St. Luke

Chapter I

This Evangelist is St. Luke. No one has ever doubted that the two books in the New Testament which are attributed to him, stand in the closest connexion with each other. He addresses them to the same person, whoever that person may have been; he speaks of the first as “the treatise of that which Jesus began to do and to teach until the day that he was taken up.”

The introduction to his Gospel has given rise to many disquisitions; I question whether we are yet alive to its full importance, “The things in which Theophilus had been catechised,” “the things which are most surely believed among us,” must all have had relation to the person of Christ. The theology of the Apostolic Church must have had a living centre. It was in Christ. Only through the knowledge of what He did and what He was, could its meaning be drawn out. Hence an Evangelist in every application of the word must be one who sets forth the life of Christ. Next it is clearly assumed in this introduction, that one who had not been an eye-witness himself of our Lord’s doings upon earth, might be just as competent to be an Evangelist as one who had seen Him and talked with Him. There might be a number of facts still unrecorded concerning Him. But it was not the function of the Evangelist chiefly to look for these, but to follow up those which were admitted, which had become the common-places of the Church’s faith, in order that their full purpose might be brought to light, that they might be known in the length and breadth of their human and divine significance. What St. Luke promises, is not something new, but an orderly narrative, one that should exhibit the facts so coherently and harmoniously that the character which was disclosed by them, their relation to the past and present and future, might be more clearly and livelily apprehended. He speaks of many having undertaken the same task; he does not disparage their works or their qualifications; he merely asserts his own. All would be tried in the fire. That which was intended to the exposition of the Divine Mind, that which it concerned men to possess, would come through it and would remain a possession for ever.

If you have followed what has been said of St. Matthew, the nature of the contrast between his gospel and St. Luke’s will at once be discovered by their accounts of our Lord’s conception and birth. In St. Matthew, the birth of a Son of God by a woman, married to an actual heir of the house of David, but without his intervention, was the fulfilment of that line of births from Isaac downwards, each of which had attested God to be the author and preserver of the race. In St. Luke, the difference between the Old Dispensation and that which is to come out of it is illustrated by the parallel stories of Zachariah and of Mary. John is born of a father well stricken in age and a barren mother, as Isaac had been. It is attested in the case of the last and greatest of the forerunners of the Prophet and King, as it was in the case of Samuel the first of them, that birth is of divine power, not of human will. But still John is the child of a man; whereas that holy thing which is born of Mary is to be called the Son of God.

Whether these chapters are received as genuine or rejected as spurious, there can be no question that this contrast was present to the mind of the writer. It is one cause of the suspicion which attaches to them, in the judgment of modern critics, that the intention is so obvious. “How clearly,” they exclaim, “we see, not the purpose of an historian to tell facts, but of a theologian to bring out a certain artificial theory.” Whether it is an artificial theory, or the revelation of a Divine principle apart from which the facts in the life of Jesus of Nazareth would not mean any thing or account for any thing, is precisely the question at issue —one which I cannot stop to discuss at each particular point of the narrative, without repeating myself most unwarrantably or anticipating the result of the whole investigation. What I am concerned with now is the connexion of these chapters with the rest of St. Luke’s Gospel, and the evidence which they furnish as to the intent of it.

The adjuncts of the two stories must not be overlooked. There is in both Gospels an allusion to Angels. We might have supposed that it would be most definite in that which is essentially and characteristically Hebrew. On the contrary, we are merely told in St. Matthew that “the Angel” of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. In St. Luke we have the name of an angel, “I am Gabriel, that stand in the presence of God.” All the Scriptures of the Old Testament speak of Angels, and assume the fact of communications between the visible and the invisible world. But not till the prophet Daniel are the visitants described by names, or any specific office assigned to them. The change in Jewish feeling on this subject after the captivity is often noticed, and is of course assigned to Chaldean influences. That mode of accounting for it seems to me vague and unsatisfactory; but I have no wish to throw it aside as if it were worth nothing, far less to overlook the fact which it seeks to interpret.

Supposing the Captivity to be, as the Jewish Scriptures throughout assume it to be, a most striking epoch in the history, (no less important, St. Matthew would teach us, than that of Abraham or of David.) one must believe it to be a step in the Divine revelation, as each of these was. The book of Daniel would seem to show us, the after history confirms the announcement, that it was a time when prophecy would be sealed up, when the records of the old world would be gathered together and would become a complete volume. This book would teach us also that the time of Nebuchadnezzar or of Cyrus was the commencement of a great period for all the nations, each of which had its own appointed place in the Divine order or government. It is in connexion with these nations that he introduces Angels; each country is said to be under the government of some one. That there is a very close relation between this belief and the belief of tutelary divinities which prevailed throughout the heathen world, there can be no question. At the same time, one can hardly understand how a Jew could acknowledge the absolute government of the Lord of all over every nation, together with the specific government over his own, unless he had some such faith. “We are under the everlasting I AM: other nations He has committed to mediate rulers,—to Angels”—this was the opinion which a Jew would most naturally entertain. Yet it may have been developed in a period in which the streams of Jewish and Gentile history were tending to become confluent. It was in no sense a graft of Gentile notions upon a Jewish stem; it may have been a most important exposition of new facts by the application of an old principle; an interpretation of Gentile history and mythology by the old Jewish truth.

That the coming of Jesus Christ should be announced by some messenger from the invisible world, is a reasonable or an incredible fact, precisely according to the belief which we have respecting His office and character. If he were the King of Men, the Lord of the visible and invisible world, the bond between them, the absence of such an announcement would be a more perplexing fact than its occurrence. If He were not this, I confess that the story, however simply told, however unlike ordinary legends in its freedom from parade, must be given up. But admitting an annunciation at all, that it should take the form which St. Luke reports, and that he should be the reporter, seems to me altogether natural. For he is, according to the common hypothesis, which is the one I am adopting, the Gentile Evangelist, intended to prepare us for acknowledging Christ as the Desire of Nations, intended to tell us what the meaning was of that seemingly unintelligible incorporation of Jewish with Gentile history and feeling, which had been going forward ever since the Captivity.

But the angelical visitations are secondary and accessory in the case both of Zachariah and Mary to the message which they bring. “Thy wife Elizabeth shall conceive and bear a son,” “The Holy Ghost shall come on thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee.” Here St. Luke shows us the central opposition between the new and the old age. The manifestation of the Holy Ghost distinctly, personally, as the Lifegiver, Life-producer, as working upon and in the spirits and the bodies of human beings—most of us hold this to be the diagnosis of the Gospel kingdom. We often lose ourselves in vague expressions or metaphors respecting it; yet we should shrink from the thought that we are using metaphors, that we are not speaking of that which is most actual and efficient, when we are discoursing of the Holy Ghost and of his operations. And orthodox men would, I suppose, be equally shocked at the notion that that could be true of the members which was not in some transcendant sense true of the Head; that there could be a power communicated to them, or effective for them, of which He had not been the first receiver. Of them I only ask that they will follow the course of thought, carefully and literally, which the Evangelist brings before them, and that however reasonably they may cling to any habitual notions, rather than abandon them at the bidding of an ordinary teacher, they will be ready to cast them aside if the book which they confess to be divine should require the sacrifice. Of those who do not accept the document, I can only ask, that they will at least take pains to ascertain what it says, that they may not hastily impeach it of inconsistencies they or we have put into it.

One opposition more must be dwelt upon; its importance cannot be overrated. Zacharias is a priest, performing an office in the Jewish commonwealth; the communication which is made to him is connected with that office; he represents the commonwealth of Israel. Mary is simply a woman; a maiden of Galilee; her relationship to the house of David is only alluded to in so far as she was the wife of Joseph. She represents humanity; humanity in its lowliest, simplest form. And she shows what the excellence and purity of humanity consists in; “Behold the handmaid of the Lord.” Here is the sancta sanctissima, the only sanctity which she claimed, or which it would not have been atheism for her to claim. That all goodness is in trust and obedience, that all evil is in distrust and disobedience, this is the lesson which St. Luke begins his Gospel by inculcating, and which we shall find penetrating his mind through and through, as it did that of his great Master and Friend.

St. Luke, it has often been remarked, is the Hymn-writer of the New Testament. The two Songs of Mary and Zacharias set forth, as all have perceived, the character of the New Dispensation; of the old as the witness and herald of the new. They both celebrate and express the fact that a spring of life and joy has been opened for human beings; that a kingdom of the Spirit is beginning among them; a kingdom now revealed but always existing; the subject of prophecy, because prophecy speaks of the eternal mystery, which at the appointed time is to be made known to men.

Chapter II

The second chapter of St. Luke contains no allusion to the wise men coming from the East to seek a King of the Jews, nor to the flight into Egypt, nor to the murder in Bethlehem. But it speaks of the decree which went out from Cæsar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed, of the message to the shepherds, that “to them was born in the city of David a Saviour, who was Christ the Lord,” of the song, “Glory be to God in the highest, on earth peace, goodwill toward men;” of Simeon’s blessing on Him, who was to be a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of the people Israel; of the widow who spake of the child to all them that looked for redemption at Jerusalem. All the scenery here is Jewish; the royal city, the offerings of purification, the holy doctor, the woman who was continually in the Temple serving God with fastings and prayers. But this only makes the essentially human character of their rejoicings and prophecies the more remarkable. We do not hear of kings or priests, but of shepherds, of devout men and women, waiting for consolation and finding it, in the belief of a blessing to the Gentiles, of a redemption for mankind.

The other fact in this chapter, is that of the Child tarrying behind His parents at the feast, and going into the Temple among the doctors, to hear them and to ask them questions. Here there is no anticipation of the subsequent ministry. The Boy does not become a teacher; He is only a questioner. He preserves and fulfils perfectly the obedience and docility of the child, while he is about His Father’s business. But there is a clear intimation of a spiritual power, which could bring the thoughts of men’s hearts to light, and could make the learned scribe know himself and know God, as he had never done before. A kingship over nature, and over the minds and bodies of men, was brought out before us by St. Matthew; a life-giving sympathy, an intercourse with the inner man, a human fellowship grounded upon, not contradicting the divine condescension and compassion, is what St. Luke, more than either of the other Evangelists, compels us to recognize.

