and the whole class who think with you, are hypocritical actors," said He; "your words prove it, for they are contradicted by your daily conduct. Do you not loose your asses, or your oxen, from the manger, where they are tied, on the Sabbath, and lead them away to water them? And if so, ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham, and, as such, one of God's own people-who is of unspeakably greater worth than any ox or ass, to be loosed to-day, though it be the Sabbath, from this bond, with which Satan has chained her, for now, eighteen years?"

There could be no reply to such a vindication. The ruler and his party were silenced, and put to shame before the quick-witted audience. The worship of the letter had received another deadly blow.

A second incident, very similar, occurred soon after. One of the . leading Pharisees had invited Jesus to dine with him on the Sabbath, as the day specially devoted to social entertainments by the Rabbis, with the sinister design of watching Him and reporting to those in authority. A number of Rabbis and Pharisees had been in. vited to meet Him, but they had not yet lain down to their meal, when a man, ill with dropsy, entered the open door of the house, with others who dropped in, with Oriental freedom, to look on, and stand about. In his case, no doubt, the motive of his coming was that he might attract the notice of Jesus. He was afraid, however, to speak, for fear of those present, and patiently waited to see if Jesus would, of His own accord, cure him. He had not long to wait. Looking at him, Jesus turned to the guests with the question He had asked before, in similar circumstances-"Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath, or is it not?" In their consciences they could not say it was not, but few men have the courage of their opinions, when current sentiment runs the other way, so they were silent. But silence was a virtual affirmative, for, if it were wrong, it was their bounden duty, as the public guardians of religion, to say so. Passing over, therefore, to the swollen and wretched being, He put His hand on him; cured him at once, and sent him away. Then, turning to the confused and baffled company, He completed their discomfiture by an appeal similar to that which He had made in the case of the woman healed shortly before. "Which of you, let me ask, if his son, or even only his ox, had fallen into a pit, would not immediately draw him out, on discovering it-even on the Sabbath?" No wonder that nothing further was said on the subject.

The couches on which the guests reclined at meals were arranged so as to form three sides of a square, the fourth being left open to allow the servants to bring in the dishes. The right-hand couch was reckoned the highest, and the others, the middle, and the lowest, respectively, and the places on each couch were distinguished in the same way, from the fact that the guest who reclined with his head, as it were, in the bosom of him behind, seemed to be the lower of the two. The highest place on the highest couch, was, thus, the

"chief place;" and human nature, the same in all ages, inevitably made it be eagerly coveted, and as precedence was marked by distance from it, there was an almost equal anxiety to get as near it as possible. With the vanity and self-righteousness of a moribund caste, there was no little scheming among the Rabbis for the best place, and much anxiety on the part of the host not to give offence; for to place a Rabbi below any one not a Rabbi, or below a fellow Rabbi of lower standing, or younger, was an unpardonable affront, and a discredit to religion itself. The intolerable pride that had made one of their order, in the days of Alexander Jannæus, seat himself between Alexander and his queen, on the ground that "wisdom" made its scholars sit among princes, remained unchanged. Such petty ambition, so unworthy in public teachers of morals and religion, and so entirely in contrast with His own instructions to His disciples, to seek no distinction but that of the deepest humility, did not fail to strike the GREAT GUEST, who had calmly taken the place assigned Him. Addressing the company-" You are wrong," said He, in revealing your wishes, and obtruding your self-assertion in such a way. Let me counsel you how to act. If invited to a marriage feast, never take the chief place on the couches, lest some one of higher standing for learning or piety come, and your host ask you to go down to a lower place, to make room for the more honoured guest. Take, rather, the lowest place, when you enter, that your host, when he comes in, may invite you to take a higher, and thus honour you before all. Pride is its own punishment, in this, as in far graver matters, for, whether before God or man, he who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted."

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It was an old custom in Israel to invite the poorer neighbours to the special meals on the consecrated flesh of offerings not used at the altar, and on similar half-religious occasions, to brighten their poverty for the moment, by kindly hospitality. This beautiful usage was, in the time of Jesus, among the things of the past, for the priest or Rabbi of His day would have trembled at the thought of being defiled by contact with people whose position made it impossible to be as scrupulous in the observance of the endless legal injunctions demanded, as themselves.

The meal at which Jesus was now present was very possibly one to which, in old times, such very different guests would have been asked. Or, it may be, the luxury displayed drew the attention of cne so simple in His habits. Not a few neighbours, in very different circumstances from the guests, had likely entered, to look on and listen, but caste looked at them askance, as if they were an inferior race. Noticing this, our Lord addressed Himself to the host in a friendly way:

"Have you ever thought what hospitality would yield you most pleasure? When you wish on special occasions to give a dinner or supper, let me tell you what you would always look back upon with

the purest joy. Do not invite your rich friends to it, or your family or kinsmen, or well-to-do neighbours. They will invite you in return, and this will destroy the worth of your act, for which you expect a recompense from God at the resurrection. Instead of such guests, invite the poor, the hungry, the lame, the maimed, and the blind. If you entertain such, they will reward you richly by their gratitude, and if you have invited them from an honest heart, as a duty, God Himself will remember it at the resurrection of the righteous.

One of the guests had listened attentively. The mention of the resurrection of the righteous, naturally, under the circumstances, raised the thought of the heavenly banquet which the Rabbis expected to follow that event. "Blessed are those," said he, "who shall cat bread at the great feast in the Kingdom of God, after the resurrection. It would, indeed, be well to give such entertainments as Thou hast named, which would be thus so richly repaid in the world to come.

