redeemer's lips. There is a thoughtful 
 care for Mary's future earthly comfort, the securing for her the 
 attention of another son, the providing for her the shelter of a new 
 home. The dying Jesus has present to his thoughts the bereaved, 
 the desolate condition in which his death will leave his mother ; he 
 will make all the provision he can towards alleviating her distress ; 
 silver and gold he has none to give her, but he has what silver and 
 gold could never buy, a hold and power over the heart of one who, 
 if he be well described as the disciple whom Jesus loved, might 
 almost as aptly be described as the disciple who loved Jesus. That 
 hold he will now exercise on her behalf. "Woman, behold thy 
 son!" Woman, not mother: he might, upon this occasion, have 
 restrained himself from calling her so, lest the very mention of her 
 relationship to him should mark her out to that unfriendly crowd, 
 and expose her to their ill-treatment. He is but repeating, how- 
 ever, on the cross, the address of the marriage-feast " Woman, 
 behold thy son !" Mary, perhaps up to that moment, had cherished
 
 THE MOTHER OF OUR LORD. 537 
 
 some hope of his deliverance ; but at that word this hope gives way; 
 she is to lose him ; he is to be her Son no more ; that tie is to be 
 broken, and a new one created in its stead. A better, kinder son 
 than John, Jesus could not have provided ; but, alas ! Mary feels 
 that he can never fill that Son's place ; still there is great kindness 
 in selecting such a substitute. 
 
 To John, no name, no epithet is applied ; Jesus simply looks at 
 him, and says, "Behold thy mother /" John had already been kind 
 to Mary, was at that moment doing what he could to comfort her, 
 would have cared for her, though no special charge of this kind had 
 been given ; but a son's place, that son's place, he could not have 
 felt warranted to assume. Now, however, when Jesus with his 
 dying breath calls upon him to occupy it, he counts it as a high 
 honour conferred upon him. He undertakes the trust, and proceeds 
 to execute it in the promptest and most delicate way. Was he but 
 interpreting aright the look that Jesus gave him, or was he only 
 obeying an impulse of thoughtful, son-like affection in his own 
 breast ? However it was, he saw that Mary's strength was failing, 
 that she was unfit for the closing scene ; he instantly led her away 
 to his own home in the city. She was not at the cross when the 
 darkness descended ; she was not there when the last and bitterest 
 agonies were borne. You search for her in vain among the women 
 who stood afar off beholding to the last. By John's kind act of 
 instant withdrawal, she was saved what she might not have had 
 strength to bear; and though that withdrawal was neither pre- 
 scribed nor suggested by our Lord himself, one can well imagine 
 with what a grateful look he would follow that son as he discharged 
 this the first office of his new relationship; how pleased he too 
 would be that a mother's heart was spared the pangs of witnessing 
 that suffering which drew from him the cry, " My God, my God ! 
 why hast thou forsaken me 1 " Mary showed the submissiveness 
 of her disposition in yielding to John's suggestion, and retiring 
 from the cross, and you never see her but once again in the Gospel 
 narrative. Neither at the resurrection nor at the ascension, nor 
 during the forty days tha.t intervened between them, is her name 
 mentioned, or does she appear. The one and only glance we get 
 of her is in the first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, where her 
 name and that of our Lord's brother, who had come then to believe 
 on him, are mentioned among the hundred and twenty who, after 
 the ascension, continued in prayer and supplication, waiting for the 
 promise of the Spirit. 
 
 In that love which in his latest hours Jesus showed to Mary, 
 let us hail the great and perfect example of filial affection he has 
 left behind him. In that mingling with the broader thoughts of 
 a world's redemption which must then have occupied his thoughts, 
 the thoughtful care for her earthly comfort, let us see the evidence
 
 538 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 of how essential a part of all true religion it is to provide, as God 
 enables us, for those whom we leave behind us in this world. 
 Let no pretext of other and higher obligations weaken within our 
 breasts the sense of our obligation to discharge this duty before 
 we die. 
 
 From our Saviour's treatment of Mary let us learn, too, to put 
 in their right place, to estimate according to their real worth, all 
 earthly, all external distinctions. To be the mother of our Lord, 
 that raised her above all other women and we gladly join with 
 all who, upon that ground, would call her blessed ; yet would we 
 still more wish to join heart and soul in our Lord's own saying, 
 that " more blessed is he who heareth the word of God, and doeth 
 it." To be the nearest herald, the immediate harbinger of Jesus, 
 that raised John the Baptist above all the prophets, and ranked him 
 among the greatest of the children of men. But yet there is 
 another connection with Christ, higher and still more honourable 
 a connection in comparison with which the closest of mere external 
 or official bonds sink into absolute insignificance that inward, 
 that spiritual, that eternal tie which binds the humble, contrite, 
 trustful spirit to the Redeemer. To be the least in his kingdom, 
 to be the least among those who truly love and faithfully obey him, 
 is a more enduring, a more illustrious distinction than to be the 
 highest among those upon whom the honours of this world are 
 heaped. And let us bless God for it, that this, the highest honour 
 to which humanity can be exalted, is one that is within the reach 
 of all. It cometh through humility and faith and love : it cometh 
 through the weight of our sin being felt, the worth of our Redeemer 
 being appreciated. It cometh through our becoming as little 
 children, and yielding ourselves up to those gracious influences of 
 the Divine Spirit, by which alone the proud heart can be humbled, 
 and the doubtful heart be assured, and the unloving heart be brought 
 to love. It cometh through the eye of faith being opened to 
 discern the closeness and the reality of the unseen world, that 
 world of spirits, whose all-engulfing bosom, when a few more of 
 these numbered years of ours on earth are over, shall have received 
 us all. It cometh from our giving to all that concerns our spiritual 
 state, our spiritual welfare and preparation for futurity, that pre- 
 dominance in our regards, our affections, our lives, to which their 
 inherent, their surpassing worth, entitles them. It springs from 
 our caring less for the honour that cometh from man, and more for 
 that honour which cometh from God only. 
 
 Finally, let us realise those relationships to one another estab- 
 lished in Christ our Lord, which, in their closeness, their blessed- 
 ness, their enduringness, so far outmeasure all the other relation- 
 ships of this human life. Why was John selected to take Christ's 
 place, to be a second son to Mary 1 Why was Mary so specially
 
 THE DARKNESS AND THE DESERTION. 539 
 
 committed to his charge ? She had other sons, upon whom the 
 duty naturally devolved. They, indeed, as yet were unbelievers ; 
 and upon that ground might fitly have been excluded. But were 
 there not two of her own sister's sons among the twelve 1 Why 
 pass the sister and the nephews over, and select John to stand to 
 her in this new relationship ? It may have been that John was 
 better placed than they, as to outward circumstances abler to 
 provide a home f the bereaved ; but can we doubt that another 
 and still weightier consideration determined the Saviour's choice 
 the spiritual affinity between John and Mary ; his capacity to enter 
 into all her sorrows ; his power by sympathy to support 1 And ties 
 kindred to those which bound John and Mary together, do they 
 not still bind together those whose hearts have been taught to beat 
 in unison, and who have been formed to be mutual helps and 
 comforts amid the trials and bereavements of life 1 Thank God for 
 it, if he has given you any such support as Mary and John found 
 in each other; and rejoice in the belief, that those relationships 
 which are grounded on and spring out of our oneness in Jesus 
 Christ, partake not of the mutability of this earthly scene, but, 
 destined to outlive it, are impressed with the seal of eternity. 
 
 X. 
 
 THE DARKNESS AND THE DESERTION. 
 MARK xv. 33, 34. 
 
 THE full bright sun of an eastern sky has been looking down on 
 what these men are doing who have nailed Jesus to the cross, and 
 are standing mocking and gibing him. The mid-day hour has come ; 
 when suddenly there falls a darkness which swallows up the light, 
 and hangs a funereal pall around the cross : no darkness of an 
 eclipse that could not be as the moon then stood no darkness 
 which any natural cause whatever can account for. As we think of 
 it, many questions rise to which no answer can now be given. Did 
 it come slowly on, deepening and deepening till it -reached its point 
 of thickest gloom 1 or was it, as we incline to believe, as instan- 
 taneous in its entrance as its exit : at the sixth hour, covering all in 
 a moment with its dark mantle ; at the ninth hour, in a moment 
 lifting that mantle off ] Was it total or partial : a darkness deep as 
 that of moonless, starless midnight, wrapping the cross so thickly 
 round, that not the man who stood the nearest to it could see aught 
 of the sufferer 1 Or was it the darkness of a hazy twilight obscuring 
 but not wholly concealing, which left the upraised form of the 
 Redeemer dimly visible through the gloom? Was it local and 
 limited, confined to Jerusalem or Judea ; or did it spread over the
 
 540 THE LAST DAT OF THE PASSION. 
 
 entire enlightened portion of the globe ? We cannot telL We may 
 say of it, and say truly, that it was inanimate nature, supplying, in 
 her mute elements, that sympathy with her suffering Lord which 
 was denied by man. Men gazed rudely on the sight, but the sun 
 refused to look on it, hiding his face for a season. Men would 
 leave the Crucified, exposed in shame and nakedness, to die ; but 
 an unseen hand was stretched forth to draw the drapery of darkness 
 around the sufferer, and hide him from vulgar gaze. 
 
 But the truest and deepest significance of this darkness is as a 
 type or emblem of the horror of that great darkness which at this 
 period enveloped the spirit of the Redeemer. The outer incidents 
 if there were any, of those three hours of darkness, remain untold. 
 We are left only to believe that its sudden descent wrought like a 
 spell upon the actors and spectators ; it stopped each wagging head, 
 it silenced each gibing tongue ; not a word seems to have been 
 spoken, not a thing done ; there they stood, or there they lay, with 
 that spell upon them, wondering what this darkness meant. We 
 can easily enough imagine whatYAez/ may have fancied or felt during 
 that strange period of suspense ; but who can imagine what He was 
 thinking, how He, the Saviour, was feeling in that dread and awful 
 interval? No eye perhaps may have pierced the outer darkness 
 that shrouded his suffering body ; still less may any human eye 
 penetrate that deeper darkness which shrouded his suffering soul. 
 We are left here without a single external index; not a look, a 
 word, an act, to tell us what was going on within the Redeemer's 
 spirit, till the ninth hour came, the moment which preceded the 
 rolling away of the darkness, and the return of the clear shining of 
 the day, and then the only sound that strikes the ear is the 
 agonising cry "My God, my God ! why hast thou forsaken me ?" 
 a cry wrung, as it were, from the sufferer's lips, when the severe 
 agony of his soul has reached its last, its culminating, its closing 
 point; a cry which, revealing somewhat of the interior of the 
 burdened heart from which it springs, leaves still more unrevealed ; 
 a cry which, after we have listened to it, and pondered it, and 
 turned it over and over again in our thoughts, seems to grow darker 
 instead of brighter to our eye, and of which we become at last con- 
 vinced that it was the simple, spontaneous, irrepressible outcry of a 
 spirit tried to the last limit of endurance ; the expression of what 
 must for ever remain to us an indescribable, unfathomable, unim- 
 aginable woe. 
 
 It would strip, indeed, this cry of the suffering Saviour of all 
 difficulty and mystery, could we look upon him as a man, and 
 nothing more ; could we look upon him in dying as subject to the 
 same mental and spiritual, as well as bodily weakness with any ot 
 ourselves; could we believe that such doubts and fears as have 
 eclipsed the faith, and darkened for a time the hopes of other dying
 
 THE DARKNESS AND THE DESEKTION. 541 
 
 men, had place within his breast ; could we interpret this saying as 
 the utterance of a momentary despondency, a transient despair. 
 "We are disposed to go the utmost length in attributing to the 
 humanity of our Lord all the sinless frailties of our nature ; and had 
 we seen him struggling in agony through the tedious death-throes of 
 dissolution, the sinking body drawing the sinking spirit down along 
 with it, and draining it of all its strength, had it been from a 
 spirit enfeebled to the uttermost, its very powers of thought 
 and apprehension, of faith and feeling, giving way, that this sad 
 lament proceeded, we can scarcely tell whether or not it would have 
 been inconsistent with a right estimate of the humanity of Jesus to 
 attribute to him such a momentary oppression under doubt and 
 fear as should have forced this exclamation from his lips, prompted 
 by his obscured perception of his personal relationship with the 
 Father. 
 
 It stands, however, in the way of our receiving any such inter- 
 pretation of this saying, that it came from one whose intellect was 
 so clear and unclouded that the moment after it was uttered he 
 could reflect on all he had to say or do in order that the Scripture 
 might be fulfilled, and whose bodily powers were so far from being 
 reduced to the last extremity of weakness, that it was " with a loud 
 voice," betokening a vigour as yet unexhausted, that he uttered the 
 despairing cry. 
 
 Besides, we have only to look back upon the few days that 
 preceded the crucifixion, to find evidence that there mingled with 
 the sufferings which Christ endured upon the cross an element 
 altogether different from the common pains of dying On one of 
 the last days of his teaching in the temple, certain Greeks desired 
 to see him. Their earnest request sounded to his prophetic ear like 
 the entreaty of the entire Gentile world. It threw him into a 
 sublime reverie of thought. Bright visions of a distant future, 
 when all men should be drawn unto him, rose before his eye ; but 
 with them the vision of a future even then at hand, of his being 
 lifted up upon the cross. A sudden change comes over his spirit. 
 He ceases to think of, to speak with man. His eye closes upon 
 the crowd that stands around. He is alone with the Father. 
 A dark cloud wraps his spirit. He fears as he enters it From the 
 bosom of the darkness there comes an agitated voice : " Now is my 
 soul troubled ; and what shall I say ? Father, save me from this 
 hour : but for this cause came I unto this hour. Father, glorify 
 thy name ;" some deep, inward trouble of the heart, a shrinking 
 from it, a cry for deliverance, a meek submission to the Divine will. 
 You have all these repeated in order, and with greater intensity in 
 the Garden of Gethsemane : " My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even 
 unto death. my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass 
 from me : nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt." Here,
 
 542 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 once more, there is the agony, the shrinking, the petition, the 
 acquiescence. 
 
 What so troubled Jesus in the Temple ? what threw him into 
 that bloody sweat in the Garden ? what drew from him these strong 
 cryings for deliverance 1 Can any one believe that it was the mere 
 prospect of dying upon a cross which thus shook his spirit to the 
 very centre ? To believe so, were to degrade him beneath a level 
 to which multitudes of his followers have risen. Deaths far more 
 formidable, more protracted, more excruciating, they have contem- 
 plated beforehand with unruffled composure, and endured with 
 unshrinking fortitude. Shall the disciple be greater than the 
 master 1 No ; there was something more in that hour for which 
 Jesus came into this world, something more in that cup which he 
 took into his trembling hands, than the mere bitterness of appre- 
 hended dissolution. He has himself taught us, by the language 
 which he employed, to identify the hour and the cup. He has 
 taught us, too, that this hour was on him in the Temple ; this cup 
 was there raised by him to his lips. The same hour was on him 
 in the Garden ; of the same cup he there drank large and bitter 
 draughts. It was that same hour which came upon him on the 
 cross, to run out its course during the supernatural darkness ; it was 
 that same cup which he took once more into his hands, to drain to 
 the very dregs. Here also, as in the Temple, in the Garden, you 
 have the same features, the conflict, the recoil, the victory. 
 Perhaps the inward trouble and agony of his soul reached a some- 
 what higher pitch on Calvary than in Gethsemane : that bitter cry 
 " My God, my God ! why hast thou forsaken me ?" sounds to 
 our ear as coming from a profounder depth of woe than any into 
 which Jesus had ever sunk before ; but in source and in character 
 the sorrow of the Saviour's spirit was in each of the three instances 
 the same a purely mental or spiritual grief, unconnected in two of 
 these cases with any bodily endurance, and, in the third, carefully 
 to be distinguished from those pains of dissolution with which it 
 mingled. 
 
 Whence did that grief arise ? what were its elements ? how came 
 it to be so accumulated and condensed, and to exert such a pressure 
 upon the spirit of our Redeemer, as to force from him those prayers 
 in the Garden, this exclamation on the cross ? It was because he 
 stood as our great Head and Representative, and suffered in our 
 room and stead : " He was wounded for our transgressions, he was 
 bruised for our iniquities ;" he made "his soul an offering for sin;" 
 "he died the just for the unjust, to bring us to God." The 
 testimony of the Scriptures to the vicarious, sacrificial, atoning 
 character of the sufferings and death of Christ, is clear, emphatic, 
 multiform, and unambiguous. But when we go beyond the simple 
 statements of the Inspired Record, and, admitting the great fact of
 
 THE DARKNESS AND THE DESERTION. 543 
 
 the Atonement, inquire into the how and the wherefore of that 
 fact, resolved to accept implicitly all that the Scriptures teach, but 
 equally resolved not to go beyond its teaching, nor add any theories 
 of our own to its simple and impressive lessons, we feel ourselves 
 on the borders of a region too remote, too mysterious, for eyes like 
 ours fully and accurately to survey. 
 
 Let us, however, that we may catch a distant sight of one inner 
 fountain of our Kedeemer's sufferings, approach it by a path which, 
 for some distance at least, is not obscure. It is said in Scripture 
 that Christ bore our sins in his own body on the tree ; it is said, 
 also, that he bore our griefs, and carried our sorrows. Our griefs 
 he bore by sympathy ; our sorrows he carried by entering into them 
 and making them his own. That central heart of love and pity 
 opened itself, at every point, to all the forms and varieties of human 
 woe. Its sympathy stood free from all those restraints that lie upon 
 ours. Our ignorance, our selfishness, our coldness, our incapacity 
 for more than a few intense affections, narrow and weaken the 
 sympathy we feel. But he knows all, can feel for all ; so that not 
 a pang of grief wrings any human bosom but sends an answering 
 thrill through the loving, pitying heart of our Divine Eedeemer. 
 Human sympathy, too, deepens, takes a peculiar character, a 
 peculiar tenderness, according to the closeness and dearness of the 
 tie which binds us to the sufferer. A mother's fellow-feeling with 
 a suffering child is something very different from what any stranger 
 can experience. And it is not simply as one of us, as a brother 
 man, that Jesus feels for us in our sorrows. It is as one who has 
 linked himself to our race, or rather has linked our race to him by 
 a tie the nature and force of which we are little capable of under- 
 standing. Only we may say, that parent was never bound to child, 
 nor child to parent, in a bond so close as that which binds Jesus 
 Christ and those whom he came to redeem. It would need his own 
 omniscience to fathom the depth and intensity imparted to his 
 sympathy by the peculiarity of that relationship in which it has 
 pleased him to place himself to his own. 
 
 Now, Christ's is as much the central conscience as the central 
 heart of humanity. Conceive him entering into a connection with 
 human sin, kindred to that into which he enters with human sorrow, 
 realising to himself, as he only could, its extent, its inveteracy, its 
 malignity : in this way taking on him all our sins, and letting the 
 full impression of their inherent turpitude, their ruinous results, fall 
 upon his spirit, who shall calculate for us the bulk and weight of 
 that burden which might thus come to be borne by him 1 Once, in 
 a Jewish synagogue, he looked round upon a small company of men, 
 and he was grieved because of the hardness of their hearts. Let us 
 imagine that grief amplified and intensified to the uttermost by our 
 Lord's taking upon himself the sin of the world. Let all the hard-
 
 544 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 ness of all men's hearts, all the hard speeches that ungodly sinners 
 have spoken, the ungodly deeds they have done; let all the 
 impurity, and injustice, and cruelty, and profanity, and impiety 
 which have been perpetrated under these heavens of which the 
 enmity and malignity which nailed him to the cross might be taken 
 as a specimen and index ; let all that vast accumulation of human 
 iniquity be conceived of as present to the Redeemer's thoughts, 
 appropriated and realised by him as the iniquity of those to whom 
 he had linked himself by a bond of closest fellowship, of undying, 
 unquenchable love ; let all the sins of that world he came to save 
 gather in and press down upon the pure and holy and loving spirit 
 of the man Christ Jesus : Do we not get a dim and distant sight of 
 a fountain of woe thus opened within, sufficient to send forth waters 
 of bitterness which might wellnigh overwhelm his soul, putting his 
 capacity to suffer to an extreme trial ? 
 
 Further still, may we not imagine that as he made thus the sins 
 of our sinful world his own, and thought and dwelt upon that 
 holiness of God, upon which they were such terrible invasions ; the 
 wrath of the Holy One, which they had so thoroughly deserved, and 
 so deeply had provoked ; the separation from God, the banishment 
 from his presence, the death they did so righteously entail ; that, 
 in the very fulness of that love and sympathy which made him 
 identify himself with us men for our salvation, the horror of such a 
 darkness settled over the mind of the Redeemer that the face even 
 of his heavenly Father for a moment seemed obscured, that its smile 
 seemed changed into a frown, that the momentary apprehension 
 seized him that in himself that death, that separation from the 
 Father, was about to be realised, so that from his oppressed, 
 bewildered, faltering manhood, there came forth the cry, " My God, 
 my God ! why hast thou forsaken me 1" 
 
 Let us not forget that there was not, indeed could not be the 
 nature of the connection forbade it any absolute or entire desertion 
 of the Son by the Father. " Therefore," said Jesus, " doth my 
 Father love me, because I lay down my life for the sheep." Could 
 that love be withdrawn from Jesus when he was in the very act of 
 laying down his life? "This," said the Father, "is my beloved 
 Son, in whom I am well pleased." Was there ever a time at which 
 he was more pleased with him than when he was offering himself 
 up in that sacrifice so acceptable to God 1 Nor does the Son ever 
 entirely lose his hold of the Father. Even in this moment of amaze- 
 ment and oppression it is still to God, as his God, that he speaks : 
 "My God! my God! why hast thou forsaken me 1 ?" It was the 
 sensible comfort only of the Divine presence and favour which were 
 for the time withdrawn ; the felt inflowings of the Divine love 
 which were for the time checked. But what a time of agony must 
 that have been to him who knew, as none other could, what it was
 
 THE DARKNESS AND THE DESERTION. 545 
 
 to bask in the light of his Father's countenance ; who felt, as none 
 other could, that his favour indeed was life ! On us, so little do 
 we know or feel what it is to be forsaken by God, the thought of 
 it, or sense of it, may make but a slight impression, produce but 
 little heartfelt misery ; but to him it was the consummation and the 
 concentration of all woe, beyond which there was and could be no 
 deeper anguish for the soul. 
 
 I have thus presented to you but a single side, as it were, of that 
 sorrow unto death which rent the bosom of the Redeemer, as he was 
 offering himself a sacrifice for us upon the cross. Perhaps it is the 
 side which lies nearest to us, and is most open to our comprehension. 
 Certainly it is one the looking at which believingly is fitted to tell 
 powerfully on our consciences and hearts to make us feel the 
 exceeding sinfulness of our sin, and set us hopefully and trustfully 
 to struggle with the temptations that beset our path. 
 
 In a household which enjoyed all the benefits of high culture 
 and Christian care, one of the children committed a grievous and 
 unexpected fault he told a falsehood to cover a petty theft: 
 rebuke and punishment were administered, carried farther than they 
 had ever been before, but without effect. The offender was not 
 awakened to any real or deep sorrow for his offence. The boy's 
 insensibility quite overcame his father. Sitting in the same room 
 with his obstinate and sullen child, he bent his head upon his hands, 
 and, sobbing, burst into a flood of tears. For a moment or two the 
 boy looked on in wonder, he then crept gradually nearer and 
 nearer to his sobbing parent, and at last got up upon his father's 
 knees, asking, in a low whisper, why it was that he was weeping so. 
 He was told the reason. It wrought like a spell upon his young 
 heart ; the sight of his father suffering so bitterly on his account 
 was more than he could bear. He flung his little arms around his 
 father, and wept along with him. That father never needed to 
 correct his child again for any like offence. And surely, if, in that 
 great sorrow which overwhelmed the spirit of our Redeemer on the 
 cross, there mingled, as one of its ingredients, a grief like, in origin 
 and character, to that which wrung this father's heart, and melted his 
 child to penitence, the sight and thought of it ought to exert a 
 kindred power over those for whom Jesus died. 
 
 A younger son is guilty of a great offence against his father. 
 His elder brother, in acting the part of a 'mediator between the 
 offending child and his offended parent, might voluntarily submit 
 to the exact and the full punishment which his younger brother had 
 deserved, by doing so might turn away the father's wrath, and 
 earn the title to a brother's gratitude. But what if the offender 
 sees his elder brother, at the pure and simple impulse of love, 
 melted into a profound and heart-breaking grief, yearning over him, 
 weeping over him, taking on himself a suffering far more acute thai? 
 2 M
 
 546 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 that which the lash of parental discipline might righteously have 
 inflicted on the offender, would not the sight of the pain that his 
 conduct had given one who loved him so tenderly, tell most 
 powerfully in the way of quickening him to a sense of his wrong- 
 doing 1 Transfer this to our Elder Brother, the Mediator with our 
 offended Father in heaven. The exact punishment which our sin 
 entails remorse, despair, the sting of a torturing conscience, the 
 felt abiding misery of a soul cut off from the Divine favour Jesus 
 could not literally bear. He has, indeed, borne that for us which 
 has satisfied the Divine justice, and been accepted as a full and 
 adequate atonement for our transgression; but may it not have 
 been that the suffering in our room and stead, which was accepted 
 of the Father, was part of the suffering which our great sin and his 
 great love drew down on him, who, by linking himself to us by the 
 tie of a common humanity, laid a brother's heart open to such a 
 sorrow for our sin as none but the Eternal Son of the Father could 
 have endured? Surely, in the consideration that it was in such 
 kind of suffering with and for our sins that the great Atonement of 
 the cross, in a measure at least, consisted, there is one of the most 
 direct and powerful of appeals, one singularly fitted to touch, to 
 soften, to subdue. 
 
 I am very conscious how little anything which has as yet been 
 said is fitted to throw full or satisfactory light upon that most 
 mysterious of all the mysterious sayings of our Lord the plaintive, 
 lonely, loud, and bitter cry which emanated from the cross, which, 
 piercing the overhanging darkness, was heard with wonder in the 
 heavens. It came out of the depth of an anguish that we have no 
 plummet in our hand to sound ; and we become only the more 
 conscious how unfathomable that depth is, by trying it here and 
 there with the line of our short-reaching intellect. Instead of 
 hoping to find the bottom anywhere, let us pause upon the brink ; 
 adoring, wondering, praising that great love of our most gracious 
 Saviour, which has a height and a depth, a length and a breadth in 
 it, surpassing all human, all angelic measurement : 
 
 " Oh, never, never canst thou know 
 
 What then for thee the Saviour bore, 
 The pangs of that mysterious woe 
 
 Which wrung his bosom's inmost core. 
 Yes, man for man perchance may brave 
 The horrors of the yawning grave ; 
 And friend for friend, or son for sire, 
 Undaunted and unmoved expire, 
 From love, or piety, or pride ; 
 But who can die as Jesus died ?"
 
 " IT IS FINISHED." 547 
 
 XL 
 
 "IT IS FINISHED." 
 MATT. xxvn. 47-50 ; MARK xv. 35-37 ; LUKE xxm. 46 ; JOHN xii. 28-30. 
 
 WITH the arrival of the ninth hour, the outer darkness cleared 
 away, and with it too the horrors of that inner darkness from whose 
 troubled bosom the cry at last came forth, " My God, my God ! 
 why hast thou forsaken me ?" That mental agony, one of whose 
 ingredients perhaps to us the most intelligible I have endea- 
 voured to describe, had been endured. The hour for which he 
 came into the world has run its course ; the cup, which with such a 
 trembling hand he had put to shrinking lips, has been drunk to its 
 dregs ; the powers of darkness have made on him their last assault, 
 and been repelled ; the momentary darkness of his Father's counte- 
 nance has passed away. As the sun of nature dispels the gloom 
 that for these three hours had hung around the scene, and sheds 
 once more his illuminating beams upon the cross ; even so the light 
 of an answering inward joy comes to cheer in death the spirit of our 
 Eedeemer. It is not in darkness, whether outward or inward, not 
 in darkness, but in light, in full, clear, unclouded light that Jesus 
 dies. 
 
 The first, however, and immediate effect of the lifting from his 
 oppressed and burdened heart that load of inward grief which had 
 been laid upon it was a reviving consciousness of his bodily con- 
 dition, the awakening of the sensation of a burning thirst. Let 
 the spirit be thoroughly absorbed by any very strong emotion, and 
 the bodily sensations are for the time unfelt or overborne, they fail 
 to attract notice ; but let the tide of that overwhelming emotion 
 retreat, and these sensations once more exert their power. In the 
 shock of battle, the excited combatant may receive his death- wound, 
 and be unconscious of pain. It is when they lay him down in quiet 
 to die, that exhausted nature betrays a sense of suffering. So is 
 it, after a manner, here with Christ. His lips scarce feel their 
 parchedness as they utter the cry, " My God, my God ! why hast 
 thou forsaken me 1 " Too full, too agitated, is the soul within, to 
 be keenly alive to bodily sensations. But now that the relief from 
 inward agony has come, the cravings of nature return, and first 
 among these the strong desire for something to alleviate the thirst. 
 This thirst, however, so far from entirely engrossing his thoughts, 
 serves but to suggest to the dying Saviour and this shows, as we 
 before remarked, how clear and calm and self-possessed he was to 
 the very last that among all the numerous prophecies which had 
 spoken of the time and manner of his decease, of his being 
 numbered with transgressors, of the shaking of heads, and the
 
 548 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 shooting out of tongues, the parting of his garments, the casting 
 lots for his vesture, there still was one 1 about their giving him in 
 his thirst vinegar to drink, which remained to be fulfilled. As 
 being, then, at once the natural expression of the feeling of the 
 moment, and the means of bringing about the fulfilment of that 
 prophecy, "Jesus said, I thirst." 
 
 In saying so, he made an appeal to the sympathy of his crucifiers, 
 in the belief that they would offer him some of that sour wine, or 
 vinegar, which was the ordinary drink of the Eoman soldiers. Did 
 Jesus know how that appeal would be met and answered? We 
 cannot but believe he did ; and, if so, it stands out as at once the 
 last act in point of time, and one of the lowest in point of degree, 
 of that humiliation before men to which it pleased him to stoop, 
 that he addressed himself as a petitioner to those who treated his 
 petition as they did. Let us try to realise what happened around 
 the cross, immediately after the departure of the three hours' 
 darkness. One might have expected that the natural awe which 
 that darkness had undoubtedly inspired ; the moaning cry, as from 
 one deserted, that came from the cross, as it was rolling away ; the 
 fresh sight of Jesus, upon whose pallid features there lingered the 
 traces of his terrible agony ; and, last of all, his asking of them to 
 drink, would have conspired to awaken pity, or at least to silence 
 scorn. The coming back, however, of the light relieving, perhaps, 
 a dread they might have felt that in the darkness Jesus should 
 escape or be delivered seems to have rekindled that fiendish 
 malignity which now found a last and most demoniac way of 
 expressing itself. "Eli! Eli!" no Jew could possibly misunder- 
 stand the words, or imagine that they were a call to Elias for help. 
 The Eoman soldiers did not know enough about Elias to have 
 fallen on any such interpretation. That the words were taken up, 
 played upon by the bystanders, and turned into a new instrument 
 of mockery, shows to what a fiendish length of heartless, pitiless 
 contempt and scorn such passions as those of these Scribes and 
 Pharisees, if unrestrained, will go. One, indeed, of those around 
 the cross appears to have been touched with momentary pity, 
 perhaps a Eoman soldier, who, when he heard Jesus say, " I thirst," 
 and looked upon his pale, parched lips, ran and took a stalk of 
 hyssop. From what we know of the size of the plant, this stalk 
 could not have been much above two feet long, but it was long 
 enough to reach the lips of Jesus, the feet of a person crucified not 
 being ordinarily elevated more than a foot or two above the ground. 
 This circumstance explains to us how close to the crucified the 
 soldiers must have stood ; how near many of the outstanding 
 crowd may have been ; how natural and easy it was for Jesus to 
 speak to Mary and John as he did. To that stalk of hyssop the 
 i See Psalm Ixix.
 
 " IT IS FINISHED." 549 
 
 man attached a sponge, and, dipping it in the vessel of vinegar, that 
 stood at hand, was putting it to the Saviour's lips, when the 
 mocking crowd cried out, " Let be ; let us see whether Elias will 
 come to save him." This did not stop him from giving Jesus, in 
 his thirst, vinegar to drink. The ancient prophecy he must uncon- 
 sciously fulfil; but it did serve to half-extinguish the prompting 
 upon which he had begun to act, and induce him to take up into his 
 own lips, and to repeat, the current mockery, "Let us see whether 
 Elias will come to take him down." 
 
 When Jesus had received the vinegar, he said, "It is finished!" 
 It does not fall in with the character or purpose of these Lectures, 
 intended to be as purely as possible expository, to take up this 
 memorable expression of our dying Lord^^d^use it as a text out 
 of which a full exposition of the doctrine of the Cross might be 
 derived. Eather, as being more in accordance with our present 
 design, let us endeavour to conceive of and to enter into, as far as 
 it is possible, the spirit and meaning of the expression as employed 
 by our Lord upon the cross. 
 
 First, then, as coming at this time from the Saviour's lips, it 
 betokens an inward and deep sensation of relief, repose ; relief from 
 a heavy burden ; repose after a toilsome labour. To the bearing of 
 that burden, the endurance of that toil, Jesus had long and anxiously 
 looked forward. From that time, if time it may be called, when 
 he undertook the high office of the Mediatorship, from the be- 
 ginning, even from everlasting, through the vista of the future, the 
 cross of his last agony had risen up before his all-seeing eye, .aa 
 the object towards which, notwithstanding the dark shadows cast 
 before it, the thought of his spirit stretched forward. In what 
 manner and with what feeling it was regarded by him in the period 
 which preceded his incarnation, it becomes us not to speak, as we 
 have no means of judging ; but we can mark how he felt regarding 
 it after he became a man. 
 
 In the earlier period of his ministry, Christ practised a strict 
 reserve in speaking of his death. In spite, however, of that self- 
 imposed restraint, broken hints were ever and anon dropping from 
 his lips, sounding quite strange and enigmatical in the ears to which 
 they were addressed. " I have a baptism," said he to his disciples, 
 " to be baptized with, and how am I straitened till it be accom- 
 plished!" When, near the end of his ministry, the necessity for 
 reserve was removed, Jesus spoke openly about his coming death, 
 and always in such a way as to convey the very deepest impression 
 of the profound interest with which he himself contemplated 
 beforehand that great event. So eagerly did he look forward to it, 
 so striking an influence had that prospect even upon his outward 
 aspect and movements, that when, for the last time, he set his face 
 to go up to Jerusalem, and all the things that were to happen to
 
 550 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 him there came rushing into his mind, he " went before " the twelve, 
 as if impatient to get forward. They were amazed, we are told, 
 as he did so ; and as they followed him, and gazed upon him, they 
 were afraid. The reason of this rapid gait and strange expression 
 he revealed, when he took them apart by the way, and told them 
 what his thoughts had been dwelling on. There was but one 
 occasion on which he could freely and intelligibly speak out the 
 sentiments of his heart: it was when he stood with Moses and 
 Elias on the mount, and there, even when invested with the glories 
 of transfiguration, the decease which he was to accomplish at 
 Jerusalem was the one chosen topic of discourse. As the time 
 drew near, still oftener was that great decease before his thoughts ; 
 still heavier did its impending weight appear to press upon his 
 spirit. It was not, it could not be any mere ordinary human death 
 that so occupied the thoughts of Jesus Christ. We endeavoured in 
 our last Lecture to make it apparent to you that the true, the real 
 sufferings of that death lay in another, far deeper region than that 
 to which the ordinary pangs of bodily dissolution belong ; and we 
 cannot but believe that that internal conflict, that inner agony of 
 soul, reserved for the last days and hours of our Redeemer's life, 
 was broken, as it were, into parts, distributed between the Temple, 
 the Garden, the Cross, for the very purpose of making it palpable, 
 even to the eye of the ordinary observer, that the sufferings of the 
 Redeemer's soul formed, as has been well said, the very soul of his 
 sufferings. And when those mysterious sufferings, so long looked 
 forward to, at last were over, the load borne and lifted off, with 
 what a deep, inward feeling of relief, repose, must Jesus have said, 
 "It is finished!" 
 
 Secondly, Connecting this expression with what went so immedi- 
 ately before our Lord's remembrance of all that was needful to be 
 done to him and by him in dying, in order that the Scriptures 
 might be fulfilled it may reasonably be assumed that he meant 
 thereby to declare the final close and completion of that long series 
 of types and prophecies of his death which crowd the pages of the 
 Old Testament Scriptures. In the very number and variety of 
 these types and prophecies, another attestation meets our eye to the 
 pre-eminent importance of that event to which they point. If you 
 take the twenty-four hours which embrace the last night and day 
 of the Redeemer's life, you will find that more frequent and more 
 minute pre-intimations of what occurred throughout their course 
 are to be found in the prophetic pages, than of what happened in 
 any other equal period in the history of our globe. The seemingly 
 trifling character of some of the incidents which are made the 
 subjects of prophecy at first surprises us ; but that surprise changes 
 into wonder as we perceive that they fix our attention upon the 
 death of Jesus Christ, as the central incident of this world's strange
 
 " IT IS FINISHED." 651 
 
 history, the one around which the whole spiritual government of 
 this earth revolves. By all those promises and prophecies, those 
 typical persons and typical events and typical services, the raising 
 of the altar, the slaying of the sacrifice, the institution of the 
 priesthood, the ark with its broken tables and sprinkled mercy-seat, 
 the Passover, the great day of atonement, the passage of the High 
 Priest within the veil ; by the voice of God himself speaking, in the 
 first promise, about the seed of the woman, and the bruising of his 
 heel ; by the wonderful Psalms of David, in which the general descrip- 
 tion of the suffering righteous man passes into those minute details 
 which were embodied in the Crucifixion ; by those rapt utterances 
 of Isaiah, some portions of which read now more like histories of 
 the past than intimations of the future, the eye of this world's hope 
 was turned to that event beforehand, as backward to it the eye of 
 the world's faith has ever since been directed. 
 
 But, Thirdly, that we may make our way into the very heart of 
 its meaning, does not the expression, " It is finished," suggest the 
 idea of a prescribed, a distinct, a definite work, brought to a final, 
 satisfactory, and triumphant conclusion? Spoken in no boastful 
 spirit, it is the language of one who, having had a great commission 
 given him, a great task assigned, announces that the commission 
 has been executed, the task fulfilled. Taking it as the simple 
 announcement of the fact, that some great transaction was brought 
 to its consummation, we ask ourselves, as we contemplate the entire 
 circle of the Redeemer's services to our race, still running out their 
 course, what part of these services was it of which it could be said 
 that it was then finished 1 Here, in the foreground, we have to put 
 that one and perfect sacrifice which he offered up for the sin of the 
 world. Through the Eternal Spirit, he offered himself without 
 spot to God, and by that one sacrifice for sin, once for all, he hath 
 perfected for ever those that are sanctified ; he hath done all that 
 was needed to atone for human guilt, to redeem us from the curse 
 of the law, to finish transgression, to make an end of sin, to make 
 reconciliation for iniquity. 
 
 But again, Christ's death upon the cross brought to a close that 
 obedience to the Divine law, that perfect fulfilment of all the 
 righteousness which it required ; held out to us as the ground upon 
 which we are to find immediate and full acceptance with our Maker. 
 "As by one man's disobedience many were made sinners ; so by the 
 obedience of one shall many be made righteous." " He made him 
 to be sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the 
 righteousness of God in him." "For all have sinned, and come 
 short of the glory of God : being justified freely by his grace, through 
 the redemption that is in Christ Jesus ; whom God hath set forth 
 to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his right- 
 eousness for the remission of sins that are past; to declare, I say,
 
 552 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 at this time his righteousness; that he might be just, and the justi- 
 fier of him which belie veth in Jesus." 
 
 Further still though embraced indeed in the two particulars of 
 the sufferings and services of the Redeemer already mentioned 
 there was finished upon the cross the new, the full, the wonderful 
 revelation of the Father, that unbosoming of the Eternal, the open- 
 ing up to us of the very heart of the Godhead, the exhibition of the 
 mingled love and holiness of our Father who is in heaven. There 
 was completed then that glorious, that attractive, that subduing 
 manifestation of the love of God for sinful men, which carried the 
 Divine Being to the extreme length of suffering and of self-sacrifice, 
 and which has ever formed the most powerful of all instruments for 
 pacifying the conscience, melting the heart, moulding the character, 
 renewing and sanctifying the will. 
 
 Whether, then, he looked up to God, and thought of his having 
 glorified his name, finished the work that had been given him to do; 
 or whether he looked down to man, and thought of the saving power 
 which his cross was to exert over millions upon millions of the 
 human family, it may well have been to Jesus Christ a moment of 
 intensest joy, when his latest pang endured, his last service ren- 
 dered, his strictly vicarious work completed he exclaimed, " It is 
 finished !" 
 
