J. 12 On the next day much people that were come to the feast, when they heard that Jesus 13 was coming to Jerusalem, took branches of palm trees, and went forth to meet him.L. 29 And it came to pass on the next day, when they drew nigh unto Jerusalem, when he was come to Bethphage and Bethany, at the mount called the mount of Olives, Jesus 30 sendeth forth two of his disciples, saying unto them, Go ye your way into the village over against you; in the which at your entering straightway ye shall find an ass tied, and a colt tied with her whereon yet never man sat: loose them, and bring them hitherMk. 3 unto me. And if any man say unto you, Why do ye this? Thus say ye unto him, The 4 Lord hath need of them; and straightway he will send them hither. And the disciples that were sent went their way, and did as Jesus commanded them, and found the colt, even as he had said unto them, tied by the door without, in a place where two ways L. 33 met: and they loose him. And as they were loosing the colt, the owners thereof that 34 stood there said unto them, Why loose ye the colt? And they said unto them, even as 35 Jesus had commanded, The Lord hath need of him; and they let them go. And they brought the ass and the colt to Jesus, and they cast their garments upon the colt; and they set Jesus thereon.M. 4 All this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, 5 as it is written, Tell ye the daughter of Zion, Fear not, behold, thy King cometh unto J. 16 thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass. These things understood not his disciples at the first: but when Jesus was glorified, then remembered they that these things were written of him, and that they had done these things unto him. 17 The people therefore that was with him when he called Lazarus out of his grave, and 18 raised him from the dead, bare record. For this cause the people also met him, for that they heard that he had done this miracle.

L. 36 And as he went, a very great multitude spread their garments in the way; and others cut down branches off the trees, and strewed them in the way. And when he was come nigh, even now at the descent of the mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice, for all the mighty works that they had seen. And the multitudes that went before, and that followed, cried, saying, Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he, the King of Israel, that cometh in the name of the Lord: Blessed be the kingdom of our father David, that cometh in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest! And some of the Pharisees from among the multitude said unto him, Master, rebuke thy disciples. And he answered and said unto them, I tell you that if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out. The Pharisees therefore said among themselves, Perceive ye how ye prevail nothing? Behold, the world is gone after him.

THE next morning he took up his sorrowful journey again, and moved slowly toward the Temple. As the Passover, with its sacrifices, was just at hand, companies of pilgrims, driving sheep for the altar, would be seen in the highways, all gathering up from the four quarters, to the centre of the nation’s faith. Among them goes the Lamb of God—the one sacrifice—final, perfect, and sufficient, whom these typical altars of thousands of years had heralded with their banners of smoke and flame. The day to see that marvellous fulfilled Scripture, that the Lamb should be slain in the fulness of ages and yet slain from the foundation of the world, is, at last, close by; “the hour” of which he so often spoke, as if all reckonings of days, in the knowledge of history, ran to and from that central point of time. But then he is not only Sacrifice and Priest; not only Prophet and Fulfilment; but another of his comprehensive characters is Kingship. So, in token of that royal office whereby he is to reign forever, he must enter the city of his sacrifice with kingly honors, in meekness, to die, yet in majesty, to triumph. F. D. H.

J. 12. Much people that were come to the feast. Josephus estimates the numbers present on a Passover occasion at about three millions, little short of half the population of the two provinces. The number of lambs slain is stated to have been 256,500. H.—Heard that Jesus was coming. Jesus of Nazareth had now, for three years, assumed the character of a public teacher; his wonderful works were generally acknowledged; all considered him an extraordinary being; but whether he was the Messiah still hung in the balance. And now the Passover rapidly approached; the roads from all quarters were crowded with the assembling worshippers. Not only the great mass of the inhabitants of Palestine, but many foreign Jews thronged from every quarter—from Babylon, Arabia, Egypt, from Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy, probably even from Gaul and Spain. Through all this concourse of the whole Jewish race, animated more or less profoundly with the same national and religious feelings, rumors about the appearance, the conduct, the pretensions, the language of Jesus, could not but have spread abroad, and be communicated with unchecked rapidity. H. M.

L. 29. Bethphage and Bethany. Of Bethphage, “the house of figs,” no trace has been discovered. Bethany has continued, beyond question.