Chapter III

The preaching of John the Baptist in the third chapter differs from the accounts we have had of it previously, in the answers which John makes to the different classes who ask him, “What shall we do then?” Perhaps the exceedingly simple character of the answers, enjoining merely common duties which belonged to the stations of the enquirers and carefulness in eschewing the temptations peculiarly incident to them, may strike some as at variance with the spiritual character which has been claimed for St. Luke. Would such directions about good works as a preparation for faith in the Deliverer, have been expected from a disciple of St. Paul? Or, if they belong naturally to the lower dispensation of John the Baptist, would he have been the person to recollect and preserve them? I apprehend the very one. Men of all kinds and classes had come to John to be baptized. If they meant what they did, if they had actually sins to confess and had confessed them, they had received power from above to do right acts. They were to prove their faith in that power by doing them. Higher blessings would then be given them. They would know Him who had come to bind together in one, publicans, soldiers, all. They would receive His baptism of the Spirit and of fire, to fit them for higher ministries, to preserve them from the trial-day which was at hand.

Chapter IV

I have nothing to say upon the question of the genealogy beyond what has been said a thousand times. That it is carried back to Adam has been evidence to all, that St. Luke is not purposing chiefly to speak of a Son of David and a Son of Abraham, even though none could completely fulfil those characters who was not the Son of Man and the Son of God. St. Luke must bring that fact out directly, not subordinately. The second Adam must clearly be seen to be in a far more complete sense than the first, yet in as actual and formal a sense, the representative of the race.

All the Evangelists declare that Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness. St. Luke says that Jesus, “being full of the Holy Ghost, returned from Jordan, and was led into the wilderness;” he says that “He returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee;” he speaks of His going into the synagogue at Nazareth, and opening the book where it was written, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.” These are not trivial observations; they would be recognized in any book as indicating the habit and tendency of the writer’s mind. The more they are considered in reference to the history which they introduce, and in the midst of which they occur, the more force will be perceived in them.

The Temptation, in all the Gospels, is the cardinal event upon which the subsequent ministry depends. I have alluded already to a difference in the order of the temptations as they occur in St. Luke, and have assented to the common opinion, that it is characteristic of the Gentile or human character of the third Gospel as distinguished from the first. I did not insist strongly upon the point, because I feel that the Temptation is so much a meeting-point between the two,—the obedience of the Son to the Father being the ground of that ultimate dominion over the kingdoms of the world which the devil does not, and cannot give,—that I have been both loth to press even distinctions which I feel to exist, lest they should interfere with our perception of that common truth which is at the root of them. There are many minute contrasts,—such as that between the statement that He fasted forty days, and that then the Tempter came to Him, and the words, “being forty days tempted of the devil,” which I believe are very intelligible, and also very instructive, when we have apprehended the ground of the differences and resemblances in the Evangelists. But they are of more value when we trace them out for ourselves than when we receive them at second-hand. I merely wish to give hints which may assist the student of Scripture, not to overwhelm him with interpretations of my own.

Chapter V

Every one perceives that there is a difference in the order of events in St. Luke and St. Matthew; every divine has, perhaps, tried, at some time or other, to trace the course of the respective narratives. I believe such experiments will lead to a great many disappointments; that the theories upon which we have thought we could venture most safely are found to leak unexpectedly when we are at sea in them. Yet I am far from thinking that the effort is without its reward, even if we come to no formal and positive decision upon the subject. I do not profess to have any new light upon it; but when I have read St. Luke’s story in reference to what I believe to be the leading thought of the writer, I think I have discovered an inward coherency in his record. It has justified itself to me, though I might blunder very much if I tried to explain why particular narratives might not have been transposed, why they occupy the places in which we find them. Supposing these Gospels to be works of divine art, they should have characteristics answering to those which we recognize in works of human art, still more in nature itself. There is an arrangement of parts which we could not lose without losing the sense and meaning of the picture, or poem, or landscape that is presented to us, which it is worth while to meditate upon, which critics may often assist us in considering, but which, after all, comes out to us by very slow degrees, which we shall probably never be able to interpret rightly to others or to ourselves, though it may impart a method to our own minds and may make all we do and speak more clear and intelligible. With these remarks I will dismiss this chapter, in which there is nothing, strictly speaking, new, though I am satisfied that the connexion in which it stands may give every passage in it a force different from that which it possessed when it was found with different antecedents and concomitants.

Chapter VI

This observation is still more applicable to the sixth chapter. There have been endless discussions on the question whether the discourse contained in it is, or is not, an abridgement of the Sermon on the Mount. The facts of the case are these. We have in this chapter a very great number of the sentiments contained in the fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters of St. Matthew, delivered nearly, though not exactly, in the same words. We have a number wholly omitted, though some of them appear with different modifications elsewhere. In the opening of the fifth of St. Matthew, it is said, “And seeing the multitudes, He went up into a mountain: and when He was set, His disciples came unto Him;” in the seventeenth verse of our chapter it is said, “And He came down with them, and stood in the plain.” In St. Matthew the sermon follows His calling the two disciples James and John; in St. Luke it follows the naming the twelve apostles.

It has been a common theory, by which many thought that they explained these differences, that the Evangelists only culled from the discourses of Christ a number of sentences which they threw together into this general sermon. But all must, I think, perceive that the scenery of the discourse is part of its substance, that you can only abstract it from the circumstances in which it was said to have been delivered by making it not the utterance of a living being, but a set of school apophthegms; that is, by destroying its nature. That the same words should have been repeated in different places and circumstances, which would give them a new meaning and application, we should all expect. There is no true human teacher who does not repeat himself, or seem to repeat himself. He cares little for novelties, in the vulgar sense of the word novelty; he brings the same principles to bear on a multitude of cases, and so keeps them everlastingly fresh. But when you have a definite description of persons and places, you may be sure it is given because they have associated themselves, and were intended to associate themselves, with the words and thoughts spoken, which cannot be rudely torn from them without the dislocation and loss of their sense. Any one who compares the last three verses of the fourth chapter of St. Matthew with the 17th, 18th, and 19th of the sixth chapter of St. Luke, will find that they refer to the same kind of persons, the same places, the same scenery. The difference, that St. Matthew said, He went up into a mountain and opened His mouth, and that St. Luke says, He went up into a mountain to pray, and then came down into the plain or table-land to speak, is too trifling to be noticed. No one would suppose that He preached upon a high pinnacle or retired part of a mountain. St. Matthew’s language is general, but accurate enough for his purpose; St. Luke’s is more definite, because he had another fact to record, which made it important that he should mention his previous solicitude and the private selection of the Apostles. With respect to the times, it seems quite clear that each Evangelist is always ready to sacrifice mere chronology to that order or succession of events which most revealed his purpose. In the short period of our Lord’s ministry there are certain great land-marks, such as the Temptation, the Transfiguration, the Entry into Jerusalem, which all observe. Within those landmarks they follow the bent and course of thought which the Spirit has given to each; they group events according to another than a time order. So far as we can see, it is a very simple and natural order. St. Matthew, for instance, connects the calling and naming of the Apostles with the commission which was given them; St. Luke connects the naming of them with a discourse which he intimates (and St. Matthew says nothing to the contrary) was delivered immediately after their appointment, and which sets forth the nature of the kingdom whereof they were to be the heralds.

It is therefore the nature and the intent of the discourse, as it is reported by the two Evangelists, which really concern us. Upon this subject I have made some remarks already. St. Luke has not omitted a few unimportant paragraphs of the sermon in St. Matthew; he has omitted some of its most capital and characteristic passages, those which the reader of St. Matthew dwells upon, and which affect his view of every word in it. He cannot have done this undesignedly. He has no more abridged this discourse than St. Mark has abridged the whole Gospel of St. Matthew. He has omitted precisely that part which conveys to us the object and design of St. Matthew, which would have prevented us from perceiving his own. Thus the part of the discourse which he has preserved gains a force which otherwise would have been hidden; it does not set forth the fulfilment of the old dispensation, but the special and distinct condition and office of the new. The important and precious Hebrew element was brought out in its fulness elsewhere; St. Luke’s business was to sink that, that the pure human element of the teaching might be manifest to all.

Chapters VII. VIII

There are two narratives in the seventh chapter which belong exclusively to St. Luke. The first is the raising of the Widow of Nain’s son, the second is the interview with the woman who was a sinner in the house of Simon the Pharisee. I suppose it must have struck most readers that in the first three Gospels there is less emphasis laid on the fact of the dead being raised to life than they would at all expect. The few acts of this kind which are mentioned are not alluded to as distinguished from the general course of our Lord’s acts; even the impression which is said to have been made by them is not greatly dwelt upon. Such words as these, “There came a fear on all; and they glorified God, saying, That a great Prophet is risen up among us; and, That God hath visited His people,” contain all that they have to say upon this point. In these Evangelists you discover the conviction that the Christ was come to encounter death in all its forms, so deeply rooted, so governing their whole minds, that they do not stop to make distinctions, or feel one instance of the conflict as much more striking or memorable than another. I do not find any thing remarkable in St. Luke recording one more event of this kind than St. Matthew or St. Mark.

But the sympathies of ordinary readers, which are greater helps in investigating the inner sense of these acts of power than the discourses of critics, have always pointed to the words, “son of a widow,” as containing the most vital and essential part of this narrative. In them I believe we discern the mind of St. Luke. If it is one leading character of the New Dispensation as distinguished from the Old, that it puts a more direct honor upon the woman, or, more strictly speaking, brings out the honor which was there latent and implied, St. Luke should certainly, according to all the notions we have formed of him hitherto, exhibit that sign of the later time in connexion with the life of the Son of God. We have seen how he exhibits it in the first and second chapters of his Gospel, not by any affected sentimentalism, not by losing sight of the manliness which belonged to the Jewish history and must belong to the history of every great and godly nation; but by connecting the glory of the woman with the glory of humanity, by exhibiting her passive and receptive faith as the agent through which a real Divine energy makes itself effectual. I should fear the charge of being fanciful in connecting this observation with the story of the miracle at Nain, if I had not the support of the most honest popular feeling, and if instances illustrative of the same tendency did not occur again and again in this Gospel.

