this meaneth, I will have mercy and not sacrifice, ye would not have condemned the guiltless;" you would not have found fault with them in whom no true fault can be found. The quotation is from Hos. vi. 7, and leaves some ambiguity on the mind of an English reader; which would have been avoided by some such translation as this, "I desire mercy and not sacrifice,"* the words themselves containing one of those prophetic glimpses of the Gospel, one of those slights cast upon the Law even during the time when the Law was in force,t and example of that "finding fault" with it which the apostle notes, (Heb. viii. 8,) whereby a witness was borne even to them that lived under it, however some may have refused to receive that witness, that it was not the highest thing, but that God had something better and higher in store for his people. The prophet of the Old Covenant is here anticipating the great apostle of the New, and saying with as clear a voice, "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels. . . . and though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing." (1 Cor. xiii. 1-3.) He is declaring, That which God longs for on the part of men is not the outward observance, the sacrifice in the letter, but the inward outpouring of love, that which the "sacrifice" symbolized, the giving up of self in the self-devotion of love. (Cf. Heb. x. 5-10.) This must underlie every outward sacrifice and service to give it value; and when the ques tion arises between the form and the spirit, so that the one can only be preserved by the loss of the other, then the form must yield to the life, as the meaner to the more precious.

But the application of the words in the present case still remains unsettled. For it may be either, "If you had truly understood what God

* In the LXX., έλεος θέλω ἢ θυσίαν, καὶ ἐπίγνωσιν Θεοῦ, ἢ ὁλοκαυτώματα. Among those slights, God's words by Ezekiel, "Wherefore I gave them also statutes that were not good, and judgments whereby they should not live,” (xx. 25,) are often enumerated; by Melancthon, by Reineccius, (Deus ne suæ quidem legi hunc honorem tribuit, quod mereatur vitam æternam,) and by many more. Yet this is certainly an error. Depreciating things as are spoken of the Old Covenant, yet this is ever relatively, and only in comparison with the New: never this absolute blame. (VITRINGA, Obss. Sac., v. 1, p. 265; præcepta non bona, ¿v ¿μpúoɛɩ, in quibus nihil inerat boni.) The verse is to be explained by the verse ensuing, with which it stands in intimate connection. The "I gave" here, is but the rapédwkev avroùs ó Ɖeds eis Táoη áτquías, of Rom. i. 26. Cf. Acts vii. 42; 2 Thess. ii. 11. These "statutes that were not good," were the heathen abominations to which God gave them over.

Exactly in obedience to this precept, "I will have mercy and not sacrifice," and with a true insight into the law of love, as the highest law of all, those holy men have acted, that in great needs have sold the most sacred vessels of the Church for the redemption of captives, or for the saving of perishing souls in some great famine.

asks of men, what service from them pleases him best, you would have understood that my disciples were offering that, who in true love and pity for perishing souls had so labored and toiled as to go without their necessary food, and were therefore thus obliged to satisfy the cravings of a present hunger,*-that their loving transgression was better than many a man's cold and heartless clinging to the letter of the commandment." Or else the words may have more direct reference to the Pharisees themselves: "If you had understood the service wherein God delighted the most, you would have sought to please him by meekness and by mercy, by a charitable judgment of your brethren,-by that love out of a pure heart, which to him 'is more than all whole burnt-offerings and sacrifices.' (Mark xii. 33.) Ye would not thus have been judges of evil thoughts." (Prov. xvii. 15.) Thus Olshausen, who adds: "This merciful love was just what was wanting in the fault-finding of the Pharisees. It was no true bettering of the disciples which they desired; no pure zeal for the cause of God urged them on. Rather sought they out of envy and an inner bitterness to bring something against the disciples; and, in fact, out of this did, in an apparent zeal for the Lord, persecute the Lord in his disciples. They condemned the guiltless;' for the disciples had not out of ennui, for mere pastime's sake, plucked the ears, but out of hunger. (ver. 1.) Their own they had forsaken, and they hungered now in their labor for the kingdom of God. Therefore stood they in the same position as David the servant of God, who, in like manner, with them that were with him, hungered in the service of the Lord; as the priests, who in the temple must labor on the Sabbath, and so for the Lord's sake seem to break the law of the Lord. While this was so, they also might without scruple eat of the shewbread of the Lord: what was God's, that was theirs."

