court of justice, and condemned to be beheaded simply for indulging an angry thought or feeling. No Jew, no Christian was ever called before the Sanhedrin, and condemned to be stoned to death simply for calling his brother Raca. No Jew, no Christian was ever first put to a shameful death, and then denied decent burial simply for calling his brother Fool. And no man who reads these words with the understanding can for a moment suppose that Christ meant these sins of anger to be brought before courts of justice, and to be visited with punishments so disproportioned and inappropriate. The most savage judge who ever disgraced the bench would not have doomed men to death for an angry feeling that was never uttered in word or action, nor to a death in the last degree shameful for uttering an angry word. And would Christ, the Lover and Redeemer of men? Use your common sense. Translate these Hebrew figures of speech into their English equivalents, and see what you think of them then. Whosoever is angry with his brother without cause shall be brought up before the Police Court; and whosoever shall call his neighbour Coxcomb shall be tried for his life at the Assizes: and whosoever shall call his brother Fool shall be hung, and then denied Christian burial!" Can you swallow that? Does that sound like "the sweet reasonableness of Christ" to you? If not, you may be sure that He who taught all things

66

There is no

in parables is uttering a parable here. thought of hell in his mind; there is no thought even of literal courts of justice. He is simply teaching an Oriental people, in the Oriental forms with which they were familiar, that every sin, however inward, will receive its due recompense of reward; that the heart is the fountain from which all sin flows; that in God's sight the murderous wish, scheme, bent, is murder: and that every utterance of it, whether in word or in deed, since it deepens and confirms it, will entail a still severer punishment. "Be angry, and you will suffer for it; let your anger mount to utterance, and you will suffer the more every new access and expression of evil passion will plunge you still deeper in sin and misery." This is what Christ meant; this is the law of anger as interpreted by Him.

Twice more the word Gehenna is used by Christ in the Sermon on the Mount (St Matthew v. 29 and 30). If our right eye or our right hand offend us, if, that is, it become an occasion of sin, we are to cut it off or to pluck it out; for "it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into Gehenna." It is the law of Adultery of which our Lord speaks here; and He treats it in precisely the same method and spirit in which we have already heard Him treat the law of Murder. The Jewish code only punished the outward

F

overt act punished it by stoning, and in aggravated cases by dooming the bodies of the offenders to be flung into the valley of Hinnom. Our Lord used this Jewish punishment to illustrate his meaning. "To commit adultery is," He says, "to take the way to Gehenna. And as I adjudge even a lustful look, or touch, to be adultery, it were better for you to pluck out your right eye, or to cut off your most serviceable hand, than to commit that sin; since, by the loss of one member, you may save your whole body from the fire and the worm."

Can we take these words in their literal sense? or are not they too a parable? If we take the word Gehenna literally, as meaning the valley of Hinnom, we must also take the right eye and the right hand literally; and every man who has looked and longed and touched must cut off his hand and pluck out his eye. Is that what Christ means? Is his

code written in blood? Does He bid us atone the sin of the soul by mutilating the body? Impossible ! The simple truth is that no thought of a literal valley of horrors was in his mind, and still less any thought of an everlasting torment, to be evaded only by an excision of the offending organs of sense. He was

simply using these familiar terms as figures of speech to convey the solemn warning, that it is better for us to endure the utmost pains of self-denial and self

restraint than to yield even to the first movements of sensual and unlawful desire.

A similar passage occurs in St Matthew xviii. 8 and 9, and is repeated, in an expanded form, in St Mark ix. 43-48. In both we are exhorted to cut off the hand, the foot, the eye which offends, on the ground that it is better for us to go into life maimed and halt and blind than to have our whole body cast into Gehenna

"into the Gehenna where their worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched." Here, of course, the allusion is not to hell, but to the valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem, where fires were always burning and the worm for ever preyed on the corpses of the dead. And here, again, there is only an allusion to that valley ; i.e., Gehenna is only a figure of speech. For if we take any part of the passage literally, we must take it literally throughout. If Gehenna stands for a real valley, polluted by the prey of the worm and the fire, then in common fairness we must admit that the foot and the hand and the eye stand for the physical organs and members of the human frame, and the plucking out and cutting off for real physical acts. But we cannot take the whole passage in that literal way. It is impossible that we should please God by maiming and crippling the body which He has given us. And how should our whole body, the bodies of English men and women, be cast into a Palestinian valley?

What our Lord is really teaching here is about the first and most important moral lesson we all have to master, viz., that we must learn to go without a great many things we should like to have; that we must learn to rule and deny ourselves on pain of being ruined and undone. What He means is that self-control, self-denial, is life to us; that self-seeking, unbridled self-indulgence, is death. If we deny ourselves our strongest craving when to indulge it would be wrong, if we refuse to yield to our most absorbing affection when to gratify it we must sin against God and our neighbour or wrong our own souls, we enter into our true life, into the life which is eternal; and enter into it here and now. We may indeed enter into this life maimed and wounded for a time; for have we not crucified our strongest craving, our most engrossing affection, that we might enter it? Nevertheless, even on these terms, it is well to lay hold upon life, or to seize it in a firmer grasp. But if we care mainly to please ourselves, to gratify instead of ruling our passions and desires; if we will take our own way and follow our own will at the cost of conscience and duty, we lose our true life; we adjudge ourselves unworthy of it: here and now we enter into the eternal death, for here and now we cut ourselves off from God and his eternal life of service and self-sacrifice. This, without a figure, is the general principle which our Lord taught