One presents itself to us immediately. Our Lord is eating bread in the Pharisee’s house; a woman that is a sinner comes in, brings an alabaster box of ointment, stands at His feet behind Him, weeping, begins to wash His feet with tears, wipes them with the hairs of her head, kisses His feet and anoints them with the ointment. It would be a great perversion of this story to think of it as referring to one sex merely. The common feeling that it represents Christ’s treatment of the sinner as such, and the difference of one who is conscious of owing the five hundred pence, and of being forgiven that, from one who scarcely and with hesitation confesses to the fifty, must be the true feeling. God forbid that I should in any wise weaken it! If I did I should hide one of the greatest characteristics of this Gospel, the one which belongs to it as the Gentile Gospel—its eagerness, I mean, to bear testimony that the outcasts and the lost are continual objects of the divine care and search. But yet the person in whom this principle is set forth must not be forgotten. All her acts, every one has perceived it, are the acts of a woman. The whole female character comes out in them. It is indeed a side of humanity which must never be wanting in a man, or he will be congealed into a hard Pharisee or Sadducee. In one sense it is humanity itself, conscious of its shame, and yet dependent, trusting, hiding its evil in the love of One above it, till it is buried and lost. But still it is the female side of humanity, not the commanding, kingly side, but the side on which lie submission, self-surrender, hope, the side which is prone to all weakness, error, ruin, and which can be raised out of the very depths of all, by the voice of love which it at the same time acknowledges as the voice of authority, “Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace.” The belief of a Magdalen has always gone along in the heart of Christendom with the belief in a Virgin. Both have been infinitely degraded, and with them the ideas of penitence and faith. In the degradation of them the female character has been degraded; for it has made a religion for itself, it has turned its fancies into idols, it has cut itself off from manly thoughts and feelings, and has caused them to take a defying atheistical shape. But both these ideas can be redeemed, and must be redeemed; no one would be so helpful in the work as that Evangelist who was appointed to bring them livingly before us.

The 8th chapter opens with another of the indications to which allusion has just been made. “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.” This memorable and important passage is confined to St. Luke. On the strength of it, the Magdalen has been very reasonably identified with the woman who brought the alabaster box of ointment to the Pharisee’s house. Whether she is also to be identified with the sister of Lazarus, is a more difficult question, upon which this passage certainly throws no light, and which, so far as I am aware, receives none from St. Luke’s Gospel.

Chapter IX

This chapter contains the story of the Transfiguration. It should therefore, according to a remark made a short time ago, be a critical one in the chronology of events. All commentators and harmonists have confessed that it is. The words in the 51st verse, “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,” can have no other meaning than that He set out on that last journey which ended with His royal entry into Jerusalem and with His Crucifixion. All the passages in the Gospel between that and the 28th verse of the 19th chapter, have been considered, and must be considered, as connected with that journey; the period which they occupied may have been a very short one. They contain the most peculiar and remarkable part of St. Luke’s gospel—a proof, if proof were wanting, how little the attempt to arrange the Gospels after the manner of the harmonists, can help us to understand their real import or appreciate the relation of different passages to each other.

This chapter contains between the 49th and 57th verses, two narratives which belong exclusively to St. Luke. The first turns upon the remark of St. John when Jesus took the child and set him by Him, “Master, we saw one casting out devils in thy name; and we forbad him, because he followeth not with us;” a passage very interesting for the light it throws upon the way in which our Lord’s words called forth an answer in the conscience, apparently not related to them; unspeakably valuable as pointing out the danger of our interference with God’s own work of assigning offices to men. These words I apprehend connect themselves very closely with St. Luke’s object. The disciple and friend of St. Paul would naturally be reminded of language which denoted that the calling of the twelve Apostles was not one which was meant to exclude another and more secret calling; that holy as their order was, its holiness proceeded entirely from His vocation who might choose others in a different way to cast out devils in His name.

Still more characteristic is the other passage. Christ and His disciples on their journey to Jerusalem, enter into a village of the Samaritans; the inhabitants will not receive them; James and John ask, “Shall we call down fire upon them, as Elias did?” It must have been shortly after the confession of Peter, shortly after the Transfiguration. The Apostles therefore had a much stronger conviction than before, that their Master was the divine King, the Son of the living God. Could any thing be more natural than the vindication of His office and authority by the method which the Old Testament history had justified? It has been said, and I think most truly, that the answer, “Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of,” was not a condemnation of Elias, but an assertion of the principle of the new economy. I cannot admit however that the words contained no censure upon the Apostles, or merely a censure for not understanding a difference which they were as yet not capable of understanding. The words are too strong for that. “Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of,” must signify, “Ye know not whether ye are under the dominion of a righteous Spirit or an unrighteous one.” What Elias had done in a righteous spirit to assert the dominion of the righteous Ruler, the Lord God of Israel, they would have done to assert the authority of their Master, of the Person who had called them to be His ministers. The persecuting temper of the Apostles showed that they still did not understand that they were the disciples of a Son of Man, the head of a universal dispensation, who was to gather Samaritans and Jews into the same fold. For that reason St. Luke would be careful to report the story and its warning. But since this Son of Man was also the Son of God, since He came to fulfil that which had been spoken by Moses and Elijah, the words of James and John showed that they were only beginning to understand the acts of lawgivers and prophets, that they had not yet entered into their mind and spirit.

Chapter X

The mission of the Seventy is recorded only by St. Luke. Old interpreters have conjectured that he was one of the number. There can be no need for a gratuitous assumption; we are told that he was an Evangelist; we have seen in the instance of the last chapter that he was careful to report words which checked the desire of an apostle to make his order a plea for exclusiveness. It was natural that he should dwell upon an incident which justified the existence of a distinct class of teachers; which showed that the New Dispensation, though derived from the Old and recognizing its principles in the number of the original Apostles, would require and possess an organization adapted to its work among the Gentiles. It will be remarked that neither here, nor in the commands to the twelve Apostles in the twelfth chapter, is there the limitation to the tribes of Israel which we find in Matthew; an indication that St. Luke contemplated the ultimate and universal meaning of both offices rather than their temporary restriction. In their strictness St. Matthew’s directions belong to the immediate going forth of the Apostles to the towns whither Christ himself had gone or would go. But it is impossible not to see more in the words, “Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Judah till the Son of Man come,” than a mere reference to the time of their Master’s continuance on earth. What force they did bear in the minds of those to whom they were addressed, and how they were obeyed, we may have to consider in my second lecture. I am only desirous here to point out the consistency of St. Luke in following out the idea whereby his Gospel is distinguished from the Hebrew one.

The exquisite passage, in which the joy of the Seventy because the devils are subject to them, is brought into comparison with the rejoicing of the spirit of Jesus, when He said, “I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent,” is worthy of the deepest study for its own sake, and I think also for the light which it throws upon our immediate subject. Spiritual life and joy, in its pure form and in its temptations, must, if what has been said before is true, be a subject for the Evangelist of the coming age especially to dwell upon. Surely the loss would have been incalculable if we had not this indication of the fountain of gladness which there was in the innermost heart of the Man of Sorrows.

The words which were spoken privately to the disciples, “Blessed are the eyes which see the things that ye see: for I tell you, that many prophets and kings have desired to see those things which ye see, and have not seen them,” at once suggest that comparison between the time that had been, and that was to be, which this whole Gospel is bringing before us. They spring out of the previous words; they show how the oil of gladness in Christ could not be confined to himself, but flowed upon all about him; His blessedness was in the recollection of their blessedness, and theirs was to consist in knowing the Father and the Son.

I believe also that the Church (see Gospel for 13th Sunday after Trinity) teaches us much by connecting these words with the passage that follows them—with the question of the lawyer, and the parable of the good Samaritan. The representative of the old world—of the Law—comes forward with a question, “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?” The Pharisaical schools, which must have understood by eternal life (as so many of us do) merely future life, the rewards after death, will of course have been continually discussing this point; the teacher who could offer the best rules would be esteemed the wisest. The observation must be repeated which I made in reference to the young ruler who, with a different purpose, and in a different state of mind, proposed a similar question. The keeping of the commandments was not held to be a security for obtaining this future life by those who set most store by the commandments. Something more must be done. Each doctor could suggest what were the most acceptable methods of pleasing God; how a man might increase his chance of felicity. What scheme had the new prophet to propose? The reply is an argumentum ad hominem: the student of the Law is sent back to the Law. Our Lord does not sanction the doctrine that more is required than is written there. But what is written there? Then the lawyer recollects the words which some enlightened doctor of an olden time had probably set before his hearers as expressing the highest demands of God upon his creatures. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and soul and mind, and thy neighbor as thyself.” Assuredly he could not have answered better; whether another told him, or he found for himself that these words in Deuteronomy explained the nature and condition of human life, he was right; the secret was there. But the lawyer had never felt before so keenly as then, when the eyes of Him who was Truth were upon him, and when he heard himself commended for his knowledge of the right way,—that these grand words did not meet his case. Of course it was possible to love God with all the heart and soul; of course, also, it was possible to love one’s neighbor as one’s self. But who is he? The text does not tell that. What a discovery for a lawyer to make! The letter of the sublimest command was powerless to enforce obedience! It could not even with all its accuracy define its own objects! A whole world was left open to the subtlety of interpreters, practically to the fancy of the ordinary man, in fixing the limits of that one word “neighbor”! And where was the definition to be found? The parable answered the question. It reveals the existence of a Law of Love, acting directly upon the heart, determining that heart by its own power to recognize neighborhood where all outward geographical rules, old traditional feelings, the maxims of religion, denied its existence. It revealed at the same time the impotency of a mere rule to make a man practically confess neighborhood, where all geographical lines, traditions, religion, proclaimed its existence. The priest and the Levite saw the man who had gone down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and passed by on the other side.