 To Jesus Christ alone was given that joy in dying which springs 
 from the knowledge that all the ends of living and dying had been 
 perfectly answered. Looking upon the career he had pursued, he 
 could see not a single blot nor blank space in the whole. Of what 
 other man, cut off as he was in the midst of his years, could the 
 same be said ? When good and great men die in the full flush of 
 their manhood, the full vigour of their powers, we are apt to mourn 
 the untimely stroke that has laid them low, that has cut short so 
 many of the undertakings they were engaged in, deprived the world 
 of so much service that it was in their heart to have rendered. Nor 
 can any such look back upon the past without this humbling feeling 
 in the retrospect, that many an offence has been committed, many 
 a duty left imperfectly discharged. But for us there is no place for 
 mourning, as we contemplate the death of our Redeemer, which 
 came to close the one and only life which, stainless throughout its 
 every hour, did so thoroughly and to the last degree of the Divine 
 requirement accomplish all that had been intended. And for him 
 it was as if the cup of bitterness having been drunk, the cry of 
 agony as he drained the last drop of it having been uttered, there 
 was given to him, even before he died, to taste a single drop of that 
 other cup that cup of full ecstatic bliss, which the contemplation 
 of the travail of his soul, of the glory it rendered to the Father, the 
 good it did to man, shall never cease to yield. 
 
 But to what practical use are we to turn this declaration of our
 
 " IT IS FINISHED." 553 
 
 dying Saviour ? He rested complacently, gratefully, exultingly, in 
 the thought that his work for us was finished. Shall we not try to 
 enter into the full meaning of this great saying ] Shall we not try, 
 in the way in which it becomes us, to enter with him into that same 
 rest ? For the forgiveness, then, of all our sins, for our acceptance 
 with a holy and righteous God, let us put our sole, immediate, and 
 entire trust upon this finished work of our Redeemer ; let us believe, 
 that whatever obstacles our guilt threw in the way of our being 
 received back into the Divine favour, have been removed; that 
 whatever the holiness of the lawgiver, and the integrity of his law, 
 and the moral interests of his government required in the way of 
 atonement or expiation, has been rendered. Let us look upon the 
 way of access to God as lying quite open to us ; let us take the 
 pardon ; let us enter into peace with God ; let us bring all our guilt 
 and bury it in the depths of his atonement. Let us lay hold of the 
 righteousness of Christ, and clothe ourselves with it in the Divine 
 presence ; and regarding the reconciliation with God, effected by 
 the death of his dear Son, as only the first step or stage of the 
 Christian salvation, let us throw open our whole mind and heart to 
 the blessed influences that Christ's love, his life, his sufferings, his 
 death, his entire example were intended to exert in making us less 
 selfish, more loving, more dutiful, more thankful, more submissive, 
 more holy. 
 
 There still remain, for one or two brief remarks, these last words 
 of our Redeemer, "Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit." 
 The words are borrowed from one of the Psalms. Jesus dies with 
 a passage of the old Hebrew Scriptures on his lips, only he prefaces 
 the words by the epithet so familiar to his lips and heart, "Father." 
 In the depth of his bitter anguish, under the darkness of momentary 
 desolation, he had dropped this phrase. It had been then, " My 
 God, my God !" But now, once more, in the light that shines 
 within, around, he resumes it, and he says, "Father, into thy hands 
 I commit my spirit." If the saying which went before, "It is 
 finished," be taken, as it well may be, as Christ's last word of fare- 
 well to the world he leaves behind, this may be taken as his first 
 word of greeting to the new world that he is about to enter. New 
 world, we say, for though, as the Eternal Son, he was but returning 
 to the glory that he had with the Father before the world was, let 
 us not forget that death was to the humanity of the Lord, as it 
 will be to each and all of us, an entrance upon a new and untried 
 state. It seems to us as if, in these last words of our Elder 
 Brother, it was that nature of ours he wore which breathed itself 
 forth in our hearing ; that human nature which, when the hour of 
 departure comes, looks out with trembling solicitude into the world 
 of spirits, seeking for some one there into whose hands the depart- 
 ing spirit may confidently commit itself. In the "It is finished,"
 
 554 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 the voice of the great High Priest, the Eternal Son of the Father, 
 predominates. In the " Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit," 
 is it not the voice of the man Christ Jesus that mainly salutes our 
 ear ? No timidity, indeed, nor fear, nor any such trembling awe as 
 any of us might fitly feel in dying. Nothing of these ; not a shadow 
 of them here ; yet certainly solemnity, concern, the sense as of a 
 need of some support, some upbearing hand. And shall vve not 
 thank our Saviour, that not only has he made the passage before us, 
 and opened for us, in doing so, the gate to eternal life, but taught 
 us, by his own example, not to wonder if our weak human nature, 
 as it stands upon the brink, should look out with an eager solicitude 
 to find the hands into which, in making the great transition, it may 
 throw itself? 
 
 And where shall we find those hands ? He found them in the 
 hands of that Father, who at all times had been so well pleased 
 with him. We find them in his hands who went thus before us to 
 his Father and our Father, to his God and our God. He too found 
 them there who has left us the earliest example how a true Christian 
 may and ought to die. Considering the small number of the Lord's 
 disciples, we may believe that Stephen was not only the first of the 
 Christian martyrs, but actually the first after the crucifixion who 
 fell asleep in Jesus. Can we doubt that in dying the last words of 
 Jesus were in Stephen's memory ? There had been too many points 
 of resemblance between his own and his Master's trial and condem- 
 nation, for Stephen not to have the close of the Kedeemer's life 
 before his mind. His dying prayer is an echo of that which came 
 from his Master's lips ; the same, yet changed. It might do for the 
 sinless one to say, "Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit." 
 It is not for the sinful to take up at once and appropriate such 
 words; so, turning to Jesus, the dying martyr says, " Lord Jesus, 
 receive my spirit," in that simple, fervent, confiding petition, leaving 
 behind him, for all ages, the pattern of a sinner's dying prayer, 
 modelled upon the last words of the dying Saviour. 
 
 XII. 
 
 THE ATTENDANT MIRACLES. 
 MATT. xxvn. 51-54 ; MARK xv. 39 ; LUKE xxni. 47-49 ; JOHN xix. 31-37. 
 
 IN all its outward form and circumstance, there scarcely could 
 have been a lowlier entrance into this world of ours than that made 
 by Jesus Christ. The poorest wandering gipsy's child has seldom 
 had a meaner birth. There was no room for Mary in the inn. 
 She brought forth her firstborn son amid the beasts of the stall,
 
 THE ATTENDANT MIRACLES. 555 
 
 and she laid him in a manger. But was that birth which, though 
 it had so little about it to draw the notice of man, was yet the 
 greatest that this earth has ever witnessed to pass by without any 
 token of its greatness given ? No ; other eyes than those of men 
 were fixed on it, and other tongues were loosed to celebrate it. The 
 glory of the Lord shone around the shepherds, and the multitude 
 of the heavenly host, borrowing for a time the speech of Canaan, 
 filled the midnight sky with their praises as they chanted, " Glory 
 to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men." 
 Never was there a lowlier cradle than that in which the new-born 
 Eedeemer lay ; but over what other cradle was there ever such a 
 birth-hymn sung 1 
 
 And as with the birth, so also with the death of Jesus. In all 
 its outward form and circumstance, a more humiliating death than 
 that of being crucified as one of three convicted felons, he could 
 not have died. There was no darker, more degrading passage 
 through which he could have been sent forth from among the living. 
 But was that death of the Eternal Son of God to have no outward 
 marks of its importance imprinted on it ? Left to man, there had 
 been none ; but Heaven will not let it pass unsignalised. And so, 
 at mid-day the darkness came and settled for three hours around 
 the cross ; and when at the ninth hour Jesus gave up the ghost, the 
 veil of the Temple was torn in twain from the top to the bottom, 
 and the rocks rent, and the graves opened. These were the 
 external seals which the hand of the Omnipotent stamped upon the 
 event, proclaiming its importance. But these seals were also 
 symbols ; they were more than mere preternatural indications that 
 this was no common death. Each in its way told something about 
 the character and object of this death. The mystery of those 
 hidden sufferings of the Eedeemer's spirit, the inner darkening of 
 the light of his Father's countenance, stood shadowed forth in the 
 three hours' darkness. The rending of the veil had a meaning of 
 its own, which it scarcely needed an apostle to interpret. To the 
 few eyes that witnessed it, it must have been a most mysterious 
 spectacle. Jesus died at the third hour after mid-day ; the very 
 hour when eager crowds of worshippers would be thronging into 
 the courts of the Temple, and all would be preparing for the even- 
 ing sacrifice. Within the Holy Place, kindling perhaps the many 
 lights of the golden candlestick, some priests would be busy before 
 the inner veil which hung between them and the Holy of Holies : 
 that veil no thin, old, time-worn piece of faded drapery, but fresh, 
 and strong, and thickly woven, for they renewed it year by year ; 
 that Holy of Holies the dark, secluded apartment within which 
 lay the ark of the covenant, with cherubim above it shadowing the 
 mercy-sent, which no mortal footstep was permitted to invade, save 
 that of the High Priest once only every year. How strange, how
 
 556 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 awful to the ministering priests, standing before that veil, to feel 
 the earth tremble beneath their feet, and to see the strong veil 
 grasped, as if by two unseen hands of superhuman strength, and 
 torn down in the middle from top to bottom, the glaring light of 
 day, that never, for long centuries gone by, had entered there, flung 
 into that sacred tenement, and all its mysteries laid open to vulgar 
 gaze. The Holy Ghost by all this signified that while as yet that 
 first tabernacle was standing, the way into the holiest, the access 
 to God, was not yet made manifest ; but now, Christ being come, 
 to offer himself without spot to God, neither by the blood of goats 
 nor calves, but by his own blood, to enter into the true Holy of Holies, 
 even as he died on Calvary that veil was rent asunder thus within 
 the Temple to teach us that a new and living way, open to all, 
 accessible to all, had been consecrated for us through the rending 
 of the Redeemer's flesh, that we might have boldness to enter into 
 the holiest, and might draw near, each one of us, to God, with a 
 new heart and in full assurance of faith. Little of all this may 
 those few priests have known who stood that day, gazing with awe- 
 struck wonder upon that working of the Divine and unseen hand, 
 to them a sign of terror, rather than a symbol of what the death 
 on Calvary had done. We read, however, that not long afterwards 
 within a year many priests became obedient unto the faith ; 
 and it pleases us to think that among those who, from the inner 
 heart of Judaism, from the stronghold of its priestly caste, were 
 converted unto Christ, some of them may have been numbered 
 whose first movement in that direction was given them as they 
 witnessed that rending of the veil, that laying OPEN of the Most 
 Holy Place. 
 
 " And the earth did quake : and the rocks rent ; and the graves 
 were opened " the main office, let us believe, of that earthquake 
 which accompanied, or immediately followed upon the death of 
 Christ, not to strike terror into the hearts of men ; not to herald 
 judgments upon this earth; not to swallow up the living in its 
 opening jaws ; no, but to shake the domains of death ; to break the 
 stony fetters of the dead ; to lay open the graves, out of which the 
 bodies of the saints might arise. It seems clear enough, from the 
 words which Matthew uses who is the only one of the Evangelists 
 who alludes to the event, that they did not come out of their 
 graves till the morning of our Lord's own resurrection. It is 
 scarcely conceivable that they had been re-animated before that 
 time, and lain awake in their graves till his rising called them from 
 their tombs. Then they did arise, and went into the Holy City, 
 and appeared unto many, one certainly, of the most mysterious 
 incidents which attended the death and resurrection of the Saviour, 
 suggesting many a question : Who were they that thus arose ? were 
 they of the recently dead, recognised by loving relatives in the
 
 THE ATTENDANT MIRACLES. 557 
 
 Holy City ; or were they chosen from the buried of many bygone 
 generations 1 Did they return to their sepulchres, or did the grave 
 never more close over them ? Did they, after a brief appearance in 
 the Holy City, pass into the Heavenly Jerusalem 1 or did they linger 
 upon this earth, to be the companions of our Lord during those 
 forty days, so small a portion of which is occupied by Christ's 
 appearances to his disciples, the rest spent where and how we know 
 not ; and did they, that ministry to Jesus over, go up with him 
 into the heavenly places 1 All about them is hid in the deepest 
 obscurity. Like shadows they come, like shadows they depart. 
 This, however, their presence told, that the voice which from the 
 cross cried, "It is finished," went where sound of human voice had 
 never gone before, and did what sound of human voice had never 
 done. It was heard among the dead ; it stirred the heavy sleepers 
 there, and piercing the stony sepulchre, went quivering into ears long 
 sealed against all sound. And when the third morning dawned, 
 these bodies of the saints arose, to complete as it were the pledge 
 and promise of the general resurrection of the dead which our 
 Lord's own rising carried with it, and having done that office, 
 silently and mysteriously withdrew. You may have sometimes seen 
 a day in early spring, stolen from the coming summer, a day of 
 sunshine so bright and warm, of air so bland, of breeze so gentle, 
 that, as if fancying that her resurrection time had come, dead 
 nature woke, buds began to burst, flower leaves to unfold, and 
 birds to sing, all to be shut up again in death, as the bleak 
 withering winds of days that followed swept across the plain. Even 
 into such a day did the appearance of these old tenants of the grave 
 turn that of our Lord's resurrection, lightening and enriching it with 
 the promise of the time when all that are in their graves shall hear 
 Christ's voice, and his full and final victory over death and the 
 grave shall be accomplished. 
 
 Mark the Evangelist, to whom we are indebted for so many 
 minute and graphic incidents in the gospel history, tells us that at 
 the moment when Christ expired, the Roman officer in charge was 
 standing over-against him, within a few yards of the cross, gazing on 
 the face of the crucified. He had halted there as the darkness 
 rolled away. He heard that loud and piercing cry, as of one 
 forsaken, come from the lips of Jesus. He saw the change come 
 over the Saviour's countenance, the light that spread over those 
 pallid features, the joy that beamed from those uplifted eyes. 
 Another and a louder cry, not now the cry as of one sinking in 
 conflict, but of one rejoicing in victory, when suddenly Jesus bows 
 his head and gives up the ghost ; that moment, too, the earthquake 
 shook the earth, and the cross of Jesus trembled before the 
 Roman's eyes. The shaking earth, the trembling cross, impressed 
 him less, as Mark lets us know, than the loud cry so instantly
 
 558 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 followed by death. He had, perhaps, been present at other 
 crucifixions, and knew well how long the band he ruled was 
 ordinarily required to watch the crucified. But he had never seen, 
 he had never known, he had never heard of a man dying upon a 
 cross within six hours. He had seen other men expire ; had watched 
 weak nature as it wanes away at death the voice sinking into 
 feebleness with its last efforts at articulation, but he had never 
 heard a man in dying speak in tones like these. And so impressed 
 was he with what he saw and heard, that instantly and sponta- 
 neously he exclaimed, "Truly this man was the Son of God!" 
 Foreigner and Gentile as he was, he may have attached no higher 
 meaning to the epithet than Pilate did when he said to Jusus, " Art 
 thou then the Son of God ?" This much, however, he meant to 
 say, that truly and to his judgment this Jesus was more than human 
 was divine was that very Son of God, whatever this might 
 mean, which these Jews had condemned him for claiming to be. 
 Such was the faith so quickly kindled in this Gentile breast. The 
 Cross is early giving tokens of its power. It lays hold of the dying 
 thief, and opens to him the gates of Paradise. It lays hold of this 
 Centurion, and works in him a faith which, let us hope, deepened 
 into a trust in Jesus as his Saviour. From such unlikely quarters 
 came the two testimonies borne to the Lord's divinity the day he 
 died. 
 
 The Centurion speaks of him as one already dead. The pale face 
 and the drooping head tell all the lookers on that he has breathed 
 his last. The great interest of the day is over ; the crowd breaks 
 up ; group after group returning to Jerusalem, in very different 
 mood and temper from that in which they had come out a few 
 hours before. It had been little more at first than an idle curiosity 
 which had drawn many of those onlookers that morning from their 
 dwellings. Cherishing, perhaps, no particular ill-will to Jesus, they 
 had joined the procession on its way to Calvary. They gather by 
 the way that this Jesus had been convicted as a pretender, who had 
 impiously claimed to be their king, their Christ. They see how 
 irritated the High Priests and tueir followers are at him. It is an 
 unusual thing for these magnates of the people to come out, as they 
 now are doing, to attend a public execution. There must surely be 
 something peculiarly criminal in this Jesus, against whom their 
 enmity is so bitter. Soon these new comers catch the spirit that 
 their rulers have breathed into the crowd, and for the first three 
 hours they heartily chime in with the others, and keep up their 
 mockery of the crucified. But from the moment that the darkness 
 falls upon them, what a change ! There they stand, silently peering 
 through the gloom ; no jest nor laughter now, nor strife of mocking 
 tongues. Upon that cross, but dimly seen, their eyes are fixed. 
 The wonder grows as to how all this shall end. It ends with those
 
 THE ATTENDANT MIRACLES. 559 
 
 prodigies that accompany the death. Appalled by these, they smite 
 upon their breasts as Easterns do in presence of all superhuman 
 power and make their way back to their homes : no noisy, shouting 
 rabble, but each man silent, and full of thought and awe. Who or 
 what, then, could that Jesus be whom they had seen die such a 
 death, at whose death the whole frame of nature seemed to quiver? 
 Whatever he was, he was not what their rulers had told them. No 
 false, deceitful man, no impious pretender. Was he then indeed 
 their Christ, their king 1 They got the answer to those questions 
 a few weeks later, when Peter preached to that great company on 
 the day of Pentecost ; and may we not believe that among those 
 who listened to the great Apostle on that occasion, and to whom he 
 spake as to the very men who, with wicked hands, had slain the 
 Lord of glory, there were not a few of those who now returned to 
 Jerusalem from Calvary, impressed and half-convinced, waiting but 
 the work of the Spirit to turn them into true and faithful followers 
 of the Crucified 1 
 
 Such was the impression made upon the Roman officer, and on a 
 section of the bystanders. But the High Priests and their minions, 
 the true crucifiers of the Lord, what impression has all which has 
 happened thus at Calvary made on them? Has it stirred any 
 doubt, has it awakened any compunction, has it allayed their fears 
 or quenched their hate 1 No ; they witness all these wonders, and 
 remain hard and unrelenting as at the first. Speaking of that 
 obduracy, which stood out against all the demonstrations of the 
 Lord's Divinity, St. Gregory exclaims, " The heavens knew him, and 
 forthwith sent out a star and a company of angels to sing his birth. 
 The sea knew him, and made itself a way to be trodden by his feet ; 
 the earth knew him, and trembled at his dying ; the sun knew him, 
 and hid the rays of its light ; the rocks knew him, for they were 
 rent in twain ; Hades knew him, and gave up the dead it had 
 received. But though the senseless elements perceived him to be 
 their Lord, the hearts of the unbelieving Jews knew him not as 
 God, and, harder than the very rocks, were not rent by repentance." 
 
 The only effect upon the rulers of the Jewish people of the sud- 
 den and unexpected death of Jesus was to set them thinking how 
 the crosses and bodies which hung upon them might most speedily 
 be removed. Their own Jewish code forbade that the body of one 
 hung upon a tree should remain suspended over a single night: 
 " His body shall not remain all night upon the tree, but thou shalt 
 in any wise bury him that day, that thy land be not defiled." 1 As 
 crucifixion was a mode of punishment originally unknown among 
 the Jews, this command refers to the case of those who, after death 
 by stoning or strangulation, were hung upon a gibbet. The Roman 
 law and practice were different. Crucifixion was the mode of death 
 1 See Deut. xxi.
 
 560 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 to which slaves and the greater criminals were doomed. In ordinary 
 circumstances, the bodies of the crucified were suffered to hang upon 
 the cross till the action of the elements, at times otherwise aided 
 and accelerated, wasted them away. Even when sepulture was 
 allowed, it was thought profitable for the ends of justice that for 
 some days the frightful spectacle should be exposed to the public 
 eye. In no case under the Eoman rule did burial take place on the 
 very day of the execution. If that rule were in this instance to be 
 broken, it must be under the special leave and direction of Pilate. 
 Besides, however, the natural desire that their own rather than the 
 Roman method of dealing with the crucified should be followed, 
 there was another and more special reason why the Jews desired 
 that the bodies should as quickly as possible be removed. Next day 
 was the Sabbath ; no common Sabbath either the Sabbath of the 
 great Paschal festival. It began at sunset. Only an hour or two 
 remained. It would be offensive, of evil omen, if on a day so sacred 
 three bodies hanging upon crosses should be exhibited so near the 
 Holy City. It would disturb, defile the services of the holy day. 
 Besides, who could tell what effect upon the changeful, excitable 
 multitude this spectacle of Jesus might have, if kept so long before 
 their eyes ? A deputation is despatched, therefore, to Pilate, to 
 entreat him to give orders that means may be taken to expedite 
 the death by crucifixion, and have the bodies removed. Pilate 
 accedes to the request ; the necessary order is forwarded to Calvary, 
 and the soldiers proceed in the ordinary way to execute it. They 
 break the legs of both the others; they pass Jesus by. There is 
 every sign, indeed, that he is already dead, but why not make his 
 death thus doubly sure ? Perhaps, even over the spirits of those 
 rough and hardened men, the Saviour's looks and words, the manner 
 of his death, the darkness and the earthquake, which they connected 
 in some way witk him, may have caused a feeling of awe to creep, 
 restraining them from subjecting him to that rough handling which 
 they were ready enough to give to the others. However this may 
 have been, the shield of that prophecy, " A bone of him shall not 
 be broken," guarded his limbs from their rude and crushing strok es. 
 One, indeed, of the soldiers is not to be restrained, and to make 
 sure that this seeming death is real, he lifts his spear as he 
 passes by, and thrusts it into the Redeemer's side ; a strong, rude 
 thrust, sufficient of itself to have caused death, inflicting a wide, 
 deep wound, that left behind such a scar, that Jesus could say to 
 Thomas afterwards, " Reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my 
 side." From that wound there flowed out blood and water, in 
 such quantity, that the outflow attracted the special notice of John, 
 who was standing at some distance from the cross ; the blood and 
 the water so distinct and distinguishable from one another, that 
 this observer could not be deceived, and thought it right to leave
 
 THE ATTENDANT MIRACLES. 661 
 
 behind him this peculiarly emphatic testimony : " He that saw it 
 bare record, and his record is true : and he knoweth that he saith 
 true, that ye might believe." It has been thought that John was 
 led to put such stress upon this incident of the crucifixion, and to 
 press into such prominence his own testimony as an eye-witness to 
 its reality, on account of the convincing refutation thus afforded of 
 two strange heresies that sprung up early in the Church : the first, 
 that Jesus had never really died upon the cross, but only passed 
 into a swoon, from which he afterwards revived ; and the second, 
 that it was not a real human body of flesh and blood, but only the 
 appearance of one that was suspended on the cross. It may have 
 been that the Evangelist had these beliefs in view. But whatever 
 was his immediate object in testifying so particularly and so earnestly 
 to the fact, it only puts that fact so much the more clearly now before 
 our eyes, authorising us to assume it as placed beyond all doubt, 
 that within an hour or so after Christ's death for it could not 
 have been much longer, when a deep incision was made in the side 
 of the Eedeemer, there visibly flowed forth a copious stream of 
 blood and water. Is that fact of any moment, does it give any 
 clew to, or throw any light upon the proximate or physical cause of 
 the death of Christ ? The answer to these questions we reserve for 
 our next Lecture. 
 
 Meanwhile, let us give a moment or two more to reflection 
 upon that strange variety of impression and effect which the cruci- 
 fixion of our Lord had upon the original spectators. There were 
 those whom that spectacle plunged into a despondency bordering 
 on despair. Mary, the mother of our Lord, was not able to bear 
 that sight, and the love of her Divine Son went forth, and withdrew 
 her early from the trial of seeing him expire. His other acquaint- 
 ance, and the women that followed him from Galilee, stood afar off, 
 beholding half ashamed and half afraid ; with something of hope, 
 with more of fear ; lost in wonder that he, about whom they had 
 been cherishing such grand, yet false and earthly expectations, 
 should suffer himself or should be suffered by that Father of whom 
 he had so often spoken as hearing him always, who had himself 
 declared that he was at all times well pleased with him to die 
 such a death as this. As the darkness fell, perhaps a new hope 
 sprang up within some of their breasts. Was Jesus about to use 
 that darkness as a veil behind which he would withdraw himself, 
 as he had withdrawn himself from those who were about to cast 
 him from the rocky height at Nazareth 1 Had he gone up to that 
 cross to work there the greatest of his miracles ? and was he in 
 very deed about to meet the taunt of his enemies, and come down 
 from the cross that they might believe in him 1 Alas ! if any such 
 hope arose, the ninth hour quenched it ; and when they saw him 
 draw his latest breath, this band of friends and followers of Jesus 
 2N
 
 562 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 turned their backs on Calvary, with slow, sad footsteps to return 
 dispirited and disconsolate, to their homes. Mainly this was owing 
 to the strength of that prejudice which had so early taken such 
 strong possession of their minds, that the kingdom which their new 
 Master was to set up was a temporal one. To that prejudice so 
 sudden and so overwhelming a shock was given by the crucifixion, 
 that, stunned and stupified by it, these simple-minded followers of 
 Jesus were for a time unable to recall, and unprepared to believe, 
 his own predictions as to his death. Upon the Scribes and Phari- 
 sees, the Chief Priests and rulers of the people, the six hours of 
 the crucifixion had, as we have seen, none other than a hardening 
 effect. The gentleness, the patience, the forgiving spirit, the 
 thoughtfulness for others, the sore trouble of his own spirit, the 
 supernatural darkness, the returning light, the sudden and sublime 
 decease, the reeling earth, the opening graves ; all these, which 
 might have moved them, had they not been possessed by the one great 
 passion of quenching for ever the hated pretensions of this Nazarene 
 have no other influence upon their spirits than quickening their 
 ingenuity to contrive how best, most quickly, and most securely, 
 they can accomplish their design. And these are they of all that 
 motley crowd, who knew the most, and made the greatest profession 
 of religion ! These are the men who would not that morning cross 
 the threshold of Pilate's dwelling, lest they might unfit themselves 
 for the morrow's duties within the Temple ! These are the men 
 who cannot bear the thought that the services of their great Paschal 
 Sabbath should be polluted by the proximity of the three crosses 
 of Golgotha ! They can spill, without compunction, the blood of 
 the innocent. They can take that blood upon themselves and upon 
 their children, but they cannot suffer the sight of it to offend their 
 eye as they go up to worship upon Mount Zion. These are the 
 men who, in their deep self -ignorance, in their proud and boastful 
 spirit, were wont to say, " If we had been in the days of our fathers, 
 we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the 
 prophets." These are the men whose whole character and conduct 
 are suggestive of the likenesses to themselves that have arisen in 
 every age of the Church, one of whose noted peculiarities is ever 
 this, that to wound their pride, or expose in any way their hollow 
 pretensions, is sure to draw down on all who attempt the dangerous 
 office the very same malignity of dislike and persecution that nailed 
 our Saviour to his cross. 
 
 Upon many of the crowd which stood for those six hours around 
 the cross, the events that transpired there appear to have produced 
 that surprise, solemnity, alarm, and subdued state of feeling, they 
 were so fitted to produce on the bulk of mankind. We have already 
 ventured to express the hope that, with not a few of them , what they 
 saw and heard prepared their minds and opened their hearts to
 
 THE ATTENDANT MIRACLES. 563 
 
 receive the good seed which, scattered on the day of Pentecost by 
 apostolic hands, was so watered with the influences of the Holy 
 Spirit. 
 
 But are we wrong in imagining, of another and perhaps still 
 larger proportion of those who returned, beating their breasts, to 
 Jerusalem, that a few days, or a few weeks, brought them down to 
 their ordinary and natural condition of indifference and unconcern 1 
 Yes, they would say, that was a wonderful forenoon ; there was a 
 strange concurrence of striking things about the close of that strange 
 man's lif e ; but as to any further inquiry after him the lending 
 their ears to that gospel which set him forth as crucified to redeem 
 their souls from death, and cover, by his mediation, the multitude 
 of their sins they became too callous, the world got too strong a 
 hold of them, to admit of their giving any further or more earnest 
 heed. Have not these, too, their likenesses among us? men capable 
 of strong but temporary impressions. Bring them to Golgotha, set 
 up the cross before them, let them see the Saviour die, and their 
 breasts may own a sentiment akin to that which affected so many 
 originally at Calvary : but they are morning clouds those feelings, 
 it is an early dew this softening of their hearts ; let the bright sun 
 rise, the fresh breeze blow ; let the day, with so many calls to 
 business and pleasure come, and those clouds vanish, this dew 
 disappears. And yet the cross was not to be lifted up in vain. 
 It hardened the Pharisees, it dispirited the disciples, it awed the 
 multitude ; but it saved the penitent thief, and it convinced the 
 unprejudiced Centurion. " I," said the Lord himself, contemplat- 
 ing beforehand the triumph of his cross, " I, if I be lifted up, will 
 draw all men unto me." And when he was lifted up, even before 
 he died, and in the very act of dying, he drew to him that Gentile 
 and that Jew, each one the leader of a multitude that no man may 
 number, upon whom the power of that attraction has since actecl. 
 God grant that upon all our spirits this power may come, drawing 
 us to Jesus now, and lifting us at last to heaven ! 
 
 XIII. 
 
 THE PHYSICAL CAUSE OF THE DEATH OF CHRIST. 
 JOHN xix. 33-35 ; MABK xv. 42-45. 
 
 HAD no one interfered, the body of our Lord had been taken 
 down by the soldiers from the cross, by their cold and careless 
 hands to be conveyed away to one of those separate burying-places 
 reserved for those who had suffered the extreme penalty of the law. 
 Not unfrequently, in such cases, friends or relatives came forward 
 to crave the body at the hands of the authorities, that they might
 
 564 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 give it a more becoming burial. There was but one exception, the 
 case of those whose crime was treason against the State, the very 
 crime for which Christ had, nominally at least, been condemned. 
 In that instance the mode of disposal of the body prescribed by law 
 was rarely if ever departed from. But where are there any friends 
 or relatives of Jesus in condition hopefully to interfere? That 
 small band of his acquaintance, which has stood throughout the 
 crucifixion beholding it afar off, is composed principally of women. 
 John, indeed, is there, a witness of the closing scene, and of the 
 preparation made for the removal of the bodies. But was Pilate, 
 to whom application must of course be made, likely to listen to any 
 petition that he might present ? John knew something of the High 
 Priest, but nothing of the Roman Governor. There was everything 
 in fact to discourage him from making any application in that 
 quarter, even if the idea of doing so had occurred to him. But it 
 is most unlikely that it had. For what could John, or the disciples 
 generally, have done with the body of their Master though they 
 had got it into their hands ? It must be buried quickly, within 
 an hour or so. And where could these Galilean strangers find a 
 grave at Jerusalem to lay it in, where but in some exposed and 
 public place of sepulture, unsuitable for the destiny in store for it 1 
 At the fitting time, the fit instrument appears. Joseph of 
 Arimathea, a rich man, an honourable councillor, a member of the 
 Sanhedrim well known as such to Pilate, has either himself been 
 present at the crucifixion, or hears how matters stand. Shall the 
 body of Jesus pass into the rough hands of these Roman soldiers, 
 and be dragged by them to a dishonoured burial 1 Not if he can 
 hinder it. He has a new sepulchre of his own, close by the very 
 place where Christ has died, whose very nearness to the spot suggests 
 to him how suitable a place it would be for so sacred a deposit. 
 Joseph goes instantly to Pilate, and boldly asks that the body may 
 be given to him. Pilate makes no difficulty regarding the alleged 
 crime of Jesus. He never had believed that Christ was guilty of 
 treason against Csesar's government ; does not now act on any such 
 assumption. But Joseph has told him something about the time 
 and manner of the Saviour's death which he had not heard before, 
 which greatly amazes and induces him to hesitate. Those Jews 
 who had come to him a short time before, with the request that he 
 would issue an order that the bones of the three might be broken 
 and their bodies removed, must have come to him after the three 
 hours' darkness, after the death of Christ. But they had told him 
 nothing about that death. They had spoken as if the same means 
 for expediting their decease had to be taken with all the three. 
 Now, for the first time, he hears that Jesus had, even then, breathed 
 his last; had died just as that mysterious darkness, which had 
 troubled Pilate as it had troubled the crowd at Golgotha, had rolled
 
 THE PHYSICAL CAUSE OF THE DEATH OF CHKIST. 565 
 
 away; as that earthquake, which had shaken every dwelling in 
 Jerusalem, had been felt within his residence. Pilate will not 
 believe it, can scarcely credit Joseph's story, must have a thing 
 so strange attested upon better testimony. Waiving, in the mean- 
 time, all answer to Joseph's request, he sends for the Centurion, 
 who, doubtless, told him all that he had witnessed ; told him about 
 the loud voice, and the immediately succeeding death ; told him 
 what raised in the eyes of these two Eomans, even to the height of 
 a miracle, a death like this. 
 
 We should understand their feelings better were we as familiar 
 as they were with the common course of things at a crucifixion. It 
 is now fifteen hundred years since this mode of punishment ceased 
 to be practised in Christendom : it was discontinued because of the 
 sacredness, the spiritual glory which Christ's crucifixion had thrown 
 around it. With eyes unfamiliar with its details, yet with imagina- 
 tions that delighted to picture its cruelties and horrors, the priest- 
 hood of the middle ages put these materials into the hands of poets 
 and painters, out of which the popular conceptions of the erection 
 of the cross, and the sufferings on the cross, and the taking down 
 from the cross, have for so long a time been drawn. There is much 
 in these conceptions, that by using the means of information which 
 we now possess, we can assure ourselves is incorrect The cross 
 was no such elevated structure as we see it sometimes represented, 
 needing ladders to be applied to get at the suspended body. It 
 was seldom more than a foot or two higher than the man it bore ; 
 neither was the whole weight of his body borne upon the nails 
 which pierced the hands. Such a position of painful suspension, 
 causing such a strain upon all the muscles of the upper extremities, 
 would have added greatly to the sufferings of the victim, and 
 brought them to a much speedier close. The cross, in every instance, 
 was furnished with a small piece of wood projecting from the 
 upright post or beam, astride which the crucified sat, and which 
 bore the chief weight of his body. The consequence of this 
 arrangement was, that crucifixion was a much more lingering kind 
 of death, and, in its earlier stages, a much less excruciating one 
 than we are apt to imagine, or than otherwise it would have been. 
 As there was but little loss of blood, the nails that pierced the 
 extremities touching no large blood-vessel, and closing the wounds 
 they made, the death which followed resulted from the processes 
 of bodily exhaustion and irritation ; and these were so slow, that in 
 no case, where the person crucified was in ordinary health and 
 vigour, did they terminate within twelve hours. ^Almost invariably 
 he survived the first twenty-four hours, lived generally over the 
 second, occasionally even into the fifth or sixth day. The ancient 
 testimonies to this fact are quite explicit, nor are modern ones 
 wanting, although there are but few parts of the world now where
 
 566 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 crucifixion is practised. "I was told," says Captain Clapperton 
 speaking of the capital punishments inflicted in Soudan, a district 
 of Africa, " that wretches on the cross generally linger three days 
 before death puts an end to their sufferings." 
 
 So well was it understood by the early Fathers of the Church, 
 by those who lived in or near the times when this mode of capital 
 punishment was still in use, that life never was terminated by it 
 alone within six hours, as was the case with Christ, that they all 
 agree in attributing his death to a supernatural agency. Most of 
 them, as well as many of the most distinguished of our modern 
 commentators, assign it to the exercise by Christ of the power over 
 his own life which he possessed; in accordance, it was thought 
 with his own declaration : " No man taketh my life from me, but I 
 lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have 
 power to take it again. This commandment have I received of my 
 Father." That Christ's death was entirely voluntary, submitted to 
 of his own free will, and not under any outward pressure or con- 
 straint, is universally conceded. This entire voluntariness, how- 
 ever, it will at once appear to you, is sufficiently covered and vindi- 
 cated, when we believe that whatever the physical agencies were 
 which combined to effect the death, it was an act of pure free will 
 in him to submit to their operation. That without or independent 
 of any such agency, Christ chose to accelerate his decease upon the 
 cross by a simple fiat of his own will, breaking the tie which 
 bound body and soul together, was the solution of the difficulty 
 very naturally resorted to by those who had the clearest possible 
 perception of the extraordinary character of this incident, and who 
 knew of no other adequate cause to which it could be attributed. 
 
 Another solution, indeed, has been proposed, reserved for 
 modern times, but not coming from our highest authorities, which 
 would explain the speedy death of Jesus on the cross, by ascribing 
 it to an extreme degree of bodily debility induced by the sleepless 
 night, the agony in the Garden, the scourging in Pilate's Hall, and 
 the mental conflict at Calvary. All these must undoubtedly have 
 told upon the frame of the suffering Eedeemer, and have impaired 
 its powers of endurance. But we must remember that they found 
 that frame in the very flower and fulness of its strength, free, we 
 may believe, of all constitutional or induced defects. Nor should 
 we, in order to make out this solution to be sufficient, exagger- 
 ate their actual effects. However acute the bodily endurance of 
 Gethsemane may have been, we know that Jesus was supernaturally 
 assisted to sustain them ; they passed wholly away when the mental 
 agony which produced them ended. You see no trace of them, in 
 our Lord's presentation of himself to the band which arrested him, 
 or in his appearances before Caiaphas and Pilate. The scourging 
 was a not uncommon precursor of crucifixion, and could not have
 
 THE PHYSICAL CAUSE OF THE DEATH OF CHRIST. 567 
 
 enfeebled Christ more than it did others. He bent so much 
 beneath the weight of the cross that a temporary relief from the 
 burden was given ; but that he had not sunk in utter exhaustion 
 was apparent enough, from the very manner in which he turned 
 immediately thereafter to the daughters of Jerusalem, and from 
 the way in which he spoke to them. Further evidence that Jesus 
 did not sink prematurely under physical debility is afforded us by 
 the fact, witnessed to particularly by many of the Evangelists, and 
 which, as we saw in our last Lecture, made a strong impression 
 upon the mind of the Centurion. The fact alluded to is this, that 
 it was with a loud voice, indicating a great amount of existing 
 vigour, that Jesus uttered his last fervent exclamation on the 
 cross. He did not die of sheer exhaustion, fainting away in feeble- 
 ness, as one drained wholly of his strength. 
 
 Are we, then, to leave the mystery of our Lord's dying thus, 
 at the ninth hour, in the obscurity which covers it ; or is there any 
 other probable explanation of the circumstance 1 It is now some 
 years since a devout and scholarly physician, 1 as the result, he tells 
 us, of a quarter of a century's reading and reflection, ventured to 
 suggest dealing with this subject with all that reverence and 
 delicacy with which it so especially requires to be handled that 
 the immediate physical cause of the death of Christ was the rupture 
 of his heart, induced by the inner agony of his spirit. That strong 
 emotion may of itself prostrate the body in death, is a familiar fact 
 in the history of the passions. 2 Joy, or grief, or anger, suddenly 
 or intensely excited, have been often known to produce this effect. 
 It has been only, however, in later times that the discovery has 
 been made, by post-m,ortem examinations, that in such instances, the 
 death resulted from actual rupture of the heart. That organ, 
 which the universal language of mankind has spoken of as being 
 peculiarly affected by the play of the passions, has been found in 
 such cases to have been rent or torn by the violence of its own 
 action. The blood issuing from the fissure thus created has filled 
 the pericardium, 3 and, by its pressure, stopped the action of the 
 heart. In speaking of those who have died of a broken heart, we 
 have been using words that were often exactly and literally true. 
 
 If this, then, be sometimes one of the proved results of extreme, 
 intense emotion, why may it not have been realised in the case of 
 the Eedeemer? If common earthly sorrow has broken other 
 human hearts, why may not that sorrow, deep beyond all other 
 
 1 Dr. Stroud, in a treatise On the Physical Cause of the Death of Christ : 1847. 
 
 2 Ancient story tells us of one of the greatest of Greek tragedians (Sophocles) 
 expiring on its being announced to him that the palm of victory had been awarded, 
 in a public literary contest in which he was engaged ; of a father dying on its being 
 told him that, on the same clay, three of his sons had been crowned as victors in the 
 Olympian games. See Dr. Stroud's treatise. 
 
 3 The shut sac or bag by which the heart is surrounded and enclosed.
 
 568 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 sorrow, have broken his 1 We know that of itself, apart from all 
 external appliances, the agony of his spirit in Gethsemane so affected 
 his body that a bloody sweat suffused it, a result identical with 
 what has been sometimes noticed of extreme surprise or terror 
 having bathed the human body in the same kind of bloody dew. 
 Why, then, should not the agony of the Saviour's spirit on the cross 
 which we have every reason to regard as a renewal of that in 
 the Garden have told upon his physical frame in a way equally 
 analogous to other results verified by experience 1 Still, however, 
 had we nothing more positive to go upon, it could only be regarded 
 as a conjecture, a thing conceivable and quite possible, that Jesus 
 had literally died of a broken heart. But that striking incident, 
 upon the nature of which, and the singular testimony regarding it, 
 we remarked in the close of our last Lecture, puts positive evidence 
 into our hands ; and the precise weight of this evidence every recent 
 inquiry into the condition of the blood within the human body after 
 death has been helping us more accurately and fully to appreciate. 
 Let me remind you, then, that within an hour or two after our 
 Saviour's death (it could not have been more), what the skilful 
 knife of the anatomist does upon the subject on which it operates, 
 the Koman soldier's spear did upon the dead body of our Lord, it 
 broadly and deeply pierced the side, and from the wound inflicted 
 thus there flowed out blood and water ; so much of both, and the 
 water so distinguishable from the blood, as to attract the particular 
 observation of John, who was standing a little way off. We cannot 
 be wrong in fixing our attention upon a fact to which the beloved 
 Apostle so especially summons it in his Gospel. 
 
