with their contraries in the popular tendencies of the times. They must not be truths of the study, but of the fishing-boat, and the market, and the exchange, and the country village. They must not be entrusted to a few scholars, but sown broadcast over the people. They must not avoid attack, but meet it; they must not be kept back for fear of revolutions, but must expect revolutions and flourish in their atmosphere.

This was the element in which Christ lived, and these were the tests He chose for his teaching. He made his truths common property; He taught them to all alike. He made no conditions, required no special training. They were men to whom He spoke; that was enough for Christ, and his practice was the keynote of all succeeding efforts, political or otherwise, to secure liberty of life and thought for the people. This was what, it seems, the Jewish doctors did not do. Take the instance of freedom from the bondage of the law. We are told that it was preached before Him. Who ever denied it? We find it, independent of the Talmud, in other ancient writings. But again, the question comes, Why had it no vogue? Why had it no popular fruit? Why did its teaching not create a character like S. Paul's? Why had it no vital, changing, regenerating power?

There was something dead at its root. I believe it was that it was confined to an intellectual oligarchy, possessing that indifference to the advance of spiritual truth which accompanies a merely intellectual conception of it; that universal tolerance which lets things run along, and which loses its good when it becomes

tolerant of evil; that hatred of revolutionary movements which has ever characterised the aristocracy of culture.

Now, if there is one oligarchy more tyrannical and dangerous to true liberty than another, it is an oligarchy of culture; and that was the position of the Jewish sages, exceptions of course being understood. It is inferred, however, that the Jewish schools were democratic because every man was taught a trade, because among the roll of their wisest men there were tanners, carpenters, gardeners, men of the common people. But if these men were drawn from the ranks, it does not follow that they were fond of enlightening the class from which they sprang. On the contrary, these are almost invariably the worst defenders of their own class, the most anxious often to keep up a barrier, the greatest despisers of those among whom they once lived: and as to the democratic element in such a society, it may last for a time, but we know from the history of the mediæval Church, which drew priests, cardinals, and popes from the lowest ranks, what its boasted sympathy with the people came to in the end.

No; I think we have every reason to conclude that the text, this people who knoweth not the law are cursed,' is a real picture of what was going on in Palestine at the time of our Lord. If so, can you wonder at his denunciations? If the mass of the Pharisees were keeping up this esoteric learning, this seclusion of higher truths to a cultured few, are not Christ's words of indignation justified ?—are you astonished that the very truths these men held turned to poison in their hearts? Above all, is it at all astonishing that these truths had

no extension, that they did but little work, that they produced no universal religion? The chill region of intellectual knowledge of spiritual truth in which these doctors lived exiled from it popular enthusiasm. Connected with an exclusive class, they could not be teachers of the common people. They themselves wanted the strong life and faithful energy which belong to the common people. Only in that element could great truths organise themselves into a religion for men. Aristocracies, and especially aristocracies of culture, are not naturally religious; democracies are. The religions of the world have arisen from and been supported by the people. It is very plain that Christ saw and acted upon that. He committed his truths to fishermen, publicans, villagers, to Galilæans, to unlearned and ignorant men, whose hearts were free and natural, whose intellects were capable of new thought; He threw Himself upon the common people. He gave the loftiest truths to all men alike. He rejected all clinging to culture which tended to isolate a class or to limit the universality of his work. He poured 'light and sweetness on men, but it was a light which shone like the sun upon all alike, it was a sweetness of thought and feeling which expended itself upon the unwise as well as the wise, the outcast from society as well as the rabbi who was honoured in the Temple.

It was partly this that made his teaching stream like a river and swell like a sea. It was this partly that sent it in a few years over Judæa, Greece, Rome, and Asia. It was partly this that made all nations flow into it. It was partly this that gave it its expanding,

its conquering power. It was partly this that chimed in with the great movement of the world towards the overthrow of a corrupt imperialism and a cruel oppression of the people. It was partly this that sent its mighty waves onwards in ever increasing volume, till they drowned beneath their tide the temples of Paganism and the ruins of the old philosophies.

It was this which was symbolised at his birth, when around his sacred infancy knelt in a common worship the men from the East, the rich, the wise, and the nobly born; the shepherds from the hills of Bethlehem, poor, ignorant, and low born; when intellect and ignorance alike grew wiser by receiving the kingdom of God as a little child.

JUDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY.

'Whose fan is in his hand, and he will throughly purge his floor, and will gather the wheat into his garner; but the chaff he will burn with fire unquenchable.'-Luke iii. 17.

It is the glory of Christianity,' says a modern writer, 'that it carried the golden germs hidden in the schools and among the silent community of the learned, into the market of humanity.' Yes, that is one of the glories of Christianity as contrasted with esoteric schools, with that aristocracy of culture which reserves truths to itself or does not care, in learned laziness, to spread them among the common people. Granting that the Jewish doctors possessed, before Christ came, many of the truths He taught, it is plain that, in spite of the large extension of schools, there was no organised missionary effort to spread them among the masses. The phrase, this people who knoweth not the law are cursed,' to whatever date we assign the gospel in which it occurs, has its importance when we compare it with another in the gospel of S. Luke: "The common people heard Christ gladly.' Whatever may have been the excellence of the teaching which lay hid among the wise men of the Pharisees, it is plain that it lay hid, that the mass of the Pharisees stood apart from the