There is, I am sure, a depth in this parable, taking it in its simplest sense, to which familiarity has made us blind. I do not doubt that the very incident had occurred, as it is described. The Samaritans are throughout represented as open to impressions of affection and gratitude which the Jew, cased in formalities, did not receive or entertain. Whence came these impressions? Did they come from the evil nature? Or had the Samaritan less of this evil nature because he rejected a portion of the Scripture, and did not worship in the Temple at Jerusalem? Or was there some secret spring of good from which all that was loving in Jew or Samaritan proceeded; some actual Person in whom the law of Love dwelt perfectly, and from whom men derived their impulse and power to fulfil it? Should not Jews, convinced of their inability to fulfil that law though they possessed written letters of stone, cry out that such an one should come forth out of the darkness and declare Himself to them as the Lord of their lives, the author of their obedience? If He did so declare Himself, might not Samaritans, might not Gentiles own, This is the common brother of us all; the One who owns all wounded and half-dead creatures as objects of His love and care; the One whose Spirit can help us all to go and do likewise. Blessed are your eyes, fishermen of Galilee, for you see that universal brother whom kings and prophets desired to see!

If I am not mistaken, we shall find that this parable is the type of those which are peculiar to St. Luke; that though each has a distinct purpose and brings out a different truth respecting the divine Kingdom, a feeling of the contrast between Law and Gospel, between the human and the merely national, between the mind of God as set forth in a Person, and that mind as it is exhibited in decrees, of the contrast, and yet of the essential oneness of the principles of the old world and the new, is latent in them all. It may be difficult at times to distinguish between this idea and the idea of fulfilment in St. Matthew, each so involves the other, each is so impossible without the other. Yet the more we think of it, the more we shall find that if either had been presented alone, there would have been narrowness and imperfection in that which ought to be universal and perfect, and that when they were both presented, there was abundant room for partisans to take hold of each, and to represent it as the contradiction, not the completion, of the other. But I am anticipating a future part of this inquiry.

I have represented St. Luke’s Gospel as in some sense an exhibition of contrasts. That characteristic has always been recognized in the story which concludes this chapter. The two forms of character which men have been accustomed to describe as the active and contemplative, are supposed to be brought together, and a very distinct preference to be expressed for that of which Mary was the type. No doubt there is this opposition; no doubt it belongs to all ages. But I question whether we arrive at the real force of our Lord’s words by reducing two actual women into representatives of certain qualities which ought to be united in every character, if it is formed in the image of Him whose inward delight was to do the will of His Father in Heaven, and who went about doing good. Martha complains of her sister, and is rebuked for her complaining, not for her diligence. The deeper moral would seem to be, that restlessness and bustle are not activity, that a still current of inward life is essential to steady patient work. I am afraid that our eagerness to find a force and emphasis in the words, “one thing is needful,” proceeds less from a reverence for Him who spoke them, than from the convenience of so short a sentence as a motto for sermons, and from an unhappy notion that religion is a thing to be separated from all other things—the pursuit of one selfish object rather than of a great many. If we once adopt that notion, we shall certainly not sit at Jesus’ feet; we may not be as active as Martha was, but we shall be as much troubled by outward cares and inward restlessness as she can ever have been. These remarks may raise the suspicion that I am anxious to weaken the popular impression of the passage. My real desire is to strengthen it by disconnecting it with some accompaniments with which I think it has nothing to do. The genuine common feeling respecting Mary and Martha is in accordance with the hints I have given respecting St. Luke’s general object, and illustrates that special tendency which I have noticed in him to bring out the female character in its relation to Christ and His Gospel, thus seizing one of the points which has remarkably distinguished the history of the modern world from that of the old.

Chapter XI

In the Sermon on the Mount, as reported by St. Matthew, our Lord bids His disciples not pray as the Pharisees did, standing in the corners of the streets, but to their Father who saw in secret, and Himself would reward them openly. Then He says, “After this manner therefore pray ye.” Here the disciples say, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples.” He repeats with some variation the same form of words. This form, it has often been remarked, had long been known to the Jews; at all events they had each of its separate petitions. It is the Lord’s prayer, not because Jesus taught His disciples to cast away that which had been in use previously, but because He enabled them to enter into the sense of it, to understand that God was answering it and would answer it, to feel that their Father was Himself meaning to accomplish those wishes which He taught them to utter. The Pharisee might pray, saying, “Our Father,” standing in the corner of the streets; but he did not believe in a Father, he acknowledged only a Being whose name he dreaded, whose kingdom he was afraid must come, whose will in heaven he wished to be like his on earth. St. Matthew might therefore most justly represent Christ as fulfilling the very letter and spirit of the Old Dispensation, by teaching that confession of a Father, that desire for the triumph of His Name, His kingdom, His will, which they by their self-righteousness were continually setting at naught. But the disciples would very naturally think that a prayer which Christ had spoken in the hearing of a great multitude, was not the one which He intended for them, His chosen band. They saw Christ praying upon a mountain apart; they remembered that John had communicated what his disciples thought was a peculiar wisdom to them; would He not tell the secret of prayer, of influencing the divine Mind, could He not give them His esoteric lore? He taught them the same “Our Father.” This was to be the prayer for the New Dispensation—this common prayer, this which belonged to the poorest beggar among the crowds around the Mount as much as to them, the ministers and judges of the new kingdom.

Then follows what we have not elsewhere, a parable recommending importunity—saying, that a friend may obtain that by continual entreaty which he does not obtain merely because he is a friend. Compare this with a passage in St. Matthew, in which it is said, “Do not think ye shall be heard for your much speaking; for your Father in heaven knows what things ye have need of before you ask him.” The two lessons seem in direct opposition to each other. And, what is curious, the sentiment which liberal and enlightened men of this day approve, and are fond of quoting, is recorded by the narrow-minded Hebrew Matthew; the one which they denounce as fanatical and superstitious, we owe to the disciple of St. Paul. It may be well for them, it is certainly well for those who reverence these Gospels, to observe, that the importunity which St. Luke urges, both here and in a parable which will come before us hereafter, is importunity that God’s will may be done, that God’s kingdom may come. What that kingdom is, what that will is, how the one is to be accomplished, and the other established, He must know before we ask Him. But the eagerness of our entreaty that it should be done, will depend, first, upon our belief that His is a good will and a good kingdom; secondly, upon our experience that there is a very bad will and a very bad kingdom actually and perpetually resisting it; thirdly, upon our confidence that we are meant to be fellow-workers with our Father in heaven meant, with the energy of our wills and the energies of our acts, to assist in the victory of the true over the false; in other words, must depend upon the degree in which the Spirit of our Father in heaven works in us. Most rightly therefore the Gospel which directly treats of the communication of the Spirit to man as the source of his energies and acts, would dwell upon this side of the truth. And it illustrates this difference, and the object of our Evangelist, that in the parallel passages, Matthew vii. 11, and Luke xi. 13, St. Luke sacrifices the antithesis, “If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father which is in heaven give good gifts to them that ask Him?” that he may introduce the words, “Give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him.” No doubt our Lord at different times used both expressions; but what a light does the latter throw upon the former!

From these words St. Luke proceeds, by what seems to me a very natural process of thought, to the argument of our Lord with the Pharisees respecting the power by which He cast out devils. It was by a Spirit He cast out devils. If it was a bad spirit, then Satan was divided against himself; if it was by a good spirit, then the strong man who was keeping his goods in peace had been assaulted by One who was stronger than he.

Then by another transition still more characteristic, he sets forth the opposition between the spiritual kingdom and the seeking for signs; between the spiritual power which makes clean the inside of the man first, by that means purifying the outward, and the materialism of the Pharisees, who made clean the outside of the cup and the platter, while their inward part was full of ravening and wickedness. I have spoken of all these passages before, but I wish the reader to observe how they may obtain a new force from their connection.

Chapter XII

In some English Bibles this chapter is headed, “Christ’s charge to the Apostles.” Now there is no allusion to the Apostles, as such, in the whole discourse which it contains till St. Peter asks (ver. 41) our Lord, “Speakest thou this parable (concerning preparation for the Son of Man) to us, or even to all?” And he receives the answer, “Who then is that faithful and wise steward, whom his Lord shall make ruler over his household?” Undoubtedly, many of the sentences in this chapter form part of the charge to the Apostles in St. Matthew, as many of them belong to the first stage of His ministry. The new force which they receive in St. Luke seems to be this, that they are addressed to disciples, or to individuals of the multitude, not to the twelve; that they are connected with the last journey to Jerusalem, the post-transfiguration period; therefore with more strong denunciations of all the habits which were destroying the Jewish heart, and making it incapable of recognizing its King. There are a great many minor differences which will suggest themselves to the attentive reader, and which make this discourse as full of fresh teaching as if its words had occurred nowhere else.

Chapter XIII

Every passage in this chapter is obviously bearing upon Jerusalem and the approach to it. Several incidents in it are found only in this Gospel. The force of the answer respecting the Galilæans, and those on whom the tower of Siloam fell, as correcting a tendency, strong then and strong always, to determine the condition of individuals from the events which befal them, has been always acknowledged; not enough stress perhaps has been laid upon the clause, “Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.” He does not teach them to think lightly of such occurrences as those which were reported to him; they were what the Jews considered them, divine visitations; signs and tokens of the divine mind; but they were signs, not about those who perished, but to the nation and to each member of the nation who heard of them; warnings of a like punishment which Roman governors or the powers of nature might be appointed to bring upon covetous, self-righteous, hypocritical stewards of God’s mercies to mankind. When we draw any lesson from this part of the discourse, we turn it into a warning of punishment in a future world; we do not see how directly our Lord denounced a judgment in this world upon a people which is proud of its privileges, and is only making them an excuse for judging and despising others.

In this sense the parable of the fig-tree follows most naturally upon the last words. Every preparatory warning of the coming judgment was a voice saying of the barren tree, “Cut it down; why cumbereth it the ground?” and contained at the same time the petition, “Let it alone this year also.”

I have observed already, that the habit of mind which produced the Pharisaical doctrine respecting the Sabbath is represented in the Gospels, not as an excess of good, but as essentially, radically evil; hateful to God; not to be tolerated through fear of weakening the authority of the commandment; but to be regarded with “anger” as subversive of it. Nowhere should we more look for one of our Lord’s solemn, practical protests against this detestable temper than here. For nothing more proved the fig-tree to be rotten at the core, incapable of bearing any wholesome fruits.

