LESSON CVIII.

THE WOES ON THE HYPOCRITES.

MATT. xxiii. 13-31.

But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in,

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows' houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.

Woe unto you, ye blind guides, which say, Whosoever shall swear by the temple, it is nothing; but whosoever shall swear by the gold of the temple, he is a debtor !

Ye fools and blind for whether is greater, the gold, or the temple that sanctifieth the gold?

And, Whosoever shall swear by the altar, it is nothing: but whosoever sweareth by the gift that is upon it, he is guilty.

Ye fools and blind: for whether is greater, the gift, or the altar that sanctifieth the gift?

Whoso therefore shall swear by the altar, sweareth by it, and by all things thereon.

And whoso shall swear by the temple, sweareth by it, and by him that dwelleth therein.

And he that shall swear by heaven, sweareth by the throne of God, and by him that sitteth thereon.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.

Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess.

Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first that which is within the cup and platter, that the outside of them may be clean also.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness.

Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous.

And 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.

Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets.

COMMENT.-The Sermon on the plain had its Woes, but far less terrible than these Woes on the Hypocrites. The Wrath of the Lamb (Rev. vi. 16) is the most terrible of all things. Having put to silence His foes, Christ proceeds to sentence them, and a most awful sentence it is, and fully was it carried out. As there were eight Beatitudes proclaimed at the beginning of His course, so there are now eight Woes on those who had above all prevented the lost from being saved.

First, He denounces them for having not only refused to enter His Kingdom and receive His promise, but for having kept out the people whom He came to seek and save.

The second Woe is against the cunning, which by a seeming religion and long hypocritical prayers, persuaded rich women into giving these greedy deceivers all they had; thus taking advantage of their folly, and want of protectors.

The third is against their party spirit. There was nothing of which they were prouder than winning proselytes from the Gentiles, but they won them only to the outward observance of ceremony, not to the spirit of the Law, and even bought them over, so that it was a common saying that the Pharisees' proselytes were the disgrace of Israel.

The fourth Woe is on their abominable quibbling about oaths and vows, making the obligation depend, not on the honest intention of the two parties, but on the exact terms of the oath; so that there were means of releasing a person from what he had sworn to do, and he could even deceive the ignorant by making oath in a form that he did not view as binding. Whereas our Lord shows there is no such thing as a light oath. Every such pledge is really a calling of God to witness. This is a renewal of His teaching in St. Matthew, v. 33-37, which had been unheeded, and now is awfully enforced. That had chiefly dealt with vain, foolish, extravagant asseverations: this, with the deeper guilt of deceitful oaths. The fifth Woe is also a repetition of one of the Woes spoken in the Pharisee's house at Capernaum two years before (Luke xi.).

The tithing of every pot herb was one of the pretentious acts of religion on the part of the Pharisees, which was shown to be a monstrous act of hypocrisy when coupled with their extortion and robbery of the poor. They are said never to have bought a bunch of mint in the market without asking whether the tithe had been paid. It is well to be scrupulous, but to be scrupulous in small matters to hide sin in large ones is shameful mockery. Our Lord uses the proverb for this, “Strain at a gnat and swallow a camel," and it serves for us of the later Church equally well, for we are all too apt to let outward attention to trifles deceive us while we let the heart, which would prompt that attention, stray into great sins.

The sixth and seventh Woes turn on the outward appearance being made clean while within all is a mass of festering uncleanness, and this leads on, as in the denunciations in St. Luke, to the eighth Woe, on those who complacently adorned the tombs of the very prophets whom they themselves would have slain had they lived at the same time; and while at that very moment they were compassing the death of the greatest of all Prophets.

LESSON CIX.

THE INNOCENT BLOOD.

A.D. 30.—MATT. xxiii. 32—39.

Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers.

Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?

Wherefore, behold, I send unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes : and some of them ye shall kill and crucify; and some of them shall ye scourge in your synagogues, and persecute them from city to city:

That upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar.

Verily I say unto you, All these things shall come upon this generation. O 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.