 First, then, we have it now authenticated beyond reasonable 
 doubt, that what John noticed, the copious outflow of blood and 
 water, is precisely what would have happened on the supposition 
 that the heart of our Kedeemer had been ruptured under the 
 pressure of inward grief, is precisely what has been noticed in 
 other instances of this form of death. When it escapes from the 
 blood-vessels, whether that escape takes place within the body or 
 without, human blood within a short time coagulates, its watery 
 part separating slowly from its thicker substance. When rupture 
 of the heart takes place, and the blood which that organ contains 
 passes into the pericardium, it ere long undergoes this change ; and, 
 as the capsule into which it flows is large enough to contain many 
 ounces' weight of liquid, if, when it is full, the heart be pierced, the 
 contents escaping exhibit such a stream of mingled blood and 
 water as the eye of John noticed as he gazed upon the cross. This 
 is what the anatomist has actually witnessed ; numerous instances 
 existing in which the quantity and quality of the blood escaping 
 from a ruptured heart have been carefully noted and recorded. 
 Having satisfied ourselves as to these facts, from regarding it at
 
 THE PHYSICAL CAUSE OF THE DEATH OF CHRIST. 569 
 
 first as but an ingenious supposition, we feel constrained to regard 
 it as in the highest degree probable that Christ our Saviour died 
 this very kind of death. But what shuts us up to this conclusion is, 
 that no other satisfactory explanation can be given of the outflow 
 of blood and water from the Saviour's side. When not extravasated 
 that is, when allowed at death to remain in the vascular system, 
 the blood of the human body rarely coagulates, and when it does, 
 the coagulation, or separation into blood and water, does not take 
 place till many hours after death. In rare instances of persons 
 dying from long-continued or extreme debility the entire blood 
 of the body has been found in a half watery condition ; but our 
 Saviour's death was not an instance of this kind, and even though 
 it should be imagined that what long-continued illness did with 
 others, agony of spirit did with him, inducing the same degree of 
 debility, attended with all its ordinary physical results ; this, which 
 is the only other supposition that can be held as accounting to us 
 for what John witnessed, fails in this respect, that, pierce when or 
 how it might, it could only have been a few trickling drops of 
 watery blood that the spear of the soldier could have extracted 
 from the Eedeemer's side. Inasmuch, then, as all other attempted 
 explanations of the recorded incidents of our Eedeemer's death are 
 found to be at fault, and inasmuch as it corresponds with and 
 explains them all, we rest in the belief that such was the bitter 
 agony of the Kedeemer's soul as he hung upon the cross, that 
 unstrengthened now by any angel from heaven, as in the Garden, 
 when but for that strengthening the same issue might have been 
 realised the heart of our Eedeemer was broken, and in this way 
 the tie that bound body and spirit together was dissolved. 1 
 
 But of what use is it to institute any such inquiry as that in 
 which we have been engaged 1 or what gain would there be in 
 winning for the conclusion arrived at a general assent ? It might 
 be enough to say here that, if reverently treated, there is no single 
 incident connected with the life or death of our Divine Eedeemer, 
 upon which it is possible that any light may be thrown, which does 
 not solicit at our hands the utmost effort we can make fully and 
 minutely to understand it. Even, then, though it should appear 
 that no direct or practical benefit would attend the discovery and 
 establishment of the true and proximate physical cause of the death 
 of Christ, still we should regard the inquiry as one in itself too full 
 of interest to refrain from prosecuting it. But would it not be 
 wonderful, would it not correspond with other evidences of the truth 
 of the Gospel narrative which the progress of our knowledge has 
 eliminated, should it turn out to be true, as we believe it has done, 
 that the accounts of the sufferings and death of Jesus, drawn up by 
 four independent witnesses all of them uninformed as to the true 
 1 See Appendix No. I.
 
 570 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 state of the case, and signally ignorant how that which they 
 recorded might serve to reveal it did, nevertheless, when brought 
 together and minutely scrutinised, contain within them those 
 distinct and decisive tokens which the advanced science of this age 
 recognises as indicative of a mode of death, so singular in its char- 
 acter, so rare in its occurrence, so peculiar in its physical effects ? 
 
 Would it not also give a new meaning to some of the expi essions 
 which in Psalms box. and xxii. the two Psalms specially pre- 
 dictive of his sufferings and death our Saviour is himself repre- 
 sented as employing ? Read together the 20th and 21st verses of 
 Psalm Ixix. : " Reproach hath broken my heart ; and I am full of 
 heaviness : and I looked for some to take pity, but there was none ; 
 and for comforters, but I found none. They gave me also gall for 
 my meat; and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink." If 
 the very kind of drink they were to offer him was not deemed un- 
 worthy of being specified in that ancient prophecy the very 
 smallness, in fact, of the incident making it serve all the better the 
 purposes of the prophecy, need we wonder if it were only the 
 literal truth which the speaker uttered when he said, "Reproach 
 hath broken my heart'"? When so much has turned out to be 
 literally true, it is but ranking that expression with the others, 
 when it also has that character assigned to it. Or take the 14th 
 verse of Psalm xxii. : " I am poured out like water, and all my 
 bones are out of joint : my heart is like wax ; it is melted in the 
 midst of my bowels." Here, again, we feel that, if in other parts of 
 that Psalm if in speaking of the shooting out of the lips, the 
 shaking of the head, the words that were spoken, the parting of his 
 garments, the casting of lots for his vesture the great Sufferer is 
 recognised as describing that which did afterwards actually occur, 
 it is not surprising if, in describing his own bodily condition, in 
 speaking, as he does, especially of the state of his heart, he should 
 be speaking of that which also was actually realised. 
 
 But there are positive benefits attendant on the reception of that 
 view of the Saviour's death which I have now unfolded to you. It 
 serves, I think, to spiritualise and elevate our conception of the 
 sufferings of Calvary ; it carries our thoughts away from the mere 
 bodily endurances of the crucifixion ; it concentrates them on that 
 mysterious woe which agitated his spirit, till the very heart that 
 beat within the body of the agonised Redeemer, under the powerful 
 impulse of those emotions which shook and wrung his soul, did 
 burse and break. If the bloody sweat of the Garden, and the 
 broken heart of the Cross, were naturally, directly, exclusively the 
 results of those inward sorrows to which it pleased the Saviour to 
 open his soul, that in the enduring of them he might bear our sins, 
 then how little had man to do physically with the infliction of that 
 agony wherein the great atonement lay ! If we have read and
 
 THE PHYSICAL CAUSE OF THE DEATH OF CHRIST. 571 
 
 interpreted aright the details of our Lord's sufferings in the Garden 
 and on the Cross, these very details do of themselves throw into 
 the background the corporeal part of the endurances, representing 
 it in fact only as the appropriate physical appendix to that over- 
 whelming sorrow, by which the spirit of the Redeemer was bowed 
 down under the load of human guilt. This spiritual sorrow formed 
 the body of that agony of which the corporeal was but the shadow 
 and the sign. 
 
 From the very heart of the simple but most affecting records of 
 Gethsemane and the Cross there issues the voice of a double 
 warning a warning against any such estimate of the sufferings of 
 the man Christ Jesus as would assimilate them to the common 
 sorrows of suffering humanity. As a man there was nothing in all 
 that he had to endure from man, which can in any way account for 
 his sweat being as great drops of blood in the Garden. In the 
 rending of his heart upon the cross, his sufferings remain, even in 
 their outward manifestations and results, inexplicable on any other 
 supposition than that which attributes to them a vicarious character, 
 representing them as borne by the incarnate Son of God, as the 
 Head and Representative of his people. But whilst the very 
 outward history of Gethsemane and the Cross pleads thus strongly 
 against any lowering of our estimate of the true character and design 
 of Christ's sufferings, does it not as strongly and persuasively lift 
 up its protest against those pictorial and sentimental representations 
 of the Saviour in his agony and in his death, which make their 
 appeal to a mere human sympathy, by dwelling upon and exag- 
 gerating the bodily endurances which were undergone? We 
 approach these closing scenes of our Redeemer's life, we plant our 
 footsteps in the neighbourhood of the Garden and the Cross ; as 
 soon as we do so, we begin to feel that it is very sacred ground we 
 tread. We try to get nearer and nearer to the Great Sufferer, to 
 look a little farther into the bosom of that exceeding sorrow of his 
 troubled, oppressed, bewildered spirit. It is not long ere we become 
 convinced, that in that sorrow there are elements we are altogether 
 unable to compute and appreciate, and that our most becoming 
 attitude, in presence of such a Sufferer as this the One through 
 whose sufferings for us we look for our forgiveness and acceptance 
 with God is one of childlike trust, devout adoring gratitude and 
 love. It is too remote, too hidden a region this for us rashly to 
 invade, in the hope, that with those dim lights which alone are in 
 our hands, we shall be able to explore it It is too sacred a region 
 for the vulgar tread of a mere human curiosity, or the busy play of 
 a mere human sympathy. 
 
 But what chiefly commends to us the view now given of the 
 Redeemer's death, is its correspondence with all that the Scriptures 
 teach as to the sacrificial character of that death, all that they tell
 
 572 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 us of the virtue of Christ's most precious blood. More clearly and 
 immediately than any other does this view represent Christ's death 
 as the proximate and natural result of the offering up of himself to 
 God, the pouring out of his soul in the great sacrifice for sin. From 
 the lips of the broken-hearted, these words seem fraught to us with 
 a new significance, " No man taketh my life from me ; I lay it down 
 of myself," all, even to the very death of the body, being embraced 
 in his entire willingness that there should be laid upon him the 
 transgressions of us all. It was his soul, his life, that Jesus gave a 
 ransom for many. The life was regarded as lying in the blood, and 
 so it was the blood of the sacrificed animal that was sprinkled of old 
 upon the door-posts, upon the altar, upon the mercy-seat, the 
 atoning virtue regarded as accompanying the application of the 
 blood ; and so, lifting this idea up from the level of mere ceremo- 
 nialism, we are taught that " without shedding of blood," without 
 life given for life, "there is no remission;" and so, still further 
 pointing us to the one true sacrifice, we are told that not by the 
 blood of bulls and goats, but by his own blood Christ has entered 
 into the Holy Place, having obtained eternal redemption for us. It 
 is the blood of Christ "which cleanseth from all sin." It is the 
 blood of Christ " which purges the conscience from dead works, to 
 serve the living God. " It is the blood of the covenant by which we 
 are sanctified. We know, and desire ever to remember, that this 
 is but a figurative expression ; that the blood of Christ stands only 
 as the type or emblem of the life that was given up to God for us. 
 But the blood merely of a crucifixion does not fill up the type, does 
 not put its full meaning into the figure. Crucifixion was not a 
 bloody death, it was only a few trickling drops that flowed from the 
 pierced hands and feet. But if, indeed, it was his very heart's 
 blood which Jesus poured out in the act of giving up his life for us 
 on Calvary, with what fuller and richer significance will that 
 expression, " the blood of Jesus," fall upon the ear of faith ! This, 
 then, is he his bleeding broken heart the witness to it who came 
 by water and by blood ; not by water only, but by water and by 
 blood. With minds afresh impressed by the thought how it was 
 that the blood of Christ was shed ; with hearts full of gratitude and 
 love, let us take up the words that the Spirit has put into our lips : 
 " Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own 
 blood, to him be glory and dominion for ever and ever." "Thou 
 art worthy, for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy 
 blood, out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation." 
 
 " Rock of ages, cleft for me, 
 Let me hide myself in thee ; 
 Let the water and the blood, 
 From thy riven side that flowed, 
 Be of sin the double cure, 
 Cleanse me from its guilt and power."
 
 THE BURIAL. 673 
 
 XIV. 
 
 THE BURIAL. 
 JOHN xix. 38-42 ; LUKE xxin. 55 ; MATTHEW xxvu. 61. 
 
 JOSEPH of Arimathea and Nicodemus were both rulers of the 
 Jews, both members of the Sanhedrim, the Jewish council or 
 court, composed of seventy members, in whose hands the supreme 
 judicial power was lodged. It was the right and duty of both these 
 men to have been present at the trial of our Lord on the morning 
 of the crucifixion. In common with the other members of the 
 Sanhedrim, they in all likelihood received the early summons to 
 assemble in the hall of Caiaphas. It would seem, however, that 
 they did not obey the call ; that, knowing something beforehand of 
 the object of the meeting, of the spirit and design of those who 
 summoned it, they absented themselves. We infer this from the 
 fact that when, after Christ's great confession, the High Priest put 
 the question, " What think ye 1" to the Council, they all condemned 
 him to be guilty of death. But we are told of Joseph, that he had 
 not consented to the counsel and deed of those by whom the arrest 
 and condemnation of Jesus were planned and executed. In what 
 way his dissent had been expressed we are not informed, but hav- 
 ing somehow intimated it beforehand, it is altogether improbable 
 that, without any demur on his part, he should have been a con- 
 senting party to the final sentence when pronounced. And neither 
 had Nicodemus gone in with the course which his fellow-rulers had 
 from the beginning pursued towards Jesus. When the officers of 
 the Chief Priests and Pharisees came back to their employers, their 
 task unexecuted, giving as their reason for not having arrested 
 Jesus, that "never man spake like this man," so provoked were 
 those Pharisees at seeing such influence exerted by Jesus upon their 
 own menial servants, that in the passion of the moment, they ex- 
 claimed, " Are ye also deceived ? Have any of the rulers or of the 
 Pharisees believed on him ? But this people, who knoweth not the 
 law, are cursed." 
 
 Perhaps the question about the rulers touched the conscience of 
 Nicodemus, who was present on the occasion ; perhaps he felt that 
 it was not so true as they imagined that none of the rulers believed 
 on Jesus ; perhaps he felt somewhat ashamed of himself and of the 
 false position which he occupied. At any rate, the haughty and 
 contemptuous tone of his brethren stirred him up for once to say a 
 word : "Doth our law," said he to them, "judge any man before 
 it hear him, and know what he doeth ?" A very gentle and reason- 
 able remonstrance, but one which had no other effect than turning 
 against himself the wrath that had been expending itself upon their
 
 574 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 officials. " Art thou also," they say to him, "of Galilee?" Nico- 
 demus cowered under that question, and the suspicion that it 
 implied. Neither then nor afterwards did he say or do anything 
 more which might expose him to the imputation of being a follower 
 of Jesus; but we cannot think so ill of him as to believe that, 
 beyond concealing whatever belief in Christ he cherished, he would 
 have played the hypocrite so far as to let his voice openly be heard 
 as one of those condemning our Lord to death. 
 
 Let us judge both these men as fairly and gently as we ourselves 
 would desire to be judged. To what amount of enlightenment and 
 belief as to the character and claims of Christ they had arrived 
 previous to his decease, it were difficult to imagine. Both must 
 have had a large amount of deep, inveterate Jewish prejudice to 
 contend with in accepting the Messiahship of the Nazarene ; not 
 such prejudice alone as was common to the great mass of their 
 countrymen, but such as had a peculiar hold on the more educated 
 men of their time, when raised to be guides and rulers of the people. 
 Over all this prejudice Joseph had already triumphed ; there was a 
 sincerity and integrity of judgment in him, an earnest spirit of faith 
 and hope ; he was a good man and a just ; one who, like the aged 
 Simeon, had been waiting for the kingdom of God, the better pre- 
 pared to hail it in whatever guise it came. He had thus become 
 really, though not openly or professedly, a disciple of Jesus. We 
 do not know whether Nicodemus had got so far. We do know, 
 however, that the very first words and acts of Jesus at Jerusalem 
 made the deepest and most favourable impression on his mind. It 
 was at the very opening of our Lord's ministry, that this man came 
 to Jesus by night. Instead of thinking of the covert way in which 
 he came, only to find ground of censure in it, let us remember that 
 he was the one and only ruler who did in any way come to Jesus ; 
 and that he came as his very first words of salutation and inquiry 
 showed in the spirit of deep respect, and earnest desire for instruc- 
 tion. Let us remember, too, that without one word of blame 
 escaping from our Lord's own lips, it was to this man that, at so 
 early a period of his ministry, our Saviour made the clear and full 
 disclosure of the great object of his own mission and death. Christ 
 must have seen some good soil in that man's heart, to have scattered 
 there so much of the good seed. That seed was long of germinating, 
 but it bore fruit at last, ^,ry pleasant for the eye to look upon 
 
 It was the fault both of Joseph and Nicodemus, that they were 
 ashamed and afraid to confess Christ openly. But who shall tell us 
 exactly what their state of mind, their faith and feeling toward him 
 was ; how much of hesitation both of them may indeed, we may 
 boldly say must have felt as to many things about Jesus which they 
 could in no way harmonise with their conceptions of the Great Prophet 
 that was to arise ? " Search and look," his brother councillors had
 
 THE BURIAL. 675 
 
 said to Nicodemus, at that time when he had ventured to interpose 
 the question which provoked them, " search and look; for out of 
 Galilee ariseth no prophet." Nicodemus had nothing to say to that 
 bold assertion ; nothing to say, we may well believe, to many an 
 objection taken to the pretensions of the son of the Galilean car- 
 penter. In common with Joseph, he may have believed ; but both 
 together may have been quietly waiting till some further and more 
 distinct manifestations of his Messiahship were made by Christ. 
 But why did they not, so far as they did believe in him, openly 
 acknowledge it ? Why did they not feel rebuked by that poor man, 
 blind from his birth, dragged for examination before them, who 
 witnessed in their presence so good a confession ? It was because 
 they knew so well that their brother rulers had agreed that, " if 
 any man did confess that he was Christ, he should be put out of 
 the synagogue." It was because they knew so well and felt so 
 keenly what to them that excommunication would involve : for it 
 was no slight punishment among the Jews to be expelled from the 
 synagogue ; it involved in its extreme issue consequences far more 
 disastrous than a mere ban of admission into their religious assem- 
 blies ; it involved loss of station, separation from kindred and the 
 society of their fellow-men. To the poor blind beggar upon whom 
 it actually was passed, that doom may have fallen but lightly ; for 
 he had never known much of that of which this doom was to 
 deprive him. A very different thing this expulsion from the 
 synagogue would have been to Joseph and to Nicodemus. Let us 
 not judge these men too harshly for the reluctance they showed to 
 brave it ; let us rather try to put ourselves exactly in their position, 
 that we may sympathise with the hesitation which they felt in 
 making any open acknowledgment of their attachment to Christ. 
 
 His death, however, at once put an end to that hesitation in both 
 their breasts. They may not have been present at the crucifixion, 
 for they could not have joined in the mockery, nor were they pre- 
 pared to exhibit themselves as friends of the Crucified. But though 
 not spectators of the tragedy, they were somewhere in the neighbour- 
 hood, anxiously waiting. Could they, members of the same San- 
 hedrim, thrown often into contact, witnesses of each other's bearing 
 and conduct as to all the steps which had been taken against Jesus, 
 have remained ignorant of each other's secret leanings toward the 
 persecuted Nazarene ? Was it by chance they met together at the 
 cross, to act in concert there ? We would rather believe that, attracted 
 by the tie of a common sympathy with Jesus, the sad news of his being 
 taken out to Golgotha to be crucified brought them that forenoon 
 together ; that they were by each other's side as the tidings reached 
 them of all the wonders which had transpired around the cross, and 
 of the strange death which Jesus died. The resolution of both is 
 promptly taken ; and it looks, certainly, as if taken with the know
 
 576 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 ledge of each other's purpose. Joseph goes at once boldly to 
 Pilate, and craves the body of Jesus. An ancient prophecy, of 
 which he knew nothing, had proclaimed that he was to make his 
 grave with the rich. This rich man has a new sepulchre, wherein 
 never man lay, which he had bought or got hewn out of the rock, 
 with the idea, perhaps, that he might himself be the first to occupy 
 it. It lies there close at hand, not many paces from the cross. He 
 is resolved to open it, that it may receive, as its first tenant, the 
 body of the crucified. Nay, further ; as there are few, if any, now 
 of Christ's known friends to undertake the task, he is resolved 
 his dignity, the sense of shame, the fear of the Jews, all forgotten 
 to put his own hands to the office of giving that body the most 
 honourable sepulture that the time and circumstances can afford. 
 
 Once assured, on the Centurion's testimony, that it was even as 
 Joseph said, Pilate at once gives the order that the body shall be 
 committed into his hands. Joseph provides himself by the way with 
 the clean white cloth in which to shroud the body. The soldiers, 
 at their officer's command, bear the bodies of the other two away, 
 leaving that of Jesus still suspended on the cross. It is there when 
 Joseph reaches the spot, to be dealt with as he likes. How quiet 
 and how lonely the place, as the first preparations are made for the 
 interment ! few to help, and none to interrupt. The crowd has all 
 dispersed ; some half-dozen Galilean women alone remain. But is 
 John not here ? He had returned to Calvary, had seen but a little 
 while before the thrust of the soldier's spear ; he knew that but a 
 short time was left for disposing of the body. We may well believe 
 that though he has veiled his presence, he was present standing 
 with those Galilean women. They see, coming in haste, this Joseph 
 of Arimathea, whom none of them had ever known as a disciple of 
 their Master : they see the white linen cloth that he has provided ; 
 they notice that the body is committed to his charge ; they watch 
 with wonder as he puts forth his own hand to the taking down of 
 the body. Their wonder grows as Nicodemus also a stranger to 
 them, whom they had never seen coming to Jesus joins himself to 
 Joseph ; not rudely and roughly, as the soldiers had dealt with the 
 others, but gently and reverently handling the dead. As they lay 
 the body on the ground, it appears that this new-comer, Nicodemus, 
 has brought with him a mixture of powdered myrrh and aloes, 
 about one hundred pounds' weight. The richest man in Jerusalem 
 could not have furnished more or better spicery for the burial of his 
 dearest friend. It is evident that these two men have it in their 
 heart, and are ready to put to their hands, to treat the dead with 
 all due respect. Their fears disarmed, the Galilean women gather in 
 around the pale and lifeless form. The white shroud is ready, the 
 myrrh and the aloes are at hand, but who shall spread those spices 
 on the funeral garment, and wrap it round the corpse to lit it for
 
 THE BURIAL. 577 
 
 the burial ? This is a service, one of the last and the saddest which 
 our poor humanity needs, which, as if by an instinct of nature, 
 woman's gentle hand has in all ages and in all countries been wont 
 to render to the dead ; and though the Gospel narrative be silent 
 here, we will not believe that it was otherwise at the cross ; we will 
 not believe but that it was the tender hands of those loving women 
 who had watched at Calvary from morningtide till now, which offer 
 their aid, and are permitted and honoured to wipe from that mutilated 
 form the bloody marks of dishonour which it wore, to swathe it 
 with the pure linen robe, and wrap around the thorn-marked brow 
 the napkin, so falsely deemed to be the last clothing of the dead. 
 
 One thing alone is wanting, that the manner of the Jews in 
 burying may be observed a bier to lay the body on, to bear it to 
 the sepulchre. There has been no time to get one, or it is felt that 
 the distance is so short that it is not needed. That body has, 
 however, the best bier of all the hands of true affection, to lift it 
 up and carry it across to the new tomb which waits to receive it. 
 The feet let us assign to Joseph, the body to Nicodemus, and that 
 regal head with those closed eyes, over which the shadows of the 
 resurrection are already flitting, let us lay it on the breast of the 
 beloved disciple. The brief path from the cross to the sepulchre is 
 soon traversed. In silence and in deep sorrow they bear their 
 sacred burden, and lay it gently down upon its clean, cold rocky 
 bed. The last look of the dead is taken. The buriers reverently 
 withdraw, the stone is rolled to the mouth of the sepulchre : 
 separated from the living Jesus rests with the dead 
 
 " At length the worst is o'er, and thou art laid 
 Deep in thy darksome bed ; 
 All still and cold behind yon dreary stone 
 Thy sacred form is gone. 
 
 Around those lips where peace and mercy hung 
 The dew of death hath clung ; 
 The dull earth o'er thee, and thy friends around, 
 Thou sleep'st a silent corse, in funeral-raiment wound." 
 
 The burial is over now, and we might depart ; but let us linger 
 a little longer, and bestow a parting look on the persons and the 
 place, the buriers and the burying-ground. The former have been 
 few in number ; what they have to do, they must do quickly ; for 
 the sun is far down in the western sky when Joseph gets the order 
 from Pilate ; and before it sets, before the great Sabbath begins, 
 they must lay Jesus in the grave. Yet hurried as they have been, 
 with all such honour as they can show, with every token of respect, 
 have they laid that body in the tomb ; they have done all they 
 could. The last service which Jesus ever needed at the hands of 
 men it has been their privilege to render. And for the manner in 
 which they have rendered it, shall we not honour them? Yes, 
 verily, wherever this gospel of the kingdom shall be made known, 
 2 o
 
 578 THE LAST DAY OF THE PASSION. 
 
 what they thus did for the Lord's burial shall be told for a memorial 
 of them ; and henceforth we shall forget of Joseph that hitherto he 
 had concealed his discipleship, and acted as if he were a stranger to 
 the Lord, seeing that, when Christ was in such a special sense a 
 stranger on the earth, he opened his own new sepulchre to take him 
 in ; and we shall forget it of Nicodemus that it was by night he had 
 come to Jesus, seeing that, upon this last sad day he came forth so 
 openly, with his costly offering of myrrh and aloes, to embalm 
 Christ for the burial. Of the Galilean women we have nothing to 
 forget; but let this be the token wherewith we shall remember 
 them, that, the last at the cross and the first at the sepulchre, they 
 were the latest at the grave : for Joseph has departed ; Nicodemus 
 and the rest are gone ; but there, while the sun goes down, and the 
 evening shadows deepen around, the very solitude and gloom of the 
 place such as might have warned them away there are Mary 
 Magdalene and the other Mary to be seen sitting over-against the 
 sepulchre, unable to tear themselves from the spot, gazing through 
 their tears at the place where the body of their Lord is laid. 
 
 Let us now bestow a parting look upon the burying-ground. 
 " In the place where he was crucified there was a garden, and in 
 that garden a sepulchre." Plant yourselves before that sepulchre, 
 and look around. This is no place of graves ; here rise around you 
 no memorials of the dead. You see but a single sepulchre, and 
 that sepulchre in a garden. Strange mingling this of opposites, 
 the garden of life and growth and beauty, circling the sepulchre of 
 death, corruption, and decay. Miniature of the strange world we 
 live in. What garden of it has not its own grave 1 Your path may, 
 for a time, be through flowers and fragrance ; follow it far enough, 
 it leads ever to a grave. But this sepulchre in this garden suggests 
 other and happier thoughts. It was in a garden once of old in 
 Eden, that death had his first summons given, to find there his 
 first prey ; it is in a garden here at Calvary, that the last enemy of 
 mankind has the death-blow given to him that the great Conqueror 
 is in his turn overcome. Upon that stone which they rolled to the 
 mouth of the sepulchre, let us engrave the words " O death, where 
 is thy sting ? grave, where is thy victory ? Thanks be to God, 
 which giveth us the victory, through our Lord Jesus Christ." What 
 a change it has made in the character and aspect of the grave, that 
 our Saviour himself once lay in it ! He has stripped it of its 
 terrors, and to many a weary one given it an attractive rather than 
 a repulsive look. " I heard a voice from heaven saying " it needed 
 a voice from heaven to assure us of the truth " Blessed are the 
 dead who die in the Lord." To such the grave is, indeed, a bed 
 of blessed rest. Buried with Jesus, they repose till the hour of the 
 great awakening cometh, when with him they shall arise to that 
 newness of life over which no shadow of death shall ever pass.
 
 THE FOETY DAYS AFTER THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 L THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 MATT, xxvii. 62-66 ; xxvm. 1-6. 
 
 WE left Mary Magdalene and the other Mary keeping their 
 lonely watch overagainst the sepulchre till the sun of Friday sets. 
 At its setting, Saturday, the great Sabbath of the Passover, begins. 
 Such a Sabbath never dawned upon this world before or since. All 
 things wear an outward look of quiet in Jerusalem. A great calm, 
 a deeper than Sabbath stillness, has followed the stir and excite- 
 ment of those strange scenes at Golgotha. Crowds of silent 
 worshippers fill, as usual, the courts of the Temple ; and all goes 
 on, at the hours of the morning and evening sacrifice, as it had 
 done for hundreds of years gone by. But can those priests, who 
 minister within the Holy Place, gaze without some strange mis- 
 givings upon the rent in the veil from top to bottom, which yester- 
 day they had seen so strangely made, and which they scarce had 
 time imperfectly to repair ] Can they think without dismay of 
 that rude uncovering of all the hidden mysteries of the most Holy 
 Place, which they had witnessed ? Among the crowds of worship- 
 pers without, there are friends and followers of Jesus. They would 
 have been here, had nothing happened to their Master the day 
 before, and they are here now, for, by keeping away, they might 
 draw suspicion upon themselves ; but what heart have they for the 
 services of the Sanctuary 1 They have just had all their brightest 
 earthly hopes smitten to the dust ; and so prostrate are they beneath 
 the stroke, that they cannot even recall to memory, that but a few 
 months before, Jesus had, more than once, distinctly told them that 
 he must go up to Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders 
 and chief priests, and be killed, and be raised again the third day. 
 No writer of a fictitious story, no framer of a religious myth, had 
 he previously put into Christ's lips such distinct foretellings of his 
 death and resurrection, would have attributed to his followers such 
 an entire forgetfulness of these predictions, such an utter prostration 
 of all faith and hope, as that which the Evangelists describe as 
 coming upon all our Lord's disciples immediately after his death,
 
 580 THE FORTY DAYS. 
 
 lasting till the most extraordinary means were taken to remove 
 them, and yielding slowly even then. Yet, after all, is it not true 
 to human nature, that upon the minds and hearts of those simple, 
 rude, uncultivated men and women, filled as they had been with 
 other and quite different expectations, the shock of such a shameful 
 death, coming in such a way upon their Master, was so sudden and 
 so stunning, that all power of forming a new conception of their 
 Master's character, and taking up a new faith in him, was gone ; 
 the power even of remembering what he had said about himself 
 beforehand for the season paralysed 1 
 
 But love lives on, even where faith dies out, among those dis- 
 consolate and utterly hopeless friends and followers of our Lord. 
 While the two Marys had remained throughout the preceding day 
 before the sepulchre, others of those Galilean women had hastened 
 to occupy the short space between the burial and the sunset, in 
 beginning their preparations for the embalming of their Master's 
 body. And these, with the two Marys, are waiting now, not with- 
 out impatience ; for their hearts, not in the Temple services, have 
 gone where they have seen him laid, till the sunset, the close of 
 the Sabbath, enables them to have all the needed wrappings, and 
 spices, and ointments prepared, so that when the third morning 
 dawns they may go out to Golgotha, to finish there at leisure what 
 Joseph and Nicodemus had more hurriedly and imperfectly at- 
 tempted, before they laid Jesus in the sepulchre. 
 
 But how, throughout this intervening Sabbath, fares it with 
 the chief priests and rulers ? Are they quite at ease ; content and 
 happy ; satisfied with, if not glorying in, their success 1 They have 
 got rid of this obnoxious man ; he is dead and buried. What fear 
 c&n there be of him now ] What risk or danger to them, or to 
 their supremacy, can come out of his grave ? May they not bury 
 all their apprehensions in that closed sepulchre 1 No ; a ghastly 
 fear comes in to mar the joy of a gratified revenge. They dread 
 that dead man still; he rules their spirits from his sepulchre. 
 They would not cross Herod's threshold the day before, lest they 
 should be defiled. They could not bear the thought that Jesus 
 should hang suspended on the cross throughout the Sabbath-day ; 
 it would disturb, it would desecrate the services of the holy day, 
 the Holy Place. But they scruple not to desecrate the Sabbath by 
 their jealous fears ; by their secret councils ; by their plannings to 
 prevent a future, dreaded danger. And so, no sooner is the Sabbath 
 over, than they hasten to the Governor, saying to him : " Sir, wo 
 remember that that deceiver said, while he was yet alive, After 
 three days I will rise again." They had themselves heard him, at 
 the vejy beginning of his ministry, say publicly : " Destroy this 
 temple, and in three days I will raise it again." They had heard 
 him at a later period say : " An evil and adulterous generation
 
 THE RESURRECTION. 581 
 
 seeketh after a sign ; and there shall no sign be given to it, but the 
 sign of the prophet Jonas : for as Jonas -was three days and three 
 nights in the whale's belly, so shall the Son of man be three days 
 and three nights in the heart of the earth." "Was it to these vague 
 and general sayings of our Lord that the Rulers now referred 1 It 
 is more likely that they had in view some of those more recent and 
 more explicit declarations of Jesus to his own disciples, such as the 
 one already quoted, or such as that other, and still more explicit 
 one, when he took his disciples apart by the way, as they were 
 going up to Jerusalem, and said to them, " Behold, we go up to 
 Jerusalem ; and the Son of man shall be betrayed unto the chief 
 priests, and unto the scribes, and they shall condemn him to death, 
 and shall deliver him to the Gentiles to mock, and to scourge, and 
 to crucify him : and the third day he shall rise again." What more 
 natural than that the betrayer himself, to whose act such special 
 allusion was thus made, should, in some of his communications with 
 the Rulers, have repeated to them those memorable words ? They 
 now remember, while the disciples themselves forget. They fear, 
 while the disciples have ceased to hope. When first reported to 
 them, they had mocked at the unmeaning words ; but now that so 
 much of the prophecy has been accomplished, they begin to dread 
 lest somehow or other the remainder of it should also be fulfilled. 
 As yet all was safe ; it was not till the third day that he was to 
 rise again. During that Sabbath-day the body of the Crucified was 
 secure enough in the sepulchre ; the very sanctity of the day a suffi- 
 cient guard against any attempt to invade the tomb. But instant 
 means must be taken that thereafter there be no tampering with 
 the place of burial. No night-guard could they get so good as 
 a company of Roman soldiers, whose iron rule of discipline im- 
 posed death upon the sentinel who slept at his post. Such guard 
 they could get stationed at the sepulchre only under the Governor's 
 sanction. "Command therefore," they said to Pilate, "that the 
 sepulchre be made sure until the third day, lest his disciples come 
 by night, and steal him away, and say unto the people, He is risen 
 from the dead : so the last error shall be worse than the first." 
 Little heeding either the first or the last error, having no sympathy 
 with their idle fears about the rifling of the sepulchre, in no good 
 humour either with himself or with the Rulers, yet, since he had 
 gone so far to please them, not caring to refuse their last request, 
 Pilate complies. " Ye have a watch," he says ; ' a detachment of 
 my soldiers placed at your disposal during the feast, use it as you 
 please ; go your way, and, with its help, make the sepulchre of that 
 poor, innocent Nazarene, you got me to crucify, as sure as ye can. ' 
 And they went their way. They passed a cord across the stone 
 which filled the entrance into the sepulchre, and fastened it at each 
 end to the adjoining rock with the sealing clay, so that the stone
 
 582 THE FOKTY DAYS. 
 
 could not be removed and replaced, however carefully, in its first 
 position, without leaving behind a mark of the disturbance. And 
 they placed the sentinels, with the strict command that they were 
 to suffer no man in the darkness to meddle with that sepulchre ; 
 and thus, securely guarded, the dead body of the Redeemer reposes. 
 The darkness deepens round the sepulchre, the sentinels kindle 
 their night-lamps, and pace to and fro before it. The midnight 
 hour has passed ; it is yet dark. The day has but begun to dawn, 
 when those women, whose wakeful love sends them forth on their 
 early errand, leave the Holy City to go out to Calvary to complete 
 there the interrupted embalming. They are already near the spot, 
 when a difficulty, not thought of till then, occurs to them. And 
 they said among themselves, Who shall roll away the stone from 
 the door of the sepulchre ? That stone which they had seen two 
 nights before closely fitted into its place, was too large, too firmly 
 imbedded in its place for their weak hands to move, and at this 
 hour, and at that spot, what aid of stronger hands can they obtain 1 
 Another difficulty there was ; but of it happily they were ignorant, 
 or it might have stopped their movement altogether. Of that seal- 
 ing of the stone, of that guard planted the preceding day before 
 the sepulchre, they had heard nothing, else they might have put to 
 one another the further question, How, with such guard before it, 
 shall we ever get access to the grave ? It is as they are com- 
 muning with one another by the way, that the earth quakes, and 
 the angel descends from heaven, and rolls the stone back from 
 the door of the sepulchre, and, having done this service for the 
 embalmers, sits down upon it, waiting their approach. Was it 
 then that the great event of that morning took place 1 Was it as 
 the angel's hand rolled back the stone, and opened the entrance of 
 the tomb, that the Great Redeemer of mankind awoke, arose, and 
 stepped forth from his temporary rest among the dead ? It is not 
 said so. The keepers did not witness the resurrection. They saw 
 the angel, the light of his countenance, the snowy radiance of his 
 raiment, and for fear of him they became as dead men. But they 
 saw not the Lord himself come forth. The angel himself may not 
 have witnessed the resurrection. He did not say he had. He 
 speaks of it as an event already past. It may not have been as a 
 spectator or minister to his Lord, in the act of rising from the dead, 
 that he was sent down from heaven. The Lord of life needed not 
 that service which he came to render. Through that stone door 
 he could have passed as easily as he passed afterwards through 
 other doors which barred not his entrances nor his exits. Altogether 
 secret, the exact tune and manner of the event, unnoticed and 
 unknown was that great rising from the dead. The clearest and 
 amplest proof was afterwards given of the fact that, some time 
 between sunset of the last and sunrise of the first dav of the week.
 
 THE RESURRECTION. 583 
 
 the resurrection had taken place ; but it pleased not the Lord who 
 then arose to do so under the immediate eye or inspection of any 
 human witness. 
 
 Alarmed by the quaking of the ground beneath their feet, 
 bewildered by the strange light which is seen streaming forth from 
 beside the sepulchre, the women enter the garden, approach the 
 sepulchre, gather courage as they see that the stone is already 
 rolled away, but might have sunk again in terror as they looked 
 at him who sat upon that stone, had he not prevented their fears 
 by saying to them, in tones, let us believe, full of soothing power, 
 " Fear not ye : for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified" 
 ' I know the errand that you come on. I know that it is love 
 to the Crucified which brings you, thus early, to what was once 
 his grave ; and I have tidings of him that such love as yours will 
 delight to hear. True, all that labour of yours about these spices 
 and ointments is lost ; you will find here no body to embalm. But 
 not lost this visit to the sepulchre ; for to you first, among all his 
 followers, have I to tell, " He is not here : for he is risen, as he 
 said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay ;" ' and he led them 
 into the sepulchre. 
 
 " Come, see the place where the Lord lay." How little did the 
 angel who first uttered these words, and heard the echo of them 
 die away among the recesses of the rocky garden, how little, 
 perhaps, did he think that the invitation which he thus gave to 
 those few trembling women who stood before him, would be con- 
 veyed down through all after times, and be borne to the ears of 
 millions upon millions of the followers of Jesus Christ ! And yet 
 it has been even so, and in the course of its long descent and wide 
 circulation, it has reached even unto us. Let us listen to and obey 
 it. Come, let us look at the place where the Lord once lay, and 
 from which on that third morning he arose. 
 
 We cannot indeed literally accept the angelic invitation, and go 
 and look into the empty sepulchre. The hand of time, and in this 
 instance the still rougher hands of the devotee and of the infidel, 
 have wrought such changes in that sacred neighbourhood that the 
 exact site of the holy sepulchre cannot be identified. But though 
 we may not be able to plant our footsteps on the very ground that 
 the trembling women occupied, or follow them as, angel led, they 
 passed into the deserted tomb, yet in thought we may still bend 
 over the place where the Lord once lay. 
 
 As we do so, let us reflect upon the proofs of the divine mission 
 of the Eedeemer afforded by his resurrection from the grave. 
 Evidence enough had been afforded by our Lord himself, during 
 his lifetime, of his divine character and authority. The words he 
 spake, the works he did, proclaimed him to be the Son of the 
 Highest. But sufficient as it was to convince the candid, that
 
 584 THE FORTY DAYS. 
 
 evidence had not been sufficient to silence the cavillers. His words 
 were misunderstood and misinterpreted ; his miracles, though not 
 denied, were attributed to Satanic agency. It was as a blasphemer 
 that he was put to death. But his resurrection appears at least to 
 have had this effect : it stopped the mouths of his adversaries. 
 There might be a few among the more credulous of them who 
 accepted the clumsy tale that the chief priests tried to circulate 
 about his disciples coming by night and taking the body away. 
 But loudly and publicly as, both in the heart of Jerusalem and 
 elsewhere, the apostles proclaimed this fact in the presence of the 
 Eulers themselves, it does not appear that its reality was ever 
 openly challenged, or that any such attempt was made to explain 
 it away as had been made regarding other miracles wrought by the 
 Saviour's hands. If it failed to convince, it succeeded at least in 
 silencing those who would, if they could, have dealt with it in a 
 like manner. 
 
 It had indeed the force of a double miracle. Barely, and by 
 itself, the rising of Jesus from the dead most fully authenticated 
 the claims he had put forth. Had the Son of Mary not been all 
 that he had declared himself to be, never would such an exercise 
 of the Divine power have been put forth on his behalf. But more 
 than this, Christ had publicly perilled his reputation as the Christ 
 of God on the occurrence of this event. When challenged to give 
 some sign in support of his pretensions, it was to his future resur- 
 rection from the dead, and to it alone, that he appealed. Often, as 
 we have seen, and that in terms incapable of misconstruction, had 
 our Lord foretold his resurrection. It carried thus along with it a 
 triple proof of the divinity of our Lord's mission. It was the ful- 
 filment of a prophecy, as well as the working of a miracle ; that 
 miracle wrought, and that prophecy fulfilled, in answer to a solemn 
 and confident appeal made beforehand by Christ to this event as 
 the crowning testimony to his Messiahship. 
 