On the eastern slope of Mount Olivet, screened from sight of Jerusalem by the crest of the hill, stands the little mountain hamlet, containing little more than twenty houses, scattered irregularly in a labyrinth of narrow lanes and ruinous walls: a shrivelled and decaying place. H. B. T.

He determines to enter Jerusalem publicly, with such circumstance as would openly announce his claim to be the Messiah. G.—Jesus was now in circumstances to come forward in his Messianic character, as king, after having demonstrated, by his doctrine and walk, for three years, of what kind his kingdom was. The style in which he made his entrance was such as must have proved to every reflective spectator that he had no intention, at least at his first advent, to act the part of an earthly monarch, but only that of the King of hearts. C. B.

35. He had seldom if ever before used this mode of travelling, one not having any special dignity in our eyes, but one that highest dignitaries in the East, kings and princes, prophets and priests, might not unsuitably, upon the most important occasions, make use of. H.—M. 4, 5. As it is written. Five hundred years before, the prophet Zechariah had foretold that the King of Zion would one day appear “riding upon an ass.” At the time of the prophecy, there were no kings in Jerusalem. The kingdom had ceased at the captivity. J. 16. Remembered they had done these things. Long after the triumphant entry, the disciples found that they had been unconscious actors in a mighty accomplishment of Scripture. A thought for us all. During the greater part of our lives, many of God’s purposes on earth are being carried on through us and by us, without our being conscious of it. J. C. R.

L. 36. A very great multitude. 37. That went before and that followed. Two vast streams of people met on that day. The one poured out from the city, and, as they came through the gardens whose clusters of palm rose on the southeastern corner of Olivet, they cut down the long branches, as was their wont at the feast of Tabernacles, and moved upward toward Bethany with shouts of welcome. From Bethany streamed forth the crowds who had assembled there the previous night. The two streams met midway. Half of the vast mass, turning round, preceded; the other half followed. A. P. S.—And when the two streams of people met—those who had accompanied him from Bethany, and those who had come to meet him from Jerusalem—they left him riding in the midst, and some preceding, some following him, advanced, shouting “hosannas” and waving branches, to the gate of Jerusalem. At the descent of the Mount of Olives. There, through the clear atmosphere, rising out of the deep, umbrageous valleys which surrounded it, the city of ten thousand memories stood clear before him, and the morning sunlight, as it blazed on the marble pinnacles and gilded roofs of the Temple buildings, was reflected in a splendor which forced the spectator to avert his glance. F.

38. They hail him as their Messiah, their King. He does now what he never so fully did before: he accepts the title, he receives the homage. All is true, then, that they had been thinking and hoping.

It is openly and avowedly as Christ their king that he is about to go into Jerusalem. Then let all the honors that they can give him be bestowed. It is but little of outward pomp or splendor they can throw around this regal procession. They cannot turn the narrow mountain-path into a broad and covered roadway for their king, but they can strip off their outer garments, and cast them as a carpet beneath his feet. They can cut down leafy branches from the olive-trees and strew them in his way. Royal standards they have none to carry, they have no emblazoned flags of victory to wave. No choice instruments of music are here, through which practised lips may pour the swelling notes of joy and triumph; but they can pluck the palm-tree branches (nature’s own emblems of victory) and wave them over his head, and they can raise their voices in hosannas round him. He allows all this, receives it all as seemly and due. Swelling in numbers, freer and more animated in its expressions, the procession moves on till the ridge of the hill is gained, and the city begins to open to the view. The mighty multitude breaks out into acclamations of praise; those going before and those following after vie with one another, and fill the air with their hosannas—applying to Jesus, and this entry into Jerusalem, passages that all understood to relate to the Messiah. H.—The transient popularity of Jesus arose from the enforced admiration of his commanding demeanor, and the notoriety of his wonderful works; but it was no doubt supported in the mass of the populace by a hope that even yet he would conform to the popular views of the Messiah’s character. Their present brief access of faith would not have stood long against the continued disappointment of that hope. And it was no doubt by working on the reaction of this powerful feeling that the Sanhedrim were able so suddenly to change the prevailing sentiment. H. M.—The angelic hymn which was earliest sung in heaven in honor of the Saviour’s birth, is reëchoed by the band of disciples as he approaches Jerusalem for the last time before the close of his work. B. F. W.