I have commented already on the two parables which follow.¹ The Mustard-seed, I have said, is common to the Evangelists, being equally important as explaining the expansion of the universal out of the national kingdom, as the process of development in the universal. If I have been right in following the judgment of many wise men respecting the use of the word “leaven,” it was almost needful that the working of the true principle should not be exhibited without an allusion to the false, which in every age would work with it and beside it.

The terrible announcements in the previous discourse were likely enough to produce the kind of anxiety out of which the question would proceed, “Lord, are there few that be saved?” This often-repeated question is generally censured as indicating a desire for definite information on a subject where God does not please that we should have it. But does not its error lay rather in its indefiniteness; in the willingness of those who utter it to be content without a clear feeling of what it is from which they, or any, need to be saved? Our Lord seems to treat the error in this way: “Strive to enter in at the strait gate: for many, I say unto you, will seek to enter in, and shall not be able.” The strait gate of sacrifice; of deliverance from self; this surely was that which those who were self seeking, plotting for their own salvation, would not find. And since the self-seeking tendency of the Jew was that which on this occasion and all others he had been denouncing, how awfully did the personal warning chime in with all that he had been saying of the excision of the nation! How needful that each of his disciples should then and always be seeking to know Him; since a time was at hand when the Master of the House would reveal the secrets of every heart, and when it would be nothing to have eaten and drunk in his presence, or taught in his streets. Surely we do not in the least weaken the admonition for every time and every land, by supposing that it had a direct and remarkable application to that age; that the Son of Man was then about to try every man of what sort he was. The following words, already introduced in St. Matthew in connection with the healing of the centurion’s servant, “There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, &c., and they shall come from the east and from the west,” would have been quite inappropriate here if the disciples had not intended to connect the thoughts which concerned their own personal life with the history and destiny of their country.

It was the same day, when the same thoughts were filling our Lord’s heart, that the messengers came to say, “Get thee out; for Herod will kill thee.” The answer is “Go and tell that fox, I must walk to-day and to-morrow, and the day following.” The men of Galilee cannot kill me. “A prophet cannot perish out of Jerusalem.” The deep solemn music of the speech which follows has entered into the hearts of hundreds of thousands. They have received it in the best and truest way, as a testimony of Christ’s care and love for even the most worthless, as a declaration that those who are not gathered under his wings choose to be separate. But though this must be the force of the words, we do ourselves as well as the history, in its letter and spirit, an unspeakable wrong, if we forget that the words refer to an actual city; and that the curse upon that city was that of being left to be the victim of its own self-will, party-spirit, hypocrisy.

Chapter XIV

Another instance of healing on the Sabbath-day reminds us that we are still occupied with Pharisaical corruptions; that Christ is laying his axe to the root of them. The discourse which follows is said to be a parable. Yet it would seem to be only a simple comment upon the desire of men at a feast to seize the chief places. I apprehend that use of the word is very instructive. The parable never excludes a plain direct meaning. It is not worthless for the particular case to which it refers. But it takes that case as the manifestation of a law applicable to a number of much higher cases, belonging to the inner as well as the outward world. That habit of self-seeking which discovered itself in the struggle for the uppermost places at the feast, was the one which was undermining the Jewish nation, because it is the canker at the root of humanity itself, the great anti-christian, ungodly principle. It was not therefore the mere accident of a feast going forward which led our Lord to pass from this parable to his admonition, “when thou makest a supper, call not thy friends nor thy brethren, etc.” I do not undervalue the observation, that our Lord always used passing outward occurrences as texts of His discourse. It is a key to much that we read in these Gospels, and points out their infinite value as guides to the teacher. But the external occurrence is only an index to the more inward parts of His discourse. If He came to destroy the self-seeking, competitive spirit, which makes each man crave to be above his neighbor, He came to destroy another result of that same spirit, which makes men’s acts of kindness towards each other the result of a calculating spirit, the desire to be recompensed. And let us not fancy that our Lord is merely giving that principle another direction, that he is raising selfishness to a higher power, when He says, “Thou shalt be recompensed at the resurrection of the just.” For in all his discourses He had been teaching that this recompense is the being like God, who sends His rain upon the just and upon the unjust, upon the good and the evil. He would not indeed get rid of the name or idea of a recompense. The one is worked into the very tissue of language, because the other belongs to the very constitution of man and of the universe. The notion of excluding rewards is fantastical and absurd. But they may rest upon a principle the very opposite to selfishness, upon the divine order of which selfishness is the subversion. And I am bold to say that there is no case in all our Lord’s discourses, in which the recompense which he proposes to man, does not consist mainly in the deliverance from the selfishness which is his great torment and oppression, but upon which, alas, the followers and ministers of Christ have been content to build their notion of His kingdom in this world and in the world to come.

The topic of the feast is not exhausted. A man in the crowd felt instinctively that a society in which men should invite the poor and the blind and the halt, must be a kingdom of heaven: our Lord, he knew, had said that such a kingdom was at hand; “Blessed,” he exclaimed, “are these that shall eat bread in it, who shall be permitted to come to its festival.” Hence, the transition was natural to that spiritual feast which especially belongs to the kingdom of Heaven. According to the common notions which were current among the religious Jews, and are current among ourselves, this feast should be represented as far more select than the other. In proportion as its blessings are deeper, more removed from the sensual apprehensions of men, we should suppose that the invitations to it would be rarer. Common food might be thrown away upon common people, celestial dainties would be reserved for a special band, utterly unlike the vulgar, and separated from them. Such notions are very natural. There must be a truth latent in them, and yet there is the most intense falsehood latent in them, the very falsehood which undermined the Jewish nation, and has been at all times undermining the Christian Church. The spiritual is not less universal than the outward feast. The inward principle of the kingdom of heaven is revealed in the summons of the poor and halt and blind to the material supper. This is surely the great doctrine of the parable, which comes out here in quite another aspect than that which it bears in St. Matthew, partly from the incidents and discourses which border upon it, partly from some differences in its structure which are obvious to every reader. The king making a marriage for his son, a cardinal point in St. Matthew’s parable, is wanting here. It would evidently have been out of place, and drawn the mind away from the subject with which St. Luke desired to impress it. Again, the excuses in St. Matthew are merely general; here they are distinct and dramatical, exhibiting the different reasons which lead men to refuse the blessings, the universal blessings, which are lying most near to them, that they may grasp at distant accidental goods which they can call their own, and from which they can exclude their fellows. Thirdly, one very characteristic point in St. Matthew’s parable, the insult and murder of the messengers and the destruction of the city, which we might have looked for from the general character of the discourses in this part of St. Luke, is passed over; for this too, I imagine, belongs to the idea of the marriage of the son, but would not have added any thing to our impression respecting the feast as such, and the comprehensiveness of the invitations to it. Lastly, the fact of the man not having the wedding-garment, which illustrates very strikingly the doctrine, “Many are called, but few are chosen,” is not wanted to explain the great truth, that men lose this feast because they prefer their own selfish enjoyments to those which they must share with men who come from the streets and the highways. I should recommend the comparison of the two forms of this parable as one of the best exercises for the purpose of arriving at a knowledge of the distinct objects and general design of the Evangelists, as well as for ascertaining the nature of the parables in themselves.

I have spoken already upon the passage which follows. Every one has noticed that it is more emphatic in St. Luke than elsewhere. It is not “Whoso loveth father or mother more than me,” but, “Whosoever hateth not father and mother, and his own life also, cannot be my disciple.” We owe much, I believe, to this variation. If we had only the milder expression, there might be a justification for much of the language and conduct of those in the Romish communion and other communions, who have maintained that what they call religious duties are continually at variance with human duties, and that the one must give place to the other. Therefore it is always a question to be decided by a morbid conscience, or by a priest, when this struggle between the greater and the lesser love arises, and how the sacrifice is to be made. But no confessor or priest has courage to say, meaning what he says, “You must hate father and mother in order to save your soul;” only, “You must avoid the excess of love which would betray you.” But Christ says this. You contend that His words must not be explained away. Then do not explain them away. Find a meaning for these along with those other words, “Yea, and his own soul also,” and you will be worth listening to. I conceive that we are commanded to hate ourselves, our souls and bodies, and every thing that we prize merely as our own, in order that we may have that love which is in Christ, and which embraces father, mother, wife, children, our own souls, as all connected with Him, and based upon His relation to them and to us. In this way the passage would be in exact harmony with all that has preceded it. The Jew was resting his religion, his politics, his morality, his domestic affections, upon a ground of self. They would therefore all go to ruin, as we know they did. Christ came as the true root of humanity, the real foundation of all religion, politics, morality, domestic affections, the only reconciler of them with each other, the only security for their permanence. If any one would be His disciple, he must throw aside the other principle altogether, he must seek to banish it from his life. If he did not, he would find that he was engaging in a war with an enemy who would be far too mighty for him; he would be sitting down to build a tower which he could not finish. He would certainly send an embassy and desire conditions of peace with the great spiritual enemy of Christ and of men, if he was not ready to strip himself of all which he had, to give up his own self, his own righteousness, every thing which exalted him above another. Men are the salt of the earth, they keep it from putrefying while they have the divine, life-giving principle in them. All the selfishness of the world has not been suffered to destroy it; for there has been a seed proclaiming God, and not self, to be the ground of its institutions, the end of which they exist. But if that divine seed becomes itself infected with the maxim and principle of the corrupt world, if the religion of the elect becomes another and the most concentrated form of selfishness, how are they the salt of the earth? how can they ever become so? “He that hath ears to hear,” said our Lord, and His words do not pass away, “let him hear.”

Chapter XV

I might rest all that I have said respecting the peculiarities of St. Luke upon this chapter, the one in his Gospel which has probably exercised most influence upon the mind of Christendom in all periods. But I should be sorry, for the sake of using this advantage, to separate this passage from those which precede it, or to suggest the notion that there is any break in the line of the writer’s thoughts. The exclusiveness of the Pharisee, and of the Jewish nation as embodied in him, has been brought out before us in all that we have lately been reading. That exclusiveness has been exhibited as the anti-christian principle, the one which must hinder the Jew from believing in Him who was come as the King and Shepherd of men. It is in this character, I conceive, that St. Luke presents that sin which St. Matthew makes us feel to be an outrage upon the law and the prophets, the fulfilment and completion of all the evils which they had denounced.