 But not yet have we exhausted the testimony which the resur- 
 rection of Jesus embodies. He spoke of that resurrection as the 
 raising of himself by himself. "Destroy this temple, and in three 
 days I will raise it up. I lay down my life, that I may take it 
 again. I have power to lay it down ; I have power to take it 
 again." An assumption by Jesus Christ of a power proper to the 
 Creator alone ; a clothing of himself with the high prerogatives of 
 the giver and the restorer of life. % His actual resurrection, did it 
 not in the most solemn manner ratify that assumption, convincing 
 us by an instance of the highest kind, that whatsoever thing the 
 Father doeth, the same doeth the Son likewise 1 
 
 But further still and it is this which attaches such importance 
 to this incident in the history of our Redeemer, and causes it to be 
 spoken of in the New Testament Scriptures us standing in such
 
 THE RESURKECTION. 585 
 
 close connection with all our dearest hopes as to the life beyond the 
 grave, in the resurrection of the Saviour, the seal of the Divine 
 acceptance and approval was put upon that great work of service 
 and of sacrifice, of atonement and of obedience in our room and 
 stead, which Jesus finished on the cross. The expression and 
 embodiment of that acceptance and approval in a visible act, an 
 outward and palpable incident, gives an aid and a security to our 
 faith in Christ for our acceptance with God, far beyond that which 
 any bare announcement in words could possibly have conveyed. 
 Can we wonder, then, at the prominence given, in the teachings and 
 writings of the apostles of our Lord, to an event so full of con- 
 vincing evidence, so rich in spiritual instruction arid comfort 1 To 
 be a witness to this great event was held as the election of 
 Matthias informs us to be the special function of the apostolic 
 office. It was to this event that Peter referred at large in his 
 discourse to the multitude on the day of Pentecost. " This Jesus 
 hath God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses." Questioned, a 
 short time afterwards, before the Sanhedrim, as to the earliest of 
 the apostolic miracles, " Be it known," said Peter, " unto you all, 
 and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of 
 Xazareth, whom ye crucified, whom God raised from the dead, 
 even by him doth this man stand before you whole." When Paul 
 addressed the men of Athens, this was the one supernatural incident 
 to which, in the way of attestation, he referred : " God hath 
 appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world by that man 
 whom he hath ordained ; whereof he hath given assurance, in that 
 he hath raised him from the dead." I have but to refer to the 
 15th chapter of the 1st Epistle to the Corinthians, to remind you 
 of the place and prominence given to the event by the great apostle 
 of the Gentiles : " If Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, 
 and your faith is also vain." 
 
 From the first, it was to that crowning miracle of Christianity 
 that its teachers made appeal. And now once more, in our own 
 times, it is by that event that we desire that the entire question of the 
 supernaturalism of our religion should be decided ; for if that event 
 be true, then any, then all other miracles are at least credible, for 
 where among them shall a greater than this be found ? If that 
 event be true, then upon it does the entire fabric of our Christian 
 faith securely rest ; for if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, 
 then are we prepared along with this, and as harmonising with 
 this, to believe all that the Scriptures have taught us of the glory 
 of Christ's person, as one with, and equal to the Father; all 
 that they have taught us of the design of his life and death among 
 us, as the Redeemer of our souls from death, the giver, the infuser, 
 the nourisher, the maturer of that eternal life which is for our 
 souls in him. Let us then be devoutly grateful for it, that our
 
 586 THE FORTY DAYS. 
 
 faith, iii him 'in knowledge of whom, in union with whom standeth 
 our eternal life has such a solid foundation of fact to rest upon, 
 a foundation so firmly imbedded among all those other foundations 
 upon which our knowledge of the past reposes, that to unsettle, to 
 overturn it, you must unsettle, must overturn them all. 
 
 " Come, see the place where the Lord lay," that you may con- 
 template him, the one and only instance which this worM hath 
 witnessed of the last enemy, Death, being fairly met, met in his 
 own territory, triumphed over in his own domain, by the use of 
 his own weapons. That grim, inexorable tyrant, wealth has never 
 bribed, tears have never softened, beauty has never moved as he 
 made his unfaltering approach and struck his unerring blow. To 
 and fro, wide over the vast field of humanity, has that sheer, cold 
 scythe been ever swaying, and generation after generation has it 
 laid low in the dust. Two only out of the many millions of our 
 race two in olden time were snatched away before the stroke of 
 the destroyer came upon them, and passed away without tasting 
 death. But the translation of Enoch and Elijah was no victory 
 over death; they never met, they never grappled with this foe; 
 they were withdrawn from the battle-field before the day of conflict 
 came. Some there were, too, in after times, who, subject for a 
 season to the dominion of death, were delivered from his sway; 
 but neither was theirs the victory, for they had to return again, 
 and bow once more beneath the yoke of the great conqueror. 
 The widow's son, the ruler's daughter, and Lazarus whom Jesus 
 loved, lie low as others in the caverns of the dead. One alone of 
 human form ever grappled with that strong wrestler, Death, and 
 cast him from him overcome. His way to conquest lay through 
 brief submission. Like others, he descended into the dark and 
 dreary prison-house. The grave opened to receive him. He 
 seemed to have passed away, as the multitudes who had gone 
 before. But Death and the Grave never received such a visitant 
 into their silent and vast domains. He approached the throne of 
 the tyrant, to wrench the sceptre of empire from his hand. In 
 bursting, as he did, the barriers of the grave, it was no mere 
 respite that he obtained for himself, but a full and final victory. 
 He bade adieu that morning to the sepulchre for ever. He left no 
 trophy behind ; nothing of his in the hands of death ; nothing 
 but that empty sepulchre to tell that he had once, and for a short 
 season, been under the hold of the destroyer. Even had this been 
 a solitary conquest, though the sepulchre of Jesus were to remain 
 for ever as the only one from wlmh the tenant came forth alive, to 
 return to it no more, still would we draw near to muse upon this 
 one triumph of humanity over the last enemy. 
 
 But we have all a nearer, a more special interest in this deserted 
 tomb of Jesus Christ. His was no solitary, isolated victory over
 
 APPEARANCE TO MAEY MAGDALENE. 587 
 
 the grave. For us he died, and for us he rose again. Firm and 
 fast as the grave now seems to hold the buried generations of our 
 race, it is now doomed, as a fruit of Christ's resurrection, to relax 
 its grasp, and yield them up again. Empty as was Joseph's 
 sepulchre when the angel stood before it and invited the women 
 to enter, so empty shall one day be every grave of earth, when 
 another angel shall sound his trumpet, and it shall ring through all 
 the regions of the dead, and stir all to life again. Blessed was that 
 morning which dawned upon the empty tomb at Calvary, but more 
 blessed to us shall that other morning be, which shall dawn upon 
 all the emptied graves of earth, if only now we live in Christ ; if 
 at death we sleep in Jesus ; if at that resurrection we be numbered 
 with those who shall share the resurrection of the just. 
 
 II. 
 
 APPEARANCE TO MARY MAGDALENE. 
 JOHN xx. 1-18. 
 
 IN relating the incidents of the resurrection, St. Matthew tells 
 us that it was Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, who, as the 
 first day of the week began to dawn, went out to the sepulchre. 
 St. Mark mentions Salome as having accompanied them. St. 
 Luke introduces the additional name of Joanna. St. John speaks 
 of Mary Magdalene, and of her only. On the supposition that a 
 number of those women who came with Jesus from Galilee had 
 agreed to complete as early as possible the embalming of his body, 
 and that they had either started together from the city, or, being 
 in different parts of it the night before, had fixed to meet at early 
 dawn at the sepulchre, we can readily enough understand that each 
 of the four independent narrators might name one or more of them 
 without specifying the others. Looking, however, a little more 
 closely into the four separate accounts, we notice that, according to 
 Matthew, the women on their arrival found the stone removed 
 from the entrance of the sepulchre, and an angel sitting upon it, 
 who invited them to enter and look at the place where the Lord 
 had lain. Mark, making no allusion to any vision of an angel 
 without, says that they passed into the sepulchre, and, on entering, 
 saw "a young man sitting at the right side, clothed in a long 
 white garment," who addressed to them nearly ^the same words 
 which Matthew puts into the mouth of the angel seen sitting upon 
 the stone. Luke tells us that, finding the stone rolled away, they 
 entered in and found the sepulchre empty, and as they stood 
 perplexed at the discovery, "behold, two men stood by them in 
 shining garments," and spoke to them in terms and in a tone
 
 588 THE FORTY DAYS. 
 
 differing considerably from that attributed to the single angel by 
 the first two evangelists. It appears again, from the narrative of 
 John, that Mary Magdalene had seen no angel, had heard at least 
 no announcement that the Lord was actually alive, when she 
 hurried off from the sepulchre in search of Peter and John. What 
 are we to make of these discrepancies'? Was it sometimes one 
 and sometimes two angels that appeared ; were some eyes opened 
 and some eyes shut to the angelic visions ? Was it one visit, or 
 two, or more, by the same or different groups of women, which 
 were paid to the sepulchre ? Various attempts to answer such 
 questions have been made ; various suppositions have been framed, 
 the adoption of which, it has been thought, would relieve the 
 different accounts from conflicting with one another ; various modes 
 of interlacing them, so as to form out of them a continuous and 
 consistent narrative have been presented. If it cannot be said 
 that they have all absolutely failed, it must be said that not one 
 of them is entirely satisfactory. We cannot doubt that if all the 
 minor and connecting links were in our hands, we should be able 
 to explain what now seems to be obscure, to harmonise what now 
 seems to be conflicting ; but in the absence of such knowledge, we 
 must be content to take what each writer tells us, and regard it as 
 the broken fragment of a whole, all the parts of which are not in 
 our hands, so that we can put them connectedly together. But is 
 not this fragmentary character of each of these four separate 
 accounts just what we might have expected, considering the time 
 and manner of the events narrated, the obscure light, the women 
 coming, it may have been singly, or in different groups by different 
 routes, the surprise, the terror, the running in and out, to and 
 from the city all this within the compass of an hour or two 1 
 Which one of the spectators or actors in these busy and broken 
 movements, if asked afterwards to detail what occurred, but might 
 have given an account of it differing from that of all the others 1 
 And if any two of these independent sources of information were 
 applied to or made use of, how readily might apparent contra- 
 dictions emerge upon the face of the narratives that were after- 
 wards preserved. We do not know from what particular sources 
 Matthew, Mark, and Luke derived their information. This special 
 interest, however, attaches to the narrative of John, it is partly 
 that of an eye-witness, and partly drawn, we cannot doubt, from 
 what was told him by Mary Magdalene herself. Overlooking the 
 part taken by all the other women, John confines himself ex- 
 clusively to her. Even as our Lord himself singled her out from 
 among the women who had ministered to him, to make to her his 
 first appearance after his resurrection, so does the beloved disciple 
 speak of her alone while he details to us the incidents of that 
 wonderful manifestation.
 
 APPEARANCE TO MART MAGDALENE. 589 
 
 We feel as if a great injustice had been done to Mary 
 Magdalene, in identifying her with the woman who was a sinner, 
 who anointed the Lord's feet with ointment, and wiped them with 
 the hairs of her head. The name of that woman is not mentioned 
 in the record of the incident in which she took so prominent a 
 part The incident occurred not in Magdala but at Nain. It was 
 after Christ had left Nain that the first mention of this Mary meets 
 us in the gospel narrative : " And it came to pass afterward, that 
 he went throughout every city and village, preaching and showing 
 the glad tidings of the kingdom of God ; and the twelve were with 
 him, and certain women, which had been healed of evil spirits and 
 infirmities, Mary called Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils, 
 and Joanna the wife of Chuza, Herod's steward, and Susanna, and 
 many others, which ministered unto him of their substance." 
 Named thus along with one whose husband held an important 
 office in Herod's household, named as one of those who ministered 
 to our Lord of their substance, Mary Magdalene does not appear to 
 have been a woman of a low or poor condition. Neither have we 
 any right to ground upon the fact that seven devils had been cast 
 out of her, the conclusion that she had been a woman of depraved 
 or dissolute habits. Satanic possession carried then no more 
 evidence along with it of previous immorality, than insanity would 
 do now among ourselves. 
 
 But whoever, whatever this Mary was, she was, as we have 
 already seen, one of the latest at the sepulchre on the evening of 
 the burial, and now she is one of the earliest at that sepulchre on 
 the morning of the resurrection. Perhaps, more eager than the 
 rest, she had hurried on before, and entered the garden alone. A 
 quick glance, that waited not to catch even the sight of the angel's 
 form, had shown her that the entrance was open, and the sepulchre 
 empty. Overwhelmed with sorrow at the sight ; waiting not to 
 hear the angel's intimation that He had risen ; leaping at once to 
 the conclusion that hostile hands had rifled the sacred tomb, her 
 troubled fancy picturing to her the indignities to which that form, 
 beloved even in its lifelessness, might have been subjected, Mary 
 hurries back to the city. She seeks the house to which John had 
 carried the mother of our Lord. She finds there both John and that 
 other apostle, whom a strange attraction has drawn now to John's 
 side. She has but breath enough to say, " They have taken away 
 the Lord, and we know not where they have laid him." Her 
 eagerness of alarm passes, by sympathy, into the hearts of the 
 two apostles. They arise to run out together to the sepulchre. 
 John's lighter footstep, quickened by his more ardent, more un- 
 burdened love, carries him soonest to the spot ; but, at the 
 entrance, his deep and reverential spirit holds him back in awe. 
 He stops, and bends, and looks into the grave. Peter, of slower
 
 590 THE FORTY DAYS. 
 
 step, and still labouring, it may have been, under the burden of 
 self-reproach, is behind John in the race; but, bolder or more 
 impetuous, he stops not at the door, but, passing John, goes at 
 once into the sepulchre. He draws his brother apostle after him, 
 the one never dreaming of the influence he thus exerts, the other 
 as little thinking of the influence he obeys. Both are now within, 
 and have leisure to look round upon the place. There the linen 
 clothes are lying, with which Joseph and Nicodemus had swathed 
 the body, and there, not loosely flung upon them in a disordered 
 heap, but carefully folded up in a place by itself, lies that napkin 
 which Mary herself may have helped to bind around the thorn- 
 marked brow. Who had .arranged them thus 1 Was it the hand 
 of the great Sleeper himself, on his awakening within the tomb ? 
 or was it some angel's hand that took the death garments, as they 
 dropped from around the risen one, and thus disposed them? 
 Whoever did it, there had been no haste; all had been done 
 calmly, collectedly. Neither earthly friends nor earthly foes had 
 done it : the one would not have stripped the garments from the 
 body; the other would have been at no pains so carefully to 
 arrange and deposit them. Peter, as he looks, is amazed, but his 
 amazement shapes itself into no connected thought; he departs 
 wondering in himself at that which had come to pass. John's 
 quieter and deeper reflection suggests at once the idea that what 
 has taken place is not a removal, but a reanimation of the body. 
 An incipient faith in the resurrection forms within his breast ; a 
 faith grounded, not as it might have been, and should have been, 
 on what he had already read or heard for as yet neither he nor 
 any of the apostles knew from the Scripture, nor believed from 
 Christ's own word, that he must rise again from the dead, but 
 grounded simply on what he saw, and especially upon the singular 
 condition which the interior of the sepulchre displayed. That 
 rising faith, John kept to himself ; he never boasted that he was 
 the first of all the Twelve to believe in the resurrection. Perhaps, 
 his first public mention of the fact was when, so many years after- 
 wards, he sat down to write that Gospel which bears his name. 
 
 The brief inspection of the empty sepulchre over there being 
 nothing more to see or learn John and Peter return silent and 
 sad to their own home. Mary Magdalene had followed them, as 
 best she could, in the running out to the sepulchre ; but she does 
 not join them in their return. Two evenings before (when all but 
 she and the other Mary had left the tomb into which she had seen 
 the body borne for burial), she had clung to it to the last, and this 
 morning she clings to it still. The Master whom she had lost had 
 rendered her the greatest of services ; had been to her the kindest 
 and best of friends. Her grateful love had clung to him while 
 living ; and now this love, living in her sorrow, makes her cling,
 
 APPEARANCE TO MARY MAGDALENE. 591 
 
 even when John has left it, to the spot where in death he had 
 reposed. Mary Magdalene, standing alone weeping thus before the 
 empty sepulchre, presents herself to our eye as the saddest and 
 most inconsolable of all the mourners for the Crucified. As she 
 weeps, she stoops to take another look into the deserted place. 
 She sees a sight that might well have diverted her from her grief 
 two angels sitting, the one at the head, the other at the feet, 
 where the body of Jesus had lain. They say to her, " Woman, 
 why weepest thou ?" Did you ever read of a more absorbing grief 
 than that she, who was addressed thus by angels, should have no 
 surprise, no astonishment to spare ; but, as if unheeding who they 
 were that spoke to her, should, out of the depths of her engrossing 
 sorrow, only be able to repeat what she had said to Peter and John, 
 varying the phrase a little claiming a closer property in the 
 departed " Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know 
 not where they have laid him." And she turns away, even from 
 an interview with angels, from converse with those who may have 
 had as their purpose in putting to her that question, to tell her 
 about her risen Lord. She turns away even from them to weep 
 out, without further interruption, her most bitter grief. 
 
 But now, from other lips, the same question, " "Woman, why 
 weepest thou ?" salutes her ear. She sees, but scarcely notices, the 
 person who thus speaks to her. He is not directly before her, and 
 she cares not to turn, or make any minute scrutiny of his person. 
 Even had she done so, seeing him through the veil of dropping 
 tears, she might have failed to recognise him. She cares as little, 
 in fact, about who this speaker is as she had cared about who those 
 angels were. Taking him to be one who did not need to be told 
 why she wept, who must know all about what had happened the 
 gardener of the place she says to him, in the simplest, most artless 
 way, " Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast 
 laid him, and I will take him away." She is willing even to believe 
 that it was with no unkindly purpose he had been removed. Only 
 let her know where he is ; and, all forgetful how unfit her weak 
 hands were for such a task, she says, I will take him away. ' If 
 it be an offence that he lies here in this rich man's tomb, so near 
 the holy city, I will bear him away to some remoter burial-place, 
 where he may lie in peace, and where I may go and weep at will 
 over his grave.' 
 
 Jesus saith unto her, " Mary." The old familiar voice ! It can 
 be only He who names her so. Instantly fully the revelation of 
 his living presence bursts upon her. She turns, and forgetting all 
 about the new strange circumstances in which she sees him, as if 
 the former days of their familiar intercourse had returned, she 
 says, Eabboni ! and is about to clasp him to her arms. Jesus stops 
 the movement. "Touch me not," he says, "for I am not yet
 
 592 THE FORTY DAYS. 
 
 ascended to my Father ; but go to my brethren, and say unto them, 
 I ascend unto my Father, and your Father, and to my God, and 
 your God." This check upon the ardour of Mary's affectionate 
 approach in the first moments of recognition we can only under- 
 stand by reflecting upon the object of our Lord's sojourn upon the 
 earth for the forty days after his resurrection. 
 
 There is a mystery which hangs around this singular period in 
 the life of our Redeemer. Why did he tarry so long upon the 
 earth when his work appeared to have been finished? What 
 peculiar service did that keeping empty so long his seat at his 
 Father's right hand render to his Church and people ? During the 
 first eight days, on the first and last of which alone he showed 
 himself in Jerusalem, was he treading unseen the streets of the 
 holy city, or haunting the household of the loved family of Bethany? 
 Their midnight hours ; did they see him onoe again amid the dark 
 shadows of Gethsemane, praying now, not that the cup might be 
 taken from him, but that the fruits of his bygone passion might be 
 gathered in 1 The Sabbaths of these days ; did they see him 
 entering again the Temple, passing behind the rent veil into the 
 Holy of Holies, quenching with his unseen hand, and that for ever, 
 the fire that had burned above the mercy-seat ? During the weeks 
 which followed, was he wandering an unseen spectator over the 
 scenes of his earthly ministry; re- visiting Nazareth, re-entering 
 Capernaum, where most of his mighty works had been done, look- 
 ing in with kindly eye upon that nobleman's family, all of whom 
 had believed in him ; going out to Cana, casting a passing glance at 
 the dwelling in which the first of his miracles had been performed ; 
 lingering for a moment by the gate of the little city of Nain, 
 blessing once more, as he passed, the widow and her recovered 
 child? 
 
 It is an idle task, perhaps, for fancy to picture where or how 
 those forty days were spent. But it is not an unprofitable question 
 for us to put to ourselves, what ends could his lingering so long on 
 earth have served ? It cannot be supposed that the mere object of 
 affording proof enough that he was still alive, would have detained 
 him here so long. That could have been done in two days as well 
 as in forty. Besides, had that been the main object of his delay, 
 why did he not appear oftener in a more open and public manner 
 than he did ? Neither can it be imagined, that it was for the pur- 
 pose of continued and enlarged intercourse with his disciples. The 
 fewness and shortness of the interviews with them preclude that 
 belief. He was seen by them but ten times in all ; five of those 
 appearances occurring on the day of his resurrection ; and four of 
 them, those to Mary, to Peter, to James, to the two disciples, 
 having more of a private than of a public character. Out of the 
 forty days there wei'e but six on which he held intercourse with
 
 APPEARANCE TO MARY MAGDALENE. 593 
 
 any human being, and in those six days he did not give more than 
 as many hours to fellowship with those to whom he showed himself. 
 How brief, too, generally, and abrupt the meetings that made up 
 the hours which were so employed ! In the twilight of the garden ; 
 in the dim-lighted upper chamber ; in the grey dawn of the lake 
 side, he appears, speaks but a few sentences, and vanishes as mys- 
 teriously as he had appeared. All betokens a studied effort to stand 
 aloof, to shun all close, prolonged, familiar intercourse. What 
 impression was all this studied distance and reserve fitted to make 
 upon the minds of his disciples ? Put yourselves into their exact 
 position at this time ; remember that not one of them before his 
 death had risen to any thought or belief in his divinity ; that from 
 all their earlier earthly notions of him they had to be weaned ; that- 
 after days and years of the easiest companionship with him, they 
 had to be raised to the belief that it was the very Lord of heaven 
 and earth with whom they had been holding converse ; yet, that 
 belief was to be so formed within them, as not to militate against 
 the idea of his true and proper humanity. See, then, what an 
 important part in the execution of this needful, but most difficult 
 task, must have been fulfilled by his mode of dealing with them 
 during the forty days. 
 
 For, let us only conceive what should have happened, if one or 
 other of the two alternatives had been realised : if at once, after a 
 few interviews, sufficient simply to do away with all doubt as to his 
 resurrection, Jesus had passed up into the heavens, never to be seen 
 again on earth ; let us imagine that the descent of the Spirit had 
 immediately thereon ensued ; that the day of Pentecost had followed 
 immediately on the day of the resurrection ; that the eyes of the 
 apostles had thus at once and fully been enlightened, and the great 
 truth of their Master's Godhead had been flashed upon their minds ; 
 the danger undoubtedly would have been that, seen in the blaze 
 of that new glory, shining thus around his person, the man Christ 
 Jesus had been lost, the humanity swallowed up in the divinity ; 
 nor would it have been so easy to persuade those men that, ascended 
 up on high, seated at the right hand of the Father, he was the same 
 Jesus still, a brother to them as truly as when he lived among 
 them, equally alive to all human sympathies as when he walked 
 with them by the way, or sat down with them in the upper 
 chamber. 
 
 Take, again, the other alternative ; that after his resurrection, 
 Christ had immediately resumed and continued even let us say for 
 no longer a time than these forty days the exact kind of life that 
 he had led before, returning to all his old haunts and occupations ; 
 spending a day or two with Lazarus and his sister at Bethany ; 
 travelling up through Samaria, and sitting wearied by the well's 
 mouth, as before ; living in Peter's wife's sister's house, dining with 
 2 P
 
 594 THE FORTY DAYS. 
 
 Pharisees ; crossing the Lake in the fishing-boat ; companying with 
 multitudes on mountain-sides ; living and acting outwardly in every 
 respect as he had done before, would not such a return on his 
 part to all the old familiarities of his former intercourse, have had 
 a tendency to check the rising faith in his divinity ; to tie his 
 disciples down again to a knowing of him only after the flesh ; to 
 give to the humanity of the Lord such bulk and prominence as to 
 make it in their eyes overshadow the divinity 1 Can you conceive 
 a treatment more nicely fitted to the spiritual condition, to the 
 spiritual wants of those men at that time, than the very one which 
 the Lord adopted and carried out, so well fitted as it was, gradually, 
 gently, without violence (as is ever the mode of his acting in all the 
 provinces of his spiritual empire), to lead those disciples on from 
 their first misty, imperfect, unworthy ideas of his person, character, 
 and work, on and up to clearer, purer, loftier conceptions of 
 Him 1 In what better way could a faith in their Master's divinity 
 have been superinduced upon their former faith in him as a man, 
 a friend, a brother, so that the two might blend together without 
 damage done to either by the union ; their knowledge of him as 
 human, not interfering with their trust in him as divine ; their faith 
 in him as God, not weakening their attachment to him as man 1 
 
 With this key in our hand a key which unlocks much of the 
 mystery of our Lord's conduct throughout those forty days let us 
 return to Mary in the garden. She sees Jesus alive once more 
 before her. She hears him as of old call her by her name. He is 
 hers, she thinks again ; hers, as he had been before ; hers, not to 
 be torn from her again. All the warmth of those former days of 
 familiar friendship filling her glad heart, she offers him not the 
 homage of a higher worship ; but, addressing him as he did her, 
 " Rabboni," she says, my own, my old, my well-loved Master ! 
 She makes some gesture as of embracing him. Gently, but firmly, 
 our Lord repels the too warm, too human, too familiar approach : 
 " Touch me not, Mary." ' You think of me as given back to be to 
 you the same exactly that I was before. You are mistaken ; our 
 relationship is changed ; our method of intercourse must be altered ; 
 you must learn to think of me, and to act towards me, differently 
 from what you ever did before ; I am here, but it is only for a 
 short season ; I am on earth, but I am now on the way to my 
 Father ; my home is no longer with you and the others here below, 
 it is there with my Father up in heaven ; still shall I feel to you, 
 and all the others as tenderly as I ever felt, not ashamed even to 
 call them still my brethren. Touch me not, then, Mary ; stop not 
 to lavish on me an affection that has in it too much of the human, 
 too little of the divine ; but go to my brethren, and say unto them, 
 I ascend to my Father, and to your Father, and to my God, and 
 your God ; my Father and my God in a sense in which he is not
 
 THE JOUKNEY TO EMMAUS. 595 
 
 and cannot be yours ; but your Father and your God in a sense in 
 which he could not have been yours had I not died and risen, and 
 been on my way now to sit down with Him on the throne of glory 
 in the heavens.' 
 
 III. 
 
 THE JOURNEY TO EMMAUS. 
 LUKE xxiv. 13-33. 
 
 IT was towards evening ; the day was far spent when the two 
 disciples reached Emmaus ; yet there was time enough for them, 
 after they had dined, to return by day-light to Jerusalem (a distance 
 of about seven miles, a two or three hours' walk) and to be present 
 at that evening meeting, in the midst of which Jesus was seen by 
 them once more. It must have been between mid-day and sunset 
 that the journey to Emmaus was taken. Of the two travellers, 
 the name of one only has been preserved ; that of Cleopas, gener- 
 ally believed to have been a near relation of Christ the husband 
 of the Virgin Mary's sister. It was not, however, the closeness of 
 the relationship to Jesus which won for him the privilege of that 
 strange conversation by the way. Had nearness of relationship 
 had anything to do with the matter, there was one surely to whom, 
 above all others, we might have expected that he would appear on 
 the day of his resurrection. Yet neither on that day, nor on any 
 of the forty days he spent on earth thereafter, does Jesus seem to 
 have made any special manifestation of himself to his mother, or 
 indeed to have taken any individual notice of her whatever. Her 
 name does not once occur in the record of this period of our Re- 
 deemer's life. It looks as if with that kindly, son-like notice of 
 her from the cross, Jesus had dropped the recognition of the 
 earthly relationship altogether, as one not suitable to be carried 
 into that kingdom to whose throne he was about to ascend. 
 
 And as it was nothing in their outward relationship to Jesus, 
 so neither was it anything in the personal character, position, or 
 services of these two men which drew down upon them this great 
 favour from the Lord. They had occupied no prominent place 
 beside the Saviour in the course of his ministry. They had exhi- 
 bited no peculiar strength of attachment to him or to his cause. 
 Had Peter and James and John been the travellers, it would not 
 have been so remarkable that he should have given them so many 
 of the hours of that first day of his resurrection life ; more hours, 
 in fact, than he ever gave to any two disciples besides ; nay, so far 
 as we can measure them, more hours than he gave to any other 
 interview of that period, perhaps as many as were spent in all
 
 596 THE FOKTY DAYS. 
 
 the other interviews together, for generally they were very brief. 
 What was there in these two men to entitle them to such a dis- 
 tinction 1 They were not apostles, nor were they of any great note 
 among the seventy. Our Lord's first words to them may perhaps 
 help us to understand why it was that he joined himself to them. 
 He has been walking beside them, so close as to overhear somewhat 
 of their conversation. But they are so intent upon the topic that 
 engrosses them, that they notice not that a stranger has overtaken 
 them, and been in part a listener to their discourse. At last, in 
 manner the easiest and most natural, least calculated to give offence, 
 expressive at once of interest and sympathy, Jesus breaks in upon 
 their discourse with the inquiry, " What manner of communications 
 are these that ye have one to another, as ye walk, and are sad ?" 
 That sadness, who can tell what power it had in drawing the Man 
 of sorrows to their side 1 It was to Mary, weeping in her lonely 
 grief; to Peter, drowned in tears of penitence, that he had 
 already appeared. And now it is to these two disciples in their 
 sorrow that he joins himself : so early did the risen Saviour assume 
 the gracious office of comforting those who mourn, of binding up 
 the broken heart. But in Mary, Peter, and these two disciples, 
 three different varieties of human grief were dealt with. Mary's 
 was the grief of a grateful and affectionate heart, mourning the loss 
 of one beloved ; Peter's was the grief of a spirit smitten with the 
 sense of a great offence committed ; the grief of the two disciples 
 was that of men disappointed, perplexed, thrown into despondency 
 and unbelief. It is especially noticed that it was while they com- 
 muned together, and reasoned with one another, that Jesus himself 
 drew near to them. There was much about which they well might 
 differ and dispute. The yielding of their Master to the power of 
 his enemies, and his shameful crucifixion two days before, how 
 could they reconcile with his undoubted pretensions and power, as 
 a prophet so mighty in words and deeds ? This one, that other 
 saying of his, pointing to a future, never now, as they fancied, to 
 be realised, what could they make of them ? Had Jesus himself 
 been disappointed, deceived; had he imagined that the people 
 would rise on his behalf, and prevent his crucifixion 1 That might 
 have been had he not so often shown that he knew all that was 
 passing in men's hearts. Could he, then, have been ignorant how 
 the multitude of Jerusalem would feel and act 1 There was truth, 
 too, in what so many of them had flung reproachfully in his teeth, 
 as he hung upon the cross : He had saved others, why did he not 
 save himself? What a confused heap of difficulties must have 
 risen up before these two men's eyes as they reasoned by the way ! 
 And then besides, there was what they had heard just before they 
 left the city, the report of some women that they had gone out, 
 and found the sepulchre empty, and had seen angels, who told
 
 THE JOUKNEY TO EMMAUS. 597 
 
 them that he was alive. They, indeed, might easily have been 
 deceived ; but Peter and John had also gone out. It is true they 
 had seen no angels, nor had any one that they had heard of, seen 
 the Lord himself. But the sepulchre had been found empty. The 
 women were right so far ; were they right also in what they said 
 about the angel's message 1 Could Jesus actually be alive again ? 
 We wonder that these two men could have left the city at the time 
 they did ; we wonder at this perhaps the more because we know 
 that, had they but waited an hour or two longer, they would have 
 had all their doubts resolved. It is clear enough, however, that 
 neither of them had any faith in the resurrection; and as clear 
 that they were dissatisfied with their unbelief altogether puzzled 
 and perplexed. Ignorant, they needed to be taught; deeply 
 prejudiced, they needed to have their prejudices removed. For 
 hours and hours, for days and days, they might have remained 
 together without clearing up the difficulties that beset them. But 
 now, in pity and in love, the great Enlightener himself appears 
 appears in the garb of a stranger who joins them by the way. 
 They do not at first, they do not all through the earnest conver 
 sation which follows, recognise him. 
 
 In reading the accounts of all the different appearances of 
 Christ after his resurrection, the conviction seems forced upon us, 
 that some alteration had taken place in the aspect of our Saviour, 
 enough to create a momentary hesitation in recognising him, yet 
 not enough, after a closer inspection, to leave any doubt as to his 
 identity. In the garden, Mary Magdalene was so absorbed in her 
 sorrow, so utterly unprepared to meet the living Master she 
 looked so indirectly, with such a heedless glance at the stranger, 
 whom she took to be the gardener that we do not wonder at her 
 failing to see at first who he was. So soon, however, as her name 
 was uttered, and she turned and fixed that steadier look upon the 
 speaker, the recognition was complete. To the women by the way, 
 to whom next he showed himself, his very salutation revealed him, 
 and left them no room for doubting that it was he. They held 
 him by the feet, too, for a moment or two, as they worshipped, 
 and got the evidence of touch as well as sight to assure them of 
 his bodily presence. That evening, in the upper chamber, the 
 disciples were assembled. They could not be taken by surprise. 
 They were prepared by the reports of Mary Magdalene, of the 
 women, of Peter, of the two disciples from Emmaus, to believe 
 that he was alive ; yet when Jesus stood in the midst of them, 
 they supposed that they had seen a spirit ; so troubled were they 
 at the sight, so incredulous were they even as they looked at him, 
 that he had to say to them, " Why are ye troubled, and why do 
 thoughts arise in your heart 1 Behold my hands and my feet, 
 that it is I myself ; handle me, and see, for a spirit hath not flesh
 
 598 THE FORTY DAYS. 
 
 and bones as ye see me have;" and still further, to remove all 
 doubt, he asked that some meat should be presented, and he took 
 the piece of the broiled fish and the honey-comb, and did eat them 
 in their presence. It may have been the sudden apparition of 
 Christ in the midst of them, while the doors of the chamber 
 remained unopened, which, in part, begot the belief that it was a 
 spirit that stood before them ; but that there was something too in 
 the changed appearance of their Master, which helped to sustain 
 that belief, is evident, from what is told us of his next appearance 
 by the lake side of Galilee. John's quick eye and ear recognised 
 him from the boat ; but when they had all landed and gathered 
 round him, " none of them," it is said, " durst ask him, Who art 
 thou ? knowing that it was the Lord." Whence the desire to put 
 such a question, but from a passing shadowy doubt, and whence 
 the doubt but from some change in his appearance ? When after- 
 wards, on the mountain which he had appointed, Jesus showed 
 himself to above five hundred brethren at once, they saw him, and 
 worshipped; but some, it is said, doubted, those, let us believe, 
 who saw him then for the first and only time, and on whom the 
 sight seems to have had the same effect that it had in the first 
 instance on nearly all who witnessed it. It seems to us the best, 
 if not the only way of accounting for this, to suppose that the resur- 
 rection body of our Lord had passed through a stage or two in its 
 transition from the natural into the spiritual body ; from its con- 
 dition as nailed upon the cross, to its etherealised and glorified 
 condition as now upon the throne ; the flesh and blood which 
 cannot inherit the heavenly kingdom, still there, yet so modified as 
 io be more plastic under the power of the indwelling spirit, less 
 subject to the material laws and conditions of its earlier being, the 
 corruptible on its way to the incorruptible, the mortal putting on 
 the clothing of immortality. And that strange, half spiritual 
 appearance which the risen Lord presented, may it not have served 
 to further the great end that our Lord had in view throughout the 
 forty days, namely, to wean the minds of his disciples from their 
 earlier, lower, more human conceptions of him, to a true faith in 
 his mingled humanity and divinity ? 
 
 There was, however, something special, I believe, in this instance 
 of the two disciples travelling to Emmaus. They might not have 
 recognised him, as, clothed perhaps in the garb of an ordinary 
 traveller, he put his first questions to them by the way ; but when 
 he assumed the office of their instructor, and, showing such intimate 
 acquaintance with the Scriptures, made their hearts burn within 
 them, as he unfolded their new meaning, must they not many a 
 time have turned on him a very searching look, wondering as they 
 looked, who this strange teacher possibly could be 1 Yet were two 
 or three hours spent, in that close and earnest conversation, without
 
 THE JOURNEY TO EMMAUS. 599 
 
 their once suspecting that it was the Lord. How accurately does 
 this accord with the differing statements of Mark and Luke ! 
 Mark distinctly tells us that he appeared to them in another, in a 
 strange form, a form different from that in which they had seen 
 him previously. He appeared to them, as to all the others, some- 
 what changed in aspect ; but had that been all, they would speedily 
 have recovered from their first surprise, and ere many minutes 
 would have identified him. For a reason, however, hereafter to be 
 alluded to, our Lord purposely concealed himself till his work of 
 instruction was completed, and drew a veil of some kind over their 
 eyes, which hindered their discovery of him by the way. 
 
 He comes to them as an entire stranger ; such as they might 
 naturally have met upon the road, and it is as a stranger that 
 throughout he converses with them. " What manner of com- 
 munications," he says, " are those that ye have one to another, as 
 ye walk, and are sad V Little need, thought one of them (his own 
 deep interest in them leading him, perhaps, to exaggerate that felt 
 by the general community) little need of asking such a question. 
 Of what could any two men leaving Jerusalem, only two days after 
 that crucifixion had occurred, of what else than of it, and him 
 the Crucified, could they be talking 1 " Art thou only," says 
 Cleopas, " a stranger in Jerusalem, and hast not known the things 
 which are come to pass there in these days ]" And the stranger 
 says to him, What things ? Thus it is, by questions needless for 
 him on his own account to put, but very useful to them to answer, 
 that Jesus draws out from them that statement, which at once 
 reveals the extent of their ignorance and incredulity, but, at the 
 same time, the amount of their belief, the strength of their attach- 
 ment to Christ, and the bitterness of that grief which the dis- 
 appointment of their expectations regarding him had created. A 
 stranger though this man is to them, they do not hesitate to 
 confess their faith in Jesus of Nazareth as a prophet mighty in 
 words and deeds ; obnoxious as they know the now hated sect to 
 be, they do not hesitate to acknowledge themselves openly as 
 disciples of this persecuted and now crucified Nazarene, though the 
 hope they once had, that he should have been the Redeemer of 
 Israel, they must confess themselves to have relinquished. Nay, 
 so far has the kindly and sympathising inquiry of this stranger 
 won for him a way into their confidence, that, as if he must be 
 interested in all that concerned the discipleship of Jesus, they tell 
 him what certain women of their company, and certain others of 
 themselves, had reported about the sepulchre. 
 
 The stranger's end is gained. The wound has been gently 
 probed ; its nature and extent revealed ; and now the remedy is 
 to be applied. He who had asked to be informed takes the place 
 of the instructor ; he who had been reproached for his ignoranoy
 
 GOO THE FOHTY DAYS. 
 
 reproaches in his turn. " fools, and slow of heart to believe !" 
 Slow of heart indeed, and difficult to convince had they been, who, 
 after such explicit declarations of his own beforehand, that he 
 should be delivered up to the Eulers, and suffer many things at 
 their hands, and be crucified, and rise again the third day, had 
 nevertheless remained so obstinate in their incredulity. Truly the 
 rebuke was needed. Yet how faithful are the wounds of a friend ; 
 he wounds but to heal; he rebukes the unbelief, but instantly 
 proceeds to remove its grounds, even as he rose from his slumber 
 in the storm-tossed fishing-boat, first to rebuke the disciples for 
 their unbelieving fears, and then to quiet the tempest which had 
 produced them. The one great, misleading prejudice of the 
 disciples had been their belief that the path of the promised 
 Messiah was only to be one of triumph and of glory. To rectify 
 that error, it was only required that they should be made to see 
 that the predicted triumph and glory were alone to be reached 
 through the dark avenues of suffering and of death. " fools, 
 and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken : 
 ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into 
 his glory] And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he. 
 expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning 
 himself." Either Christ, then, is not himself to be believed in 
 which case it were useless to hear and read anything about him 
 or in those Old Testament Scriptures there are to be seen every- 
 where prophetic fingers pointing forward to Him. To search those 
 Scriptures, and to find little or nothing there of Christ, little or 
 nothing to show how it behoved him to suffer, and then to enter 
 into his glory, is to handle them after a very different fashion from 
 that in which they were handled by our Lord himself. 
 
 It is not likely that these three travellers had a copy of the Old 
 Testament in their hands. It was not by reference to chapter and 
 verse that the exposition of the Saviour was conducted ; it was by 
 no minute criticism of words and phrases that the conviction of 
 these wayfaring men was carried. They were familiar generally 
 with the Scriptures. One or two of the leading prophecies about 
 the Messiah, such as that first one of God himself in paradise, as to 
 the seed of the woman and the serpent ; such as that of Moses as 
 to the raising up of a prophet like unto himself; such as that of 
 Isaiah, when he saw his glory, and testified beforehand of the 
 sufferings by which that glory should be preceded and entered; 
 such as that of Daniel about the Messiah being cut off, but not for 
 himself, Jesus may have quoted. But not alone from direct and 
 specific prophecies from the paschal lamb, and the smitten rock, 
 and the serpent of brass, and the blood-sprinkled mercy-seat, but 
 from the whole history of the Jewish people from the entire circle 
 of types and ceremonies and sacrifices, did Jesus draw forth the
 
 T1IE JOURNEY TO EMMA.US. 601 
 
 materials of that wonderful exposition by which, for two hours o* 
 so, he kept those listening men hanging upon his lips. As wa 
 think who the expounder in that instance was, and what the 
 materials of his exposition, how natural the expression, Would 
 that I had heard all these things concerning Christ illustrated by 
 Christ himself ! But have we not the substance of that exposition, 
 as much of it as is needful for us to have, preserved in the writings 
 of the New Testament ; and may we not be sure that if we believe 
 not them, neither would we be persuaded though one rose from the 
 dead, as Jesus that morning had done, and should teach us even as 
 he taught those two disciples ? 
 
