course, has these excrescences. I should not like to have to apologize for all the peculiar types of piety which find nourishment within the enclosure of the Free Church. Pharisaism was not to Paul that utterly offensive and hollow thing it is in the descriptions of Christ. If it had been, he would hardly have said, when he was arraigned before the Sanhedrim, "I am a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee." In a sense that cry of his was a clever ruse, which he afterwards regretted. And yet, in a deep sense, it was true. And the passionate zeal for God, and the profound belief in immortality, which were amongst the strongest forces in his religion, as in all true religion, were learnt, not first from Christ, but from the Law and at Gamaliel's feet. The system which nurtured Paul, and which such men as Hillel and Gamaliel continued to profess, could not be all formalism or falsehood. And yet, in the hands of Christ, what an offensive and fraudulent thing it is! Are we, then, to say that His invective against it is too severe, and His descriptions overcharged? In answer to this I would have you observe that all Christ's charges are substantially borne out by contemporary evidence. Hillel was the noblest of the Pharisees; but even those who, in a climax of anti-christian absurdity, praise him as the rival and teacher of Jesus, would be obliged to admit that he was sometimes guilty of a lamentable want of straightforwardness. And Paul himself, in the famous passage in the second chapter of Romans, where, though speaking of the Jew, he is really describing the Pharisee, uses language almost if not altogether as strong as Christ's. "Thou that preachest a man should not steal, dost thou steal? Thou that sayest a man should not commit adultery, dost thou commit adultery? Thou that makest thy boast of the law, through breaking the law dishonourest thou God? For the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles through you." The awful severity of Christ's condemnation of them has caused some surprise. Are the features of Christ's picture, it may be asked, not somewhat out of proportion? Does He give us a fair delineation of the good and the bad features of this famous and powerful system? A full answer to this would take far too long time; but I wish to suggest one or two things. Observe, first, Christ is not giving a full delineation of the good and bad features of the system. It was not for Him to delineate the good side. Everybody knew it and admitted it. It was the rankling evils that were not seen, or were not acknowledged, that He had to point out. He found a huge imposture weighing upon the national life and conscience. He had no call to indicate the nobler inspiration in which it had originated, or the better elements that still clung to it. His mission was different. No one had had insight or courage enough to expose the lies, to threaten this moral and religious monster with the thunders of God; no one save John and He. And what John had done in a biting sentence or two, He did in a prolonged polemic unrivalled for pungency, completeness, and scenic force,-a polemic which has served as the armoury from which the keenest shafts have ever since been drawn in the long contest against pretension and fraud. Besides, not only had the mask to be torn off, but this was a thing that lay directly in Christ's path. The unmasking and denouncing of the evil which the Pharisees represented was a part of His peculiar task. Every true Hebrew prophet had had particular evils to expose; and one of the main evils they had always to deal with was the false prophets of their day. These false prophets had to be exposed, because they offered the people benefits that were fallacious by methods that were wrong. Christ was the great Hebrew prophet, and the Pharisees were the false prophets of His day. They were speaking in the name of God. They were offering a religion which came into competition with the religion which Christ himself offered. They were, Jesus knew, giving the people a stone for bread; and the stone looked so like bread that the people were taking it. Sadducee or sinner was offering no quack remedy for the disease of the heart. Sadducees or sinners did not cross Christ's path. They were on a different path altogether; and they knew it, and the people knew it. But the rivalry between the false religion and the true, the old and the new, the Law and the Gospel, the letter and the spirit, traditionalism and inspiration, dead orthodoxy and living faith, affectation and reality, was inevitable and instinctive. 66 Allow me, on this point, to quote a few sentences from Dr. Mozley's sermon on The Pharisees," in his University Sermons-the most suggestive piece of writing on the subject that I know. "It was a new development of evil when a class socially and religiously respectable were discovered to be corrupt at the root. Evil which produced evil, which issued in disorder and crime, was an old fact; but evil which was the parent of outward discipline and goodness was new. It was new that a man should work his own will and obtain his own ends by this medium; and that that which once required vices could now be done by virtues. This was a great discovery, a great improvement, so to call it, in the science of evil. It was a great revelation of the power and character of evil that it was not confined to its simple and primitive ways, its direct resistance to conscience; but that it had at its disposal a very subtile and intricate machinery for attaining what the simple methods could not reach. It was fit that He who knew what was in man should summarily arraign this new form of evil upon its appearance in the world; and He knew that it must be exposed in no doubtful terms, that less severity would not have answered His purpose, and leave the mark that He designed. "For, indeed," Dr. Mozley proceeds, "not only was this a new form of evil, but it was a worse type than the old. When the will is not radically bad, it is evident that in the Gospel estimate the evil which is the excess of appetite and passion is not so bad as the evil that corrupts virtue. The Gospel is tender to faults of mere weakness and passion; it watches over the outbursts of a vehement and passionate nature, to see if, when the storm is past, it cannot elicit the element of good that lies beneath. But while this is its temper towards natural frailty, it casts an obdurate look on false goodness, because false goodness is unrepentant. Why should a man repent of his goodness? The victim of passion, the gay, the thoughtless, the ambitious, may be converted; but who is to convert the hypocrite? The hypocrite in the vulgar sense knows he is one; but the Scripture hypocrite is