The parable of “The Prodigal Son” has seemed to most persons to contain a hint of the Gentile economy, as well as an implicit condemnation of the Jew, who would not have his brother received back with music and dancing. Yet this has been rather the feeling of commentators than of the people. They have protested against any view of the parable which shall rob them of its distinct personal application, which shall make it not a message to the individual prodigal, but to all who will claim for themselves that character. They are right. The sure witness of the heart that this parable expresses the very inmost mind of God, cannot be set aside to make it square with any interpretations, however reasonable, however seemingly consonant with the circumstances and intention of the Evangelist. But if we really look to this discourse of our Lord’s for a revelation of the divine purpose, we shall find that all the different views of it which become in themselves either dry and scholastic, or narrow and partial, are pervaded by a higher light which harmonizes them.

In the first place, we should take the incidents of the story simply as they stand. The parable is not a tale about some distant beings. Actual publicans and sinners were about our Lord, actual Pharisees were murmuring, “This Man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them.” Of these sinners our Lord surely speaks when He says, that the shepherd leaves the ninety and nine in the wilderness to seek the one sheep that was lost; of these, when He speaks of the woman sweeping the house diligently till she finds her piece of money. We shall misunderstand St. Luke greatly, and St. Paul more, if we suppose that they concern themselves chiefly about Gentiles as such. They are born Jews. All their heart and sympathies are essentially Jewish. But they have found out that to be Jews they must be men. It is a Gospel to men, a covenant with men they require, and therefore with the Gentiles, or with all nations. The remark is surely obvious enough. My reader may almost smile that I state it with so much emphasis. But I do not think he knows how much the commentators, how much the Christian world, how much he and I have forgotten it, or what incalculable confusion and loss have ensued from this forgetfulness. If we can once fairly rid ourselves of it, I believe the Gospel of St. Luke, and the Epistles of St. Paul, will come out to us as quite new books, new, though they are essentially the old books, with the very words we have read from childhood, taken even more literally and simply than we took them then.

With this one thought on our mind, we shall come to the story of the younger and the elder son without the least fear that we shall be cheated of any of its individual significance, if it should comprehend the widest views of God’s purposes in the history of the world. If the prodigal is spoken of from the very first as a son, if the hard-hearted elder brother in the field is told, “all that I have is thine,” we must be prepared to ask ourselves manfully, whether these are not the primary facts and laws of the New Dispensation, whether the Gospel is not a claim for men as men to be sons of God; an assertion that they must be prodigals, joining themselves to citizens of the country and feeding swine, till they know that to be the case; and that if they do know it, the condition of their enjoying it and being the better for it, is that they should recognize the right of all, the most outcast, to the title, and should rejoice when they come back with a new and childlike delight to claim it. The view of God’s purposes in all His dealings with mankind, which the parable thus considered sets forth, is indeed most comfortable to the reader of Gentile as well as Jewish history; but it interprets still more remarkably the modern world than the old, the right which Christendom has had to claim for all its sons and daughters sonship to God, the impossibility of attaching any thing but a narrow and formal meaning to the ordinance which stamps us Christians, if it does not proclaim that truth to each one of us. At the same time it contains the most earnest encouragement spread far and wide the Gospel (that is to say, the good news to men of their sonship), and a warning of the great guilt by turning Baptism into a plea for exclusiveness, into a denial of that human privilege which it asserts and upon which its glory rests. But along with this general force, the parable carries in it the history of each man who comes to himself; showing how that return to human sanity can be nothing else than the discovery of an actual Father, how this discovery implies the acknowledgment of an attraction and influence proceeding from Him, a confession that He has sought for the lost sheep, has swept diligently for the piece of money. And here we see how the lines of St. Matthew and St. Luke, starting from different points, meet and coincide. The one shows us Christ revealing a Father, the other Christ bestowing a Spirit; but the Spirit guides the lost child to the Father; the moment his heart is awakened by that touch, he knows from whence it must have proceeded.

Chapter XVI

The covetousness of the Jew has been brought before us already under various aspects. We have seen that it is the sin which the New Testament generally—this Gospel particularly imputes to him. We must not, under pretence of finding out a more spiritual signification, shrink from giving the word its most vulgar force as denoting the mere craving for money and grasping it when obtained. On the other hand, we must not limit the disease by this manifestation of it. The worst form of it, that which touched the vitals of the nation, was the religious form; but those who exhibited this would often exhibit the other; if they did not, they would communicate it to persons whose tastes and education were different from their own. These remarks are very necessary to the understanding of this chapter.

The two parables in it ought, I conceive, to be considered together. The Jew was a steward who, by his dispensation of God’s bounties, whether material or spiritual, was to show what He is and what He requires of those who possess advantages which their fellow-men have not. This steward is accused to his Lord that he has wasted his goods. They have been in the strictest sense wasted, because, according to the law under which they are held, they must decay and grow less if they are not scattered abroad. The steward is called to account; God makes him feel in himself that he has violated a trust. The hour is coming when he will be cast out of it. What shall he do? He cannot confess his fault; he cannot begin a new course of effort. But he can use his commission as a means of getting friends. He can make men, in whom there has been kindled an earnest sense of obligation to some divine teacher and friend, feel that these obligations are less than they had fancied. He can destroy in the peoples of the earth the religion which they have; he can rob them of that conscience and moral instinct with which God had endowed them. Who can doubt that this was the effect of the Jew’s presence and false witness in a number of heathen lands? Who can doubt that his unbelief in these idols helped to deprive the heathens of the flickering, insecure faith which they had, while his own godlessness supplied nothing in the place of it? How strictly was this putting fifty measures of wheat or of oil where the conscience had written a hundred! And yet was the steward wrong in thinking that he was meant to win the love of these people about him? or that the treasures which God had given him were to be the means of winning it? No, surely, he was right; he made the discovery in a roundabout way, which, if he had made it before, would have changed him from an unfaithful into a faithful servant. If he had dispensed his master’s wealth as he was meant to do, instead of fancying that it was given for his own use and behoof—instead of thinking that to possess it was the great blessing of all—he would have found the mammon of unrighteousness, which proved a millstone about his neck, a mighty blessing. And I say unto you, my disciples, Use the money which God gives you for Him, not for yourselves, and it will bring in friends who will not merely give you the temporary refuge which the cast-off servant sought, but will receive you in your hours of weakness and sorrow into their very heart of hearts, will bear you with them when they are kneeling in the presence of their Father.

That most important hint or digression connects the meaning and moral of the parable with the coming age, makes it an explanation of some of the contradictory facts in the history of Christendom—the position, habits, and influence of Jews in the modern world being of course not the least remarkable—and enforces it with especial emphasis upon any nation which is brought into contact with others in merchandise or government, and which has a large store of the mammon of unrighteousness, a great disposition to worship it. But we must not let our Lord’s passing commendation of the steward, valuable as it is in bringing out the sense of the parable, cause us to forget that he proceeds at once to the words, “He that is unjust in the least is unjust also in much; and if ye have been unfaithful with the unrighteous mammon, who shall commit to you the true riches?” or that he then introduces a sentence apparently out of all connection with what has gone before: “The law and the prophets were until John: since that time the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force. It is easier for heaven and earth to pass, than for one tittle of the law to fail. Whoso putteth away his wife, and marrieth another, committeth adultery; and whoso marrieth her that is put away, committeth adultery.”

I apprehend that this association of thoughts, puzzling as it may seem to an ordinary critic, is one which the conscience of the hearer will not have been slow to recognize and justify. Mammon-worship was becoming the only worship of the Jew; his subsequent history was already foreshadowed in the tendencies of that time. Before he could obtain the true inward riches, the riches of the heavenly kingdom, he must have some sense of the responsibility attaching to his outward treasures; he must know that they are not his own. Ever since John’s time the message about the kingdom of heaven had been stirring men’s hearts mightily; there had been a pressure into it; a craving to know what it was. And those who did desire this knowledge with all their hearts would obtain it; the violent would take it by force. But there were a number who thought the kingdom of heaven a mere kingdom of privileges, where the rigidness of the law would be relaxed, where men would be permitted licenses which they had not under Moses and the prophets. Far indeed was that from being the case. One tittle of the law could not fail. Nay, there were privileges and permissions granted under that law which in the kingdom of heaven could have no place. The law would be fulfilled, for instance, by a more severe enforcement of the bond of marriage—that bond which Jews and Gentiles at this time were so continually breaking—than it had been wise or possible for Moses to make. Thus St. Luke fulfils his own special task. While he is denouncing the sins and foretelling the judgment of the Old Dispensation, he is asserting the principles and conditions of the New; he is showing how essentially that dispensation would be one of inward and universal principle and practice, not of strict rule and occasional exceptions.

