weightier matters of the law; judgment, mercy, and 'faith." (Matt. xxiii. 23.) Scrupulous to a nicety in obeying the mere letter of the word; but total strangers to the vital and spiritual nature of it.

It would have been happy for the church, comparatively speaking, had this Pharisaical righteousness, died, when the Pharisees of our Lord's generation died; but alas! in every generation, the brood hath been preserved; and being so very congenial to the natural pride of the human heart, swarms have sprung from the original stock, and have ceased not to send forth their progeny from age to age. And their characters when fully fledged, are uniformly so very captivating, that all the unregenerate, like themselves, are delighted with their plumage. Like those in the days of our Lord; they profess the highest reverence for the sabbath; attachment to what is called religious duties, public worship, and with some of them family prayer, attendance now and then on the sacrament, comparative statement of themselves with more openly profane; so that by thus walking upon stilts of their own creating, they hush all apprehensions asleep, as if there was no possibility of their not being in safety: and like the great progenitor of the stock our Lord so marked in the parable, their language is like his: "God I thank thee, that I am not as other men are; extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week; I give tithes of all that I possess." (Luke xviii. 11, 12.) And who shall count to what extent the numbers are, in the present awful day of a Christ despising generation, and under how fatal a delusion the great mass of the unregenerate live, and are lulled in this security; "speaking Peace, peace, when there is no peace."

The answer of the poor man to the reproaches of those self-righteous persons in our Lord's day is very

striking: "He that made me whole," said he, "the same said unto me, Take up thy bed and walk." It was an unanswerable argument to justify the act, both of carrying his bed and walking, when he that had so miraculously wrought the cure, had commanded him to do both. Besides, it was a palpable demonstration of the reality of his being healed. "Thirty and eight years," and perhaps well known to the whole inhabitants of Jerusalem, had this poor cripple been impotent and helpless, and now he is in a moment enabled both to carry his bed and walk. his bed and walk. What but the most determined perverseness could have induced any to call in question the Almightiness of him by whom this act was wrought? And who but the sworn foes of Christ, could have hesitated in the conviction, that the same Lord who appointed the sabbath, had here honoured the sabbath by such sovereignty as manifested his own eternal power and GODHEAD? And as the Lord very blessedly observed upon another occasion, when he sent the Pharisees to their own law, as written by the prophet Hosea, vi. 6. "Go ye,” said Jesus, ❝ and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy and not sacrifice. If ye had known what this meaneth, ye would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of man is Lord even of the sabbath day." (Matt. ix. 13. and xii. 7, 8.) And let not the reader fail to observe, to what an extent of operation would this daring remonstrance of the Jews have led, had it been for a moment admissible. For the same reason which they urged, (and under the garb of reverence too, for the sabbath) for the man's not carrying his bed when healed in his body, held equally good, when the Lord at any time cured the paralysis of the soul. So that those professed orthodox men, whose veneration for the sabbath took offence at the lesser, what would they have said had they seen, or could they know, the numberless acts of our most glorious Christ, which

he is continually carrying on in the greater? Oh! thou gracious Lord of the sabbath! how doth my very soul leap within me, when I behold thee spiritually by the eye of faith doing now on the sabbath in the days of thy power, what thou didst then in the days of thy flesh, in the Jewish synagogue; "healing broken hearts, giving deliverance to the captives, and restoring sight to the blind.” (Luke iv. 18, 19.) Surely, all that know thy name among the lookers on, must rejoice, and all the daily receivers of thy grace on thy holy sabbaths, must dance with sacred joy in the contemplation of the innumerable cures of our God by the side of the gospel pool of Bethesda, and shout aloud with thanksgiving! Nay like the prophet, in every sabbath, and through the whole of the Lord's day, would I call upon the inanimate part of creation, to join in the sacred dance, and say, "Sing, O ye heavens, for the Lord hath done it; shout, ye lower parts of the earth; break forth into singing, ye mountains, O forest, and every tree therein for the Lord hath redeemed Jacob, and glorified himself in Israel." (Isa. xliv. 23.)

But we have not yet done with these ancient Pharisees, no nor will the church of our most glorious Christ, while she is in this wilderness, be ever delivered from the more modern ones, for their heresy is the same. When the cripple had thus justified himself in doing what he had done at the command of Him that so wonderfully had healed him they were not the more satisfied, but questioned him still further: "Then asked they him, what man is that which said unto thee, Take up thy bed and walk?" I pray the reader not to overlook several prominent features indicative of their character, and which, under all their pretended veneration for the sabbath, manifested their hatred to the Lord.

First: "What man (said they) is that which said.

unto thee, Take up thy bed and walk?" The act itself had proved to the clearest demonstration, that he who had so healed by a word, was more than a mere man. And had they considered what the Scriptures of their own prophets had said, they might have read that such acts as Jesus had then wrought, were the very testimonies by which the Messiah should be known. For when he came, his name, it was said, should be "Emmanuel, God with us." (Isa. vii. 14. Isa. xxxv. 4-6.) Here is not a word said about the miracle which Christ had wrought. A man so well known in the city, by his long impotency and helplessness, and so miraculously restored to health and strength by a word speaking, and yet no acknowledgment of the greatness and graciousness of the deed by any of those Jews; but rather invidiously to lessen Christ in the poor man's esteem by such a question, as they wished him to consider Christ nothing more than a mere man like himself.

Secondly: Their question was directed with a greater invidiousness of evil both to Christ, and to the man the Lord hath healed. For if they could have satisfied him that Christ was but a man, they would have charged both Christ and his patient as sabbathbreakers, and therefore they intended to proceed on that ground, not allowing him for a moment to be any other than man. And the next step would have been to have criminated him by the law. (Nehem. xiii. 17, 18. Jer. xvii. 21, 22.) What an awful state of obduracy is the mind of every man hardened with by the fall! To use the strong language of the Lord by the prophet, to every fallen son of Adam, the words are the same: "Thou didst debase thyself, even to hell.” (Isa. lvii. 9.)

But we feel a relief of soul from such horrid portraits of nature, which we are under the awful guilt of unregeneracy by passing on to the relation given of

the healed cripple in the next verse.

To the invidi

ous question of the Jews, What man his he? the poor man returned no answer: for it is said; "he that was healed wist not who it was, for Jesus had conveyed himself away; a multitude being in that place." Here a subject of much interest to the healed ones of the Lord's people opens before us, and which under divine teaching, cannot fail of inducing much comfort. Numbers are spiritually blessed in ordinances, by providences, and a great variety of methods in the Lord's stores of his grace and omnipotency; while they for a long time not unfrequently remain unconscious of the Almighty hand which worketh all. The Lord doth now in the present day of his power, as he did in the first ages of the church. And as Jacob, at Bethel, until he awoke out of his sleep, did not discern the Lord in the vision: so they wist not till afterwards their Deliverer, but then with him say: "Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not." (Gen. xxviii. 16.)

It is very blessed however, when the life of God is begun in the soul, to look back and trace, on numberless occasions, how the Lord was working on our mind and inducing feelings which at time we wist not like this man, from whence they came, but now behold the gracious and divine direction. Often in the early part of life, there have been visits and communications from the Lord, which for the moment have arrested the hearts; occasioned a certain undescribable feeling, but which have passed off again, and we hear no more of them, and yet in the after seasons of more pointed grace, and sometimes for years between, some renewed love-token of the Lord hath awakened the recollection of the former, and both have been productive of very blessed goings forth of soul to the Lord's praise.

And there can be no doubt, but that the interest