This remark gave Jesus an opportunity of delivering a parable which must have run terribly counter to the prejudices of the company. The spirit of caste that prevailed in the hierarchical party, and their utter want of sympathy for the down-trodden masses, were abhorrent to His whole nature. It was daily clearer that the relig ious and moral impulse by which He was to revolutionize the world, would never come from Israel as a nation. The opportunity had been offered and even pressed, but it had been rejected, and hence He was free to proclaim the great truth, which, for a time, He had held back, that the Heathen, as well as the Jew, was invited, on equal terms, to the privileges of the New Kingdom of God. It was specially necessary in these last months of IIis life to make this prominent, that the minds of the disciples, above all, might be prepared for a revolution of thought so momentous and signal. He, therefore, now, took every opportunity of showing that the invitations of the New Kingdom, in fulfilment of the eternal purpose of God, were to be addressed as freely to heathen as to Israel, and that the religion He was founding was one of spirit, and truth, and liberty, for the WHOLE WORLD. This revelation, so transcendent in the history of the race, He once more disclosed, had they been able to understand Him, at the Pharisee's table.

"A certain man," said He, as if in answer to the last speaker, "made a great supper, and invited many guests; doing so early, that they might have ample time to prepare, and keep themselves free from other engagements. When the hour fixed for the banquet came, he sent his servant-as is usual-once more to those invited, to say that all was ready, and to pray them to come. But though they had had ample time to make all arrangements, they were still alike busy and unconcerned about the invitation, and, as if by common agreement, each in turn excused himself from accepting it. 'I have just bought a field,' said one, ‘and must go and see it-I beg your master

will hold me excused'-and went off to his land. 'It is impossible for me to come,' said another, for I have just bought five yoke of oxen, and am on the point of starting to try them.' A third begged to be excused because he had only just married, and therefore could not come, as he had a feast of his own.

"The servant had, therefore, to return to his master with this sorry list of excuses, each of which was a marked affront. 'I shall see that my feast has not been prepared for nothing,' said he to the servant-go out, at once, to the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in all the poor, the maimed, the blind, and the lame you can find, that my table may be filled.'

"There was still room, however, after this had been done. 'Go outside the city to the country roads and hedgeways,' said the householder, and gather any waifs and beggars you find, and compel them to come in, for my house must be filled, and none of the men I invited to my supper will taste it.'"

Had the hearers but known it, this parable was a deadly thrust at their most cherished prejudices. The priests and Rabbis, leaders of the nation, had been invited again and again by Jesus and His disciples, to the spiritual banquet of the New Kingdom, but they had despised the invitation, on any excuse, or on none. The poor and outcast people, the sinners and publicans, and the hated multitude, who neglected the Rabbinical rules, had then been summoned, and had gladly come, and, now, the invitation was to go forth to those outside Israel-the abhorred heathen-and they, too, were to come freely, and sit down at the great table of the kingdom of the Messiah, with no conditions or disabilities; while they who, in their pride, had refused to come, were finally rejected.

It was the proclamation, once more, of the mighty truth which might well be too hard for those who first heard it, to understand, since it is imperfectly realized after nineteen centuries-that external rites and formal acts are of no value with God, in themselves: that He looks at the conscience alone: that neither circumcision nor sacrifices, nor legal purifications, nor rigid observance of Sabbath laws, nor fasts, but the state of the heart, determines the relation of man to God.

Before leaving the world, our Lord would put it beyond question that His religion knew no caste, or national privilege: that it was independent of the cumbrous machinery of rite and ceremony which had crushed the life out of the religion of the Old Testament; and that it could reign, in its divine perfection, in any human heart that opened itself to the Spirit of God.

CHAPTER LIII.

IN PEREA.

THE incident of the Sabbath meal, in the house of the Pharisee, had occurred as Jesus was journeying by slow stages towards Jerusalem. He had long ago felt that to go thither would be to die; but His death, in whatever part of the country He might be apprehended, was already determined by His enemies, and it was necessary for the future of His Kingdom that He should not perish obscurely, like John, in some lonely fortress, but with such publicity, and so directly by the hands of the upholders of the Old Theocracy, as to leave their deliberate rejection of His teaching in no doubt, and to bring home to them the guilt of His death.

Yet He was in no hurry. It was still some time till the Passover, and He advanced leisurely on His sad journey, through the different villages and towns, teaching in the synagogues on the Sabbaths, and anywhere, day by day, through the week. Meanwhile, the miracles which He wrought before continually increasing multitudes excited in Herod, the local ruler, the same fear of a political rising as had led him to imprison the Baptist.

In spite of our Lord's earnest effort to discourage excitement, by damping every worldly hope or ambition in the crowds that followed Him, and leaving no question of His utter refusal to carry out the national programme of a political Messiah, Herod was so alarmed that he made efforts to apprehend Him. Had the throngs increased with His advance from place to place, as they well might, so shortly before the Passover, He would have entered Jerusalem with a whole army of partisans, and compromised Himself at once with the Roman authorities.

He, therefore, spared no efforts to discourage and turn back to their homes those whom He saw attracted to Him from other than spiritual motives. He wished none to follow Him who had not counted the cost of doing so, and had not realized His unprecedented demands from His disciples. Instead of courting popular support, now that His life was in such danger, He raised these demands, and refused to receive followers on any terms short of absolute self-surrender and self-sacrifice to His cause, though He had nothing whatever to offer in return beyond the inward satisfaction of conscience, and a reward in the future world, if the surrender had been the absolutely sincere and disinterested expression of personal devotion to Himself.

"Consider well," said He, "before you follow me farther. I desire no one to do so who does not without reserve devote himself to me and my cause. He must tear himself from all his former con