 There was something indeed peculiarly, sublimely interesting 
 in that two hours' walk and talk of these three men on the way to 
 Emmaus. Had you been on that road that day, had you met 
 those travellers as they journeyed on, beyond the earnestness of 
 their conversation with one another, you would have seen nothing 
 remarkable about them, nothing to make you turn and look back 
 upon them as they passed. Two of them are men in humble attire, 
 travelling in the humblest fashion, returning to one of the humblest 
 village-homes : and the third, there is nothing about him different 
 in appearance from the other two; nothing to keep them from 
 conversing with him as an equal, one with whom the most un- 
 restrained familiarity might be used. Yet who is He ? He who 
 that very morning had burst the barriers of the grave; he in 
 honour of whose exit from the tomb angels from heaven had been 
 despatched to watch at the foot and at the head of the sacred spot 
 where in death his body had for a time reposed ; he who was now 
 upon his way to enter into that glory which he had with the 
 Father before the world was, Incarnate Deity fresh from the con- 
 flicts and the victories of the garden, the cross, the sepulchre. It 
 is literally God walking with men, men walking, though they knew 
 it not, with God. History tells us of earthly sovereigns stripping 
 themselves at times of all the tokens and trappings of royalty, for 
 the purpose of mixing on equal terms with the humblest of their 
 people ; but history never told, and imagination never pictured, a 
 disguise, an incognito like this. But why was that disguise adopted, 
 and, in this instance, so long preserved 1 Why, instead of doing 
 as he did with the eleven, first manifesting himself, and then open- 
 ing their understanding to understand the Scriptures, did he keep 
 himself unknown all the time that the work of exposition was 
 going on ? May it not have been to obtain such a simple, natural, 
 easy access for the truth into those two men's minds and hearts, as 
 to give it, even when unsupported by the weight of his own per- 
 sonal authority, a firmer and securer hold 1 Whatever may have 
 been its more special object as regards the two disciples, wonderful 
 indeed was that condescension of our Lord which led him to give
 
 602 THE FORTY DAYS. 
 
 so many hours of his first resurrection-day to this humble office. 
 Many a proud scribe in Jerusalem would have recoiled from it, 
 have deemed it a waste of his precious time, if asked to accompany 
 two such humble men, and spend so much of one of his Sabbaths 
 in instructing them out of the Scriptures. The Divine Eedeemer 
 himself thought it not a task too lowly ; and by devoting in his 
 own person, so much of that first Christian Sabbath to it, has he 
 not at once left behind him a pattern of what all true and faithful 
 exposition of the sacred Scriptures ought to be, even the unfolding 
 of the things touching a once crucified, but now exalted Saviour ; 
 and has he not dignified, by himself engaging in it, the work of 
 one man's trying, at any time, or in any way, to lead another to 
 the knowledge of the truth as it is in Jesus ? 
 
 It was with heavy hearts that the two disciples had left Jeru- 
 salem ; and had all the journey been like the first few paces of it, 
 it had seemed a long way to Emmaus. But they are at the village 
 now, and the road had never appeared so short. Had they imagined 
 they could be there so soon, they would have lingered on the road. 
 And now this stranger, whose discourse had so beguiled the way, 
 and made their hearts so burn within them, makes as if he would 
 go farther. Emmaus, it would seem, is not his resting-place. But 
 how can they part from him 1 How may that conversation, which 
 has shed such a fresh light into their understandings, such a new 
 hope into their hearts, be prolonged ? They invite, they urge him 
 to remain. He gives, he makes the opportunity for their con- 
 straining him to be their guest. He acts as he had done with the 
 two blind beggars ; with the disciples in the storm ; with the Syro- 
 phenician woman. He suffers violence to be used with him : and 
 then, when he has brought out all the strength of desire and affec- 
 tion towards him in the earnest entreaty, he yields to the urgency 
 he had himself excited. The two disciples constrain him, and he 
 goes in apparently to abide with them. They have him now, as 
 they think, with them for the whole evening; and what an evening 
 it shall be, when, supper over, the conversation of the wayside may 
 be renewed ! The humble table is quickly spread. This is the 
 home, it has been thought, of one of the two disciples, and he 
 whose home it is prepares to do the duty of the host. That duty 
 is taken out of his hands. The mysterious stranger takes the 
 bread ; he blesses, he breaks, he gives. Who but One could bless 
 and break and give in such a way as this 1 The scales fall from 
 the disciples' eyes. 'Tis he, their own lost but now recovered Lord 
 and Master ! Let him wait but a moment or two, they shall be 
 clasping him, as Mary would fain have done, to their hearts, or, 
 falling down, as the women did, and worshipping at his feet. 
 Tune is not given them. He reveals himself and disappears. This 
 moment known by them, the next vanishing from their sight.
 
 THE EVENING MEETING. 603 
 
 IV. 
 
 THE EVENING MEETING. 
 MARK xvi. 13, 14 ; LUKE xxiv. 33-49 ; JOHN xx. 19-23. 
 
 WHEN they left Jerusalem on the afternoon of the first day of 
 the week, the two disciples had intended to remain that night, 
 perhaps permanently, at Emmaus. The Paschal Sabbath over, 
 they had resolved to return to their village home, to their old 
 way of living, burying, as best they could, their expectations dis- 
 appointed. But the conversation by the way, the manifestation in 
 the breaking of bread, that revealed and vanishing presence of their 
 risen Lord, altered the whole current of their thoughts and acts. 
 They could not stay at Emmaus. Late as it was, they instantly 
 arose and returned to Jerusalem. How quickly, how eagerly would 
 they retrace their steps ! What manner of communications would 
 those be that they would now have with one another ; how different 
 from those which Jesus had interrupted; the incredulity turned 
 now into faith, the sadness into joy. The stranger who had made 
 their hearts burn within them, on their way out to the village, he 
 too was traversing at the same time the road they took on their 
 way back to Jerusalem. But he did not join them now ; he left 
 them to muse in silence on all they had seen and heard, or to add 
 to each other's wonder, gratitude, and gladness, by talking to one 
 another by the way. Their hearts were now full of the desire to 
 tell to the brethren they had left behind in the city all that had 
 happened. On reaching Jerusalem, they get at once the oppor- 
 tunity they so much desire. A meeting of the apostles, and of as 
 many others as they could conveniently call together, or could 
 entirely trust, had quietly, somewhat stealthily convened; the first, 
 we may believe, since the Thursday evening meeting in the upper 
 chamber. And where but in that same chamber can we imagine that 
 this Sunday evening assembly gathered ? The doors were closed 
 against intruders, but these two well-known disciples from Emmaus 
 are easily recognised, and at once admitted. In what an agitated, 
 conflicting state of thought and feeling do they find those assembled 
 there ! They had all heard the reports of the women and of Mary 
 Magdalene ; but they say little or nothing about them ; perhaps give 
 them little credit. But there is Peter, whom no one can well distrust; 
 telling all the particulars of his interview, and carrying the convic- 
 tion of so many, that they are joyfully exclaiming : " The Lord is 
 risen indeed, and hath appeared to Simon." But this is not the 
 general, not at least the universal state of sentiment. The two 
 disciples tell their tale, but it falls on many an incredulous ear.
 
 604 THE FOKTY DAYS. 
 
 They are as little believed as the women and Mary Magdalene had 
 been. They are trying all they can, by a minute recital of how 
 Jesus had been known of them, to remove the incredulity, when 
 suddenly, silently coming as a spirit cometh, casting no shadow 
 before him (the doors not opening to let him in), no sight nor sound 
 giving token of his approach Jesus himself is in the midst of them, 
 and his "Peace be unto you !" stills at once the conflicting conversa- 
 tion that had been going on. The manner of this appearance may 
 have been wholly miraculous and supernatural, or it may have been 
 partly or wholly due to those new properties with which the resur- 
 rection body of the Saviour was endowed. Upon this difficult 
 topic I have already said all it seems needful or perhaps possible to 
 say. We must leave it clothed with the mystery which surrounds 
 it. No mystery, however, hangs round the kindly, condescending 
 manner in which Jesus proceeds to deal with the terror which his 
 sudden appearance had created. He points to his hands, his feet, 
 his side, to the marks of those wounds that told of his recent 
 death; marks which it pleased him that his resurrection body 
 should still bear ; marks which, it would seem from the Apocalyptic 
 vision, were not to be effaced even from that glorified body which 
 he carried to the throne ; marks which that form is to wear for 
 ever, the only visible memorials that are to survive of the great 
 decease accomplished at Jerusalem. Jesus asks them to handle 
 him ; an invitation which it is difficult to say whether they accepted 
 or not. He shows them his hands and his feet ; and while yet they 
 believe not for joy and wonder, he seeks still further to remove 
 their incredulitj r , by showing them that he has still the power, 
 though no longer the need, of partaking with them of their ordi- 
 nary food. He eats of the fish and of the honeycomb. Doubt now 
 gives place to conviction, fear to believing joy ; a joy so fresh, so 
 full, that it in turn begins to shake the new-born faith. How true 
 to nature all this rapid succession of conflicting sentiments ! Now 
 at last, however, that little company of disciples has settled into a 
 condition fitting it to listen, and Jesus returns to the subject that 
 had engrossed the conversation on the way out to Emmaus ; to this 
 larger, more influential audience he unfolds the testimony that 
 Moses, the Prophets, the Psalms all the three divisions into which 
 the Scriptures of the Old Testament were classified by the Jews 
 rendered to his Messiahship ; dwelling particularly upon the topic 
 most suited to the existing condition of their thoughts, how, in 
 accordance with all that had been beforehand declared and signified, 
 it behoved him, as the Christ, to suffer and then to rise again the 
 third day. " Then opened he their understanding, that they might 
 understand the Scriptures." Wherever, therefore, in the writings 
 of any one of these Christ-taught men they refer an important 
 passage of the Old Testament to the Messiah, we may conclude
 
 THE EVENING MEETING. 605 
 
 that they had for doing so the direct and authoritative sanction oi 
 our Lord's own interpretation. 
 
 But his Messiahship, his death, his resurrection, were not 
 matters in which they alone, their nation alone, were interested. 
 Now that the needful work of suffering and death was over ; now 
 that the wonderful exhibition at once of the sacredness of the 
 Divine law, the holiness of the Divine character, the deep unutter- 
 able love of God, had been given, now, wide over all the world, 
 were repentance and remission of sin to be proclaimed in his name ; 
 and they, the men to whom Jesus was then speaking, were to be 
 the witnesses, the heralds, the preachers of this large and all-em- 
 bracing gospel of peace on earth, and good-will, on God's part, 
 towards all the children of men : The first and earliest hint this of 
 the nature and the extent of their great commission ; a hint which 
 they did not then understand, which they did not understand even 
 under the enlightening and quickening influences of the day of 
 Pentecost. So far their understanding was opened, that they saw 
 clearly now that Christ ought to have suffered these things, and 
 then to enter into his glory ; but their understanding was still shut 
 as to that proclamation of God's forgiving mercy and love, which 
 now in the name of Jesus was to be borne abroad over the whole 
 earth. 
 
 But though it was to be left to time, and the after teachings of 
 the Spirit, to lift them out of their narrow conceptions of the Divine 
 love to man, as if its outgoings were to be limited to the pale of any 
 one community upon earth, still an initial impression of the sacred- 
 ness of their vocation as his disciples, of the manner in which the 
 duties of that vocation could alone properly be discharged, and of 
 the blessed and enduring results which were to follow in the tram 
 of that discharge, might be made upon their minds. And this was 
 the result which Jesus, in the most striking and solemn manner, 
 proceeded now to bring about : the first step taken by him in the 
 gradual and slow-moving process of qualifying them for that mission 
 which they, and all other disciples of the Saviour after them, were 
 to undertake and carry out. 
 
 Then said Jesus unto them again, " Peace be unto you !" His 
 first greeting, in which the same words had been used, they had 
 been too surprised and affrighted to listen to, or take home. Now 
 that their minds had become more composed, that they had settled 
 down into a tranquil and joyful conviction that it was indeed their 
 risen Lord who was in the midst of them, he repeats the greeting ; 
 repeats it that they might not take it though it was the common 
 salutation phrase he used as meant merely to be the usual greeting 
 with which Jew met Jew in the ordinary course of life ; that they 
 might not take it as a mere expression of good-will, a wish for their 
 welfare ; but that they might have their thoughts thrown back
 
 606 THE FORTY DAYS. 
 
 upon what, three evenings before, he had said to them : " Peace 1 
 leave with you, my peace I give unto you : not as the world giveth, 
 give I unto you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them 
 be afraid." He had said so with the cross, with the sepulchre 
 before him. And now the peace having been secured, and sealed 
 by the blood of the cross and the rising from the sepulchre, with a 
 new emphasis he says to them, ' Peace, my peace, peace with G-od, 
 peace of conscience, the peace of pardon be unto you ; take it as 
 coming to you through me ; enter into, and enjoy it as the fruit of 
 my passion, as God's free gift to you in me. Let the quickening, 
 the comforting assurance that God is at peace with you, that you 
 are at peace with God, take possession of your hearts, that, having 
 tasted and seen that the Lord is gracious, you may be prepared for 
 executing the high errand on which I am about to send you forth, 
 that of publishing everywhere the gospel of this peace ; preaching 
 peace by me to them that are afar off, and to them that are nigh ; 
 "For as my Father sent me, even so now send I you." I send 
 you forth in my name, and I will qualify you by my Spirit.' And 
 having said so, he breathed on them, and said, " Keceive ye the 
 Holy Ghost " an outward and expressive symbol of the twofold 
 truth, that dead, motionless, useless for all the common work of this 
 earthly existence, as lay that dust which the hand of the Creator 
 moulded into human form till he breathed into it the breath of its 
 natural life, so dead, motionless, useless for the work of our Chris- 
 tian calling do we all lie, till the breath of true spiritual life be 
 breathed into us by the Holy Ghost. And as it was from the lips 
 of the risen Saviour that the breath proceeded, which spread out 
 upon the little company at Jerusalem, so is it from the risen, 
 exalted Saviour that the Spirit comes, whose life-giving influences 
 spread over the whole church of the first-born. But specially upon 
 this occasion was the breathing of Jesus upon the disciples, and the 
 gift which accompanied that breathing, meant to indicate that the 
 mission on which Jesus was sending these disciples out that of 
 being witnesses for him was one that could alone be discharged by 
 those who, through him, had received more or less of that heavenly 
 gift. It was this impartation of the Spirit, which was to form the 
 one, indispensable qualification for the work ; without which it could 
 not be done. "We know, historically, that it was but a very limited 
 measure of this gift which was actually upon this occasion bestowed. 
 The Holy Ghost was not yet in his fulness given, because that Jesus 
 was not yet glorified. The more plentiful effusion of this gift was 
 reserved for the day of Pentecost. That Spirit, who was to con- 
 vince of sin, and to lead into all truth, began even then, indeed, his 
 gracious work in the minds and hearts of these disciples, by con- 
 vincing them of their unbelief and hardness of heart, and by open- 
 ing their minds to understand the Scriptures. This was but an
 
 THE EVENING MEETING. 607 
 
 earnest of better things to come, a few sprinkled drops of that 
 fuller baptism wherewith they were afterwards to be baptized ; but 
 yet enough to teach that it was by Spirit-taught, Spirit-moved men 
 by men in whose breasts the heaven-kindled fire of the true 
 spiritual life had begun to burn that the commission Jesus had 
 been giving could alone be executed. And let not those to whom 
 Jesus is now speaking, speaking as the heads and representatives 
 of the whole body of his true followers upon earth ; let them not 
 think, weak as they are, powerless as they appear, that, in going 
 forth to proclaim in his name, to every penitent transgressor, the 
 free, full, instant, gracious pardon of all his sins, they are embark- 
 ing in an ideal, unreal work, a work of which they shall never 
 know whether they are succeeding in it or not. 
 
 'No,' says the Saviour; 'partake of the peace I now impart, 
 accept the commission I now bestow ; go forth in my name ; 
 receive ye the Holy Ghost to guide you; announce the news of 
 God to sinners ; proclaim the remission of sins, and, verily I say, 
 whosesoever sins ye thus remit, they are remitted; whosesoever 
 sins ye retain, they are retained.' Such I take to be the real spirit 
 and object of these last words of Jesus, as spoken by him to his 
 disciples at this time; words spoken to animate them in their 
 after work by the assurance that they should not labour in vain ; 
 that what they should do on earth should be owned and ratified 
 in heaven. It were to misinterpret the incidents of that evening 
 meeting; it were to mistake the simple, immediate, and precise 
 object which, in using them, our Lord had in view, to explain these 
 words as if they were intended to clothe the eleven apostles, and 
 after them, their successors or representatives to clothe any class 
 of officials in the church, exclusively, with a power of remitting 
 and retaining sins. Where is the evidence that, as originally 
 spoken, the words were addressed exclusively to the eleven ? There 
 were others present as well as they. " The two disciples," Luke 
 tells us, " found the eleven gathered together, and those that were 
 with them." These other members of the infant church, with the 
 two disciples, had the benediction pronounced on them as well as 
 on the eleven ; the instructions were given to them as well as to 
 the eleven ; the breath was breathed on them as well as on the 
 eleven. Had Jesus meant, when he spake of this remitting and 
 retaining sins, to restrict to the eleven the power and privileges 
 conferred, should he not by some word or token have made it 
 manifest that such was his desire 1 At other times he was at pains 
 to single out the twelve, when he had something meant for their 
 eyes and their ears alone. Is it likely that at this time he would 
 have omitted to draw a line between them and the others who 
 were before him, had it been to them that these closing words were 
 exclusively addressed 1
 
 608 THE FORTY DAYS. 
 
 But we have another and still stronger reason for not believ- 
 ing in any such restriction. Jesus had once before used words of 
 nearly the same import with those that are now before us, and he 
 had addressed them to the disciples at large : " Moreover, if thy 
 brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between 
 thee and him alone : if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy 
 brother. But if he will not hear thee, then take with thee one or 
 two more, that in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word 
 may be established. And if he shall neglect to hear them, tell it 
 unto the church : but if he neglect to hear the church, let him be 
 unto thee as a heathen man and a publican. 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. 
 Again I say unto you, That if two of you shall agree on earth as 
 touching any thing that they shall ask, it shall be done for them 
 of my Father which is in heaven. For where two or three are 
 gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them." 
 The two concluding verses, as well as the preceding context, con- 
 tain the conclusive evidence that it was not to any select class or 
 order of his followers that Jesus said, " Whatsoever ye shall bind 
 on earth shall be bound in heaven ; and whatsoever ye shall loose 
 on earth shall be loosed in heaven" (Matt, xviii. 15-20). 
 
 We are not in the least disposed to doubt, that while Christ 
 speaks of the remitting and the retaining of sins as pertaining to 
 the Church at large, his words cover the acts of the Church in her 
 organised capacity, the inflicting and removing of ecclesiastical 
 censures through her office-bearers in the exercise of discipline. 
 Here, however, we have two remarks to make : 1st, That it is 
 only so far as these acts are done by spiritual men, seeking and 
 following the guidance of the Spirit, only so far as they are in 
 accordance with Christ's own expressed will, that they are of 
 any avail, or can plead any heavenly ratification ; and, 2dly, 
 That all the force they carry is nothing more or less than an 
 authoritative and official declaration of what that will of the 
 Lord is. Neither in any man, in any pope or any priest, in any 
 community, or in any ecclesiastical court, lies the absolute, the 
 independent, the arbitrary power to absolve the sinner from his 
 sins. But did not he, we are asked, with whom alone it is ac- 
 knowledged that that power rests, appoint the eleven as his earthly 
 delegates, and in the commission here given them, convey into 
 their hands as such, that power ? Just as little as in two other 
 commissions given to two of the old prophets, he handed over to 
 them that power over the kingdoms and nations of the earth 
 which, we rightly believe and affirm, resides alone in the hands of 
 the Almighty. " Then the Lord put forth his hand, and touched 
 my mouth : and the Lord said unto me, Behold, I have put my
 
 THE EVENING MEETING. 609 
 
 words in thy mouth. See, I have this day set thee over the 
 nations, and over the kingdoms, to root out, and to pull down, and 
 to destroy, and to throw down, and to build, and to plant " ( Jer. i. 
 9, 10). "It came to pass also in the twelfth year, in the fifteenth 
 day of the month, that the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, 
 Son of man, wail for the multitude of Egypt, and cast them down, 
 even her, and the daughters of the famous nations, unto the nether 
 parts of the earth, with them that go down into the pit " (Ezek. 
 xxxii. 17, 18). 
 
 Here, in terms not less distinct than those in which Christ 
 gives his disciples power over the sins of men, to remit or to retain, 
 God gives to the two prophets power over the nations to cast down 
 and to destroy. The true interpretation of the grant or commis- 
 sion is in both cases the same. In the exercise of any power, 
 inherent or delegated, natural or acquired, Jeremiah and Ezekiel 
 were altogether impotent of themselves to overturn a nation ; in 
 the exercise of any power, original or conferred, personal or official, 
 the apostles were just as impotent to remove any sinner's guilt. 
 The prophet's function was limited to the denouncing of a doom 
 which it was for the hand of Jehovah alone to execute. The 
 Church's function is as strictly limited to the announcing of a 
 pardon which it is for the grace of the heavenly Forgiver alone to 
 bestow. And if, in executing that simple but most honourable 
 office of proclaiming unto all men that there is remission of sins 
 through the name of Jesus, she teaches that it is alone through her 
 channels through channels that priestly or ordained and conse- 
 crated hands can alone open the pardon cometh, she trenches 
 upon the rights and prerogatives of Him whom she represents, and 
 turns that eye upon herself that should be turned alone on him. 
 
 V. 
 
 THE INCREDULITY OF THOMAS. 
 JOHN xx. 24-29. 
 
 WAS it his fault, or his misfortune simply, that Thomas was 
 not present at that first meeting on the evening of the day of the 
 resurrection 1 Clearly enough, we cannot charge his absence with 
 the same kind of neglect with which now a refusal to join in the 
 ordinary services of the sanctuary would be loaded ; for no such 
 services had then been instituted, nor had any authority, human or 
 divine, as yet prescribed them. That evening conference, hastily 
 summoned under the prompting of the strange incidents of the day, 
 was, in fact, the first of those assemblings on the Lord's day which 
 have since become one of the established customs of Christianity. 
 2Q
 
 610 THE FOKTY DAYS. 
 
 But as no such custom had as yet been established, Thomas cannot 
 be accused of violating it. The circumstances, however, under 
 which that conference was held, were so peculiar, the pressure 
 which prompted it so urgent, that we cannot imagine that any 
 slight or fortuitous impediment would have kept any one of the 
 eleven away. It may, therefore, have been Thomas's extreme in- 
 credulity as to the fact of the resurrection, the utter and blank 
 despair into which the death of his Master had cast him, which 
 indisposed him to join the rest. If it were so ; if he kept aloof 
 from his brethren, as believing that no good could come from their 
 assembling ; that it was all over with the hopes as to their Master 
 which they had been cherishing ; that they were mere idle tales 
 which had been circulating about his having risen from the dead, 
 then, for his neglect of all that Jesus had predicted about his 
 death and resurrection, and for his treatment of the testimony of 
 Peter and the other early visitors of the sepulchre, he was amply 
 punished, in losing that sight of the risen Jesus given to the 
 others, and in his being left, for the seven days that followed, to 
 the wretchedness of uncertainty and doubt an uncertainty and 
 doubt which would be all the bitterer, as contrasted with the 
 unclouded convictions and new-born joy of his brother disciples. 
 Whilst they, lifted from the depths of their despair, were con- 
 gratulating one another on the great triumph over death and the 
 grave which their Master had achieved, were strengthening each 
 other's faith, and heightening each other's joy, he, alone and dis- 
 consolate, was scraping together the scanty food on which his 
 incredulity might nourish itself. In the course of that week, his 
 brethren made many attempts to rid him of his distrust. But all 
 in vain ; the more they insisted, the more he refused. The stronger 
 they affirmed the proof to be, the more inflexible became his reso- 
 lution to resist it. The particulars of the manifold conversations 
 and discussions which would, no doubt, go on between them, are 
 not preserved. All that is told is, that he took and kept resolutely 
 to that position behind which he entrenched himself, as he said, 
 " Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put 
 my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his 
 side, I will not believe." What were the grounds, real or fictitious, 
 upon which this incredulity of Thomas rested; and how came 
 that incredulity to take such a shape, and to embody itself in such 
 a declaration ? 
 
 Here, I think, by realising distinctly the actual condition of 
 things, both as regards the external circumstances which sur- 
 rounded him, and the jaundiced eye with which he was disposed 
 to look at them, we may convince ourselves that the incredulity of 
 Thomas was not due to any reluctance, on his part, to believe in 
 the resurrection, simply because of its being a strange, a super-
 
 THE INCREDULITY OF THOMAS. 611 
 
 natural occurrence. In that age, and in that country, this was a 
 form of unbelief altogether rare, quite unlikely to have been exhi- 
 bited by Thomas, or any follower of Jesus Christ. A belief in the 
 supernatural was general, almost universal. To withhold his belief 
 in any occurrence, purely and solely because it was miraculous, 
 would have made a man about as conspicuous then, as a belief in all 
 the alleged miracles of ancient and modern times would make a 
 man conspicuous now. Between that time and this, the world has 
 undergone an entire revolution in the state of its general belief, in 
 the form of its practical infidelity. Besides, even if there had been 
 a large leaven of Sadduceeism working originally in the mind of 
 Thomas, he had already witnessed, in his attendance upon Christ, 
 incidents too extraordinary for him to refuse credence to the resur- 
 rection purely and solely on the ground of its singularity. Neither 
 he, nor any others of the Lord's disciples unwilling, as they all 
 were at first, to believe that their Master was indeed alive again ; 
 difficult as they all were of conviction on this point would have 
 admitted their initial hesitation and incredulity to have proceeded 
 from any such source. It was not the character of the event, it was 
 the nature of their precedent faith in, and their precedent expecta- 
 tions about, their Master and his kingdom, which generated the 
 difficulty which was felt by them as to believing in the resurrection. 
 The true fountain of their earlier incredulity lay within, and not 
 without ; in their prejudices in regard to other matters, not in the 
 nature and circumstances of the resurrection. There appears to 
 me, therefore, to be a violence done to historic truth, to the real 
 state of the case, when Thomas is taken, as he so often is, as a type 
 or early instance of that unbelief, belonging rather to modern than 
 to ancient times, which staggers at all miracles, and is indisposed 
 to admit anything supernatural. 
 
 Thomas's incredulity seems to have outstripped that of all the 
 other disciples. They would not believe the Galilean women, when 
 they brought to them the first reports of the resurrection ; but they 
 had believed when Peter told them that he had seen the Lord, even 
 before they saw him with their own eyes. But Thomas will not 
 believe, though to Peter's testimony there is added that of the two 
 disciples who went out to Emmaus, and that of the whole body of 
 the disciples to whom Jesus had afterwards appeared. To what is 
 this excess, this peculiar obstinacy of unbelief on Thomas's part to 
 be attributed? "Was he the most prejudiced man among them; 
 the man who clung most tenaciously to his earlier ideas and pre- 
 possessions, and would not let them go ? Did those common ele- 
 ments of unbelief, which operated in the breasts of the others as 
 well as in his, yet work in his with so much greater force as to sig- 
 nalise him in this way, and keep him standing out in his distrust 
 for so long a time beyond them 1 There was one of those elements
 
 612 THE FORTY DAYS. 
 
 which we have some reason to think did work powerfully on 
 Thomas. It would be quite a mistake to conceive of Thomas, 
 because of his abiding incredulity, that he was a cold, selfish, cautious, 
 unsanguine, naturally misbelieving man, hard to convince of any- 
 thing which lay outside the circle of his own observations, or that 
 did not touch or affect his own interests. Whatever in origin and 
 nature his scepticism was, it was not the scepticism of religious 
 indifference, nor did it spring from a predisposition to doubt. That 
 the spirit of curiosity, of inquiry, was strong in him, we may perhaps 
 infer from his breaking in upon our Lord's discussion in the upper 
 chamber, saying, "Lord, we know not whither thou goest, and how 
 can we know the way?" Fuller evidence that he possessed and 
 knew how to exercise the critical faculty ; that he liked to search 
 and sift the evidence, and get at the real and solid grounds for 
 believing, shall meet us presently ; but we must dismiss from our 
 minds the idea that he answered in any way to the description 
 which Wordsworth has given us of the man 
 
 " A smooth-rubb'd soul, to which could cling 
 
 No form of feeling, great or small ; 
 A reasoning, self-sufficient thing, 
 An intellectual all in all." 
 
 The only other notice of him in the gospel narrative, besides the 
 one already alluded to, and that in the passage now before us, for- 
 bids us to entertain any such ideas of Thomas's natural character 
 and disposition. Escaping out of the hands of his enemies, Jesus 
 had retired to Bethabara, To him, in his retreat, the sorrowing 
 sisters sent their message : "Lord, behold, he whom thou lovest is 
 sick." The messengers were left without an answer. But, after 
 two days of delay and inaction, Jesus abruptly says to his disciples, 
 without explaining anything of the object of his visit, " Let us go 
 into Judea again." It seemed a fatal resolution; the disciples try 
 to turn their Master from acting on it. " Master," they say to him, 
 "the Jews of late sought to stone thee, and goest thou thither 
 again ]" Their Master then tells of the reason for his going, and 
 of his resolution at all hazards to carry out his intention. Then, 
 says one of the twelve, if he will go, go to almost certain death, 
 "let us also go, that we may die with him." Had the name not 
 been given, had we not been told which of them it was who so 
 instantly, so warmly, so generously declared himself ready to die 
 with his Master rather than desert him, we should have said that 
 it must have been Peter who spake these words ; but it was Thomas, 
 to whom much of Peter's ardour appears to have belonged. Upon 
 such a man, so ardent in his attachment to his Master, we can 
 readily believe that the blow of the crucifixion came with a pecu- 
 liarly stunning force. In proportion to the eagerness of his hopes 
 would be the blankness of his despair ; nor is it wonderful that,
 
 THE INCREDULITY OF THOMAS. 613 
 
 sunk into the depths of that despair, he would at first refuse to 
 believe in the resurrection. Still, however, attribute what extra 
 force we may to this one or that other of the ingredients of the 
 unbelief shown by Thomas in common with his brethren, it aeems 
 difficult to understand the pertinacity of Thomas in standing out so 
 long and so stubbornly against all attempts of his brethren to con- 
 vince him. The great bulk of them had believed before they had 
 seen the Lord. Why should that evidence, which was sufficient to 
 carry their faith, not have carried his 1 Yes, but they all at last 
 had seen ; they had seen, and he had not. In that very distinction 
 do we not get sight of the secret bias by which the spirit of Thomas 
 was swayed over to an unwillingness to give credence to the resur- 
 rection, an incredulity which, in self-justification, built up those 
 buttresses of self-defence, behind which it finally entrenched itself, 
 and from which it would not be dislodged ? The others had seen 
 him, and he had not ; why should he be asked to believe on differ- 
 ent evidence from theirs ? He had been as attached a follower of 
 Jesus as any of them. Why should he be singled out, and left the 
 only one who had not seen his Master ? He did not like, he did 
 not choose, to be indebted to others for the grounds of his believ- 
 ing. He had just as good a right to ocular proof as they had ; and, 
 in fact, till he got it he would not believe. The unwillingness that 
 his faith should be ruled by theirs, generated a disposition to ques- 
 tion the soundness of that faith. The Evangelist has given us only 
 the conclusion to which Thomas came, the result of the many 
 conferences with his brethren, and to which he for so many days 
 so resolutely adhered. The very terms in which he embodied this 
 resolution enables us to fill up the blank. Jesus had come amongst 
 them, the other disciples would tell Thomas, suddenly, silently, 
 the door being shut ; they had not seen him till he was standing in 
 the midst. It was very like the mode of a spirit's entrance ; very 
 unlike the manner in which one clothed with a solid substantial 
 body would or could appear. They confessed to Thomas, that 
 unless it were the two disciples who had just come in from Emmaus, 
 all of them at first believed that it was a spirit, none of them that 
 it was Christ : that he had himself noticed this, and had corrected 
 their first and false impression. He had eaten in their presence, he 
 had shown them the marks in his hands and side ; he had said, 
 "Handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye 
 see me have." Yes, but had any of them accepted the invitation, 
 had any of them made such scrutiny of these marks, as to be sure 
 that they were not superficial? They could not say they had. 
 Strictly interrogated by one who was anxious to detect any weak 
 point in the evidence, they could not deny that it was within the 
 limits of the possible that there might have been a mistake ; that 
 there was a difference, they could not tell what, between the appear-
 
 614 THE FOHTY DAYS. 
 
 ance of their Master as they had seen him before death, and as they 
 saw him at the evening meeting. Seizing greedily upon anything 
 which could possibly create a doubt, and turning it into an instru- 
 ment of self-justification, Thomas at last declares, " Except I shall 
 not only see in his hands the print of the nails, but shall put my 
 finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, 
 I will not believe." No small amount of ingenious casuistry spring- 
 ing out of wounded pride, an exaggerated feeling of self-consequence 
 working in a nature not less strong in will, than ardent in affection. 
 
 " I will not believe." ' And is it even thus,' we feel disposed to 
 make answer, ' that thy hurt vanity hopes to redeem itself from the 
 fancied oversight ; is it thus that, placed, as thou thinkest, below 
 thy brethren, by not having got the same proof given them, thou 
 thinkest to set thyself right by putting thyself above them, and 
 declaring that that proof may have been enough for them, but is not 
 enough for thee 1 What right hast thou to ask a kind or amount 
 of evidence above that which has satisfied all these thy brethren, 
 and which would have satisfied any one unbiassed by deep precedent 
 prejudice ? What right hast thou to dictate thus to God, and to 
 declare that thou wilt not believe till the form of proof thou pre- 
 scribest be afforded ? Thou wilt not believe and if thou dost not, 
 who but thyself will be the loser ? Hadst thou been in the hands 
 of man, in any other hands than those of so gracious a Master, thou 
 mightest have waited long enough ere the proof was given, which 
 in such spirit was demanded.' 
 
 Seven days go past, and the apostles are once more gathered 
 together on the evening of the second first-day of the week. Thomas 
 is with them now. What brought him there ? Why, if he thought 
 them wrong in rejoicing over an event, in the reality of which they 
 had not sufficient reason to believe, did he join himself to their 
 company 1 Because, I believe, with all his assumed and declared 
 incredulity, he was not in his inmost heart such an utter unbeliever 
 as he would have others think he was. He had taken up a position 
 which it behoved him to defend ; but I am much mistaken, if a 
 strong desire, an expectation, nay, something even of a faith, that 
 it was even as his brethren had told him, was not working latently, 
 yet strongly in his breast. We often grievously err in this respect, 
 in our judgment or representations of others. If a man is known 
 or said to be a covetous or an ambitious man, we are too apt to 
 make him all covetousness or all ambition, and nothing beside. 
 And so Thomas, being obstinately incredulous, we might imagine 
 him to be utterly so. Not at all likely. There was room in him, 
 as there is in most men, for very opposite and conflicting states of 
 thought and emotion. We believe, therefore, that it was in a very 
 mixed state of faith and feeling that Thomas sat down that evening 
 with the rest. They have not sat -long when again, in the very
 
 THE INCREDULITY OF THOMAS. 615 
 
 same way in which he had come before, Jesus enters and stands 
 before them. The general salutation over, and before another word 
 was spoken, he turns to Thomas and says, "Keach hither thy 
 finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and 
 thrust it into my side : and be not faithless, but believing." How 
 sudden, how unexpected the address ! Thomas knew that for seven 
 days none of the disciples had seen the Lord ; none of them could 
 have reported to him the words that he had used. Yet now are 
 these very words repeated. It is the omniscient Jesus ; it is his 
 own well-loved Master who stands before him. Instant within him 
 is the rebound from incredulity to faith, to a far higher faith than 
 that simply in the reality of the resurrection ; of that he has no 
 doubt. He does not what the Lord desires, and what he himself 
 desired before. He does not put his finger into the print of the 
 nails ; he does not thrust his hand into the side. Enough to see 
 that well-known form ; enough to hear that well-loved voice. That 
 sight, those words of Jesus, are sufficient to rebuke and to remove 
 his unbelief. In a moment his doubts all flee ; faith takes their 
 place : a faith purified, exalted, strengthened ; a faith in the true 
 divinity as well as in the true humanity of his risen Lord ; a faith 
 higher, perhaps, at that moment than that to which any of his 
 brethren around had attained. Adoring, believing, loving, the 
 fervent, affectionate Thomas casts himself at his Master's feet, 
 exclaiming, " My Lord and my God !" 
 
 A great advance here, we may well believe, on all Thomas's 
 earlier conceptions of his Master's character. And may we not 
 believe also that the bitter experience of the preceding week, the 
 troubled exercises of thought through which he then had passed, 
 the searchings of those Scriptures which it was reported to him had 
 been quoted and commented on by Christ himself, had all been 
 secretly preparing him to take this advancing step ; to believe that 
 the Messiah of ancient prophecy was a very different Being in 
 character and office from what he had before imagined; much 
 lowlier in some respects, much higher in others. And now, all at 
 once, the revelation of the Redeemer's glory bursts upon him as 
 Jesus in person stands before him ; and not only does all his former 
 incredulity die away, but on its ruins there rises a faith which 
 springs up all the higher and stronger, because of the pressure by 
 which it had previously been kept in check. Jesus knew how 
 prepared Thomas was to call him Lord and God. He then might 
 be asked to do what to Mary was so emphatically forbidden. 
 " Touch me not," he said to her whose love to him had too much in 
 it of the earthly, the human, too little of the spiritual, the divine. 
 " Reach hither thy hand," he said to Thomas. The invitation may 
 be safely given to him who is ready to own the divinity of his Lord. 
 
 The title given him conveying as it did so distinct and emphatic
 
 6 1 6 THE FORTY DAYS. 
 
 a testimony to that divinity, Jesus at once, as if it were his by 
 birthright, accepts. But though he refuses not the tendered 
 homage, he passes no such approving judgment on him who presents 
 it, as he had formerly done upon Peter when he had made a like 
 confession of his faith, and Christ had called him blessed. Instead 
 of this, Christ administers now a mild but effective rebuke : 
 "Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed. Blessed 
 are they who have not seen, and yet have believed." Christ could 
 not mean by saying so, to declare that he who believes without 
 seeing is more blessed than he who upon sight believes ; for that 
 would exalt the weakest believer now above the strongest believer 
 of Christ's own age. The idea that Jesus evidently intended to 
 convey was this, that of two kinds of faith equally strong, that was 
 to him a more acceptable, and to the possessor a more peace-giving 
 one, which rested on reasonable testimony in absence of personal 
 observation, than that which would not yield to such kind of evi- 
 dence, and demanded that ocular demonstration should be given. 
 It was, in fact, as addressed to Thomas, a distinct enough yet 
 delicate intimation, that his faith had been all the more acceptable 
 to his Master if it had not been delayed so long. But though this 
 was the primary meaning of the saying, it is not without its bearings 
 upon those who, like ourselves, have not seen, and yet are called to 
 believe. The spirit of Thomas still lives among us. Have we not 
 often detected ourselves, thinking at least, if not saying, that, had 
 we lived in the days of Jesus Christ, ^had we seen what those 
 disciples saw, we would not have doubted as they did ; that, give 
 us but the evidence that they had, and our doubts would disappear ] 
 We practise thus a strange deception upon ourselves. We transfer 
 ourselves in fancy to those scenes of the gospel history, carrying 
 with us all the ideas of our age, forgetting that very different were 
 the ideas of the men of that generation, who, though they had the 
 advantage of the sight, had the disadvantage of the prejudices of 
 their country and their epoch. So equalised in point of advantage 
 and of responsibility do we believe the two periods to have been, 
 that we may safely affirm, that the men of this generation who will 
 not believe in the testimony of the original eye-witnesses, had they 
 been of that generation, would not have believed though they had 
 been the eye-witnesses themselves. He who now says, I will not 
 believe till I see, would not. even seeing, have then believed.
 
 THE LAKE-SIDE OF GALILEE. 
 
 VI. 
 
 THE LAKE-SIDE OF GALILEE, 
 JOHN xxi. 1-14. 
 