St. Mark has alone preserved for us the weighty words which follow, (ii. 27:) "The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath." The end for which the Sabbath was ordained was to bless man; the end for which man was created, was not to observe the Sabbath. A principle is here laid down, which it is clearly impossible to confine to the Sabbath alone. Rather it must extend to the whole circle of outward ordinances. It does in fact say this, The Law was made for man; not man for the Law. Man is the end, and the ordinances of the Law the means; not these the end, and man the means. Man was

* So Maldonatus: Hoc est quod apostolos maximè excusabat, quod in prædicando et faciendis miraculis adeò fuissent occupati, ut nec parare cibum nec capere possent. In like manner Wolf (Cura, in loc.): Non dubitaverim...verba hæc opponi judicio Pharisæorum immiti et rigido, de discipulis tanquam violatoribus Sabbathi, rato. See a remarkable parallel 2 Macc. v. 19.

not made to the end that he might observe these; but these were given, that they might bless man, that they might train and discipline him till he should be ready to serve God from the free impulses of his spirit.* And all this being so, "therefore the Son of man is Lord also of the Sabbath." Now to say here with Grotius, that "Son of man" is equivalent to man, and that the meaning of these words is, The Sabbath was made for man, and man therefore can do with it as he will, is evidently an error. For, in the first place, there is no passage in the New Testament in which "Son of man," occurring as it does eighty-eight times, does not mean the Messiah, the man in whom the idea of humanity was fully realized; and, again, with all the bold things which St. Paul speaks of man's relations to the Law, he never speaks of him, even after he is risen with Christ, as being its lord. He is not under it; he is released from its rule, so that it is henceforth with him as a friendly companion, not as an imperious schoolmaster. But it is God's Law, and so long as he is still in the flesh, and therefore may continually need its restraints upon his flesh, he never stands above it; rather, at the first moment of his falling away from the liberty of a service in Christ, will come under it anew.

Even the ceremonial law man is not lord of, to loose himself from it, as upon the plea of insight into the deeper mysteries which it shadows forth: he must wait a loosing from it at the hands from which it first proceeded, and which first imposed it. Simply as man, Christ himself was "made under the law." (Gal. iv. 4.) But as Son of man, as the Messiah, who is also Son of God, he has power over all these outward ordinances: he himself first gave them for the training of man, as a preparatory discipline, and when they have done their work, when this preparatory discipline is accomplished, he may remove them; he may say when the shadow shall give place to the substance, when his people so possess the last that they may forego the first. And it was the sign

* Even in the Talmud it was said, "The Sabbath is in your hands, and you not in the hands of the Sabbath; for it is written, The Lord hath given you the Sabbath. Exod. xvi. 29; Ezek. xx. 12."

See (in loc.) Grotius's ingenious defence of his theory, which he confidently affirms is the only one which the connection of the words in St. Mark will allow : but Cocceius answers well, Non sequitur: Hominis causà factum est Sabbatum: Ergo homo est Dominus Sabbati. Sed bene sequitur: Ergo is, cujus est homo, et qui propter hominem venit in mundum, quique omnem potestatem in cœlo et terrâ possidet, in hominis salutem et bonum est et Dominus Sabbati. Ceterùm Dominus Sabbati non esset, nisi esset supremus voμolérns, et nisi ad ipsius gloriam pertineret Sabbati institutio, et ejus usus ad salutem hominis.

He is not, to use Augustine's distinction, sub lege, but he is cum lege, and ir. lege.

and augury that they had done their work, when he was come, in whom the highest gifts of God to men were given. The very fact that he was trusted with the highest, involved his power over all lower forms of teaching. Christ is "the end of the law," is every way the end, as that to which it pointed, as that in which it is swallowed up; being himself living law, not therefore in any true sense the destroyer of the law, as the adversaries charged him with being, but its transformer and glo rifier, changing it from law into liberty, from shadow to substance, from letter to spirit.*

To this our Lord's clearing of his disciples, or rather of himself in his disciples, (for the accusation was truly against him,) the healing of the man with a withered hand is attached immediately, as we have seen, by St. Matthew, although St. Luke shows that it did not find place till the following Sabbath. Like another healing, very similar in its circumstances, that of the woman with the spirit of infirmity, (Luke xiii. 11,) like that too of the demoniac at Capernaum, (Mark i. 2, 3,) it was wrought in a synagogue. There, on the ensuing Sabbath, in "their synagogue," the synagogue of those with whom he had thus disputed, he encountered " a man who had his hand withered." St. Luke tells us that it was his "right hand" which was thus affected. The disease under which this man labored, and which probably extended throughout the whole arm, was one occasioned by a deficient absorption of nutriment in the limb; it was in fact a partial atrophy, showing itself in a gradual wasting of the size of the limb, with a loss of its powers of motion, and ending with its total death. When once thoroughly established, it is incurable by any art of man.t

