has its worship in words, and its religion is of the lips, while its heart is far from Me. Their service of Me is worthless, for it is not My Law, but only human invention." These words describe you to the letter. You put aside what God has commanded, and has enforced by promises and threats, and yet keep superstitiously, 'traditions' which only custom, and homage to human teachers, have introduced. Of this kind are your hand-washings, and many similar usages.' Such a defence was an open declaration of war against Pharisaism, and the hierarchy closely identified with it. His words struck at the insincerity and false-heartedness of the party as a whole, at its fundamental principles, its practice, its modes of thought, its whole ideas and aims. They are pious, very pious, He tells them, in outward seeming. They keep the traditions fastidiously, but their piety is from the lips, not the heart; obedience to the Rabbis, not God. They wash pots and cups, and care for gifts, as their religion, and ignore the commands of Jehovah. No irony could be more keen or annihilating. What flames of rage must it have kindled in the hearts of the great party so mortally assailed? They could not challenge His loyalty to the higher law, for He spoke as its Champion against their human additions and perversions. They could not but feel that, far from destroying either the Law or the Prophets, He was ennobling and exalting them. But the very light He poured on the oracles of God showed so much the more the worthlessness of their cherished system, and their misconception of their office as the teachers of the people. He had virtually condemned not only their putting washings above duty to parents; He had denounced them for laying more stress on the Temple worship and ritual than on such filial piety. Hence washings, sacrifices, alms, and fasts; all the boastful, pretentious worship and outward practice on which they rested, were of no value compared with the great eternal commands of God, and were even crimes and impiety, when they proudly set themselves in their room. arraigned Pharisaism, the dominant orthodoxy, as a whole. The system, so famous, so arrogant, so intensely Jewish, was only an invention of man; a subversion of the Law it claimed to represent, an antagonism to the Prophets as well as to Moses, the spiritual ruin of the nation!

He

The die was finally cast. All that it involved had been

1 Isa. xxix. 13.

THE SPIRITUALITY OF THE NEW KINGDOM.

199 long weighed, but He who had come into the world to witness to the Truth, could let no prudent regard for self restrain His testimony. It was vital that the people who followed the Rabbis and priests should know what the religion and morals thus taught by them were worth. The truth could not find open ears while men's hearts were misled and prejudiced by such instructors. No one would seek inward renewal who had been taught to care only for externals, and to ignore the sin and corruption within. Pharisaism was a creed of moral cosmetics and religious masks, as all ritual systems must ever be. With Jesus, the only true religion was purity of heart and absolute sincerity to truth. Leaving the Rabbis, therefore, and calling round Him the crowd which was lingering near, He proclaimed aloud the great principle He had laid down-" Hear me, all of you," cried He, "and understand. There is nothing from without the man that, entering into him, can defile him; but the things which come out of the man are those that defile him." Words clear enough to us, perhaps, but grand beyond thought when uttered, for they were the knell of caste -heard now, for the first time, in the history of the world;the knell of national divisions and hatreds, and of the religious worth of external observances, as such, and the inauguration of a universal religion of spirit and truth! They proclaimed that nothing external, made clean or unclean, holy or unholy. Purity and impurity were words applicable only to the soul and its utterances and acts. The charter of spiritual religion, the abrogation of the supremacy of forms and formula for ever, was at last announced; the leaven of religious freedom cast into the life of humanity, to leaven it throughout in the end!

Even the disciples were alarmed at an attitude so revolutionary. In common with the nation at large, they looked on the Rabbis with a superstitious reverence, and now hastened to tell Jesus how deeply the whole class was offended by His words. It was hard for simple Galilæan peasants to break away from hereditary habits of thought. But Christ's answer was ready. Every plant which my Heavenly Father has not planted, shall be rooted out. Leave them: they are blind leaders of the blind, and, as such, both they and their followers must stumble on to destruction!" The plants of human, not Divine planting,

Matt. xv. 13.

were the "traditions" and "commandments of men "-the hedge of the Law," in which the Rabbis gloried. Henceforth, there was a breach for ever between the men of the schools and the New Kingdom.