But I said that the second parable could not be separated from the first. That the Gentile world is set forth in Lazarus, the Jewish nation in the man clothed with purple and fine linen, has been an old belief, which a careful student of the Gospel as an orderly narrative can hardly avoid; but which, as in the case of the Prodigal Son, has been encountered by the witness in the consciences of Christians, that the story must be meant for themselves. If I had the least notion that it applied less directly to us, because it brought out the contrast with which the Evangelist is always busy, and applied that contrast to the hearts of the Jews who were standing round our Lord, I should suspect myself and better interpreters of a mistake, if the evidence were ever so strong in our favor. But I apprehend the ordinary way of looking at the parable, as if it were merely a story about two individual men—of making it in fact not a parable at all,—destroys the point of it as bearing upon our own lives, and gives us excuses for escaping from its warnings. For we say to ourselves, that after all it is only a story. Having asserted its literal meaning, we are afraid of taking it literally, lest we should sanction opinions about the state and feelings of the departed which we think unsafe. I am far from pronouncing that they would be unsafe, or from sanctioning the dangerous notion that we are to shrink from the strictest meaning of Scripture, lest it should involve us in Romish opinions or any other. But I am satisfied that the English public do not take the words plainly and simply as the record of a fact; and therefore they cannot complain of any who are influenced by a consideration of the context to regard it as a parable respecting races and dispensations, believing that in this way the individual truth and moral of it will be only the more apparent. Certainly the words “purple and fine linen,” would naturally denote to any Jew the garments of the king and the priest; the being carried by angels into Abraham’s bosom, the adoption into the covenant which God made with Abraham. This would be the ordinary strict way of interpreting a parable; to follow its symbols carefully, and render them according to the nature of the subject from which they are drawn. By doing so, I apprehend we understand the covetousness of Dives in its heights and in its depths; the covetousness of religious privileges which he valued because others were not the sharers of them; the covetousness which made money the standard of worth, the conditions under which it was held the rule by which all blessings were measured. To say that this was the habit of a nation, is not surely to say that it was not the habit of a given individual in that nation, any more than we say that an actual dog may not have licked an actual beggar’s sores, because we take that to be a beautiful symbol of the sympathy which outward nature, and the animal creation, expressed for those whom God’s chosen witnesses were neglecting; of the witness they bore of His care and love to hearts which could have received no impression respecting Him from those who were sent into the world to declare His name, and show forth His image, except that He was exclusive, capricious, hard-hearted. Nor can I see how the belief that the parable speaks of the translation of the other nations to the privileges of which the Jews showed themselves unmindful, takes away the edge of its application to those nations, seeing that five brethren are spoken of who might come into the same place of torment into which their elder brother had come, unless they took warning from the judgment upon his covetousness and cruelty. And if the highest punishment which could reach him was to be excluded from the office he had abused, to be stripped of his priestly and royal robes, to be left to feel what a gulf his covetousness had put between him and whatever was pure and loving in the past or the present, I cannot understand how this lesson bears less directly upon each one of us, who under whatever color is making self an idol, because we feel that it also bears upon the state and destiny of Christendom and of every Church in it.

Chapter XVII

This parable has taught us that the sin of the New Dispensation would be the same as that of the Old. The covetousness of the Jew had caused offences innumerable; the same cause would always produce the same effects; “It is impossible but that offences will come; but woe unto him through whom they come!” Thus I connect the first paragraph of this chapter, and the lesson respecting the means of avoiding offences which we have considered at large in St. Matthew, with the general subject of our Lord’s discourses on his way to Jerusalem.

The passage follows, “And the Apostles said unto the Lord, Increase our faith. And the Lord said, ‘If ye had faith as a grain of mustard-seed, ye might say unto this sycamine-tree, Be thou plucked up by the root, and be thou planted in the sea; and it should obey you. But which of you, having a servant plowing 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? 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.’ And it came to pass, as he went to Jerusalem, that he passed through the midst of Samaria and Galilee.” This passage is found only in St. Luke, with the exception of the words, “If ye had faith as a grain of mustard-seed,” which has been noticed among the passages that are common to all the Evangelists. I have often had occasion to remark that the habit of mind which our Lord was denouncing in the Jews generally, displayed itself in various forms in the Apostles, and that he was destroying those seeds of it in them which would have made them utterly unfit to testify against it in their countrymen. Their prayer for an increase of faith, plausible as it sounded, He seems to tell us was itself mixed with covetous desires, which are the great antagonists of faith. They wanted to have a great amount of faith, not that they might serve God with it, but themselves. They wanted faith as a something upon which they could plume themselves, and which would set them above others; they must learn that God gives men faith that they may do His work, not that they may have a feast of their own.

We are especially reminded that the miracle of healing the ten lepers was on the way to Jerusalem. The facts of it serve better than many discourses, as an intimation to the Jew of that fact which had already been announced in the parable of the Good Samaritan, that there was more openness of heart to receive God’s loving-kindness in those who were outside the nation and excluded from many of its privileges, than in those who had them all. The importance of the lesson for St. Luke’s design, and especially for this part of his narrative, does not need to be pointed out.

If the following passage were not so remarkably illustrative of this design, I might be tempted to dwell upon it for another purpose, because it so strikingly confirms that view of the coming of the Son of Man, and of the revelation of His Kingdom, which I deduced from the account of the last days in the three Evangelists. St. Luke has brought here several of the passages which the other two introduce into the discourse respecting the temple and its goodly buildings. He introduces them in answer to a demand of the Pharisees, “When the kingdom of God should come?” The answer is, “The kingdom of God cometh not with observation; for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” The passage is often quoted; few perhaps, in our day so often. But it is always quoted with a reservation, that there is a kingdom of God without as well as within, and that all the passages in the Gospels which refer to the coming of the Son of Man, speak of that outward kingdom, not of the other. How does this doctrine accord with the context of the words? St. Luke immediately proceeds to use that very language, which occurs elsewhere, as the description of the coming of the Son of Man, as if it were a part of His answer to the Pharisees, and was to expand and explain His condemnation of their materialism. What can we infer from these words, but that the great events in the outward world were to discover that kingdom which was not to come with observation; that they would bring to light that kingdom which is within, lying at the very root of each man’s being and of the being of society, the order which God had established in the beginning, and which, on the breaking up of the outer fabric of the Jewish polity, would come forth in new power? That the gospel of the Spirit should set forth this truth we might well expect; that the Evangelist of the new and human dispensation should record the words which declare its nature, and its permanent eternal foundation, cannot be strange; that such an announcement of the new and true Jerusalem should accompany the series of warnings which were preparing Christ’s disciples for His rejection in the old, at least gives a consistency and awefulness to the words befitting Him who is said to have uttered them.

Chapter XVIII

It is needless to inquire at any time upon what principle the dividers of chapters in the New Testament proceeded. I presume they had a notion that parables were in some measure to be sorted together, and to be separated, when it was possible, from discourses not of their nature; else one could not account for a parable that men ought always to pray, and not to faint, being disjoined from the previous warnings respecting the coming of the Son of Man, even though it concludes with the words, “Nevertheless when the Son of Man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?” Unquestionably they had a right to think that this parable has a worth of its own apart from any of its incidents; that it describes the very impulse to prayer, the consciousness of being haunted and tormented by an adversary; that it shows how men must and will pray so long as they have a notion that there is a Judge of the earth at all, even though they think that He is an unfeeling and indifferent one; and that all the deepest encouragement to prayer lies in the belief that He is one who cares to set them free from their oppressor. But this everlasting significance is realized a thousand times more, if we suppose that there was a crisis when every thing looked dark and terrible; when the Son of Man seemed to have deserted the earth over which He had brooded for so many generations, and which He had at last visited as one of its inhabitants; when His disciples looked and looked in vain for a glimpse of His day; when the adversary seemed quite invincible, and judges and rulers to regard neither God nor man. And if then, just then when all hearts were waxing feeble and tongues cleaving to the roof of the mouth, there came an actual revelation amidst thunders and lightnings of Christ’s power and presence and permanent royalty:—that would be a consolation indeed to men in all ages, that would be an encouragement to God’s elect to cry day and night even in the most oppressive circumstances of their lives, since they might be certain that He was hearing them and about to answer them when He seemed to bear longest with them.

St. Luke had used the words “His own elect.” Could there be better, more genial, more encouraging words? If a man does not look upon himself as called by God, what strength can he have to pray? How can he ask for deliverance if he does not believe that God wills to deliver him, and that his adversary who seeks to destroy him is God’s adversary? But was there no danger accompanying this righteous and necessary confidence? Might it not lead a man to despise others, to glorify himself? If it should take that effect upon him, what effect would it have upon his prayer? Our Lord answers the question in a parable which must always be looked upon as the necessary pendant to the other. If a man does think that he is not like other men, he cannot pray; he is conscious of no adversary; he is not flying to a judge from that adversary. Unless he says, “God be merciful to me a sinner,” unless he takes the lowest place among men and seeks deliverance as a man, and not as better than other men, he does not know what he wants to be set free from, he does not know who is to set him free; he has no faith, his conscience has no justification. What a paradox is here! The elect man must look upon himself as one with all other men, else he cannot feel that God is hearing him, God is justifying him. A man who stands upon his separation, cannot feel that God has called him or has any thing to do with him; his very effort to separate himself from the world, proves that he belongs to the world; for what is the world in its evil sense, but a set of individuals who are trying to set themselves one above another, to sever themselves one from another? It is a paradox surely, the paradox of Christianity, the one which we shall find the Apostle of the Gentiles continually bringing before us, the one which has caused the greatest perplexity and confusion to the readers of his epistles who have thought that they could clear him of the difficulty by getting rid of one or the other of the facts which he acknowledged and which I think we shall find he reconciled.

I have given full scope to the wish of readers that this parable should have an universal character, for I have not even noticed the circumstance, which scarcely any one passes over, that the persons in it are a Pharisee and a Publican. That circumstance at once connects it with the general subject of these discourses, the discovery of that falsehood in the Jew by which he was perverting and inverting the purpose of God in calling him, so bringing down that exclusion upon himself which he supposed that God desired for all others. The passages which follow, to the 30th verse, have been commented upon at some length already. What I said of them generally, will explain their special suitableness to this place.

I have also spoken of the passage beginning with the 31st verse; but I would notice it here as one of a number of allusions to the going up to Jerusalem which give a peculiarly pathetic character to these chapters, and which do not suffer us to forget to what object it is that every warning, encouragement, and event, is subordinate. The last incident has a touching connection with the ignorance of the disciples spoken of in the 34th verse. How it was that their Master should be scourged and spitted on and put to death, the disciples could not understand; nor will any words, even Christ’s own, teach a man, Jew or Christian, how the great King should be the great sufferer. Suffering must teach him. The blind man who cried, “Thou Son of David, have mercy upon me,” and whom the disciples would not permit to approach Him, discovered for himself, teaches us, that only He who is a brother of man in his sorrows, can be his Lord and deliverer.

