verse thirty-two, has reference to more than a mere liphomage, and implies the loyal service of obedience, so here, the condemnation pronounced on the workers of iniquity is not a condemnation of those who have failed to give intellectual assent to the truth, so much as of those who have actually become accustomed breakers of the law written in the fleshly tables of the heart.

7:26. them."

"Hears these sayings of mine and does not do

He of whom Jesus is speaking is not the man who hears nothing of the word of truth. It is the Christian who limits himself to putting this truth into his understanding. For, if he heard not, he would not build. He builds, therefore, but upon the sand. He informs himself but does not put his information to practical use. It is the theologian who seeks knowledge but not holiness;—it is myself, alas! I, who rejoice in the word of God, who am charmed with its beauty, and yet do not practise the virtues my intellect understands!

The words of the man involve a singular mingling of faith and distrust. He believes in the power of Christ to cure. But he doubts his will. As if he were saying to himself: Can he stoop to one so foul as I?

If he shared the common feeling that leprosy was the punishment of sin, he might ask himself: Will he pity and relieve one so sinful as I?

8:5

"A Roman Captain came to him and begged him." Here, as in the case of Cornelius, the faith and life of Judaism as exemplified in the villages of Galilee has made a deep impression on the soldier's mind. He has found a

purity, a reverence, a simplicity and a nobleness of life here which he has never seen in his life before. So he has come to "love the nation."

8:8.

"Lord, I am not of enough account for you to come under my roof."

This feeling of unworthiness implies at once the consciousness of his own sins and at the same time the recognition of the surpassing holiness of Him whom he is addressing.

Christ came not simply as one of boundless wealth to scatter alms broadcast over the land. His coming was for a far more noble purpose. He came to take upon Himself our infirmities and to bear our sicknesses.

He suffered with those he saw suffering. This intensity of sympathy was intimately connected with his power to heal. It is worthy of note, therefore, that such labor of love on his part was followed by weariness and physical exhaustion. It is always so, too, with those who are most Christlike in their daily lives.

8:22. "Leave the dead to bury their dead."

Let those who have no spiritual life linger in the circle of outward routine duties, and sacrifice the highest spiritual possibilities of their nature to them. But those who will live in reality and in truth will dutifully do the work to which their Master calls them. They will leave the lower conventional duties of life to be done or left undone as circumstances at the time may direct.

8:29.
"What do you wish of us, you Son of God?"
See note on S. John, chapter two, verse four.

8:34. They begged him to go from their parts." They felt the destruction of their drowned herds and the fear of like new disasters more than the deliverance and healing of their unfortunates. Self interest is fierce. Let a man to-morrow discover a process, a vaccine, which preserves forever from every malady without exception, is it altogether certain no physician ruined individually by this generous benefaction will not be tempted to say to the admirable inventor, as the Gadarenes did to Jesus? "Depart out of our country! A grave-digger without work was crying one day: “It's a bad year. No one dies.” See also note on S. Mark 5:17.

9:13. "I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners." Jerome and Hilary see some irony in these words. "The rigeteous" that is to say, those who were regarding themselves as righteous, such as the Pharisees. Bossuet's comment is also worth considering. It expresses another side of truth:

'Jesus Christ as Son of God, whatever pleasure he takes in seeing at his feet a sinner returned to the good way, he always loves with a stronger affection the innocence which has never been inconsistent, and honors it with a greater intimacy. Whatever favor the tears of a penitent may have in his eyes, they can never equal the pure pleasures of an ever faithful holiness. * * * Such are the thoughts of Jesus according to His divine nature. But he thinks otherwise of us when he becomes our Saviour. As Saviour, he says, I must seek those who are lost: as a Physician, those who are sick; as a Redeemer, those who are captive * * * ." In the same way that a physician, as a man, will take more pleasure in the company of the well and nevertheless, as a physician, he will take delight in relieving the sick. So this charitable Physician

Surely, as Son of God, he prefers the innocent; but, in his sphere of Saviour, he will rather seek the criminals again.

9:15. "But the days will come, *** then will they fast.

The time following the departure of our Lord, as he here shows his disciples, was a time of sorrow, conflict, discipline. At such a time the self conquest implied in abstinence was the natural and true expression of the feelings belonging to it.

So the Christian Church has always felt. So it was in the lives of at least two great Apostles (Acts 10:10; 11 Corinthians II: :27).

The Church of England and the American Church following her example have always kept their days of fasting in connection with the seasons and days of the Christian Year that call specially to meditation on the sterner, sadder, side of truth.

9:17. "Nor does any one put new wine into old wine skins."

This saying means, we believe, that the formalist Pharisees and Scribes, lost in the observances and rights of the Jewish religion, might never have accepted the doctrine of the Saviour, a doctrine rude as the undressed cloth, a doctrine which was fermenting in the soul like new wine. Therefore Jesus takes for his Apostles men, whose faith indeed is not without the Temple and the synagogue, but who are totally without ecclesiastical functions-that is as one would say nowadays-laity. Hence the stumbling stone to the Jewish priesthood.

9:18.

"A president of a synagogue came."

He was the one who, in the gatherings in the Synagogue, presided over the assembly.

9:20.

"Touched the border of his garment."

See note on S. Mark 5:29.

9:23. "He saw the flute players."

When any one was dead among the Jews, a number of flute players and weeping women chanted funeral dirges about the body.

10: 1-4.

"He called his twelve disciples to him," etc.

In naming the Apostles, the Evangelists keep to an order so constant and so particular there is room for believing every thing was symbolic in their calling, the place of each in the number as well as the number itself.

We possess four lists of the Apostles. Now, all have this in common, that they distribute them in three groups. The names in these groups are always the same, however the order in which they are given differs. Three of the Apostles invariably occupy the first place in their group. Simon Peter stands at the head of the first group; Philip, of the second; James the son of Alphaeus, of the third. Last of all, at the end of every list, Judas Iscariot is found. This can be verified by comparing : S. Matth. 10:2-4; S. Mark 3: 16-19; S. Luke 6:14-16, Acts 1:13.

We shall not seek the mysterious meaning of these divisions since the sacred writers do not give it, but we call attention to them here as one of the interesting particulars of the Gospel.

IO: I. The whole of this chapter is occupied with the commissioning and sending out of the twelve Apostles.