But the mind is slow to realize great spiritual truths. To the disciples, their Master's words were dark and strange, demanding explanation. Nor was it possible, either then, or even to the very last, to familiarize them with the new ideas they involved, or free them from the influence of past modes of thought. The tendency to regard the external and formal as a vital and leading characteristic of religion, was well-nigh unconquerable in minds habituated to Jewish conceptions. An earnest request of Peter for further explanation, only drew forth an amplification of what had been already said. The evil in man was traced directly to the thoughts; but to eat with unwashed hands, it was repeated, made a man in no way "common " or polluted, as alleged by the Pharisees. Yet the truth had to lie long in the breasts of the Twelve before it wrought their spiritual emancipation from the slavery of the past. The natural and eternal distinction of good and evil was proclaimed, after having been obscured for ages by an artificial morality; but fully to unlearn inveterate prejudice would require the lapse of generations.

JESU

CHAPTER XLV.

THE COASTS OF THE HEATHEN.

ESUS had now, apparently, been two years before the world as a religious teacher, and had shared the usual lot of those who seek to reform entrenched and prosperous abuses. His brief and dazzling popularity had roused the bitter hostility of threatened interests, and they were at last banded together for His destruction. For months past He had seen the death-clouds gathering ever more threateningly over Him, and devoted Himself, with calm anticipation of the end, to the task of training the Twelve to continue His work when He had perished. He had taken the utmost care to avoid open collision with His enemies, and to confine Himself to the instruction of the little circle round Him; but the priests and Rabbis had been quick to see in this very quiet and retirement their greatest danger, for open conflict might destroy what peaceful seclusion would give opportunity to take root. "The world," as He Himself expressed it, "hated Him, because He witnessed of it that its works were evil."1 Not only His formal accusations and the spirit of His teaching, but His whole life and actions, and even His gentlest words, arraigned things as they were.

Rumours of possible action against Him by Antipas increased the difficulty of the situation. Every one knew that He and many of His followers had come from the school of the Baptist, whom Antipas had just murdered, and it was evident that His aim was more or less similar to that of John, though His acts were more wonderful. Hence speculation was rife respecting Him. Was He the promised Elias? or, at least, Jeremiah, risen from the dead? or was He some special prophet sent from God?? Many, indeed, were questioning if He might not even be the Messiah, and 2 Mark vi. 15; viii. 28, Matt. xvi, 14.

1 John vii. 7.

were willing to accept Him as such, if He would only head a national revolt, in alliance with the Rabbis and priests, against the Romans. To Antipas His appearance was doubly alarming, for it seemed as if the fancied revolutionary movement of John had broken out afresh, more fiercely than ever, and superstition, working in an uneasy conscience, easily saw in Him a resurrection of the murdered Baptist, endowed, now, with the awful power of the eternal world from which he had returned. A second murder seemed needed to make the first effective, and to avoid this additional danger Jesus for a time sought concealment.

But the craft and violence of the half-heathen Antipas was a slight evil compared with the hatred which glowed ever more intensely in the breasts of the Rabbis and priests of Jerusalem, and in those of the Pharisees and other disciples of the schools, scattered over the country. The demands of Jesus went far beyond the mere summons of the Baptist, to prepare for a new and better time. He required immediate submission to a new Theocracy. He excited the fury of the dominant party, not like the Baptist, by isolated bursts of denunciation, but by working quietly, as a King in His own kingdom, which, though in the world, was yet something far higher. Hence, the feeling against Him was very different from the partial, cautious, and intermittent hatred to the Baptist. The hierarchy and the Rabbis, as the centre of that which, with all its corruptions, was, as yet, the only true religion on earth, felt themselves compromised directly and fatally by Him, and could not maintain themselves as they were, if He were tolerated. The whole spiritual power of Israel was thus arrayed against Him; a force slowly created by the possession, for ages, of the grandest religious truths known to the ancient world, and by the pride of a long and incomparably sublime national history. In the past, it had been assailed from without, at long intervals, but in recent years it had been, for the first time, attacked from within by the Baptist, and now felt itself still more dangerously assaulted by this Galilæan. To crush such an apparently insignificant opponent-a peasant of Nazareth, rising, singly and unsupported, against a power so colossal-seemed easy; nor could it be fancied more difficult to scatter and destroy His small band of followers, as yet, mostly, despised peasants.

The first official step towards the repression of the new movement had, apparently, been already taken, on the