 SPEAKING to his disciples in the upper chamber before his death, 
 Jesus said to them, " After I am risen again, I will go before you 
 into Galilee." On the morning of the resurrection, the angel said to 
 the first visitants of the empty sepulchre, " Go your way, tell his 
 disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee : there 
 shall ye see him, as he said unto you." And as they went to 
 execute this message, Jesus himself met them, and said, " Be not 
 afraid : go tell my brethren that they go into Galilee, and there 
 shall they see me." Pointed so frequently and emphatically to 
 Galilee as to the chosen district within which their Master was to 
 manifest himself, we might have anticipated that the apostles would 
 have taken their immediate departure from Jerusalem. They could 
 not have done so, however, during the Passover week, without 
 being guilty of a great offence against the religious feeling of their 
 fellow-countrymen. They stayed, therefore, for these ten days still 
 in the holy city. This delay in proceeding to Galilee had their 
 Master's sanction not indistinctly put upon it, by his twice appear- 
 ing to them collectively, whilst they yet lingered in the metropolis. 
 And yet, upon the occasion of one of these manifestations, Jesus 
 said to them, " Behold, I send the promise of my Father upon 
 you : but tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem, until ye be endued 
 with power from on high." How are we to explain the con- 
 tradictory orders upon which, given during this interval, they 
 were called upon to act ? Galilee had obviously, for some special 
 reasons, been selected by Christ as the region in which some 
 special revelations of himself, after his resurrection, were to be 
 given. Did this spring from a strong desire to revisit the 
 scenes of his early life, the neighbourhoods in which most of 
 his wonderful works were done? In solitude and concealment, 
 shunning everything like frequent or continued intercourse even 
 with his own disciples, Jesus was to spend forty days on earth, 
 before his ascension to the Father. Would it have been unnatural, 
 that he should desire that the larger number of these days should 
 be given to regions hallowed to him by associations such as human 
 memory had never before been intrusted with 1 Or was it that, 
 as Galilee had absorbed the largest share of his earthly labours, 
 and had yielded to that labour the largest fruits, so it was there 
 that the largest number of his disciples could be congregated, and 
 that the quietest and securest opportunity of meeting with them 
 could be had? It was there, we know, that he met the five hundred
 
 618 THE FORTY DAYS. 
 
 brethren ; perhaps, it was there only that so many could have been 
 collected, or, being collected, could have found a secluded and pro- 
 tected meeting-place. Whatever the motives were which prompted 
 the Saviour to fix beforehand upon Galilee, and to announce it as 
 his chosen trysting-place for meeting with the brethren at large, 
 one can well enough see how desirable it was that the apostles 
 should be laid under the double obligation,; -first, of going north- 
 ward to Galilee, that they might share in the benefit of the most 
 public of all Christ's appearances after his resurrection ; and, secondly, 
 of returning to Jerusalem, as to the place in which the promise of 
 the descent of the Spirit was to be fulfilled, and they were to be 
 clothed with power from on high to execute their great mission 
 upon the earth. Nearly two months were to elapse, ere that 
 baptism of the Spirit was to be given. It might have been incon- 
 venient or dangerous for them to have spent so long an interval 
 idly, without occupation or means of support, in the metropolis. 
 But neither were they to be suffered to return to their old Galilean 
 haunts without an intimation being made to them, that it was in 
 Jerusalem that their apostolic work was to make its auspicious com- 
 mencement. It is not likely that the apostles saw this at the time 
 as we now see it, as they saw it afterwards themselves. When 
 they first left Jerusalem, they had perhaps no small difficulty in 
 harmonising the apparently conflicting instructions which had been 
 issued. One thing was very apparent, that their Master intended 
 to show himself to them in Galilee ; and to Galilee, therefore, so 
 soon as the Passover celebration was over, they retired. 
 
 One evening some of them are together by the lake-side. 
 Whether any of them had ever thought of resuming their old way 
 of living, or had actually engaged in it, we do not know. All, 
 however, is, this evening, so inviting ; the lake looks so tempting ; 
 the night, the best time for the fisher's craft, so promising ; their 
 old boats and nets so ready to their hand, that one of them, the 
 very one from whom we should have expected such a proposition 
 to come (in whom the spirit of his old occupation should be the 
 readiest to revive), Peter says to them, "I go a fishing." The 
 others say, " We also go with thee." It was not a concerted meet- 
 ing this by the lake-side. The proposal is evidently on the part of 
 Peter a thought of the moment, and it is agreed to in the same 
 quick spirit as that in which it is made. The meeting, the proposal, 
 the acquiescence, all seem fortuitous, accidental. Yet was it not 
 all foreseen, -all pre-arranged? An unseen eye follows these seven 
 men as they embark, and watches them at their fishing toil ; even 
 the eye of him who was waiting for them in the morning by the 
 shore, by whose hand it was that the whole incidents of that night 
 and morning were regulated. 
 
 The disciples toiled all night ; it was the time most favourable
 
 THE LAKE-SIDE OF GALILEE. 619 
 
 for their work. These seven men knew the lake well, every bay of 
 it where fish were most likely to be taken ; and they were skilful 
 at their craft. Yet, though they did their best, and toiled all 
 through the watches of the night, they caught nothing. Two years 
 before, Peter had once been out all night with as little success, but 
 Peter had never seen so many practised hands in a single boat toil- 
 ing so long, and toiling so fruitlessly. Had the remembrance of 
 that other night of like fruitless labour been suggested to any of 
 the seven ? It would not seem that it had. The morning breaks 
 upon the quiet lake, upon the wearied boatmen, and finds them 
 within one hundred yards or so of the shore. There, upon the 
 beach, a stranger stands ; stands as any inhabitant of the neighbour- 
 hood might have stood, who, having caught sight of the fishing- 
 boat, and knowing how its occupants must throughout the night 
 have been engaged, wanted to be one of the first purchasers from 
 them of the fruit of their toil. One might have thought that 
 the very sight at such an early hour of a solitary figure upon the 
 shore, would have awakened curiosity in the hearts of the disciples, 
 and that, as they had been frequently and distinctly told, it was 
 here in Galilee they were to see their Master again, it might have 
 occurred to them that it was Jesus. The very kind and form of 
 the question put to them, "Children, have ye any meat?" a 
 question which it appears much more clearly from the original than 
 from our English version, 1 was just the one which any stranger 
 wishing to become a purchaser of their fish might have put may 
 have served rather to allay than to stimulate their curiosity. It is 
 certain, at least, that they did not at first recognise him. Having 
 got an answer to his question ; having been told that they had 
 nothing in the boat, Jesus said to the exhausted and hopeless fishers 
 of the night, " Cast the net on the right side of the ship, and ye shall 
 find." They may have wondered for a moment at an order of that 
 kind being given ; they may have thought that the stranger had 
 seen some indication of the presence of fish in that direction, which 
 had escaped their eye. They may have had but little faith that 
 the new cast of their net would be more successful than the many 
 they had made before. But what the stranger directs can easily 
 be done. They may try one last throw of their net before they 
 land. They do so, and now at once they see that not without a 
 reason had the order been given. Now, they find, that within the 
 small enclosure which their net makes, such a multitude of fishes is 
 embraced, that they have difficulty in drawing it through the water 
 towards the land. And now it is that love proves itself as quick of 
 eye as it had already shown itself to be swift of foot. When Peter 
 and John ran out to the sepulchre, John outstripped Peter in the 
 race. He outstrips him also in the recognition. They are together 
 1 "Children, have ye aught to eat?" REVISED VKUSION.
 
 620 THE FORTY DAYS. 
 
 in the boat ; a strange attraction binds the gentlest to the most 
 forward of the twelve ; and no sooner does it appear that the last 
 cast of the net, taken in obedience to the command of him who 
 stands upon the shore, is not only successful, but successful to such 
 an extraordinary degree, than the thought flashes into the mind of 
 the beloved disciple that it must be Jesus. "It is the Lord!" 
 whispered John to Peter. The Lord ! Thomas has taught them 
 the expression ; they begin to speak of him as the Lord. " It is 
 the Lord," says John, and satisfies himself with saying so. And now 
 once again the characteristic difference between the two men reveals 
 itself : John the first to recognise ; but Peter the first to act upon 
 the recognition. At once believing that it is as John has said, 
 Peter, leaving it to the others to drag the net to shore, flung him- 
 self into the water. It was but a short distance to the shore 
 about 200 cubits, 100 yards. He was quickly beside the stranger; 
 although it does not appear from the narrative that he gained any- 
 thing by his greater forwardness of movement. 
 
 It is soon evident that it was not the want of any supply out of 
 their boat which had led Jesus to put to them the question, 
 " Children, have ye any meat ? " On landing, the disciples find a 
 fire of coals, and fish already laid thereon, and bread at hand. 
 Who gathered these coals? Who kindled that fire? Whence 
 came the fishes and the bread? Mysteriously provided, the 
 materials for the morning meal are there, quite independent of any 
 supply which the last draught of the net may produce. But though 
 all be ready for the weary and hungry fishermen, they must not 
 leave their own proper work unfinished. As they gather in 
 'wonder around that fire to gaze on him who has furnished this 
 fresh food for them, "Bring," said Jesus to them, "of the fish 
 which ye have now caught." As if reminded by this order, of his 
 having failed to take his proper part in the labour of dragging the 
 net to shore, Peter is now the readiest to act upon this injunction. 
 It is he who lands the net ; and not till the fish taken in it have 
 been secured and counted, does Jesus say to them, "Come and 
 dine." He takes the bread and the fish, breaks and divides them 
 among the seven. Was the miracle of the mountain-side here, on 
 a smaller scale, again enacted ? Was there only food enough for 
 one man there at first, and did that food multiply as he blessed 
 (which we may assume he did) and parted it among them ? This 
 at least is certain, that he was known now not of Peter and John 
 alone, but of all the seven, in the breaking of the bread. They all 
 know it is the Lord ; yet none of them durst ask him anything 
 about himself, a mysterious awe felt in his presence sealing their 
 lips. It is in silence that this morning meal by the lake-side is 
 partaken of. This, John says, was the third time that Jesus had 
 showed himself; not literally the third time that he had showed
 
 PETER AND JOHN. 621 
 
 himself to any one, but the third time that he had showed himself to 
 the disciples collectively assembled in any considerable number, 
 after he had risen from the dead. 
 
 It had been by a miraculous draught of fishes, like the one now 
 before us, that, at the outset of his ministry, Christ had drawn 
 away three at least of the seven now around him from their old 
 occupations, and taught them to understand that in following him 
 they were to become fishers of men. Why was that miracle re- 
 peated 1 Because the lesson which it conveyed was needed to be 
 again given and re-enforced. Had they been told at first to go to 
 Galilee without the hint of a power to be given from on high, to be 
 bestowed at Jerusalem, they might have returned to their old 
 neighbourhoods, under the impression that they were to abide there 
 permanently. And now that, bereft of the companionship of Christ, 
 deprived of the means of support, if not driven by necessity yet 
 tempted by opportunity, they resume their ancient calling, was it 
 not needful and kind in Jesus to interfere, and, by the repetition 
 of that miracle, whose symbolic meaning they could not fail at 
 once to recognise, to teach them that their first apostolic calling 
 still held good, that still the command was upon them, " Follow me, 
 and I will make you fishers of men." 
 
 VII. 
 
 PETER AND JOHN. 
 JOHN xxi. 15-23. 
 
 THE repetition of the miraculous draught of fishes was nothing 
 else than a symbolical renewal of the commission given originally to 
 the apostles, intended to teach them that their first calling to be 
 fishers of men still held good. There was one, however, of the 
 seven for whose instruction that miracle was intended, whose 
 position towards that apostolic commission was peculiar. He had 
 taken a very prominent place among the twelve, had often acted as 
 their representative and spokesman. But on the night of the 
 betrayal he had played a singularly shameful and inconsistent part. 
 Vehement in his repeated assertion that though all men should 
 forsake his Master he never would, though thrice warned, he had 
 thrice over, with superfluous oaths, denied that he ever knew or 
 had anything to do with Jesus. How will it stand with Peter if 
 that apostolic work has to be taken up again ? Has he sufficiently 
 repented of his sin ? Will he not, in the depth of that humility 
 and self-distrust which his great fall has taught him, shrink from 
 placing himself on the same level with the rest ? Does Jesus mean 
 that he should re-occupy the place from which, by his transgression,
 
 622 TITE FORTY DAYS. 
 
 he might be regarded as having fallen ? Singling him out when the 
 morning meal by the lake-side was over, Jesus said to him, " Simon, 
 son of Jonas, lovest thou me more than these, thy brethren, my 
 other disciples, do V What a skilful yet delicate method, without 
 subjecting him to the painful humiliation of having his former 
 denials of his Master exposed and dwelt upon, of testing and exhi- 
 biting the trueness and deepness of Peter's repentance ! Will he 
 repeat the offence ; will he again compare himself with the others ; 
 will he again set himself above them ; will he renew that boasting 
 which was the sad precursor of his fall 1 How touchingly does his 
 answer show that he perfectly understood the involved reference to 
 the past ; that he had thoroughly learned its humbling lessons. No 
 longer any comparing himself with, or setting himself above others. 
 He will not say that he loves Jesus more than they ; he will not 
 say how much he loves. He will offer no testimony of his own as 
 to the love he feels. He will trust his deceitful heart no more. 
 But, throwing himself on another's knowledge of that heart which 
 had proved better than his own, he says : " Yea, Lord, thou 
 knowest that I love thee." 
 
 Our Lord's reply is a most emphatic affirmative response to this 
 appeal. It is as if he had said at large : ' Yes, Simon Barjona, I 
 do know that thou lovest me ; I see too that thou wilt make no 
 boast of thy love ; neither in that nor in anything else wilt thou 
 set thyself above thy fellows ; by the pressure of this probe into thy 
 throbbing heart it has been seen how true and deep thy penitence 
 has been, how thoroughly it has done its work in humbling thee. 
 And now, that thou, and these thy brethren, may know and see how 
 readily I own and acknowledge thee as being to me all thou ever 
 wert, I renew to thee this great commission ; I reinstate thee in the 
 apostolic office, "Feed my lambs !"' 
 
 Peter was not asked a second time whether he loved more than 
 others ; but as three times he had been warned, and three times he 
 had denied, so three times will Jesus reinstate, restore. Can we 
 wonder that Peter was grieved when, for the third time, the general 
 question, Lovest thou me, was put to him 1 It was not the grief of 
 doubt, as if he suspected that Jesus only half believed his word, but 
 the grief of contrition, growing into a deeper sadness at the so 
 distinct allusion to his three denials, in the triple repetition of the 
 question. With a sadder and fuller heart, in stronger words than 
 ever, he makes the last avowal of his love : " Lord, thou knowest 
 all things, thou knowest that I love thee." 
 
 " Simon, Simon," our Lord had said to Peter before his fall, 
 " Satan hath desired to sift thee as wheat, but I have prayed for 
 thee that thy faith fail not ; and when thou art converted " con- 
 verted, Jesus means here not in the ordinary sense of the term, but 
 recovered, restored" then strengthen thy brethren. " That strength-
 
 PETER AND JOHN. 623 
 
 ening of the brethren formed part of the shepherd's office, now 
 anew committed to Peter; and what a lesson had he got in the 
 treatment which he had himself received at the hands of the Chief 
 Shepherd, as to how that office should be discharged ! The prayers, 
 the warnings, the look of love, the angel's message, the private 
 interview, this conversation by the lake-side, these all told Peter 
 of the thoughtf ulness, the care, the kindness, the pitying sympathy, 
 the forgiving love, of which he had been the object. Thus had he 
 been treated by Jesus ; and let him go and deal with others as 
 Christ had dealt with him. 
 
 So far in what Christ had spoken, whilst there was much that 
 was personal and peculiar to Peter, there was much also that had a 
 wider bearing. But now the Lord has a word, which is for Peter's 
 ear alone. "Whither I go" (he had said to him in the upper 
 chamber) " thou canst not follow me now, but thou shalt follow me 
 afterwards;" and Peter had said in reply, "Lord, why cannot I 
 follow thee now ? I am ready to go with thee to prison, and to 
 death ; I will lay down my life for thy sake." These words of the 
 apostle, though sadly falsified the night when they were spoken, 
 still were to hold good. Peter did follow his Master, even unto 
 death. He did lay down his life for Jesus' sake ; crucified, as his 
 Lord had been. Knowing this, and knowing that he needed all 
 the encouragement which could be given him, to fortify him to 
 meet the martyr's doom, not only will Jesus in that private inter- 
 view in the resurrection-day wipe all his tears away, and now in 
 presence of his brethren reinstate him in his apostolic office, but he 
 will do for him what he does for no other of the twelve, he will 
 reveal the future so far as to let him know by what kind of death 
 it should be that he should glorify God to let him know that the 
 opportunity would be at last afforded him of making good the words 
 which he too hastily and boastfully had spoken. " Verily, verily, 
 I say unto thee, when thou wast young thou girdedst thyself, and 
 walkedst whither thou wouldest ; but when thou shalt be old, thou 
 shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and 
 carry thee whither thou wouldest not." The explanatory clause 
 which is introduced here, creates the impression that there had been 
 a break or interruption of the discourse. From verse twentieth, 
 it would appear too, that Jesus had made some movement of with- 
 drawal. These two circumstances combine in inducing the idea, 
 that when our Lord said to Peter, " follow me," he meant simply 
 that he should go along with him as he now retired. If, however, 
 the words of the nineteenth verse were spoken in immediate con- 
 nection with, and in continuation of what is recorded in the 
 eighteenth, then, in saying " follow me," our Lord might have had 
 in his eye the very words of Peter about following him to prison 
 and to death, and have meant, in using them, to say, ' When thon
 
 624 THE FOKTY DAYS. 
 
 shalt be old, and another shall seize upon thee and bind thee as they 
 seized and bound thy Master in preparation for his crucifixion, then 
 Peter, follow me, through the Cross to glory.' 
 
 It is very difficult, owing to the briefness of the gospel narrative, 
 to picture to our eye the scene which followed. Did Jesus, as he 
 said "follow me," arise to depart, and was Peter in the act of 
 following when he turned and saw John following also ? Did John 
 mistake so far the meaning of Christ's word and act, as to consider 
 himself equally with Pefer called upon to follow ; or was it of his 
 own motion, and without any real or imagined invitation that he 
 was acting] However it was, Peter, his mind full of the many 
 thoughts that this pre-intimation of his death had excited, turns 
 and sees John by his side. His own fate had been foretold ; what, 
 he wondered, would be John's. The beloved disciple had once, at 
 his suggestion, put a question to their Master about the others ; 
 now he will put a question about John a question of natural and 
 of brotherly curiosity, yet somewhat out of place. He has resumed 
 too rapidly his old position, and his old hasty and forward ways. 
 Jesus will not become a fortune-teller, to gratify even a friendly 
 inquisitiveness. He puts a check upon the unbefitting inquiry, 
 and yet, singularly enough, even in rebuking, he answers it. 
 '"HI will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee ? follow 
 thou me." Each man's path, as each man's duty, is separate and 
 distinct. What the lot of another man may be, has nothing to 
 do with the regulation of thine individual course. What is it to 
 thee, Peter, whether John's destiny shall be the same or different 
 from thine ? The thing for thee to do is not to turn aside to busy 
 thyself with his hereafter, but to occupy thyself with the duty that 
 lies immediately before thee to discharge. What is that to thee *>, 
 follow thou me.' " But if I will that he tarry till I come : " Only 
 imagine that Jesus was other than divine, and how arrogant the 
 assumption here of his will regulating human destinies, fixing the 
 time and the manner of his disciples' death ; Deity incarnate alone 
 was entitled to use such language : "If I will that he tarry till I 
 come." When John wrote his Gospel, that saying of Jesus was not 
 understood. Some regarded it as implying that John should never 
 die. The beloved disciple himself saw only so far into its meaning, 
 that it contained no direct assertion of that kind, but further he did 
 not then see. Perhaps afterwards, when he saw all the apostles die 
 out before, and witnessed, as he only did, the destruction of 
 Jerusalem, of which Christ had often spoken as identified with his 
 coming, perhaps at that time, forty years after the meeting by the 
 lake-side, he remembered the words that his Master had spoken, 
 and wondered as he perceived how remarkably they were fulfilled. 
 
 Next to the absence of all notice of our Lord's mother, few 
 things are more remarkable, in the narrative of the period after the
 
 PETER AND JOHN. 625 
 
 resurrection, tkaii the silence respecting John. One of the earliest 
 visitants at the sepulchre, present at both the evening interviews at 
 Jerusalem, the disciple whom Jesus loved is neither spoken of nor 
 spoken to. This is the only case in which he meets our eye, and 
 he appears here rather in conjunction with Peter than with Jesus. 
 In the account of our Lord's ministry, though John was frequently 
 associated with Peter, it was as one of the two sons of Zebedee, the 
 tie to his brother James being then obviously a stronger one than 
 that to Peter. But from the hour when the two entered together 
 the hall of the High Priest, a singular attraction appears to have 
 drawn these two men together. The brotherly tie yields to one 
 which has become still stronger, and instead of its being Peter and 
 James and John, it is now Peter and John who are seen constantly 
 in company with one another. This is all the more singular, when 
 one considers how unlike the two were in natural character, in 
 original disposition. 
 
 John was born a lover of repose, of retirement. Left to himself, 
 he would never have been an adventurous or ambitious man. Even 
 in his very motion there had been rest Had he never seen the 
 Saviour, he would have remained quite contented in the occupation 
 to which he had been brought up. To sit upon the sunny banks of 
 that lovely inland lake mending his nets, his eye straying occasion- 
 ally across its placid waters, or lifted to the blue expanse above ; 
 to take his accustomed seat in his fishing-boat, to launch out by 
 night under these burning heavens, and sweep over the well-known 
 haunts, would have been enough for him : he neither would have 
 desired nor sought for change. It may seem to militate against this 
 idea of John's character that he and his brother were called Boan- 
 erges, the Sons of Thunder. We are not told, however, the reason 
 why this title was bestowed on them, it may have been derived 
 from something peculiar in the father rather than in the sons. Nor 
 can we allow the bestowal of an unexplained and ambiguous epithet 
 to outweigh the whole drift and bearing of the gospel narrative, 
 which speaks so much of the meekness and modesty and gentleness 
 and retiringness of John. But let us not confound John's yielding 
 gentleness with that spirit of easy compliance which shuns all 
 contest, because it does not feel that there is anything worth con- 
 tending for. Beneath John's calm and soft exterior there lay a 
 hidden strength. In the mean, vulgar strife of petty, earthly 
 passions, John might have yielded when Peter would have stood 
 firm. But in more exciting scenes, under more formidable tests, 
 John would have stood firm when Peter might have yielded. This 
 was proved on the night of the arrest, and the day of the crucifixion. 
 And there was latent heat as well as latent strength in John. As 
 lightning lurks amid the warm, soft drops of the summer shower, 
 so the force of a love -kindled zeal lurked in his gentle spirit. The 
 2 It
 
 626 THE FORTY DAYS. 
 
 Samaritans might a thousand times have refused to receive himself 
 into their dwellings, and it had stirred no resentment in his breast ; 
 but when they contemptuously refused to receive the Master to 
 whom he was so ardently attached, it was more than he could 
 endure. He joined his brother James in saying, "Lord, wilt thou 
 that we command fire to come down from heaven, and consume 
 them ? " a solitary outbreak of a sentiment but seldom felt, or if 
 felt, habitually restrained ; yet that single flash reveals an inner 
 region where all kinds of vivid emotions lived and moved and had 
 their being. 
 
 Nor let us confound John's simplicity with shallowness. If it 
 be the pure in heart who see God, John's was the eye to see farther 
 into the highest of all regions than that of any of his fellows. If it 
 be he that loveth who knoweth God for God is love, John's 
 knowledge of God must have stood unrivalled. We reckon his as 
 belonging to the highest order of intellect; not analytical nor 
 constructive ; the logical faculty, the reasoning powers, not largely 
 developed ; but his the quick bright eye of intuition, which, at a 
 glance, sees farther into the heart of truth than by the stepping- 
 stones of mere argumentation you can ever be conveyed. There 
 were besides under that calm surface which the spirit of the beloved 
 disciple displayed to the common eye of observation, profound and 
 glorious depths. The writer of the Gospel and the Epistles is, let 
 us remember, the writer also of the Apocalypse ; and if the Holy 
 Spirit chose the human vehicle best fitted for receiving and trans- 
 mitting the divine communications, then to John we must assign 
 not the pure deep love alone of a gentle heart, but the vision and 
 the faculty divine, the high imaginative power. 
 
 Peter, again, was born with the strongest constitutional tendency 
 to a restless and excited activity. He could not have endured a 
 life of monotonous repose. He was a child of impulse ; he would 
 have been a lover of adventure. He was not selfish enough to be a 
 covetous, nor had he steadiness enough to be a successfully ambi- 
 tious man ; but we can conceive of him as intensely excited for the 
 time by any distinction, or any honour placed within his reach. 
 Had he never seen the Lord, one cannot think of him as remaining 
 all his life a fisherman of Galilee ; or, if the natural restraints of his 
 position kept him there, even in that fisherman's life he would have 
 found the means of gratifying his constitutional biases. Eager, 
 ardent, sanguine, it needed but a spark to fall upon the inflammable 
 material, and his whole soul kindled into a blaze, ready to burst 
 along whatever path lay open at the time for its passage. The 
 great natural defect in Peter was the want of steadiness, of a ruling, 
 regulating principle to keep him moving along one line. Left to 
 work at random, the excitability of such a susceptible spirit involved 
 its possessor often in inconsistency, exposed him often to peril. We 

 
 THE GREAT COMMISSION. 627 
 
 have, however, had this apostle so often before us, that we need 
 not say more of him. Enough has been said to bring out the 
 strong contrast in natural character and disposition between him 
 and John. Yet these were the two of all the twelve, who finally 
 drew closest together. The day of Pentecost wrought a great 
 change upon them both, and by doing so linked them in still 
 closer bonds. The grace was given them which enabled each to 
 struggle successfully with his own original defects, and to find in 
 the other that which he most wanted. It is truly singular, in read- 
 ing the earlier chapters of the Acts of the Apostles, to notice how 
 close the coalition between Peter and John became. Peter and 
 John go up together to the temple. It is upon Peter and John 
 that the lame man at the gate fixes his eye. After he was healed, 
 it is said that he held Peter and John, as if they were inseparable. 
 It was when they saw the boldness of Peter and John that the 
 members of the Sanhedrim marvelled. And when they commanded 
 them to speak no more in the name of Jesus, it is said that Peter 
 and John answered and said, as if in very voice as well as in action 
 they were one (Acts iii. 1, 3, 11 ; iv. 13, 19). 
 
 Blessed fruit this of that all-conquering grace of God, which 
 lifts Peter above the fear of reproach, and John above the love of 
 ease ; which brings the most timid and retiring of the twelve to the 
 side of the most stirring, the most impetuous ; supplying a stimulus 
 to the one a regulator to the other ; bringing them into a union 
 so near, and to both so beneficial John's gentleness leaning upon 
 Peter's strength; Peter's fervid zeal chastened by John's pure, 
 calm love. In the glorious company of the apostles, they shone 
 together as a double star, in whose complemental light, love and 
 zeal, labour and rest, action and contemplation are brought into 
 beauteous harmony. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 THE GREAT COMMISSION. 
 MATT, xxvni. 16-20. 
 
 THE very fact that among those who saw Christ upon the 
 mountain-side of Galilee, there were some who doubted, convinces 
 us that more than the eleven must have been present at the inter- 
 view. For after his repeated appearances to them in Jerusalem, 
 after his meeting with them, and eating with them, and showing 
 them his hands and his side, and asking them to handle him, 
 that any of the eleven should at this after-stage have doubted is 
 scarcely credible. And our impression of the incredibility of this 
 is deepened by reflecting that it was to a place of his own appoint-
 
 628 THE FORTY DAYS. 
 
 ment they now went, and that for the very purpose of seeing and 
 conversing with him once more. There are other and still weightier 
 reasons, which leave no ground for doubt, that the appearance of 
 the risen Saviour recorded by St. Matthew the only one which 
 this evangelist does record, and to which we may therefore conclude 
 that a peculiar importance attached was the same with that to 
 which St. Paul refers, when he says, " After that he was seen of 
 five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain 
 unto this present, but some are fallen asleep." 
 
 It was the will of Christ to show himself alone after his resur- 
 rection, once, and once only, to the whole collective body of his 
 disciples ; to as many, at least, as could conveniently be congregated 
 at one time, and in one place. It was in Galilee that this purpose 
 could best be accomplished. There, and there only, could so many 
 as five hundred of his disciples be found, and brought safely 
 together. After the ascension, when all assembled at Jerusalem 
 that the city and its neighbourhood could supply, the number 
 gathered there was only one hundred and twenty. Hence, per- 
 haps, one reason why, on the night before his death, and on the 
 morning of his resurrection, the apostles were so repeatedly and 
 emphatically told by Christ himself, and through the commissioned 
 angel, that he went before them into Galilee, and it was to be there 
 that they were to see him. Their attention was thus fixed before- 
 hand upon an interview at which the most public and impressive 
 manifestation of their risen Lord was to be made. 
 
 The necessity of the case required that both time and place 
 should be named beforehand, fixed by our Lord himself, by him 
 communicated to the apostles, by them announced to others ; the 
 tidings conveyed abroad over Galilee, wherever disciples of Jesus 
 were to be found. One can imagine what intense curiosity, what 
 longing desire to be present at such an interview, would be kindled 
 wherever the intelligence was carried. In due time the day ap- 
 pointed dawns. On towards the indicated mountain-side, group 
 after group is eagerly pressing ; the solitary one from some far-off 
 hamlet, the one of his family that has been taken while the others 
 were left, mingling with the larger companies that Capernaum and 
 Bethsaida send forth. All are gathered now. From knot to knot 
 of old Galilean friends, the apostles pass, assuring them that this is 
 indeed the day and the place the Lord himself had named ; and 
 giving a still quicker edge to the already keen enough curiosity, by 
 telling of the strange things they had so lately seen and heard at 
 Jerusalem. 
 
 What new thoughts about the Crucified would be stirring then 
 in many a breast ! A prophet, all of them had taken him to be ; 
 but if all be true that they now are hearing, he must be more than 
 a prophet ; for which one of all their prophets ever burst the barriers
 
 THE GREAT COMMISSION. 629 
 
 of the grave ? The Messiah, many of them had taken him to be ; 
 but now, if they are to retain that faith, their former notions of who 
 and what the Messiah was to be, must be greatly changed. A 
 Messiah reaching his throne through suffering and death, is an idea 
 quite new to them. They ask about his late appearances, and are 
 lost in wonder as they hear how few they have been, how short ; 
 at what a distance, even from the eleven, the risen Jesus had kept ; 
 what a studied reserve there had been in his intercourse with them, 
 so different from his old familiarity. He is, he must be, a Being 
 other far higher than they had fancied him to be. Is it really 
 true what they had heard himself say, but had not fully understood, 
 that he was the Son of, the equal of the Father God incarnate ? 
 Thomas tells them that he fully believes so. The other apostles 
 tell them that he has opened their minds through a new interpreta- 
 tion of the prophecies to quite different notions about himself and 
 his kingdom from anything they had hitherto entertained. In what 
 a very singular condition of thought and feeling, as they try to 
 realise it, must that company of five hundred brethren have been, 
 which collected on the mountain-side, and stood awaiting Christ's 
 coming ? 
 
 At last the Lord appears : we know not how ; whether bursting 
 at once on their astonished vision, without shadow of approaching 
 form or sound of advancing footstep, seen standing in the midst ; 
 or whether seen at first far off, alone in the distance, silently 
 watched, as treading the mountain-side he drew nearer and nearer 
 to them, till at last he was by their side. However he came, when 
 they saw him, we are told they worshipped : with clasped hands, 
 or on bended knee ; some, like Thomas, with profound and intelli- 
 gent adoration; others with a worship, heightened by wonder, 
 somewhat vague, but pure as the mountain air they breathed. But 
 some doubted those who saw him now for the first time after his 
 resurrection. Here, as in almost every first interview of the kind, 
 there was a doubt, one speedily dispelled, whose natural source we 
 have already attempted to indicate. 
 
 " And Jesus came and spake to them, saying, All power is given 
 to me in heaven and in earth." To whatever height of conception 
 and belief the men of that company may have been rising, upon 
 whose ears these words fell, as Christ's greeting to them in the first, 
 the only interview they were to have with him after his resurrec- 
 tion, we may be assured that they went much beyond what they 
 ever expected to hear coming from those lips. Already they had 
 worshipped, gazing in wonder on him, as one who had come to 
 them from the dead. But what fresh subject for wonder now; 
 what higher reason for worship now ! Power they knew him to 
 possess; power over earth, and air, and water; power over the 
 spirits of all flesh ; power even over the demons of darkness.
 
 630 THE FORTY DAYS. 
 
 Power enough they had attributed to him to set up an earthly 
 kingdom in front of all opposition, to crush all its enemies undeV 
 his feet. Such power they were prepared to hear him claim, and 
 see him exercise. But they were not prepared to hear him say, 
 "All power is given to me in heaven and in earth." Far above 
 all their former thoughts of him does Jesus thus ascend, and, by 
 ascending, try to lead them up. It has been already suggested, 
 that one part of Christ's design in dwelling for these forty days on 
 earth, and in the mode of conduct to his disciples which he pursued, 
 was gradually to lift their minds from lower and unworthier thoughts 
 of him to a true conception of his divine dignity and power ; and 
 it confirms our belief in this to find that in the greatest, the most 
 public, the most solemn manifestation of himself which Christ at 
 that time made, his first declaration to the assembled five hundred 
 was, " All power is given to me in heaven and in earth !" 
 
 When first uttered, how many eyes were fixed in wonder upon 
 the man who spake these words ! Eighteen hundred years have 
 gone past since then ; millions upon millions of the human family 
 have had these words repeated to them, as spoken by the Son of 
 Mary ; have regarded them as honestly and truly spoken ; as ex- 
 pressing but a simple fact. How could this have been? How 
 could a man of woman born, who had lived and died as we do, 
 have been regarded as other than the vainest, most arrogant of pre- 
 tenders, who said that all power in heaven and in earth was his, 
 had there not been something in the whole earthly history of this 
 man which corresponded with and bore out such an extraordinary 
 assumption ? And even such were the life and death of Jesus of 
 Nazareth. They have now been for centuries before the world, as 
 the life and death of one who claimed to be the eternal Son of God, 
 the equal of the Father ; of one who said that as the Father knew 
 him, so knew he the Father; of one who said that whatsoever 
 things the Father did, the same did the Son likewise ; that the 
 Father had delivered all things into his hand ; that all power was 
 his in heaven and in earth. And no one has ever been able to 
 show anything in the character, the sayings, the doings of Jesus 
 Christ, inconsistent with such extraordinary pretensions ; all is in 
 harmony with the claim, all goes to sanction and sustain it. It 
 seems to us that the simple fact that there was a Man who lived 
 for three-and-thirty years in familiar intercourse with his fellow- 
 men, who yet, before he left this world, was recognised and wor- 
 shipped by five hundred of his fellow-men as one who was guilty of 
 no presumption in saying, " All power is given me in heaven and 
 in earth;" and who, since that time, has been believed in by such 
 multitudes as God incarnate, goes far, of itself, to sustain the belief 
 that he was indeed the Son of the Highest, and that it was no 
 robbery with him to count himself equal with God; for, only
 
 THE GREAT COMMISSION. 631 
 
 imagine that he was no more than he seemed to be, a Jew, 
 the son of a Galilean carpenter, educated in a village in the rudest 
 part of Judea, that such a man, being a man and no more, could 
 have lived so long upon the earth without saying or doing anything 
 which could belie the idea that in him dwelt all the fulness of the 
 Godhead bodily, appears to us to present far greater difficulties to 
 faith than does the doctrine of the Incarnation. 
 
 It is not so much, however, as one possessed of it by .original 
 and native right, that Jesus lays claim here to supreme and un- 
 limited power. He speaks of the " all power in heaven and in 
 earth" as "given," given by another; by Him whose law he had 
 so magnified, whose character he had so glorified in his life and by 
 his death. It was as the fruit and reward of his obedience unto 
 death that he was invested by the Father with unlimited authority 
 and power. One of the conditions of the everlasting Covenant was 
 that, crucified in weakness, Christ should be raised in power ; that, 
 on account of his having suffered unto death, he should be crowned 
 with glory and honour. And his first word to this company on 
 the mountain-side is the first announcement from his own lips, that, 
 his great decease having been accomplished, this condition of the 
 covenant had been fulfilled ; that he had entered upon possession 
 of the mediatorial sovereignty. Constituted heir of all things, the 
 great inheritance had to be acquired, the kingdom won. The heir 
 still lingers for a season upon earth, but he is on his way to the 
 throne on which he is to sit down covered with glory and honour, 
 angels and principalities and powers being made subject to him. 
 Jesus indeed speaks here as if he were already upon that throne. 
 As in the upper chamber, when the agony of the garden and the 
 sufferings of the cross still lay before him, he spake as if the passion 
 were over, as if heaven had been already entered, saying, " I have 
 glorified thee on the earth, I have finished the work which thou 
 gavest me to do. Father, I will that those whom thou hast given 
 me be with me where I am;" so here, on the mountain-side, he 
 speaks as if the cloud had already carried him away, as if his feet 
 were already standing within the throne of universal sovereignty, 
 as if, having raised him by his mighty power from the dead, the 
 Father had already set him on his own right hand in the heavenly 
 places, far above all principality and power, and might and dominion, 
 and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in 
 that which is to come ; had put all things under his feet, and given 
 him to be Head over all to the Church, which is his body, the ful- 
 ness of him that filleth all in alL 
 
 It is from the lofty elevation thus attained, it is as clothed with 
 the supreme, limitless authority and power thus acquired, that 
 Jesus issues the great commission to the Church, Go ye therefore 
 and teach or make disciples of all nations ; or, as you have it in
 
 632 THE FORTY DAYS. 
 
 another evangelist, Go preach the gospel to every creature. A 
 mission so comprehensive was as novel as it was sublime. Famili- 
 arity with the idea blunts the edge of our wonder, but let us 
 recollect that at the time when, in a remote Jewish province, 
 gathering a few hundred followers around him, Jesus sent them 
 forth, assigning to them a task which should not be accomplished 
 till every creature had heard the glad tidings of salvation in his 
 name, and all nations had been brought to sit under his shadow, 
 that at that time the very idea of a religion equally addressed to, 
 and equally adapted to all nations, equally needed by and equally 
 suited to every child of Adam, was wholly new, had never been 
 broached, never been attempted to be realised. There was no form 
 or system of idolatry that ever aimed at, or was indeed capable of 
 such universality of embrace. The object of its worship was either 
 confined to certain definite localities; the gods of certain mountains, 
 groves, or streams, whose worship was incapable of transfer ; or they 
 were the offspring and expression of some peculiar state of society, 
 whether savage or civilised, suited only to that particular state or con- 
 dition of humanity in which they had their birth and being. It is 
 true that in all the more educated nations of antiquity, there were 
 men who soared far above the vulgar prejudices and superstitions of 
 their times, whose religion, such as it was, had certainly nothing 
 about it of that confinement by which the popular belief and 
 worship were characterised ; but if free thus from one kind of con- 
 finement, their religion was all the more liable to another. Unfitted 
 for the many, it was by eminence the religion of the few. Its 
 disciples gloried in its exclusiveness. It would have lost half its 
 charm in their eyes, had the people at large adopted it. But there 
 was no danger of that. It was essentially unfitted for the multitude. 
 Its votaries would have laughed at the idea of trying to convert 
 even a single village to their faith. Such, in the days of Jesus 
 Christ, in all heathen countries, were the multiform idolatries of 
 the many, the exclusive faith of the few. In Judea, it was somewhat 
 different. Sacred books were circulating there, in which, under 
 dark prophetic symbols, hints were given of a future gathering of 
 all the nations under one great king and head. But these hints 
 were universally misunderstood and misapplied. Among the con- 
 fined and exclusive religions of that period, there was not one 
 more confined, or more exclusive, than Judaism. Both socially 
 and religiously, the Jew of the Saviour's time was one of the most 
 shut up and bigoted of the race. Everything about him, his 
 dress, his food, his domestic customs, his religious ceremonies, 
 marked him off by a broad wall of separation from the rest of the 
 species. He gloried in this distinction. He thought and spoke of 
 himself and his brethren as the elect of God, the holy, the clean : 
 the Gentiles were the dogs, the polluted, the unclean. His attach-
 
 THE GREAT COMMISSION. 633 
 
 ment to his religion, as a faith proclaimed exclusively to his 
 forefathers, and bequeathed by them as a national heritage to their 
 children, was intense. His faith and his patriotism were one, and 
 the deeper the patriotism the narrower the faith. And yet it is 
 among this people ; it is from one who was brought up in one of its 
 wildest districts ; it is from one for whom birth, position, education, 
 had done nothing in the way of weaning him from the common 
 prejudices of his countrymen, making him in that respect different 
 from any other Jew ; it is from one who, save occasional visits to 
 Jerusalem, never moved beyond the neighbourhood of a Galilean 
 village, nor shared in the benefits of any other society than it 
 supplied ; it is from him that a religion emanates whose professed 
 object is to gather into one, within its all-embracing arms, the whole 
 human family. The very broaching of a project so original, so 
 comprehensive, so sublime, at that time and in those circumstances, 
 stands out as an event unique in the history of our race. In vain 
 shall we try to explain it on the supposition that it was the self- 
 suggested scheme of the son of a Galilean tradesman. The very 
 time and manner of its earthly birth claims for it a heavenly origin. 
 Had Jesus Christ done nothing more than this, set the idea for 
 the first time afloat, that it was desirable and practicable to frame 
 for the world a religious faith and worship which should have 
 nothing of the confinements of country, or period, or caste, but be 
 alike adapted to all countries, all periods, all kinds and classes of 
 men, he would have stood by himself and above all others. 
 
