in which this saying is to be received. Those persons who heard our Saviour, could not understand Him with a reference to the sacrament, unless they had been then instructed as to His death and passion, much less could they understand Him with reference to advantages merely earthly and carnal. To us whose lot has happily fallen in these latter times, we ought sufficiently to understand, that to partake of the Messiah truly is to partake of Himself, His pure nature, His righteousness, His Spirit; and to live and grow, and to receive nourishment from that participation of Him; all which He ex pressed, on this occasion, in a lively and comprehensive manner by the phrase of eating His flesh and drinking His blood'. But the conceptions of the Jews, and, alas! of many Christians, are too gross to understand it in its true sense. As soon as He perceived that these things offended His disciples, He said to them, Are ye surprised and disturbed at what I have now spoken, as if they were strange and unintelligible sayings? Hereafter ye shall see Me go up again to that same heaven, from which I tell you I have come down; and, when ye see this, ye will learn to understand My words, not in a gross and sensual, but in a spiritual and rational

8

SECT. LXII.-Christ rebuketh Traditions.-Matt. xv. 1-20; Mark vii. 1-23.

THOUGH We are informed of many minute occurrences in the life of Jesus, yet many are concealed from us. We are not told whether He was present at Jerusalem at this Passover, which, in point of time, must, as has been stated, have been celebrated about the period of the transactions which we have just considered. It is probable, that one who engaged so openly the attention of Galilee, was the subject of much conversation at that season of great national concourse, whether He was present there or not. It is certain, that about this period, Scribes and Pharisees came to Him from Jerusalem, for the express purpose of so entangling Him in His talk, as to bring Him into discredit with the people, or of collecting some grounds of accusation against Him. They are expressly mentioned as "Scribes and Pharisees," who, with all their pretences to sanctity, were always the most violent opposers of the Saviour, and were evidently actuated by the basest motives in their conduct towards Him. St. John distinctly states of Jesus, in the interval between the feasts of the Passover and Tabernacles of this year, that He "walked in Galilee, for He could not walk in Jewry, because the Jews sought to kill Him '."

1 Dr. Robinson.

The Scribes and Pharisees, who came up from Jerusalem to Jesus, take Him to task, in the first place, as to "the traditions of the Elders," which, they said, His disciples transgressed. Josephus tells us, that the Pharisees delivered many things to the people for legal injunctions, which they received from their fathers, but which were not written in the law of Moses'. The custom of washing their hands before their meals was so strictly commanded by this sect (the Sadducees, it should be remembered, rejected all the traditions), that one of them goes so far as to say, that he that taketh meat with unclean hands is worthy of death 3. St. Matthew, who records this cavil of the Pharisees against the disciples of Christ, does not detail the custom of the Jews in this matter with the preciseness of St. Mark, who intended his Gospel for more general circulation, and therefore very properly adds the explanation of these traditions. It was also held by these Rabbins, that if a son had made a formal devotion to sacred purposes of those goods, which he could have otherwise offered for the relief of his parents, it was not then lawful for him to apply them to the relief of his parents; and they thus made void their duty to their parents in a manner quite contrary to the precept of

honouring and relieving them.

The expression,

3 Dr. Hammond.

"it is corban," is Syriac, denoting that such a thing is devoted to the treasury'. Jesus tells them, that neither acts of charity nor of devotion can be well-timed, when they obstruct men in their duty to their parents. That God will accept of nothing till this necessary duty be paid at home; and that when they divert, even to sacred uses, what is required for the relief and comfort of a parent in want, the holy treasury is defiled by the offensive offering'. The Pharisees went away, not less offended at the superiority of His argument than at the diminution of their own reputation with the multitude, in consequence of our Lord's judgment of them, as "blind leaders of the blind "."

SECT. LXIII.-Christ healeth the Syro-Phenician's Daughter. -Matt. xv. 21-28; Mark vii. 24-30.

JESUS, withdrawing from the observation of these malicious enemies, went down into "the coasts," or rather, "the borders," of Tyre and Sidon, and, it appears, His object was privacy; but His fame was now so rife every where, "He could not be hid." The old inhabitants of this tract were descendants of Canaan, never driven out by the Israelites; accordingly, this part of the country seems to have retained the name of Canaan. The Greeks called the land, inhabited by the old Canaanites, along the shores of the Mediterranean sea, by the name Abp. Sumner. 7 Dr. Ogden.

8 Dr. Hales.

of Phenicia; and the more inland tract, as being inhabited by a mixed race of Canaanites and Syrians, was called Syro-Phenicia'. This was, probably, the region now visited by our Lord: the people were not Jews in religion, but idolaters in the worst form of idolatry; and because this superstition obtained more among the Greeks than any other people, according to the Jewish mode of speaking, they, and all their more civilized neighbours (for idolaters they all were) are in Scripture called frequently by the general name of Greeks "0. A poor distressed woman of these parts, called, accordingly, by St. Matthew "of Canaan;" and, by St. Mark, "a Syro-Phenician by nation," and a "Greek" by religion, (who had probably learnt, by conversation with the Jews and with her own citizens, that, in those days, an illustrious prophet had appeared, who was regarded as the deliverer long promised to them of their royal house of David, and who had proved Himself, by His miracles, to be above the ordinary condition of men,)" came and fell at His feet," calling Him by the titles of "Lord," and "Son of David". This was the first instance in which our Lord's aid had been invoked by a person neither by birth an Israelite, nor by profession a worshipper of the God of Israel. The miracle which He was presently to work for her was

9 Dr. Wells.

10 Bishop Horsley.

11 Dr. Jortin.