the deceived too, and the deceived cannot possibly know that he is deceived. If he did, he would not be deceived. Hence that point of view in which the Pharisee figures in the Gospel as incapable of repentance. Self-knowledge is the first condition of repentance, and he did not possess self-knowledge; and it was said of him, "The publicans and harlots go into the kingdom of heaven before you,' because the publicans and harlots knew their guilt, and he did not. The heathen allowed conscience a protest; the heathen conscience was an accuser, a tormentor-it brooded over men, stung them, haunted their dreams, made itself heard, poisoning their revelry, awakening them to despair. Compare with this wild but great visitant from another world the Pharisaic conscience pacified, domesticated, brought into harness, a tame conscience, converted into a manageable and applauding companion, vulgarized, chained, with a potent sway over mint, anise, and cummin; but no sway over the heart. Our Lord treated the Pharisees with the coldness due to those without the element of repentance. 'How can ye, being evil, speak good things?' and with the holy sarcasm,' that they that are whole needed not a physician,' He left them." There is no doubt that the common reading of the Pharisees' character is shallow. They were not hypocrites in the vulgar sense, but in the deep sense. There are persons in the religious world of to-day, into whose inner consciousness if we could only get, we would see more of the springs of Pharisaism than by reading hundreds of pages of printed matter. We should probably find that such persons were far more what is called, in modern slang, sincere-what Dr. Mozley would call selfdeceived-than we fancy. The It used to be assumed that there were a great many conscious impostors in society-hypocrites in the old vulgar sense. Pictures of these were given us by eminent writers, such as Dickens and Thackeray. typical hypocrite of these writers was a coarse rascal, with the colouring of an orthodox dissenter laid on in such daubs, so transparent a knave, that it was difficult to understand what sort of fools they were who were taken in by him. A far deeper and truer delineation has been given us by George Eliot in "Middlemarch." In the character of Mr. Bulstrode we have probably the best modern representative of the Pharisee of Christ's time. Observe how very commonly the Pharisee comes into being among us. A religious impulse visits some town or district. Under the preaching of some earnest minister of the Gospel, the old dead Moderatism is broken up. Moderatism was not, of course, Pharisaism, but Sadduceeism. A true religious impulse comes to the place. The pews become full, the congregation becomes attentive, family and personal religion are revived. Family worship, from being a thing sneered at and only kept up by a handful of people who read Boston's "Fourfold State" and Guthrie's 66 Saving Interest," becomes the rule-the absence of it the exception. And the work is quite genuine. A deep tender love to Christ, lit by a faithful minister of Christ, is burning in many a heart, young and old. A generation or two has passed. There has been no great visible falling off. The church is almost as full. Family worship considered as much the correct thing, though volumes of family prayers are in more request at the booksellers, and it is understood fewer heads of households imitate literally Burns' Cottar on the Saturday Night. The subscription lists of the religious societies are, however, as well filled, and missionary meetings are very fairly attended. But though the minister is an eloquent man, and preaches well and evangelically, there has been no real reviving of the evangelical sentiment. There has been an internal decline. There are a great many Bibles in the church pews, and a great many distributed to the poor; but there are very few of the old dog-eared ones with marks on them, very few eyes anxiously scanning the page, as there used to be when Mr. So-and-so first came to the place fifty years ago. The leaders of religious society have become great debaters, and sticklers for orthodoxy; and when an anti-popery lecturer comes to the town, there are six people in the church for every one that is there at the ordinary weekly prayer meeting. The more literal and less spiritual side of Evangelicalism-its doctrinal hardness, and want of the broad tender touch of Christ-becomes prominent. The Bible is, with the good people, a sort of Fetish; and a chapter of Chronicles considered as sacred and almost as edifying as a chapter of St. John or Ephesians. The town is considered still quite a religious place; and any attempt to open the park on Sabbath would be indignantly rejected. The atmosphere is just that in which Pharisaism—the Pharisaism of Christ's time-flourishes. The majority of the leading people are religious. But their religion is their church-going, and their family worship, and their subscriptions, and their orthodoxy. And by-and-by they are capable of tampering with wills, and floating bubble companies, and wrecking big banks, in a way that men who only know the rough morality of the world would decline to have anything to do with; and yet they go down to their graves thinking themselves good religious men, and mostly the martyrs of circumstance. Ay, and remember, you may put these men, after a certain stage, under the most searching preaching in the land, and it has no more effect than the whistling of the wind. Men cast innuendos on the church to which they went when they were concocting their false balance sheets, forsooth! Why, the Pharisees listened for years to Christ himself, and all the time they were concocting His murder. They went on their way only the more determinedly; and at last put out the Light of the World in blood, and all to do God service. APPEALING TO GOD.-The mother of a certain family was married to an infidel who made jest of religion in the presence of his own children; yet she succeeded in bringing them all up in the fear of the Lord. I asked her one day how she preserved them from the influence of a father whose sentiments were so opposed to her own. This was her answer: "Because to the authority of a father I do not oppose the authority of a mother, but that of God. From their earliest years my children have always seen the Bible upon my table. This holy book has constituted the whole of their religious instruction. I was silent, that I might allow it to speak. Did they propose a question, did they commit a fault, did they perform a good action, I opened the Bible, and the Bible answered, reproved, or encouraged them. The constant reading of the Scriptures has wrought the prodigy which surprises you."Adolphe Monod. |