 But he did more than this. He not only announced the project, 
 but he devised the instrument by which it was to be accomplished ; 
 he put that instrument in its complete and perfect form into the 
 hands of those by whom it was to be employed. Study the history 
 of all other revolutions, civil or religious, which have taken place 
 upon this earth, and you will find it to be true of all of them, that 
 the methods by which they were wrought out were at first devised 
 by different men and at lengthened intervals, and afterwards perfected 
 by slow degrees. The men engaged in effecting them had to feel their 
 way forward ; had often to retrace their steps ; had often to cast aside 
 an old instrument because it was found to be useless, or because a new 
 and better one had been fallen upon in its stead. It has not been so 
 with the establishment and propagation upon the earth of the religion 
 of Jesus Christ. The instrumentality employed here has been the 
 same from the beginning. It has never asked for, because it never 
 needed, improvement or change. We have it now in our hands in the 
 same form in which it was put by Christ himself into the hands of 
 the first disciples of the faith. The experience of so many centuries 
 has detected no flaw, revealed no weakness, provided no substitute. 
 When Jesus said, Go, make disciples of all nations, he announced. 
 and that in the simplest, least ostentatious way, as if there were
 
 634 THE FORTY DAYS. 
 
 no novelty in the project, no difficulty in its execution, as if it were 
 the most natural thing in the world that it should be taken up, as 
 if it were the surest thing that it could be carried out, he 
 announced the most original, the broadest, the sublimest enterprise 
 that ever human hands have been called upon to accomplish. And 
 when he said, Go, preach the gospel to every creature, he supplied, 
 in its complete and perfect form, the instrument by which it was to 
 be realised. And that simple gospel of the grace of God preached, 
 proclaimed, made known among all nations, to every creature, 
 has it not proved itself fitted for the work ? No nation can claim 
 this gospel as peculiarly its own. No class or kind of human beings 
 can appropriate it to themselves. It speaks with the same voice, it 
 addresses the same message to the wandering savage and to the 
 civilised citizen, to the most abandoned reprobate and to the most 
 correct and fastidious moralist. Its immediate and direct appeal 
 is to the naked human conscience, to man as a sinner before his 
 Maker. Wholly overlooking and ignoring all other distinctions of 
 character and condition, it regards us all as on the common level of 
 condemnation, under the sentence of that law which is holy and 
 just and good. To each of us, as righteously condemned, it offers 
 a free, full pardon through the death, an immediate and entire 
 acceptance through the merits and mediation, of Jesus Christ. It 
 presents the means and influences by which a holy character and 
 life may be attained on earth, and it opens up the way to a blissful 
 immortality hereafter. If, looking simply at the outward means 
 employed, we were asked wherein lay the secret of the immediate 
 and immense power which the Christian religion at first exerted 
 upon such multitudes of men, we should say that it was in the call 
 it carried with it to every man, just as it found him, to repent, and 
 repenting, enter into immediate peace with his Maker through 
 Jesus Christ ; in the assurance that it gave of God's perfect good- 
 will to him, his perfect readiness to forgive and accept ; the 
 proclamation which it made that, by Christ's death, every let or 
 hindrance had been removed, and that every sinful child of Adam 
 was invited to enter into that rest which Christ had provided for 
 all who came to him. Only think, when these tidings were new, 
 and when they were at once heartily and cordially believed in, 
 what a wonderful revolution in man's inner being they were fitted 
 to effect ! Can you wonder when, to a world grown weary of its 
 follies, its idolatries, its philosophies, its gropings in the dark, its 
 struggles to find the truth, its passionate desire to know something 
 of that world beyond the grave, for the first time it was told that 
 God was not a God afar off but very near at hand, for he had sent 
 his own Son into the world to make such a revelation of him that 
 it could be said, Whosoever had seen him had seen the Father 
 also ; it was told that a life beyond the grave was no longer a
 
 THE GREAT COMMISSION. 635 
 
 matter of speculation, for Christ, the Son of the Eternal, had risen 
 as the first-fruits of a coming general resurrection of the dead ; it 
 was told that access to God and to God's full favour was no longer 
 a thing of doubt and time and difficulty, to be reached, if reached 
 at all, through prayer and priests, and services and sacrifices, for 
 a new and direct and open way had been revealed by God himself, 
 through which any one might step at once into his gracious presence, 
 into the full light of his reconciled countenance ; it was told that 
 the forgiveness of all his past sin was no longer a matter about 
 which, to the last moment of his life, a man was to be kept hanging 
 between hope and fear, for through this man Christ Jesus there 
 was offered to all who would accept it, an instant remission of all 
 his sins; it was told that poor, weak, tempted, erring, sinful, 
 suffering man had no longer to regard himself as an alien, an exile 
 from the world of the pure and the blessed, frowned on by the 
 beings, the powers he worshipped, his whole life turned into a 
 struggle by one or other kind of propitiatory offerings to keep on 
 something like good terms with his conscience and his God, for 
 there was One who had loved and suffered and died to save him ; a 
 man like himself, and yet a God ; a man to pity, a God to protect ; 
 a man to sympathise, a God to succour ; whose presence, companion- 
 ship, friendship, were waiting to cheer his path in life, and illumine 
 for him the dark valley of the shadow of death; can you wonder 
 that when, in all its simplicity and in all its fulness of comfort and 
 consolation, the gospel of the grace of God was first proclaimed to 
 sinful men, it was hailed by thousands as indeed glad tidings from 
 the far country? Or, looking at the Scripture records, can you 
 wonder that the three thousand who were converted on the day of 
 Pentecost, as they broke bread from house to house did eat their 
 meat with such gladness and singleness of heart, praising God? 
 Can you wonder, when with one accord the people of Samaria gave 
 heed to the things spoken by Philip, preaching peace by Jesus 
 Christ, that there was great joy in that city ? Can you wonder, 
 when the Ethiopian treasurer had his eyes opened to see who it was 
 who had been wounded for his transgressions and bruised for his 
 iniquities, and found in Jesus the very Saviour that he needed, that 
 he went on his way rejoicing ? Can you wonder, when at Antioch 
 and elsewhere the Gentiles heard for the first time all the words of 
 this life, that " they were glad, and glorified the word of the Lord "? 
 Many and great indeed were the hindrances which arose : slow often 
 and difficult the progress that was made. But the way in which 
 these hindrances generally acted, was to cloud with some obscurity 
 the simple tidings of the love of God in Christ to sinful men ; to 
 close the door that his grace had opened; to fetter with this 
 condition or with that, the full reconciliation with our Maker into 
 which we are all invited at once to enter ; more or less, in fact, to
 
 636 THE FORTY DAYS. 
 
 assimilate the religion of Jesus to all the other religions which have 
 represented God's favour as a thing to be toiled for through life, 
 and to be won, if won at all, only at its close, the life itself to be 
 passed in a sustained uncertainty as to whether it would be got at 
 last or not, whereas it is the distinction and the glory and the 
 power of the gospel of the grace of God, that it holds out to us at 
 the very first, as a gratuity, which it has cost Christ nruch to 
 purchase, but which it costs us nothing to acquire, the forgiving, 
 loving favour of the Most High. It asks us to dismiss here all 
 our doubts and fears ; to know and believe the love which God has 
 to us ; to see in Jesus one in whom we can undoubtingly confide, 
 who is absolutely to be depended on, in whom it is impossible that 
 too much confidence can be reposed ; who by every way that love 
 could devise, or the spirit of self-sacrifice achieve, has tried to get 
 us to trust alone, unhesitatingly, habitually, for ever in him. 
 
 What is it how often do we ask these hearts of ours what is 
 it that keeps us from welcoming such glad tidings ? What is it 
 which keeps these tidings from filling our hearts with a full and 
 continued joy ? What is it which keeps us from trusting one so 
 entirely worthy of our confidence as Jesus Christ ? Nothing what- 
 ever in the tidings ; nothing in Him of whom the tidings speak. 
 
 Try if you can construct any form of words better fitted than 
 those which meet you in the Bible, clearly and forcibly to express 
 the idea that God is now in Jesus Christ most thoroughly prepared, 
 is most entirely willing, to receive at once into his favour every 
 repentant, returning child of Adam, and that there is not a single 
 man anywhere, or upon any ground, shut out from coming and 
 accepting this pardon coming and entering into this peace. " Ho ! 
 every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters. If any man thirst, 
 let him come to me and drink. Come unto me, all ye that are 
 weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. God so loved the 
 world, as to give his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth 
 in him might not perish, but have everlasting life. The Spirit and 
 the Bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And 
 let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the 
 water of life freely." Any one every one all whosoever; we 
 know no other words which could more thoroughly take in all, 
 excluding none. These, however, are but words. The great thing 
 is to get fixed in the mind and heart that which these words point 
 to and express ; that the God whom we have offended approaches 
 us in love, in Christ, assuring us of a gracious reception ; the 
 embrace of a Father's guiding, protecting arms, and the shelter 
 hereafter of a Father's secure and blessed home. 
 
 "Baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, 
 and of the Holy Ghost." Our Lord's forerunner had adopted the 
 practice of baptizing those who desired to be regarded as his
 
 THE GREAT COMMISSION. 637 
 
 followers. His baptism, however, was prefigurative and incomplete. 
 It was simply a baptism unto repentance. It was a faith only in the 
 kingdom as at hand that was required of those who submitted to it 
 But the kingdom had come. The day of Pentecost, on which it was to 
 be visibly erected, was drawing near. Another higher and fuller bap- 
 tism was now to be proclaimed, and then begin to be administered. 
 
 Baptizing into the name, not simply in the name, of the Father, 
 the Son, and the Holy Ghost ; that might mean no more than per- 
 forming the rite in the name, that is, by the authority of God. 
 The name of God, we know, is the term commonly employed in 
 Scripture to indicate the character and the nature of the Supreme. 
 When the expression meets us, then the name of the Father, the 
 Son, and the Holy Ghost we understand it as expressive of the 
 one nature revealed to us in the three personalities of the Triune 
 Jehovah. Now to be baptized into that name is to be taken up 
 into, to be incorporated with him whose name is Father, Son, and 
 Holy Ghost. The term is expressive or symbolic, not of a mere 
 outward and formal acknowledgment or confession of our faith in 
 the Divinity, as he has been pleased to reveal himself to us under 
 that mysterious distinction of a threefold personality ; but of an 
 inward and spiritual union, communion, fellowship, with the Father 
 the Son, the Holy Ghost. The Israelites were all baptized unto 
 Moses, and, as so baptized, were taken up into, and incorporated 
 with, that spiritual community of which the Mosaic was an external 
 type. They did all eat the same spiritual meat, and did all drink 
 the same spiritual drink ; derived all their strength and refreshment 
 from the same spiritual sources. And even so are all baptized into 
 the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, emblematic 
 of that oneness with each and all of the three Persons of the Trinity, 
 which the Saviour had in his eye, when he prayed for his own, 
 ' That they all may be one ; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, 
 that they also may be one in us." And that same oneness through 
 Christ with the Father and the Holy Ghost, is it not equally if not 
 still more distinctly and impressively held out to our view in the 
 sacrament of the supper] "The cup of blessing which we bless, is 
 it not the communion or common participation of the blood of 
 Christ ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion or 
 common participation of the body of Christ ? For we, being many, 
 are one bread and one body ; for we are all partakers of that one 
 bread." Closest, loftiest, most blessed of all fellowships, that to 
 which in Jesus Christ we are elevated, and of which our participa- 
 tion of the two sacraments of the Church is the external sign. 
 
 " Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have com- 
 manded you." The crowning glory of the gospel of its proclama- 
 tion of a free and full justification before God, alone through the 
 merits of the Saviour is this, that it opens the way and supplies
 
 638 THE FORTY DAYS. 
 
 the motive to a right and dutiful discharge of all commanded duty. 
 Enthroning Christ in the heart, planting deep within it, as its 
 strongest and most constraining motive, a supreme love to him, it 
 produces an obedience which springs not from fear, but from love. 
 " If ye love me," said Jesus to his disciples, " keep my command- 
 ments." He did not question or suspect the reality of their love. 
 He knew there was a kind of love they all had to him. But that 
 affection, tender as it was, might not be strong; regarding him 
 mainly in the character of a companion or friend, it might fail to 
 recognise him in the character of their Master, their Lord. ' If ye 
 indeed love me, then,' says Jesus, to them and to us, ' let not love 
 die out in the mere feeling of attachment to my person ; let it find 
 its becoming and appropriate expression in the keeping of my com- 
 mandments ; so shall it be preserved from evaporating in the 
 emotion of the hour ; so shall 'it be consolidated into a fixed, a 
 strong, a permanent principle of action.' All love, even that of 
 equal to equal, if unexpressed, if unembodied, has a strong tendency 
 to decline; but if it be love of a dependant to a superior, of a 
 servant to a master, the love which does not clothe itself in obedi- 
 ence, becomes spurious as well as weak. A bare acknowledgment 
 in words, or in some formal act of bare profession of the fatherly 
 or masterly relationship, what is it worth if the authority of the 
 father be disregarded, the orders of the master be disobeyed ? If 
 we fail to regard Christ as the Lord of the conscience, the lawgiver 
 of the life ; if our obligations to be all and do all he has commanded 
 be unfelt ; if the love we cherish to him go not forth into action, 
 such barren and unfruitful affection will not be recognised by him, 
 who hath not only said, " If ye love me, ye will keep my command- 
 ments," but also, "He that hath my commandments and keepeth 
 them, he it is that loveth me." On the other hand, if our love to 
 Christ, however faint and feeble it be at the first, has not only an 
 eye to see him and admire his beauty, but an ear to hear him and 
 obey his word ; if under the strong conviction that to offer love 
 without service to such a Saviour as Jesus is, would be but another 
 variety of that mockery to which he was subjected in the judgment- 
 hall of Pilate ; if the sincere and honest effort be put forth to obey 
 the precepts he has given for the regulation of our heart and life, 
 then shall each fresh effort of that kind, however short it fall of 
 its destined aim, exert the happiest influence upon the love from 
 which it springs, quickening, expanding, elevating, intensifying it. 
 Each new attempt to do his will shall reveal something more of 
 the loveableness of the Redeemer's character. The loving and the 
 doing shall help each other on, till .the loving shall make the doing 
 light ; and by the doing shall the loving be itself made perfect. 
 
 And one marked peculiarity of the obedience thus realised shall 
 be this, that all things whatsoever Christ hath commanded will be
 
 THE GREAT COMMISSION. 639 
 
 attempted, at least, if not discharged. " Ye are my friends," said 
 Jesus, "if ye do whatsoever I command you;" a test of friendship 
 very sad and hopeless in the application of it, were it meant that 
 whatsoever Christ has commanded must be done, up to the full 
 measure and extent of his requirement, before we could be reckoned 
 as his friends. Then were that friendship put altogether beyond 
 our reach. A test, however, both true, and capable of immediate 
 and universal application, if we regard it as meaning that it is by 
 the universality of its embrace, and not by its perfection in any one 
 individual instance, that the obedience of the Christian is charac- 
 terised; that there shall not be one command which is freely, 
 wilfully, and habitually violated ; not one known duty which is not 
 habitually tried to be discharged. As ever then we hope to be 
 acknowledged as his friends, his true and faithful followers, let us 
 asteem every precept he hath given concerning everything to be 
 right ; and let us give ourselves to the unreserved, unrestricted doing 
 of his will (Matt. v. 21, 27). 
 
 " Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." 
 Jesus had spoken much to his disciples about his departure from 
 them, about his leaving them alone. " I go my way," he had said 
 to them in the upper chamber, " and none of you asketh, Whither 
 goest thou ? A little while and ye shall not see me, and again a 
 little while and ye shall see me, because I go to the Father. I came 
 forth from the Father, and am come into the world ; again, I leave 
 the world, and go to the Father. And ye now therefore have 
 sorrow ; but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and 
 your joy no man taketh from you." It was in such an affectionate, 
 sympathising way that Jesus sought beforehand to prepare the 
 minds and hearts of his disciples for the shock of his death, the 
 sorrow of his departure. For a little while they did not see him ; 
 he was lost in the darkness of the sepulchre. Again, for a little 
 while, they did see him, on those few occasions when he made him- 
 self visible to them after his resurrection. Even, however, on one 
 of the earliest of these appearances, he seemed at pains to remove 
 the idea from his disciples' minds that he had returned in order to 
 abide. " Touch me not," was his language to Mary, "for I am not 
 yet ascended to my Father : but go to my brethren, and say unto 
 them, I ascend unto my Father and your Father, and to my God 
 and your God." It was as one on his way to the Father, tarrying 
 but a little while on the earth, that he desired during the forty days 
 to be recognised. But now, when in this great interview on the 
 mountain-side, he manifests forth his glory, takes to himself his 
 great power, announces the universal sovereignty which had been 
 put into his hands as the Mediator, issues the great commission upon 
 which, in all ages, his followers were to act, he closes by speaking, 
 not of his approaching departure, but of his continued, his abiding
 
 640 THE FORTY DAYS. 
 
 presence : " Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the 
 world." The Omnipotent reveals himself thus as the Omnipresent 
 also : ' Go ye into all nations, Go to the farthest corner of the habit- 
 able globe, but know that, go where you will, my presence goeth 
 with you. Labour on, generation after generation, but know that 
 the time shall never come when I shall leave you or forsake you. My 
 bodily presence I remove ; with the eye of sense you soon shall see 
 me no more ; but my spiritual presence shall never be withdrawn ; 
 it shall abide with you continually, even to the end of the world, 
 till I come again, till that time arrive when it shall no longer be 
 said that I will come to you to live with you, when I shall come 
 to take you to myself, that where I am there ye may be also.' 
 
 The richest legacy he could have left to it is this promise of his 
 abiding presence with the Church. Looking at the Church generally, 
 at the Church in any one country or in any one city, any one section 
 of the Church, we may often wonder and be afraid as we contem- 
 plate the difficulties she has to contend with in going forth to 
 execute the great errand upon which she has been sent. This is the 
 light, however, in all the darkness : " All power has been given to 
 Christ in heaven and earth ; " he has been constituted Head over all 
 things for the Church. This headship over all the principalities 
 and powers of darkness, this power over all things in heaven and 
 earth, shall he not employ in helping onward the great movement 
 which is to give him the heathen for his inheritance, the uttermost 
 parts of the earth for his possession ? 
 
 IX. 
 
 THE ASCENSION. 
 LUKE xxiv. 44-53 ; ACTS i. 3-8. 
 
 THERE are ten appearances of our Saviour after his resurrection 
 recorded in the New Testament. 1 So many as five of them occurred 
 on the day of the resurrection : those, namely, to Mary Magdalene, 
 to the Galilean women, to Peter, to the two disciples on their way 
 to Emmaus, to the ten apostles and others assembled in the evening 
 within the upper chamber. The sixth appearance was to the eleven 
 and the rest on the evening of the seventh day from that on which 
 he rose from the dead. The seventh spoken of by John as the 
 third time that he showed himself, inasmuch as it was the third 
 occasion upon which he had met with them collectively, or in any 
 considerable number together was to the seven disciples by the sea 
 of Tiberias. The eighth was the great manifestation on the moun- 
 tain-side of Galilee. The ninth, of which we should have known 
 i See Appendix No. IL
 
 THE ASCENSION. 641 
 
 nothing but fur the simple record of it preserved in the fifteenth 
 chapter of the 1st Epistle to the Corinthians, was to James the 
 brother of the Lord ; and finally, the tenth, on the occasion of the 
 ascension. There may have been other unrecorded appearances of 
 our Lord. It is nowhere said in the Gospels or Epistles that there 
 were none else besides the ones related therein. But the nature of 
 the case, and the manner of the narrative, forces upon us the belief 
 that if there were any such, they must have partaken of the char- 
 acter of the manifestation to James ; having a private and personal, 
 rather than a public, object in view. But why, if his interviews 
 with his followers were so few, his intercourse with them so brief, 
 so broken, so reserved, did Jesus remain on earth so long 1 Why 
 were so many as forty days of an existence such as his spent by him 
 in this way ? It may seem useless even to put a question to which 
 no satisfactory answer can be given, inasmuch as, beyond the mere 
 statement that he afforded thereby many infallible proofs of his 
 resurrection, nothing explicit is said in the Scriptures as to the 
 particular object or design of this lingering of our Lord so long upon 
 the earth. And yet it is scarcely possible for us to forget, or to fail 
 in being struck by it, that this period of forty days was one which 
 had already been signalised in the history of redemption ; and look- 
 ing at the other instances in which it meets our eye in the Scripture 
 narrative, we are tempted to put the question, Was it as Moses was 
 withdrawn from men, to spend these forty days in fasting and 
 prayer on the Mount with God, as the fit and solemn preparation 
 for the promulgation of the Law through his hands at Sinai 1 Was 
 it as Elijah was carried away into the wilderness, to fast and pray 
 there for forty days, to prepare him for his great work as the re- 
 storer of the Law in Israel ? Was it as Jesus himself, after his 
 baptism, was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, to fast there 
 forty days, and at the end to be tempted of the devil, to fit him for 
 that earthly ministry which was to close in his death upon the 
 cross 1 Was it even so that now, for another forty days, our Lord 
 was detained on earth, as the suitable preface or prelude to his 
 entrance upon that higher stage of the mediatorial work in which 
 he is to sit upon the throne, from henceforth expecting till his 
 enemies be made his footstool ? 
 
 Passing, however, from a topic which must remain shrouded in 
 obscurity, let us take up the incidents of our Lord's parting inter- 
 view with his apostles. They have returned from Galilee, and are 
 now once more at Jerusalem. There might have been some specific 
 instruction to that effect delivered in private to themselves, or com- 
 municated to them through James, which brought the disciples 
 back from Galilee to Jerusalem. But we do not need to suppose 
 that it was so, in order to account for the movement ; for let us 
 remember that this period of forty days was immediately preceded 
 2 S
 
 642 THE FORTY DAYS. 
 
 by the great festival of the Passover, and followed by that oi 
 Pentecost, both of which required the presence of the apostles at 
 Jerusalem. It was not till the first of them was over that they 
 could well leave the Holy City, and so you find them remaining 
 there for a week after the resurrection. And now the promised 
 and appointed meeting in Galilee having taken place, the approach 
 of the second festival naturally invited their return. However it 
 came about, the fortieth day after the resurrection saw the eleven 
 and their companions once more assembled at Jerusalem. Christ's 
 former meetings with them there collectively had been in the even- 
 ing, in the closed chamber, where they had assembled in secret for 
 fear of the Jews. This last one, though we know not when or how 
 it commenced, may have begun in the same upper chamber already 
 hallowed by the former meetings, but it was obviously at an earlier 
 hour, and took place in the broad daylight. The first, or earlier 
 part of it that spent within the city appears to have been devoted 
 to the renewal and expansion of such instructions as he had de- 
 livered to the two disciples on their journey to Emmaus. We 
 gather this from the 44th to the 47th verses of the 24th chapter of 
 St. Luke's Gospel. It is very natural to read these verses in 
 immediate connection with those which go before, and to regard 
 them simply as a continuation of the nairative of what occurred at 
 that meeting on the evening of the resurrection day. And so 
 indeed, in common with the majority of readers, we were at first 
 disposed to regard them. By reading on to the end of the chapter, 
 however, you will at once perceive that the narrator, without any 
 note or mark of time, has condensed into one short and continuous 
 statement all that he had then to say about the period between the 
 resurrection and the ascension; omitting so entirely all mention 
 of any after day or after meetings, that if you had had nothing but 
 this last chapter of Luke to guide you, you might have imagined 
 indeed, could not well have thought anything else that the 
 ascension had taken place on the very evening of the resurrection 
 day. The same narrative, however, Luke has, in the first chapter 
 of the Acts, filled up, and broken down into its parts the brief and 
 summary notice with which he had closed his Gospel. And it is 
 when we compare what he says in the one writing with what he 
 says in the other, that we become persuaded that the verses from 
 the 44th downwards of the last chapter in his Gospel belong to and 
 describe, not what happened in the evening interview on the day of 
 the resurrection, but what happened in the last interview of all on 
 the day of the ascension ; for you will notice as common to the two 
 accounts, the peremptory injunction laid upon the apostles, that 
 they were not to leave Jerusalem till the promise of the Father had 
 been fulfilled, and the baptism of the Spirit had been conferred. 
 Such an injunction would not have been proper to the occasion of
 
 THE ASCENSION. 643 
 
 the first interview in the upper chamber. They were to leave 
 Jerusalem, and in point of fact did leave it, after that meeting, to 
 see the Lord in Galilee. According, however, to the account con- 
 tained in the Acts of the Apostles, it was after the command had 
 been given that they should not depart from Jerusalem that Jesus 
 spake to them of their being witnesses unto him in Jerusalem, and 
 in all Judea and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost parts of the 
 earth ; an announcement which corresponds with that contained in 
 the 47th and 48th verses of the chapter in the Gospel, leading us 
 naturally to conclude that these verses relate to the final meeting 
 on the ascension day. We must make a break somewhere in the 
 chapter of the Gospel; and it seems, on the whole, much more 
 natural and consistent to make it at the end of the 43d than at the 
 48th verse. 
 
 Adopting, then, this idea, we have the fact before us that, in 
 the first instance, when he met with the eleven in the course of 
 that day on which he was taken up into heaven, our Saviour occu- 
 pied himself with showing them how needful it was that all things 
 that had been written in the law of Moses and in the Prophets and 
 in the Psalms regarding him should be fulfilled ; with showing them 
 how exactly many of their ancient prophecies had met with their 
 fulfilment in the manner and circumstances of his death; with 
 showing them how it behoved him to suffer, and through suffering 
 to reach the throne of that kingdom which he came to set up on 
 the earth ; at once unfolding to them the Scriptures, and opening 
 their minds to understand them. As on the first, so now on the 
 last day of his being with them, this was the chosen theme on 
 which he dwelt; this the lesson upon which a larger amount of 
 pains and care was bestowed by our Lord after his resurrection 
 than upon any other. What weight and worth does this attach to 
 these Old Testament testimonies to his Messiahship ! what a sanc- 
 tion does it lend to our searching of their prophetic records, in the 
 belief that we shall find much there pointing, in prophecy and type 
 and figure, to the Lamb slain before the foundation of the earth, 
 the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world ! 
 
 Our Lord's exposition of these Scriptures could not have been 
 wholly in vain. The veil which had been upon the hearts of his 
 apostles in their former reading of the prophecies must have been 
 at least partially removed. Their notions of a Messiah coming only 
 to conquer, only to restore and establish and extend the old Jewish 
 theocracy, must have been materially altered and rectified. When, 
 then, after all these expositions of their Master, after all the fresh 
 light he had thrown upon the true nature of his kingdom and the 
 manner of its establishment, you find them coming to him and 
 saying, " Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to 
 Israel?" it could scarcely be that, ignoring all they had just heard,
 
 644 THE FORTY DAYS. 
 
 and clinging still to their first belief, they were inquiring about an 
 immediate erection of that temporal and visible kingdom which had 
 previously so engrossed their thoughts and hopes. Let us rather 
 believe that, accepting all which Jesus had taught them, admitting 
 now fully the idea of a suffering and dying Messiah, their conceptions 
 altered and elevated at once as to the kind of kingdom he was to 
 set up, and the way in which that kingdom was to be established 
 and advanced, building upon these new foundations, their old 
 spirit of curiosity found now a new object on which to fasten. They 
 saw now the need there was that Jesus should have suffered all 
 these things ; but still there was a kingdom which, through these 
 sufferings, he was to reach, a glory on which, when these were over, 
 he was to enter. Still there lay within these prophecies, which 
 their minds had now been opened to understand, many a wonderful 
 announcement of the part which Israel was to take in the erection 
 and consolidation of the Redeemer's empire upon this earth. So 
 much had already been accomplished by their Lord and Master. 
 He had been wounded for their transgressions, bruised for their 
 iniquities ; it had pleased the Lord to bruise him and put him to 
 grief, was he now instantly to see of the travail of his soul ; to 
 divide the portion with the great, the spoil with the strong ? Were 
 nations that knew not him to run unto him ; was he to be exalted 
 as Governor among the nations ; were all the ends of the earth to 
 remember and turn unto the Lord, all the kindreds of the nations 
 to worship before him ; was his law to go forth of Zion, and his 
 word from Jerusalem ; and were the nations, as it had been pre- 
 dicted they should do in the latter days, the days of the Messiah's 
 reign, to be heard saying, Come and let us go up to the mountain 
 of the Lord, and to the house of the God of Jacob 1 Lord, they 
 say to him, with some such thoughts floating vaguely through theii 
 minds, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel 1 
 Jesus, in answering that question, does not blame, does not rebuke ; 
 says nothing that would imply that they were radically wrong in 
 the hopes which they were cherishing ; that there was no such king- 
 dom as that they were asking about. Nay, rather, does he not 
 assume that the kingdom was to be restored to Israel; that the 
 question was only one as to time ; that it was here, in their too 
 eager haste and impatience, that the error of the disciples lay? 
 " And he said unto them, It is not for you to know the times or the 
 seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power ;" a somewhat 
 different declaration from that which Jesus made when, speaking of 
 the time of his own second advent, he said, " Of that day and hour 
 knoweth no man, not the angels of God," no, not even the Son in 
 his character as the great prophet and revealer of the future to the 
 Church, but the Father only. But he does not say that he himself 
 was ignorant of the times and the seasons. He only says that it 

 
 THE ASCENSION. 645 
 
 was not for them, the disciples, to know them. They were among 
 the secret things which the Father had reserved and kept within 
 his own power, to reveal when and how and to whom he pleased. 
 Would that these words of Jesus among the last he ever uttered 
 had been sufficiently pondered by our prophetic interpreters in 
 their pryings into the unknown future which lies before us. Curiosity 
 as to that future is not unnatural. There are so many things 
 to make us desire to see things otherwise and better ordered 
 than they now are. There lie too on the pages of prophecy so 
 many things which remain yet to be accomplished, such bright and 
 glorious visions of a coming period of triumph for the truth, a 
 coming reign of peace and virtue and piety upon this earth, that we 
 are not disposed to quarrel much with those whose eyes are turned 
 longingly upon a future out of whose pregnant bosom such great and 
 glorious things are to emerge. But we are most imperatively bound 
 to keep our curiosity here under that check which the hand of the 
 Eedeemer himself has laid upon it, and to remember that he has 
 told us of many things which are yet to come to pass, not that we 
 might be able to predict them, to specify beforehand the dates of 
 their arrival, but that when they do come to pass we might believe. 
 But if that kind of knowledge which they were seeking for was 
 denied to the disciples, another and better thing was to be given 
 them instead. They were to receive power from on high to execute 
 that great mission upon which they were to be sent forth ; that 
 mission was to consist in their proclaiming everywhere repentance 
 and remission of sins in the name of Jesus ; and beginning at 
 Jerusalem as the centre, they were to go forth, not as prophets of 
 the future, but as witnesses of the past, witnesses for Christ, to 
 carry the glad tidings abroad through all Judea, and in Samaria, 
 and unto the uttermost parts of the earth. Three things are 
 noticeable here : 
 
 1. The simplicity of the gospel message as originally promul- 
 gated by Christ himself. Repentance, a turning from all evil, a 
 turning with true and penitent spirit to God ; remission of sins, the 
 covering of all past transgression by an act of grace on the part of 
 God ; the remission of sins, offered in the name of Jesus, coming 
 only, but coming directly, immediately, fully, in and through the 
 name of him who is the one all-prevalent Mediator between man 
 and God ; such was the burden of that simple message which, in 
 parting from them, Jesus committed to his disciples to make known 
 over all the earth. 
 
 2. The wider and wider compass of that sphere over which this 
 message was to be borne by them. Upon the universality of its 
 embrace, its being a message for all mankind, for men of every 
 age and country, character and condition, we have already com- 
 mented ; but let us not overlook the fact as pointing to the true
 
 646 THE FORTY DAYS. 
 
 order in which all evangelistic labours should be prosecuted, that 
 the apostles were to begin at Jerusalem, to go throughout all Judea, 
 to penetrate Samaria with the glad tidings, and then to bear them 
 on to the uttermost parts of the earth. Whatever else may have 
 lain at the bottom of these instructions, this at least is apparent, 
 that their own capital, their own country, their own kindred, their 
 own immediate neighbours were first to have the tender made to 
 them. Are we wrong in interpreting the direction of our Saviour 
 as implying that all Christian effort should be from the centre to 
 the circumference ; should be so directed as to fill the inner circles 
 first, the circles of our own heart, our own home, our own city, 
 our own country ; and that if, overlooking these, neglecting these, 
 we busy ourselves among the broader, wider, outer circles, we are 
 reversing the order and running counter to the directions of the 
 Master whom we serve? I shall not venture here to say how ' 
 much better I think it would be for ourselves and for others, for 
 Christianity and for the world, if, instead of embarking in enter- 
 prises which fascinate by the wideness of their scope, but upon 
 which, just because of that wideness, so much labour is wasted, 
 each man were to cultivate the little sphere which lies more im- 
 mediately around him. 
 
 3. We notice the qualification for Christian work, the baptism 
 of the Holy Spirit bestowing the needed power. The apostles had 
 a great commission given, a great task assigned ; the wide world 
 set forth as the field of their future labours. But they were not as 
 yet prepared to execute this commission, to take up this work. 
 They were to wait in Jerusalem ; to wait some days ; do nothing 
 but wait and pray and hope ; a good and useful lesson in itself, 
 subduing, restraining the spirit of eager and impatient self-confidence 
 a lesson which is still in force ; that pause, that period of inaction, 
 those ten days of stillness between the day of the ascension and 
 the day of Pentecost, as full of instruction still to us as of benefit 
 originally to the disciples. And when the baptism of fire at last 
 was given, the wanting element was supplied, said here by Christ 
 himself to be power : " Tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem, until ye 
 be endued with power from on high." " Ye shall receive power 
 after that the Holy Spirit is come upon you : and ye shall be wit- 
 nesses unto me, both in Jerusalem and in all Judea, and in Samaria, 
 and unto the uttermost part of the earth." Not knowledge so 
 much was wanted but power; a firmer grasp of truth already 
 known ; a stronger, deeper, steadier attachment to a Saviour already 
 loved; conviction, affection ripened into abiding, controlling, 
 enduring principle of action : power to be, to do, to suffer. Is not 
 that the very thing which in religion we all most need ; the very 
 thing we feel we cannot ourselves attain ; the very thing which it 
 requires the baptism of a heavenly influence to bestow 1
 
 THE ASCENSION. 647 
 
 But let us follow Jesus to the mount called Olivet. His closing 
 counsels given, he leads his disciples out of the city. Did they, in 
 open day, pass through the streets of Jerusalem ? If they did, how 
 many wondering eyes would rest upon the well-known group of 
 Galilean fishermen ; how many fix upon the leader of that group. 
 Little heeding the looks which they attract, they pass through the 
 city gate. They are now on a well-known track ; they cross the 
 Kedron ; they approach Gethsemane. We lose sight of them amid 
 the deep shadows of these olive-trees. Has Jesus paused for a 
 moment to look, for the last time, with those human eyes of his, 
 upon the sacred spot where he cast himself on the night of his great 
 agony, upon the ground ? Once more they emerge ; they climb 
 the hill-side ; they cross its summit ; they are approaching Bethany. 
 He stops ; they gather round. He looks upon them ; he lifts his 
 hands ; he begins to bless them. What love unutterable in that 
 parting look ; what untold riches in that blessing ! His hands are 
 uplifted ; his lips are engaged in blessing, when slowly he begins to 
 rise : earth has lost her power to keep ; the waiting, up-drawing 
 heavens claim him as their own. An attraction stronger than our 
 globe is on him, and declares its power. He rises ; but still as he 
 floats upward through the yielding air, his eyes are bent on those 
 up-looking men ; his arms are stretched over them in the attitude 
 of benediction, his voice is heard dying away in blessings as he 
 ascends. Awe-struck, in silence they follow him with straining 
 eyeballs, as his body lessens to sight, in its retreat upward into 
 that deep blue, till the commissioned cloud enfolds, cuts off all 
 further vision, and closes the earthly and sensible communion 
 between Jesus and his disciples. That cloudy chariot bore him 
 away, till he was " received up into heaven, and sat down on the 
 right hand of God." 
 
 How simple, yet how sublime, how pathetic this parting ! No 
 disturbance of the elements, no chariot of fire, no escort of angels ; 
 nothing to disturb or distract the little company from whom he parts; 
 nothing to the very last to break in upon that close and brotherly 
 communion, which is continued as long as looking eye and listening 
 ear can keep it up. But who shall tell us, when these earthly links 
 were broken, and that cloud carried him to the furthest point in 
 in which cloud could form or float, and left him there who shall 
 tell us what happened above, beyond, on the way to the throne 1 
 in what new form of glory, by what swift flight, attended by what 
 angel escort, accompanied by what burst of angelic praise, that 
 throne of the universe was reached ? Our straining eyes we too 
 would turn upward to those heavens which received him, and 
 wonder at the reception which awaited him there, till on our ears 
 there falls that gentle rebuke, "Why stand ye gazing up into
 
 648 THE FORTY DAYS. 
 
 heaven 1 ?" 'Think not with eyes like yours to pierce that cloud 
 which hides the world of spirits from mental vision. Enough for 
 you to know that this same Jesus shall so come in like manner as 
 ye have seen him go.' 
 
 This mild rebuke was given to the men of Galilee upon the 
 mountain-top by two men in white apparel, who stood beside them, 
 their presence unnoted till their words had broken the deep silence, 
 and drawn upon themselves that gaze hitherto directed towards 
 heaven, but which had now nothing above on which to rest ; two 
 angels, perhaps the two who had watched and waited by the empty 
 sepulchre ; one of them the same who in the hour of his great agony 
 had been sent to strengthen the sinking Saviour in the Garden, 
 now stationed here at Olivet, to soften, as it were, to the disciples 
 the sorrow of this parting, to turn that sorrow into joy. But how 
 at that moment, when they were discharging this kindly but 
 humble office, were the heavenly host engaged 1 Surely, if at the 
 emerging out of chaos of this beautiful and orderly creation, those 
 sons of God chanted together the new world's birthday hymn; 
 surely, if in that innumerable host above the plains of Bethlehem, 
 a great multitude of them celebrated, in notes of triumph, a still 
 better and more glorious birth the entire company of the heavenly 
 host must have struck their harps to the fullest, noblest, richest 
 anthem that ever they gave forth, as the great Son of God, the 
 Saviour of mankind his earthly sorrows over, his victories over 
 Satan, sin, and death complete sat down that day with the Father 
 on his throne, far above all principalities and powers, and every 
 name that is named, not only in this world, but in that which is to 
 come. Did these two angels who were left behind on earth, who 
 had this humbler task assigned them, feel at all as if theirs were a 
 lower, meaner service 1 No, they had too much of the spirit of Him 
 who had for forty days kept that throne waiting to which he had 
 now ascended, that he might tabernacle still a little longer with 
 the children of men ; nor were they ignorant of that word of his, 
 " Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my little ones, 
 ye have done it unto me." 
 
 " Why gaze ye up into heaven 1 This same Jesus shall so come 
 in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven." This is not a 
 final departure of this Jesus from the world he came to save. That 
 was not the last look the earth was ever to get of him that you got 
 of him as the clouds covered him from your view. He is to come 
 again ; to come in the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory. 
 But for that, perhaps the disciples might have returned to Jerusalem 
 with sad and downcast spirits, as those from whose head their 
 Master had been for ever taken away. As it was, they returned, 
 we are told, with great joy ; the sorrow of the departure swallowed
 
 THE ASCENSION. 649 
 
 up in the hope of the speedy return. So vivid, indeed, was the 
 expectation cherished by the first Christians of the second advent of 
 the Lord, that it needed to be chastened and restrained. They 
 required to have their hearts directed into a patient waiting for that 
 coming. It is very different with us. We require to have that 
 faith quickened and stimulated, which they needed to have chastened 
 and restrained. It is more with wonder than with great joy that 
 we return from witnessing the ascension of our Lord. But let us 
 remember that though the heavens have received him, it is not to 
 keep him there apart for ever from this world. He himself cherishes 
 no such feeling of retirement and separation now that he has 
 ascended up on high. I have spoken to you of his last words of 
 blessing which fell audibly upon fleshly ears. But what are the 
 very last words that in vision he uttered ? " He that testifieth these 
 things saith, Surely, I come quickly." Our crowned Saviour waits; 
 with eager expectancy waits the coming of the day when his presence 
 shall be again revealed among us. It may seem slow to us, that 
 evolution of the ages which is preparing all things for his approach. 
 But with him who says, I come quickly, one day is as a thousand 
 years, and a thousand years as one day ; and as soon as the curtain 
 shall drop on the last act of that great drama of which this earth 
 is now the theatre, then, quick as love and power can carry him, 
 shall the same Jesus be here again on earth, coming in like manner 
 as these men of Galilee saw him go up to heaven. Are we waiting 
 for that coming, longing for that coming, hastening to that coming 1 
 Are we ready, as he says to us, " Behold, I come quickly," to add 
 as our response, "Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus !"
 
 APPENDIX No. I. 
 
 IN the hope that they may win for the explanation of Christ's death 
 presented in the preceding pages a larger measure of attention than it has 
 yet received, we append the following letters from two eminent physicians : 
 
 FROM JAMES BEGBIE, M.D., F.R.S.E. 
 
 Fellow, and late President, of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh ; 
 Physician to the Queen in Scotland. 
 
 MY DEAR DR. HANNA, I cannot help accepting, as correct, the expla- 
 nation which Dr. Stroud has offered and which you have adopted, and 
 so strikingly applied of the physical cause of the death of Christ, namely,' 
 rupture of the heart, and consequent effusion of blood into the pericardium, 
 the investing sheath of that organ. 
 
 Such a lesion accounts for the phenomena recorded in the Scriptures 
 regarding him, namely, the earlier than usual cessation of life during cruci- 
 fixion, and the issuing of blood and water on the piercing of his side with 
 the spear. 
 