Chapter XIX

I cannot help connecting the opening story of this chapter with the concluding one of the last. The old notion of Zacchæus as an extortioner whom our Lord reformed by His divine Spirit, though it has been thrown aside by some modern interpreters, is, I think, the most consistent with the facts of the story. The Pharisees were too well used to our Lord’s intercourse with publicans, to be struck with any common instance of the kind. If they said, “He is gone to be guest with a man that is a sinner,” the natural inference, in the absence of other evidence, is that he was worse than his class, that he had notoriously got his riches by means which were common but not universal in it. The words of Zacchæus certainly do not diminish this probability; they have all the air and effect of a new resolution; no one would fancy from them that he had not taken any thing from any man by false accusation. Our Lord’s words therefore, “This day has salvation come to this house, forsomuch as he also is a son of Abraham,” would express at once a recognition of an outcast class as included in the covenant, and an assurance that the great blessing of the covenant was deliverance or salvation from the sin by which the children of Abraham were kept from God. That the particular sin in this case was the one which our Lord had been bringing home to Pharisees and to the whole nation, and which He had foretold as the cause of its coming ruin, gives an emphasis to this moral miracle, and shows why it should have been associated with the physical miracle of healing the blind man, as an attestation of the kingship which Jesus would claim on His entrance into the city. If this is not the purport of the story, it would seem too unimportant to record at so memorable a crisis of the history as the one we have reached.

Again, we are told that He spake a parable because He was nigh to Jerusalem, and because they thought that the kingdom of God would immediately appear. This parable is often compared with the one in the 25th chapter of St. Matthew, called the Ten Talents. The obvious differences between them are, that there various sums are given to the servants, that here one pound is given to each; that there the reward to the servants who had improved their money by trading, is entering into the joy of their Lord, here it is having dominion over ten or five cities; that there is no allusion to any revolt of citizens or to their being punished, that here, as in the case of St. Matthew’s parable of the king making a marriage for his son, these are conspicuous and capital incidents. In fact, it seems to me that the rest of the parable must be looked at in subordination to them. The journey to Jerusalem and the solemn preparations for it, had led the disciples to suppose that then there would be some great display of Christ’s kingdom, nay, that it would be actually set up. The answer is, “No. First of all there will be a message from the citizens, ‘we will not have this man to reign over us.’ Then there will be an intermediate period during which different servants of the king will be endued with a power which they may either neglect or cultivate; then there will be a trial of each of them to see what he has done; then there will be a judgment upon the citizens. All this will happen before the kingdom is established.” All this I believe corresponded precisely to the period before the Ascension; to the Apostolic age, after the gift of the Spirit; to the events preceding the destruction of Jerusalem; to its overthrow. Whether the parable loses any of its force for the later Christian Church from this immediate application, must depend on the estimate we form of the endowments of that Church. If every one of its members, besides any particular talents fitting him for some particular occupation, receives the higher and general gift of an indwelling Spirit, his responsibility for that treasure cannot be less because Christians who received it in the intermediate age, when the Old Dispensation was passing away and the New had not fully come, were called to account for their stewardship of it; receiving in proportion to the profit they had made of it greater powers of usefulness, more extensive government over their fellows, or being utterly deprived of that which they had, and which they treated as if it was a semblance, not a reality. Only upon the supposition that the Church for eighteen hundred years has been left barren of that which is said in Scripture to constitute its very essence, does this parable, however exquisitely and strictly appropriate to the apostolic times, cease to be a guide for ours.

At this place we come to the great meeting-point of the different Evangelists, the descent from the Mount of Olives. St. Luke has given us a more obvious and direct preparation for that event than either of the others. In one important particular he enlarges the history of it: “I tell you,” says our Lord to the Pharisees, complaining of the disciples for their hosannas, “if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out.” And those words are explained by the tears which He sheds immediately after when He comes near the city and beholds it. Within a few years the stones of the city which were held together by the praises of the babes and sucklings, would indeed cry out: “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.”

Chapters XX. XXI. XXII. XXIII

In the first two of these chapters there is nothing of which I have not spoken at some length. The account of the last Supper in the 22d chapter contains three memorable peculiarities. First, the institution of the new feast is distinguished from the participation of the old far more markedly than by the other Evangelists. The words, “I say unto you, I will not eat any more of this passover, until it be fulfilled in the kingdom of God,” and, “I will not drink of the fruit of the vine, until the kingdom of God shall come,” are said with great distinctness after He had eaten the unleavened bread and handed round the paschal lamb, and before He took bread and gave thanks, saying, “This is my body which is given for you,” and the cup, saying, “This is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you.” I can conceive no more decisive proof of the fact that St. Luke was, and felt himself to be, in a peculiar sense the Evangelist of the New Dispensation, than this difference furnishes. The second is not equally important, but still, I think, highly significant. St. Luke speaks of a strife among them at this very feast, which of them should be accounted the greatest. “And he said unto them, The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them; and they that exercise authority upon them are called benefactors. But ye shall not be so: but he that is greatest among you, let him be as the younger; and he that is chief, as he that doth serve. For whether is greater, he that sitteth at meat, or he that serveth? is not he that sitteth at meat? but I am among you as he that serveth. Ye are they which have continued with me in my temptations. And I appoint unto you a kingdom, as my Father hath appointed unto me; that ye may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom, and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” The fact of such a strife as this at such a moment, is the most humbling, and therefore one of the most instructive, facts in the New Testament. First, they ask who is the betrayer; next, which of them shall take precedence of the others. To show how this feast was to break down the ideas of rivalship and precedence, even of one being the benefactor of another except in the sense of being more a servant; this was surely a fitting work for Him who had just instituted a sacrificial feast, and was Himself to be a sacrifice. Yet while their thoughts of power are crushed by His words and acts at once, how confidently does He promise them the real power, how He repeats all that He had ever said to them of a kingdom and their own place in it. A kingdom based on sacrifice would be actually proclaimed in the world; if they could give up themselves, they would be kings and judges in it. The third passage is the one which has caused so much perplexity to interpreters, respecting the purse, the script, and the sword, which the Apostles had not taken on their first mission, but which they would require now. I do not know that I understand the passage. But it looks to me like a reconsecration of common things which it had been proved that Christ’s disciples did not want, but yet which He would hallow and adopt into His service. They had found that their Master could support them though they had none of these things; they were to depend upon His support when they had them; but the earth would be redeemed; both the ploughshare, and the sword, and the money-bag, might be used for God in the new economy as they had been in the old. Supposing this to be the sense of the words, and it is nearly the sense which a great many have put on them, and is perhaps latent in all the Middle-age refinements and fancies respecting the two swords,—it would be in accordance with the object which we have traced through St. Luke, that he should record the conversation, as he records shortly after the mistake which the disciples made respecting the time and mode of using the sword, and our Lord’s practical correction of it.

In the account of the Arraignment and of the Passion in the 23d chapter, St. Luke has several important variations. First, he alone records our Lord’s being sent to Herod. Secondly, it is he who relates the words to the daughters of Jerusalem on the way to Calvary. Thirdly, it is he who gives the words on the cross, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” Fifthly, he tells the story of the penitent malefactor, Finally, he relates the words, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” I merely record these differences for your own meditation. A thoughtful and devout reader does not wish for many words upon such a topic; he will have learnt in better ways, than through any teaching of mine, what the power and worth of these passages in the narrative are. I only suggest to him, that instead of being breaks in the narrative of St. Luke, or accidental additions to it, they harmonize most strikingly with the structure and purpose of the Gospel; so that if the narrative of either of the other Evangelists were substituted for it, we should feel, though we might not know why, a shock and jar in our minds; I am sure that it is so, though I might not be able to illustrate my meaning without going into refinements which I should wish to avoid, and which might hurt the reader’s inner perception more than they cultivated his understanding. But it can do no harm to make the remark, which every reader has probably made for himself, that an Evangelist who recorded the story of the woman who wept at the feet of Jesus, and the parable of the Prodigal Son, was the one from whom one would have expected to hear the words, “To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise,” which St. Matthew, I conceive, for the best and wisest reasons, was not suffered to record or to know.

Chapter XXIV

The whole story of the journey to Emmaus in this chapter belongs exclusively to St. Luke. I think a great many have felt and confessed, that this story has led them, more than any other, to an apprehension of a risen Lord, and of the kind of communication which might have existed between Him and His disciples; very different from what it had been before the Passion, but different in being more real, more intimate, mixed with greater awe, yet producing a greater glow and warmth of heart, rarer in words, communicating deeper instruction, making that which had been heard dimly before intelligible, diffusing peace, enabling the heart to enter into mysteries which had been floating vaguely about it. The sense of a body delivered from the chains of death, essentially the same as it was before, using naturally as its own, powers which had been hidden or had only occasionally come forth, is one part, not the only or perhaps the chief part, of the revelation. Its capacity of vanishing and of reappearing is felt to indicate the possibility of a spiritual presence, which may be continually near, and in which men may be meant ever to abide.

Now, if this is the impression which St. Luke’s words make on us, they carry us beyond the forty days after the Resurrection. They leave upon our minds a certainty that we are at the beginning, not the end of a history. If there has been a Resurrection, we feel there must be an Ascension. Men have believed it. Why? Because there was a great array of external proofs and evidences to confirm it? Where are they? Who has ever found them, or believed any stupendous fact of this kind, upon the strength of them? Men have for eighteen hundred years accepted the fact of the Ascension upon the testimony of this one Evangelist, confirmed by the few words of St. Mark, because it was not an incredible thing to those once believing in a Son of God, and King of men, that it should be so; but incredible that it should not be so; incredible that He should be bound by any chains of space and time, that He should not have led captivity to them captive, that He should not be as actual and personal, as when He was loaded with those fetters which hinder us from realizing our personality, from being what we feel we are meant to be; that He should not be actually at the right hand of God, actually the bond of union and fellowship among men. The Evangelist of the New Dispensation casts forth this belief upon the world, asking no special homage to his own authority, producing no overpowering weight of testimony to crush unbelief, announcing it as good tidings to men, which the wants of men and the wisdom of God in the generations to come would establish, though all the earthly witnesses of it should prove utterly vain and futile, though all the power and all the wisdom of the world should proclaim that God had not set His Son upon the holy hill of Sion, and that the rulers of the earth owed Him no homage.