For I say unto you, Ye shall not see me henceforth, till ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the LORD.

COMMENT.-Carrying on the sentence on those who hypocritically adorned the tombs of the prophets whom their fathers had killed, the Lord went on to say that these Jews would go on to fill up the measure of their parents' iniquities by His own Death. And He repeated the denunciation with which John the Baptist had three years before received these very Pharisees. They had had their trial, and proved themselves still children of Satan, and the words of the Forerunner are taken up by the Messiah Himself, dooming them as the children of the Old Serpent, doing their utmost to withstand the Seed of the Woman.

From the very first this spirit of the Pharisees had persecuted and slain. It was the bitter spirit of jealousy and envy that had begun when Cain was aggrieved at the acceptance of his brother's offering. because it was the offering of faith. Thus Abel was the first martyr to the faith, and as his innocent blood cried out, or appealed to God from the earth, so these Jews by sharing the same spirit brought on themselves all the innocent blood shed by persecution, from Abel's to that of Zacharias, the son of Barachias. Who this is is not certain. Zachariah, the priest, whom Joash slew in the Temple (2 Chron. xxiv. 20, 21), occurs first to the mind, but he was the son of Jehoiada; though Berechiah may be the name of his family ancestor. Most of the worst persecutions of the prophets took place later. Zachariah the prophet was the son of Berechiah, but he is not known to have been slain, nor did he live in a time of persecution, and it is most likely that the person meant is good old Zacharias, St. John Baptist's father, who had recently been killed by the Jews in the temple, and who would thus be the last innocent victim before our Lord spake these words.

So ye shall not pollute the land wherein ye are for blood it defileth the land and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it.

Defile not therefore the land which ye shall inhabit, wherein I dwell: for I the LORD dwell among the children of Israel. (Num. xxxv. 33-34.)

The shedding of innocent blood had been here declared to be especially abhorrent to God, and to call down destruction on the land. It was Manasseh's "shedding innocent blood very much" that clenched the punishment on Jerusalem of old, when Isaiah was uttering that awful poem that described above all the present state

of Jerusalem, and the coming of the Avenger who was fulfilling those words-(Is. lix. 1-8; 14—18):

Behold, the LORD's hand is not shortened, that it cannot save;
Neither his ear heavy, that it cannot hear.

But your iniquities have separated between you and your God,
And your sins have hid his face from you, that he will not hear.
For your hands are defiled with blood,

And your fingers with iniquity;

Your lips have spoken lies, your tongue hath muttered perverseness.
None calleth for justice, nor any pleadeth for truth;

They trust in vanity, and speak lies; they conceive mischief, and
bring forth iniquity.

They hatch cockatrice' eggs, and weave the spider's web :

He that eateth of their eggs dieth, and that which is crushed breaketh out into a viper.

Their webs shall not become garments,

Neither shall they cover themselves with their works;

Their works are works of iniquity,

And the act of violence is in their hands.

Their feet run to evil, and they make haste to shed innocent blood;
Their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity;

Wasting and destruction are in their paths.

The way of peace they know not,

And there is no judgment in their goings:

They have made them crooked paths: whosoever goeth therein shall not know peace.

And judgment is turned away backward, and justice

Standeth afar off: for truth is fallen in the street, and equity cannot

enter.

Yea, truth fadeth; and he that departeth from evil maketh himself
A prey and the LORD saw it, and it displeased him that there was

no judgment.

And he saw that there was no man, and wondered

That there was no intercessor;

Therefore his arm brought salvation unto him ;

And his righteousness, it sustained him.

For he put on righteousness as a breastplate, and an helmet of salvation
Upon his head;

And he put on the garments of vengeance for clothing, and was
clad with zeal as a cloke.

According to their deeds, accordingly he will repay, fury to his adversaries,

Recompense to his enemies.

Could there be a more perfect description of this machination of this generation of vipers, and of Him who stood in the midst of them?

The voice of Abel's blood cried from the ground, and St. John