 It must be borne in mind, however, that rupture of the heart is compara- 
 tively a rare affection, and that the cases of it on record are, so far as I know, 
 limited to those advanced in life, or to such as have been labouring under 
 some degeneration of the structure of the organ, a condition which rendered 
 it liable to be torn when subjected to the pressure of severe physical exer- 
 tion, or the weight of mental agony. Now, in regard to Christ, we know 
 that at the period of his death he was in the prime of life ; and that as 
 morally he was " holy, harmless, and undefiled," so physically he was 
 without spot or blemish. 
 
 How intensely does this consideration magnify the sufferings he endured ! 
 We see him in the agony in the Garden, and under the bloody sweat. We 
 follow him to Calvary, and see him under the hiding of his Father's face, 
 bearing our sins in his own body on the tree. We cannot estimate the 
 anguish of his holy human soul during these awful hours, when there was 
 drawn from him that most touching language, ' ' My soul is exceeding sorrow- 
 ful, even unto death ; " but we can in some measure understand how his 
 bodily frame, subjected to the full weight both of mental and bodily suffering, 
 should yield and give way at the fountain of life, and how Christ, in his 
 death, should thus literally fulfil the prophetic words of Old Testament 
 writings concerning him : " Reproach hath broken my heart." I shrink from 
 treading farther on this sacred ground, and remain, clear Dr. Hanna, yours 
 affectionately, J. BEGBIE. 
 
 10 CHARLOTTE SQUARE, 
 EDINBUKUH, 26th April 1862.
 
 652 APPENDIX NO. I. 
 
 FBOM SIR J. Y. SIMPSON, M.D., F.R.S.B. , 
 
 Professor of Medicine and Midwifery in the University of Edinburgh ; 
 and Physician- Accoucheur to the Queen in Scotland. 
 
 MY DEAR DR. HANKA, Ever since reading, some ten or twelve years 
 ago, Dr. Stroud's remarkable treatise On the Physical Cause of the Death of 
 Christ, I have been strongly impressed with the belief that the views which 
 he adopted 1 and maintained on this subject are fundamentally correct. Nor 
 has this opinion been in any way altered by a perusal of some later observa- 
 tions published on the same question, both here and on the Continent. 
 
 That the immediate cause of the death of our blessed Saviour was 
 speaking medically laceration or rupture of the heart, is a doctrine in 
 regard to which there can be no absolute certainty; but, assuredly, in 
 favour of it there is a very high amount of circumstantial probability. 
 
 Let me try to state the arguments for this view in the form of a few 
 brief propositions. 
 
 I. His death was not the mere result of crucifixion ; for, 1st, The period 
 was too short ; a person in the prime of life, as Christ was, not dying from 
 this mode of mortal punishment in six hours, as He did, but usually 
 surviving till the second or third day, or even longer. 2dly, The attendant 
 phenomena, at the time of actual death, were different from those of 
 crucifixion. The crucified died, as is well known, under a lingering process 
 of gradual exhaustion, weakness, and faintness. On the contrary, Christ 
 cried with a loud voice, and spoke once and again, all apparently within a 
 few minutes of His dissolution. 
 
 II. No known injury, lesion, or disease of the brain, lungs, or other vital 
 organs could, I believe, account for such a sudden termination of His 
 sufferings in death, except (1.) arrestment of the action of the heart by 
 fatal fainting or syncope ; or (2.) rupture of the walls of the heart or larger 
 blood-vessels issuing from jt- 
 
 III. The attendant symptoms particularly the loud cry and subsequent 
 exclamations show that death was not the effect of mortal fainting, or mere 
 fatal arrestment of the action of the heart by syncope. 
 
 IV. On the other hand, these symptoms were such as have been seen in 
 cases of rupture of the walls of the heart. Thus, in the latest book published 
 in the English language on Diseases of the Heart, the eminent author, 
 Dr. Walshe, Professor of Medicine in University College, London, when 
 treating of the symptoms indicating death by rupture of the heart, observes, 
 " The hand is suddenly carried to the front of the chest, a piercing shriek 
 uttered," etc. etc. The rapidity of the resulting death is regulated by the 
 size and shape of the ruptured opening. But usually death very speedily 
 ensues in consequence of the blood escaping from the interior of the heart 
 into the cavity of the large surrounding heart-sac or pericardium ; which 
 sac has, in cases of rupture of the heart, been found on dissection to contain 
 sometimes two, three, four, or more pounds of blood accumulated within it, 
 and separated into red clot and limpid serum, or "blood and water," as is 
 seen in blood when collected out of the body in a cup or basin in the 
 operation of common blood-letting. 
 
 V. No medical jurist would, in a court of law, venture to assert, from 
 the mere symptoms preceding death, that a person had certainly died of 
 
 1 Dr. Stroud himself points out that Russell, Edwards, Rambach, and other 
 writers, had more or less correctly anticipated him in the belief that Christ had 
 died from rupture or breaking of the heart.
 
 APPENDIX NO. I. 653 
 
 rupture of the heart. To obtain positive proof that rupture of the heart 
 was the cause of death, a post-mortem examination of the chest would 
 be necessary. In ancient times, such dissections were not practised. But 
 the details left regarding Christ's death are most strikingly peculiar in 
 this respect, that they offer us the result of a very rude dissection, as it 
 were, by the gash 1 made in his side after death by the thrust of the Roman 
 soldier's spear. The effect of that wounding or piercing of the side was 
 an escape of " blood and water," visible to the Apostle John standing some 
 distance off; and I do not believe that anything could possibly account for 
 this appearance, as described by that Apostle, except a collection of blood 
 effused into the distended sac of the pericardium in consequence of rupture 
 of the heart, and afterwards separated, as is usual with extravasated blood, 
 into those two parts, viz. (1.) crassamentum or red clot, and (2.) watery 
 serum. The subsequent puncture from below of the distended pericardial 
 sac would most certainly, under such circumstances, lead to the immediate 
 ejection and escape of its sanguineous contents in the form of red clots of 
 blood and a stream of watery serum, exactly corresponding to that descrip- 
 tion given in the sacred narrative, " and forthwith came there out blood and 
 water," an appearance which no other natural event or mode of death can 
 explain or account for. 
 
 VI. Mental emotions and passions are well known by all to affect the 
 actions of the heart in the way of palpitation, fainting, etc. That these 
 emotions and passions, when in overwhelming excess, occasionally though 
 rarely, produce laceration or rupture of the walls of the heart, is stated by 
 most medical authorities, who have written on the affections of this organ ; 
 and our poets even allude to this effect as an established fact, 
 
 " The grief that does not speak 
 Whispers the o'er-fraught heart, and bids it break." 
 
 But if ever a human heart was riven and ruptured by the mere amount 
 of mental agony that was endured, it would surely we might even argue 
 a priori be that of our Redeemer, when during these dark and dreadful 
 hours on the cross, He, " being made a curse for us," "bore our griefs, and 
 carried our sorrows," and suffered for sin, the malediction of God and man, 
 'full of anguish," and now "exceeding sorrowful even unto death." 
 
 There are theological as well as medical arguments in favour of the opinion 
 that Christ in reality died from a ruptured or broken heart. You know 
 them infinitely better than I do. But let me merely observe that 
 
 VII. If the various wondrous prophecies and minute predictions in 
 Psalms xxii. and Ixix., regarding the circumstances connected with Christ's 
 iteath be j ustly held as literally true, such as, " They pierced my hands and 
 my feet," "They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my 
 vesture," etc., why should we regard as merely metaphorical, and not as 
 literally true also, the declarations in the same Psalms, "Reproach hath 
 broken my heart," " My heart is like wax, it is melted in the midst of my 
 bowels"? * And 
 
 VIII. Death by mere crucifixion was not a form of death in which there 
 was much, if indeed any, shedding of blood. Punctured wounds do not 
 generally bleed ; and the nails, besides being driven through parts that were 
 not provided with large blood-vessels, necessarily remained plugging up the 
 
 1 Its size may be inferred from the Apostle Thomas being asked to thrust not his 
 " finger," but his " hand" into it. John xx.
 
 654 APPENDIX NO. II. 
 
 openings made by their passage. The whole language and types of Scripture, 
 however, involve the idea that the atonement for our sins was obtained by 
 the blood of Christ shed for us during His death on the cross. " Without 
 shedding of blood there is no remission." This shedding, however, was 
 assuredly done iu the fullest possible sense, under the view that the 
 immediate cause of His dissolution was rupture of the heart, and the 
 consequent fatal escape of His heart- and life-blood from the central cistern 
 of the circulation. 
 
 It has always appeared to my medical mind at least that this view 
 of the mode by which death was produced in the human body of Christ, 
 intensifies all our thoughts and ideas regarding the immensity of the 
 astounding sacrifice which he made for our sinful race upon the cross. 
 Nothing can possibly be more striking and startling than the appalling and 
 terrible passiveness with which God as man submitted, for our sakes, His 
 incarnate body to all the horrors and tortures of the crucifixion. But our 
 wonderment at the stupendous sacrifice only increases when we reflect that, 
 whilst thus enduring for our sins the most cruel and agonising form of 
 corporeal death, He was ultimately "slain," not by the effects of the 
 anguish of His corporeal frame ; but by the effects of the mightier anguish of 
 His mind ; the fleshy walls of His heart like the veil, as it were, in the 
 temple of His human body becoming rent and riven, as for us " He poured 
 out his soul unto death ;" "the travail of His soul" in that awful hour 
 thus standing out as unspeakably bitter and more dreadful than even the 
 travail of His body. 
 
 Believe me, my dear Dr. Hanna, ever sincerely yours, 
 
 J. Y. SIMPSON, M.D. 
 52 QUBEN STREET, EDINBURGH, 
 May 1, 1862. 
 
 APPENDIX No. II. 
 
 IT is interesting to compare the nine different appearances of our Lord 
 after his resurrection mentioned in the Gospels, with the six alluded to by 
 St. Paul in the following verses : 
 
 " For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ 
 died for our sins according to the scriptures ; and that he was buried, and that he 
 rose again the third day according to the scriptures ; and that he was seen of Cephas, 
 then of the twelve : after that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once ; 
 of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep. Aftei 
 that, he was seen of James ; then of all the apostles. And last of all he was seen ol 
 me also, as of one born out of due time." 1 COR. xv. 3-8. 
 
 We have here the earliest written account of the resurrection of Christ, 
 coming from the pen of the apostle of the Gentiles between twenty and 
 thirty years after the date of the event. That account derives an additional 
 interest from its forming part of the evidence direct and indirect furnished 
 by the writings of St. Paul as to the facts of the gospel narrative. As 
 compared with other witnesses to the truth of these facts, he assumes a
 
 APPENDIX NO. H. 655 
 
 separate and independent position, declaring that he had himself seen the 
 Lord and derived his knowledge of his history by direct revelation from 
 himself. 1 
 
 Of the six appearances of our Lord to which he refers, we can identify 
 four with one or other of those recorded in the Gospels. As he appears to 
 place them in the* order of time, the first two which he mentions, those to 
 Cephas and to the twelve, we may regard as the same with two of the five 
 mentioned by the evangelists as having occurred on the day of the resur- 
 rection. The other three of these five, to Mary, to the women, and to the 
 two disciples on their way to Emmaus, we may either suppose that he was 
 not informed of, or that, knowing them, he passed them by, as happening to 
 persons of comparatively little note and less available for the object he had 
 in view. The appearance to above five hundred at once, we identify with 
 the one on the Galilean mountain-side. There are still two, however, of 
 those referred to by the apostle, of which no trace is to be found in the 
 gospel narrative that to James and that to himself. The latter could not 
 be alluded to in that narrative, which had nothing to do with St. Paul's life 
 and labours ; but the omission of all reference to the former is sufficient to 
 convince us that it was not the design of the evangelists to narrate every 
 incident in their Master's history ; but such only as Divine wisdom directed 
 them to select and put on record for the instruction of the Church. 
 
 1 See his account of the institution of the Supper, of which he -ays, "I received 
 of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you."
 
 INDEX. 
 
 ABIDING presence, the, of Christ, 
 his richest legacy, 640. 
 
 Abraham: "Hast thou seen Abra- 
 ham?" 298-9. 
 
 Agony in the garden, 448 seq. 
 
 " All power is given to me in heaven 
 and on earth: go ye therefore," 
 629-636. 
 
 Almsgiving, 166. 
 
 Ambition of the disciples rebuked, 
 275-277, 425-6. 
 
 Andrew, calling of, 71, 129 ; made 
 an apostle, 155. 
 
 Annas, 351, 477 seq. 
 
 Annunciation to Mary and Elisabeth, 
 1-5. 
 
 Apostleship, ordination to, unde- 
 scribed, 163. 
 
 Appearances of Christ after his re- 
 surrection, 587 seq. ; to Mary 
 Magdalene, 587-595; on the way 
 to Emmaus, 595-602; to the 
 meeting of disciples at Jerusalem 
 on the same evening, 603-609 ; 
 again on the second first-day, 614- 
 616; at the lake-side of Galilee, 
 617-620, 628 ; other appearances, 
 640, 641, 653. 
 
 Aramaic dialect, the, 240. 
 
 Ascension, the, 640-649. 
 
 BAPTISM, as used by John, 44, 93, 
 384 ; of Christ, 50-57 ; ordinance 
 instituted by Christ, 637. 
 
 Bartimeus, 362-4. 
 
 Baskets, the, with the fragments, 
 different in each miracle, 238. 
 
 Beatitudes, the, 164. 
 
 Begbie, Dr. James letter on the 
 
 physical cause of the death of 
 
 Christ, 651. 
 Bethany, 324, 352 ; the anointing 
 
 at, 365-371. 
 Bethesda, miracle at the pool of, 
 
 115-121. 
 
 Bethlehem, the inn at, 7. 
 Bethsaida, 239. 
 Betrayal, the, and the Betrayer, 
 
 458-467. 
 
 Binding and loosing, 249, 608. 
 Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, 
 
 and against the Son of man, 193. 
 Blind and dumb demoniac healed, 
 
 191 ; blind man at Bethsaida 
 
 healed, 239 ; cure of a man blind 
 
 from birth, 299-308. 
 Body and blood of Christ, 227-229. 
 " Branch," the, prophecies of, 404. 
 Bread from heaven, the, 224. 
 Brethren of Jesus, 84, 282-285, 534. 
 Burial of Christ, the, 573-8. 
 
 C^ESAREA-PHILIPPI, 244 ; sojourn in 
 the neighbourhood of, 244-272. 
 
 Caiaphas, 350, 351, 477 seq. 
 
 Cana of Galilee, marriage in, 76 seq., 
 109, 533. 
 
 Capernaum, site of, 135; first Sab- 
 bath in, 127-136; for eighteen 
 months the centre of Christ's 
 labours, 134; discourse at, 222- 
 229. 
 
 Centurion, Roman, healing of his 
 servant, 113-114. 
 
 Children blessed, 353. 
 
 Chronology of the Gospels, 323 seq. 
 
 T
 
 658 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Church, the word only twice used 
 by our Lord, 248. 
 
 Church discipline, 608. 
 
 " Come unto me, all ye that labour," 
 183, 636. 
 
 "Coming to his kingdom, "Christ's 
 what ? 420. 
 
 Commandments, the two great, 400 
 seq. 
 
 Commission, the great, 627-640. 
 
 Corban, 230. 
 
 Corner-stone, the, 387. 
 
 Crucifixion, the, 518 seq. ; the at- 
 tendant miracles, 554. 
 
 DARKNESS, the, at the crucifixion, 
 
 539 seq. 
 Daughters, the, of Jerusalem weeping, 
 
 511-518. 
 David, Christ the son and Lord of, 
 
 402-405. 
 Death of Christ, his first intimations 
 
 of it to his disciples, 251, 549; 
 
 result of his claiming to be divine, 
 
 481-485; physical cause of, 563- 
 
 572, 651-654. 
 Decapolis, the circuit through, 237- 
 
 243. 
 Dedication, Feast of, Jesus at the, 
 
 315, 323. 
 
 Demoniacal possession, 131-2, 266-70. 
 Disciples, the first, 66-76 ; sifting 
 
 of, 228 ; ambition of, 275, 359 ; 
 
 consolation of, 447. 
 Divinity, claimed by Christ, 119, 
 
 227, 317-8. 
 
 Divorce, the question of, 165, 353. 
 Doctors, Jesus among the, 35, 532. 
 Draught of fishes, miraculous, on two 
 
 occasions, its symbolic import, 
 
 621. 
 
 EGYPT, flight into, 27-29. 
 
 Emmaus, the journey to, 595-602. 
 
 Ephphatha, our Lord's use of the 
 word, 240. 
 
 Ephraim, the city, 323. 
 
 Eternal life, the gift of Christ, 316. 
 
 Evening meeting, the, on the resurrec- 
 tion-day, 603-609. 
 
 FAITH, power of, 270, 328. 
 Fasting, 160, 166, 280. 
 
 " Father, into thy hands T commit my 
 
 spirit," 553. 
 Feet, washing of the disciples', 423- 
 
 428. 
 
 Fig-tree cursed, 377-9, 382. 
 Five thousand, feeding of the, 214 ; 
 
 its immediate effect, 217; its 
 
 nature and purpose, 220, 221. 
 Flesh, eating Christ's, its import, 
 
 229. 
 
 Forgiveness of sins, 143, 189-190. 
 Four thousand, feeding of the, 238. 
 
 GADARA, the demoniac of, 202-205. 
 
 Galilee, its extent, 134; sea of, 136, 
 200; our Lord's first circuit of, 
 129-136, 140; second circuit of, 
 190-229 ; appearances in, after his 
 resurrection, 617 seq. 
 
 Gethsemane, 447 seq. 
 
 Gilboa, mountains of, 122. 
 
 Golden rule, the, 167. 
 
 Gospel, the, its adaptation to all 
 men through all time, 632-636, 645. 
 
 Gospels of the Infancy, 32 note. 
 
 Great supper, parable of the, 388. 
 
 Greeks desire to see Jesus, 413-418. 
 
 HATTIN, Horns of, supposed scene of 
 
 the Sermon on the Mount, 162. 
 Healing, miracles of, varied in 
 
 method, 239, 240. 
 Hermon, 122-3, 237, 256. 
 Herod, Christ's appearance before, 
 
 493-501. 
 
 Herodian family, 23, 24, 244. 
 Holy Spirit, at the baptism, 56, 
 
 57 ; blasphemy against the, 193 ; 
 
 breathed upon the apostles, 606, 
 
 646. 
 Houses, Jewish, form of, 140, 141. 
 
 " I am the God of Abraham, of Isaac, 
 
 and of Jacob," 398-9. 
 " 1 am the light of the world," 292- 
 
 299. 
 " I am the resurrection and the life," 
 
 336-345. 
 
 " I am with you alway," 639-640. 
 " I and the Father are one," 317. 
 " I give . . . eternal life," 316. 
 " I, if I be lifted up, will draw all 
 
 men unto me," 418, 563.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 659 
 
 " I thank tliee that thou hast hid ... 
 
 hast revealed," 181, 322. 
 Incarnation, the, 10, 227, 311, 414. 
 Innocents, massacre of the, 23-27. 
 Invitation, the great, the " hiding " 
 
 and the "revealing," 181-4. 
 " It is finished," 547-554. 
 
 JACOB'S well, 103. 
 
 Jainis's daughter raised, 171-174. 
 
 James and John, sons of Zebedee, 
 call of, 155 ; their request, 358. 
 
 Jericho, 357-365. 
 
 Jerusalem, incident in our Lord's 
 last journey to, 318-323 ; tri- 
 umphal entry into, 372-4 ; Christ 
 weeping over the city, 375-7 ; 
 daughters of Jerusalem weeping, 
 511-518. See Temple. 
 
 Jezreel, 122. 
 
 Jewish people, our Lord's ministry 
 mainly confined to them, 106. 
 
 Jews, meaning of the term as used 
 by John, 116. See Pharisees, 
 Sadducees, Sanhedrim. 
 
 John the Baptist, his birth and mis- 
 sion, 40 seq. ; first public official 
 testimony to Christ, 68-71 ; his 
 humility, 99, 100 ; his disciples' 
 inquiry as to fasting, 159-60 ; his 
 imprisonment, 176, 212 ; two of 
 his disciples sent to Jesus with a 
 question, 176 ; testimony of Jesus? 
 to John, 178-9; death of John, 
 212-214; his baptism was it 
 from heaven or of men ? 384. 
 
 John the Evangelist, calling of, 70, 
 71, 129; made an apostle, 155; 
 his character, 625-6. 
 
 Joseph of Arimathea, 564, 573-578. 
 
 Judas Iscariot, was it he who 
 volunteered discipleship in Matt, 
 viii. 191 162-3; exposure of him 
 at the last Paschal Supper, 429- 
 436. See Betrayal. 
 
 KEYS of the kingdom, the, import 
 of the phrase, 249. See Binding. 
 
 Kingdom of Christ announced, 43 ; 
 its nature, and how entered, 9'2- 
 96 ; founded in suffering, 251 ; its 
 progress, peculiarities, and devel- 
 opment set forth and illustrated in 
 
 parables, 198 seq., 3S8, 418 ; set 
 forth in the Sermon on the Mount, 
 162 seq. 
 
 LABOURERS in the Vineyard, parable 
 
 of, 365. 
 Language ordinarily spoken by our 
 
 Lord, 240, 241. 
 Law, the Mosaic, as explained by our 
 
 Lord, 165. 
 
 Lazarus, the raising of, 345-351. 
 Leper, healing of a, 137-140; ten 
 
 healed, 352. 
 Life, spiritual, Christ the author of, 
 
 119, 343-345, 415. 
 Light of the world, Jesus the, 292- 
 
 299. 
 Lord's Supper, the, 439-447, 637. 
 
 MAGI, visit of the, 16-23. 
 
 Maimonides quoted, 44. 
 
 Marriage of the King's son, parable 
 of, 388. 
 
 Martha and Mary at Bethany, 365 
 seq. See Lazarus. 
 
 Mary Magdalene, no evidence to 
 connect her with the "woman who 
 was a sinner," 190 ; at the cruci- 
 fixion, 530; at the tomb, 578; 
 Christ's appearance to, 587-595. 
 
 Mary, the Virgin, Annunciation to, 
 1-5 ; incidents of the nativity, 5- 
 10; at the passover, 33 seq. ; at 
 Cana, 77-81 ; present at the cruci- 
 fixion, 530-539. 
 
 Master, which is the great com- 
 mandment?" 400-402. 
 
 Matthew, calling of, 158. 
 
 Ministry of Christ; its unostenta- 
 tious opening, 76 ; the year of its 
 commencement, 89 note. 
 
 Miracle, the first, 76 seq. ; seven 
 miracles wrought on the Sabbath- 
 day, 148 ; the two classes of mir 
 acles, 219, and the lessons they 
 teach, 220. 
 
 Mount of Olives, the prophecies of, 
 418-423. 
 
 Mount, Sermon on the, 161-169. 
 
 " My Father worketh hitherto, and 1 
 work," 118. 
 
 "My God, my God! why hast thou 
 forsaken me?" 540-544.
 
 6GO 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Mysteries of the kingdom, 198. 
 
 NAIN, village of, 122 ; raising of the 
 widow's son, 169, 170. 
 
 Napoleon I., his sentiments on the 
 character of our Lord, 81. 
 
 Nathanael, calling of, 73, 310. 
 
 Nativity, the, 5-10. 
 
 Nazareth, the thirty years at, 31, 32, 
 123-4 ; the life there a pattern to 
 us, 39 ; scenery around the village, 
 and prospect from the hill-top of, 
 122-3 ; synagogue of, 124-127. 
 
 New birth, the, 92 seq. 
 
 Nicodemus, the conversation with, 
 90-98 ; at Christ's burial, 98, 573- 
 578. 
 
 Nobleman's son, healing of the, 110- 
 113. 
 
 "Now is my soul troubled!" 417. 
 
 " Jerusalem, Jerusalem ! " 516. 
 
 Oaths, 165. 
 
 Obedience to Christ as the evidence 
 of love, 637-8. 
 
 Old Testament, reference to prophe- 
 cies of, 28, 29. 
 
 Olives. See Mount. 
 
 Over-anxiety, 166. 
 
 PARABLES, the first, 197-200; of 
 the Persean ministry, 332 ; of the 
 Passion-week, 382-389. 
 
 Paradise what ? where? 528, 529. 
 
 Paralysis, healing of, 115, 141-144, 
 149. 
 
 Passover, first, during the ministry, 
 85 seq; the second (?), 115; the 
 last, 424. 
 
 "Peace I leave with you," 606, 607. 
 
 Persea, ministry in, 323-331, 352. 
 
 Peter, calling of, 72, 129 ; his wife's 
 mother healed, 132; made an 
 apostle, 155 ; his confession at 
 Csesarea-Philippi, 245-250 ; his 
 rebuke of Christ, 250-256; his 
 professions at the first communion 
 table, 437 ; his denials, repentance, 
 and restoration, 467-476, 622-624 ; 
 character of, 626-7. 
 
 Pharisees, the, 41 ; at John's preach- 
 ing, 45, 46 ; their early hostility 
 to Christ, 101, 128, 14-2 ; accuse 
 
 Christ of Sabbath-breaking and 
 blasphemy, 144-153 ; Simon the 
 Pharisee, 184 seq. ; collision con- 
 sequent on healing deaf and dumb 
 demoniac, 190-197 ; their hypo- 
 crisy denounced, 231 ; traditions 
 of, 229-231 ; they attempt to 
 arrest Christ, 289 ; case of the 
 blind beggar, 299-308 ; their ques- 
 tions as to the kingdom of God, 
 and as to divorce, 353 ; further 
 plots and schemes, 383 ; combina- 
 tion with Herodians, 390 ; woes 
 denounced upon them, 405-410. 
 
 Philip, calling of, 72, 73, 155. 
 
 Physical cause of the death of Christ, 
 563-572, 651-4. 
 
 Pilate, Christ's first appearance before, 
 485-493 ; second appearance, 501- 
 511. 
 
 Pounds, parable of the, 365. 
 
 Prayer, 166, 271, 281, 327; the 
 Lord's Prayer, 333-6. 
 
 Precipitation, mount of, 126. 
 
 Presentation, the, in the Temple, 
 10-16. 
 
 Prophecies of Matthew xxiv, etc. 
 418 seq. 
 
 RAISING from the dead, the three 
 cases of, 175-6. 
 
 Remission and retention of sins, 
 what meant by, 607. 
 
 "Render to Caesar," etc., 392-3. 
 
 "Reproach hath broken my heart," 
 570, 651-4. 
 
 Resurrection, the, of Christ, 579-587. 
 
 " Rising from the dead," Christ's 
 perplexity of the apostles as to the 
 meaning of the words, 253. 
 
 Ruler, young, Christ's conversa- 
 tion with, 354-357. 
 
 SABBATH, the, 145 ; alleged violations 
 
 of the, 116-118, 121, 144 seq., 288. 
 Sadducees,the disciples warned against 
 
 the, 239 ; their question as to the 
 
 resurrection, 394-400. 
 Samaria, the woman of, 99-108, 310. 
 Samaritans, history of the, 101, 102. 
 Sanhedrim, the Jewish, 116, 288, 
 
 349, 383 ; trial before the, 476 seq. 
 Satan, 58 seq., 131, 205,296, 298, 322.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 661 
 
 Scribes. See Pharisees, Sanhedrim. 
 Sea, Christ's walking on the, 218-9, 
 
 221. 
 
 "Sell whatsoever thou hast," 356-7. 
 Seventy disciples sent out, 211, 321. 
 Shechem (Sychar, the modern Nab- 
 
 lous), 103. 
 
 Shepherd, the Good, 308-318. 
 Sidon, 237. 
 Silence of Scripture, 163, 279, 280, 
 
 625. 
 
 Siloam, fountain of, 290-91. 
 Simeon and Anna, 14-16, 531. 
 Simon the leper, 367. 
 Simon the Pharisee, feast at his house, 
 
 184 seq. 
 Simpson, Sir James letter on the 
 
 physical cause of the death of 
 
 Christ, 652-654. 
 Sonship of Christ, 14, 119, 149, 246, 
 
 274. 
 
 Sower, parable of the, 198. 
 Stanley, Dean, quoted, 47. 
 Star of the Magi, 18, 19, 21, 22. 
 Strife among the apostles as to who 
 
 should be greatest, 275-277, 425. 
 Stroud, Dr., on the physical cause of 
 
 the death of Christ, 567, 651-2. 
 Swine, the herd of, 203. 
 Sychar. See Shechem. 
 Syrophenician woman, the, 231-236. 
 
 TABERNACLES, Feast of, Christ at the, 
 
 285-292, 323. 
 Tabor, mount, 161. 
 Tares and wheat, parable of the, 200. 
 Teaching by parables, 198-9. 
 Tempest, stilling of the, 201. 
 Temple, Jesus in the, 35, 36, 532 ; 
 
 first cleansing of, 83-90 ; second 
 
 cleansing of, 377-382. 
 Temptation in the wilderness, 58-66. 
 Thief, the penitent, 518-530. 
 Thomas, the apostle, his incredulity, 
 
 609-616. 
 
 Thomson, Dr., quoted, 207. 
 Thoughts known to Christ, 143. 
 " Touch me not," 594, 639. 
 Traditions, Pharisaic, 229-231. 
 
 Transfiguration, the, 256-263. 
 Treasury of the Temple, Jesus in the, 
 
 292. 
 Trial, the, before the Sanhedrim, 476- 
 
 485. 
 Tribute-money, payment of the, 272 ; 
 
 question as to, 390-393. 
 Trinity, the : distinctly recognised in 
 
 the interview with Nicodemus, 96 ; 
 
 in the ordinance of baptism, 637. 
 Twelve, first mission of the, in pairs, 
 
 205-211, 321. 
 
 Two sons, parable of the, 385, 388. 
 Tyre and Sidon, borders of, visited, 
 
 231. 
 
 UNPARDONABLE SIN, 193. 
 
 VOICE, the, from heaven at the 
 baptism, 57 ; at the Transfigura- 
 tion, 258, 262 ; in the Temple, 
 417. 
 
 WASHING the hands before meals not 
 
 observed by the disciples, 230. 
 Washing of the disciples' feet, 423- 
 
 428. 
 
 "Weep not forme!" 514-15. 
 Wicked husbandmen, parable of the, 
 
 386, 388. 
 
 Widow's mite, the, 411-12. 
 Withered hand healed, 152-3. 
 Woes denounced on the Pharisees, 
 
 405-410. 
 
 " Woman, behold thy son ! " 536-7. 
 Woman with issue of blood healed, 
 
 171. 
 Woman, the, " who was a sinner," 
 
 184-190; not Mary of Magdala, 
 
 190. 
 Worship of the Virgin, 535. 
 
 YOUTH of our Lord, its one recorded 
 incident, 36, 532-3. 
 
 ZACCHEUS, 311, 362-4. 
 
 Zebedee's sons, request of, how 
 
 treated, 358-361. 
 Zubeibeh, Saracen castle of, 244.
 
 INDEX OF PASSAGES. 
 
 MATTHEW. 
 
 22. 1-22 . 
 
 388 
 
 5. 1-20 . 
 
 190 
 
 
 
 23-33 
 
 394 
 
 22-43 
 
 169 
 
 2. 1-12 . 
 
 16 
 
 34-46 
 
 400 
 
 6. 14-16 
 
 493 
 
 13-23 
 
 23 
 
 23. 
 
 405 
 
 7-30 . 
 
 205 
 
 3. 1-12 . 
 
 40 
 
 24. 
 
 418 
 
 30-52 
 
 214 
 
 13-17 
 
 50 
 
 25. 
 
 418 
 
 7. 1-30 . 
 
 229 
 
 4. 1-11 . 
 
 58 
 
 26. 1-5 . 
 
 423 
 
 31-37 
 
 237 
 
 12-25 
 
 127 
 
 6-13 . 
 
 365 
 
 8. 1-26 . 
 
 237 
 
 18-22 
 
 154 
 
 14-19 
 
 423 
 
 31-38 
 
 250 
 
 5. 
 
 161 
 
 21-25 
 
 429 
 
 9. 1 
 
 250 
 
 6. 
 
 161 
 
 26-29 
 
 439 
 
 2-13 . 
 
 256 
 
 7. 
 
 161 
 
 36-46 
 
 447 
 
 9-32 . 
 
 264 
 
 8. 2-4 . 
 
 137 
 
 47-56 
 
 458 
 
 30-41 
 
 272 
 
 23-34 
 
 190 
 
 51-59 
 
 467 
 
 10. 1 
 
 324 
 
 9. 9-17 . 
 
 154 
 
 59-68 
 
 476 
 
 1-27 . 
 
 352 
 
 18-26 
 
 169 
 
 69-75 
 
 467 
 
 2-52 . 
 
 357 
 
 35-38 
 
 205 
 
 27. 12, 13 
 
 493 
 
 11. 1-11 . 
 
 372 
 
 10. 
 
 205 
 
 15-23 
 
 501 
 
 12-19 
 
 377 
 
 11. 
 
 176 
 
 26-30 
 
 501 
 
 20-33 
 
 382 
 
 12. 1-14 . 
 
 144 
 
 31-34 
 
 511 
 
 12. 1-12 . 
 
 382 
 
 22-50 
 
 190 
 
 35-37 
 
 518 
 
 13-17 
 
 388 
 
 24 . 
 
 327 
 
 47-50 
 
 547 
 
 18-27 
 
 394 
 
 13. 
 
 190 
 
 51-54 
 
 554 
 
 28-37 
 
 400 
 
 14. 13-33 
 
 214 
 
 61 . 
 
 573 
 
 38-40 
 
 405 
 
 15. 1-28 . 
 
 229 
 
 62-66 
 
 579 
 
 41-44 
 
 411 
 
 29-39 
 
 237 
 
 28. 1-6 . 
 
 579 
 
 13. 
 
 418 
 
 16. 1-12 . 
 
 237 
 
 16-20 
 
 627 
 
 14. 1, 2 . 
 
 423 
 
 13-19 
 
 243 
 
 
 
 3-9 . 
 
 365 
 
 21-28 
 
 250 
 
 MARK. 
 
 
 11-17 
 
 423 
 
 17. 1-13 . 
 
 256 
 
 
 
 18-21 
 
 429 
 
 9-27 . 
 
 264 
 
 1. 1-8 . 
 
 40 
 
 22-25 
 
 439 
 
 22-27 
 
 272 
 
 9-10 . 
 
 50 
 
 32-42 
 
 447 
 
 18. 1-35 . 
 
 272 
 
 12, 13 
 
 58 
 
 43-50 
 
 458 
 
 15-20 
 
 608 
 
 16-20 
 
 154 
 
 53-65 
 
 476 
 
 19. 1 . 
 
 324 
 
 21-39 
 
 127 
 
 54, 55 
 
 467 
 
 2 
 
 326 
 
 40-45 
 
 137 
 
 66-72 
 
 467 
 
 1-26 . 
 
 352 
 
 2. 1-31 . 
 
 144 
 
 15. 1 
 
 485 
 
 20. 17-34 
 
 357 
 
 1-12 . 
 
 137 
 
 33, 34 
 
 539 
 
 21. 1-11 . 
 
 372 
 
 14-22 
 
 154 
 
 35-37 
 
 547 
 
 12-17 . 87, 
 
 377 
 
 3. 22-30 
 
 190 
 
 39 . 
 
 554 
 
 23-46 
 
 382 
 
 4. 
 
 190 42-45 
 
 563 
 
 662 
 
 

 
 INDEX OF PASSAGES. 
 
 663 
 
 16. 7 . 
 
 467 
 
 19. 29-44 
 
 372 
 
 8. 12-59 
 
 292 
 
 13, 14 
 
 603 
 
 45-48 
 
 377 
 
 9. 
 
 299 
 
 
 
 20. 2-10 . 
 
 357 
 
 14 . 
 
 144 
 
 
 
 1-19 . 
 
 382 
 
 39-41 
 
 308 
 
 LtJKB. 
 
 
 20-26 
 
 388 
 
 10. 1-39 . 
 
 308 
 
 
 
 27-40 
 
 394 
 
 39-42 
 
 336 
 
 1. 1-20 . 
 
 5,40 
 
 45-47 
 
 405 
 
 40 . 
 
 325 
 
 26-56 
 
 1 
 
 21. 1-4 . 
 
 411 
 
 11. 1-27 . 
 
 336 
 
 57-80 
 
 40 
 
 5-36 . 
 
 418 
 
 27-54 
 
 345 
 
 2. 21-38 
 
 10 
 
 22. 1-30 . 
 
 423 
 
 12. 1-8 . 
 
 365 
 
 40-52 
 
 31 
 
 19, 20 
 
 439 
 
 12-18 
 
 372 
 
 3. 21-23 
 
 50 
 
 21-23 
 
 429 
 
 19 . 
 
 377 
 
 4. 1-13 . 
 
 58 
 
 39-46 
 
 447 
 
 20-36 
 
 411 
 
 16-31 
 
 122 
 
 47-53 
 
 458 
 
 13. 1-20 . 
 
 423 
 
 42-44 
 
 127 
 
 54-62 
 
 467 
 
 21-35 
 
 429 
 
 5. 1-11 . 
 
 154 
 
 66-71 
 
 476 
 
 14. 
 
 447 
 
 12-26 
 
 137 
 
 23. 1-4 . 
 
 485 
 
 15. 
 
 447 
 
 27-39 
 
 154 
 
 4-12 . 
 
 493 
 
 16. . 447, 
 
 639 
 
 6. 20-49 
 
 161 
 
 13-16 
 
 501 
 
 17. 
 
 448 
 
 7. 1-10 . 
 
 108 
 
 20-23 
 
 501 
 
 18. 2-11 . 
 
 458 
 
 11-17 
 
 169 
 
 23-43 
 
 518 
 
 15-27 
 
 467 
 
 36-50 
 
 184 
 
 27-32 
 
 511 
 
 19-24 
 
 476 
 
 8. 22-39 
 
 190 
 
 46 . 
 
 547 
 
 28-39 
 
 485 
 
 41-56 
 
 169 
 
 47-49 
 
 554 
 
 19. 1-16 . 
 
 501 
 
 9. 1-9 . 
 
 205 
 
 55 . 
 
 573 
 
 20-22 
 
 518 
 
 7-9 . 
 
 493 
 
 24. 13-33 
 
 595 
 
 25-27 
 
 530 
 
 10-17 
 
 214 
 
 33-49 
 
 603 
 
 28-30 
 
 547 
 
 22-27 
 
 250 
 
 44-53 
 
 640 
 
 31-37 
 
 554 
 
 28-36 
 
 256 
 
 
 
 33-35 
 
 563 
 
 37-45 
 
 264 
 
 
 
 38-42 
 
 573 
 
 43-50 
 
 272 
 
 JOHN. 
 
 
 20. 1-18 . 
 
 587 
 
 51-62 
 
 318 
 
 
 
 19-23 
 
 603 
 
 9. 51 to 18. 6 
 
 323 
 
 1. 30-33 
 
 50 
 
 24-29 
 
 609 
 
 10. 1-24 . 
 
 318 
 
 29-51 
 
 66 
 
 21. 1-14 . 
 
 617 
 
 25-37 
 
 332 
 
 2. 1-12 . 
 
 76 
 
 15-17 
 
 467 
 
 11. 1-13 . 
 
 332 
 
 12-21 
 
 83 
 
 15-23 
 
 621 
 
 14-54 
 
 190, 329 
 
 3. 1-12 . 
 
 90 
 
 
 
 12. 35-50 
 
 330, 331 
 
 31-36 
 
 101 
 
 
 
 13. 10-17 
 
 144 
 
 4. 
 
 99 
 
 ACTS. 
 
 
 22 . 
 
 326 
 
 46-54 
 
 108 
 
 
 
 31,32 
 
 493 
 
 5. 
 
 115 
 
 1. 3-8 . 
 
 640 
 
 14. 1-6 . 
 
 144 
 
 1-47 . 
 
 144 
 
 
 
 15-24 
 
 388 
 
 6. 1-21 . 
 
 214 
 
 1 CORINTHIANS 
 
 
 17. 11-37 
 
 352 
 
 22-71 
 
 221 
 
 
 
 18. 15-27 
 
 352 
 
 7. 1-9 . 
 
 279 
 
 11. 23-25 
 
 439 
 
 35-43 
 
 357 
 
 11-52 
 
 285 
 
 15. 3-8 . 
 
 654 
 
 Inifaersttp JJrcsa: 
 
 THOMAS AND ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE. PRINTERS TO HER MAJESTY.
 
 tlje 
 
 THE LIFE OF OUR LORD. 
 
 6 vols., handsomely bound in cloth extra, gilt edges, 30s. 
 
 Separate vols., cloth extra, gilt edges, 5s. each. 
 
 1. The Earlier Years of our Lord. Eighth Thousand. 
 
 2. The Ministry in Galilee. Fourth Edition. 
 
 3. The Close of the Ministry. Sixth Thousand. 
 
 4. The Passion Week. Sixth Thousand. 
 
 5. The Last Day of our Lord's Passion. Forty-seventh Thousand. 
 
 6. The Forty Days after the Resurrection. Ninth Thousand. 
 
 MEMOIRS OF THE REV. THOMAS CHALMERS. 
 
 Cheap Edition. 2 vols., crown 8vo, cloth, 12s. 
 
 LETTERS OF THOMAS ERSKINE OF 
 LINLATHEN. 
 
 Edited by WILLIAM HANNA, D.D., LL.D. 
 Crown 8vo, Fourth Edition 7s. 6d. 
 
 EDINBURGH : DAVID DOUGLAS.
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBF 
 
 A 000 031 373 4