The apparent variation in the different records of this miracle, that in St. Matthew the question proceeds from the Pharisees, in St. Mark and Luke from the Lord, is no real one; the reconciliation of the two accounts is easy. The Pharisees first ask him, "Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath day?" He answers this question as was his wont, (see

* Augustine (Serm. 136, 3): Dominus Sabbatum solvebat: sed non ideò reus. Quid est quod dixi, Sabbatum solvebat? Lux ipse venerat, umbras removebat. Sabbatum enim à Domino Deo præceptum est, ab ipso Christo præceptum, qui cum Patre erat, quando lex illa dabatur: ab ipso præceptum est, sed in umbrâ futuri.

See WINER'S Real Wörterbuch, v. 1, p. 796. In the apocryphal "Gospel according to the Hebrews," in use among the Nazarenes and Ebionites, which consisted probably of our St. Matthew, with some extraneous additions, this man appeared as a mason, and is introduced as thus addressing the Lord: Comentarius eram, manibus victum quæritans: precor te, Jesu, ut mihi restituas sanitatem, ne turpiter mendicem cibos. The χεῖρα έχων ξηράν is equivalent to the τὴν χεῖρα ἀδρανὴς ὢν of Philostratus, (Vita Apollon., 1. 3, c. 39,) whom the Indian sages heal.

Matt. xxi. 24,) by another question. That this is such another counterquestion comes out most plainly in St. Luke: "I will ask you one thing. Is it lawful on the Sabbath days to do good or to do evil? to save life or destroy it?" Our Lord with the same infinite wisdom which we admire in his answer to the question of the lawyer, "Who is my neighbor ?" (Luke x. 29,) shifts the whole argument and lifts it altogether into a higher region, where at once it is seen on which side is the right and the truth. They had put the alternatives of doing or not doing; here there might be a question. But he shows that the alternatives are, doing good or failing to do good,-which last he puts as identical with doing evil, the neglecting to save as equivalent with destroying. Here there could be no question: this under no circumstances could be right; it could never be good to sin. Therefore it is not merely allowable, but a duty, to do some things on the Sabbath.* "Yea," he says, "and things much less important and earnest than that which I am about to do, you would not leave undone. Which of you would not draw your sheep from the pit into which it had fallen on the Sabbath; and shall I, the true shepherd, not rescue a sheep of my fold, a man, that is far better than a sheep? Your own consciences tell you that that were a true Sabbath work; and how much worthier this! You have asked me, Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath? I answer, It is lawful to do well on that day, and therefore to heal." They can answer him nothing further, "they held their peace."

66 Then," ," that is, as St. Mark tells us, "when he had looked round about on them with anger, being grieved for the hardness of their hearts,

* Danzius (in MEUSCHEN'S N. T. ex Talm. illustr., p. 585): Immutat ergo beneficus Servator omnem controversiæ statum, ac longè eundem rectius, quàm fraudis isti artifices, proponit. The object of the interesting and learned Essay, Christi Curatio Sabbathica vindicata ex legibus Judaicis, from which the above quotation is made, is to prove by extracts from their own books that the Jews were not at all so strict, as now, when they wanted to find an accusation against the Lord, they professed to be, in the matter of the things permitted or prohibited on the Sabbath. He finds an indication of this (p. 607) in our Saviour's words, “Thou hypocrite," addressed on one of these occasions to the ruler of the synagogue. (Luke xiii. 15.) Of course the great difficulty in judging whether he has made out his point, is to know how far the extracts in proof, confessedly from works of a later, often a far later date, than the time of Christ, do fairly represent the earlier Jewish canons. The fixity of Jewish tradition is much in favor of the supposition that they do; but there always remains something in these proofs, which causes them to fail absolutely to prove. In the apocryphal gospels, as for instance in the Evangelium Nicodemi, (see THILO's Codex Apocryphus, pp. 502, 558,) it is very observable how prominent a place among the accusations brought against Christ on his trial, are the healings wrought upon the Sabbath.