40. The stones would cry out. Hitherto the Lord had discouraged all demonstrations in his favor. On this one occasion he seems to yield his whole soul to the wide and deep acclaim with a mysterious satisfaction, regarding it as so necessary a part of the regal dignity in which as Messiah he for this last time entered the city, that if not offered by the vast multitude, it would have been wrung out of the stones rather than be withheld. B.—In the mouth of any other, even the greatest of men, these words would have been an unjustifiable self-exaltation; uttered by him, they showed the weighty import which he gave to his manifestation. Christ’s conduct in this respect, moreover, shows that such an entry into Jerusalem formed part of his plan. N.

CHRIST undertakes a plan, universal in extent, perpetual in time; viz., to unite all nations in a kingdom of righteousness under God; laying his foundations in the hearts of the poor, as no great teacher had ever done before, and yet without creating ever a faction, or stirring one partisan feeling in his followers. He is never warped by the expectation of his friends; always in a balance of truth, swayed by no excesses, running to no oppositions or extremes; clear of all superstition, and equally clear of all liberalism; presenting the highest doctrines in the lowest and simplest forms; establishing a pure, universal morality, never before established; and, with all his intense devotion to the truth, never anxious, perceptibly, for the success of his doctrine. Finally, to sum up all in one, he grows more great and wise and sacred, the more he is known, and this, we say, is Jesus, the Christ; manifestly not human, not of our world. H. B.

Receive Christ as the disciples received him, as the true God and eternal life. Sages of the earth, he is the key of your problems; troubled spirits, your peace; lovers of wealth, your true treasure; he is the word which solves the enigma of life and conquers the power of death. Without him, wandering through life between an unknown past and a gloomy future, by turns the sport of our passions and our reason, a prey to infinite desires which nothing can satisfy, reduced laboriously to construct poor imitations of happiness, tired of living and afraid to die; above all, afraid to be judged, we must approach, without guide or support, that frightful limit where the earth gives way under our feet. Looking, then, to the Finisher of our salvation, rejoicing in his advent, scattering at his feet tears and palms: these tears shall be wiped away by a divine hand; these palms shall become our crown in the city of peace, when, quenching our thirst at the fountain of all perfection and felicity, we shall repeat the acclamations of the ancient believers, “Blessed be the King that cometh in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest!” A. V.

Section 119.—Weeps over the City. The Fig-tree cursed.

Sunday and Monday.

L. 41 And when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it, saying, If thou 42 hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy 43 peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes. For the days shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and keep 44 thee in on every side, and shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another; because thou knowest not the time of thy visitation.M. 10 And Jesus entered into Jerusalem, and into the temple. And when he was come 11 into Jerusalem, all the city was moved, saying, Who is this? And the multitude said, 14 This is Jesus the prophet of Nazareth of Galilee. And the blind and the lame came 15 to him in the temple; and he healed them. And when the chief priests and scribes saw the wonderful things that he did, and the children crying in the temple, and say- 16 ing, Hosanna to the Son of David, they were sore displeased, and said unto him, Hear- est thou what these say? And Jesus saith unto them, Yea; have ye never read, Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise? 17 And when he had looked round about upon all things, and now the eventide was come, he left them and went out of the city into Bethany with the twelve: and he lodged there.Mk.12 Now on the morrow, in the morning as he returned from Bethany into the city, he was 13 hungry. And seeing a fig-tree afar off in the way, having leaves, he came to it, if haply he might find anything thereon: and when he came to it, he found nothing thereon but

14 leaves only; for the time of figs was not get. And Jesus answered and said unto it, Let no fruit grow on thee henceforward: no man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever. And his disciples heard it. And presently the fig-tree withered away.

WHEN we conceive him surveying on the one hand the multitudes of giddy, thoughtless, infatuated beings around him, engrossed with the affairs of the passing hour, trifling with the grandest concerns in the universe—gay, sportive, careless, hurrying on to the verge of life; and then, on the other hand, turning to behold the dread futurity, the awful gulf of ruin flaming forth the wrath of the Almighty God against the impenitent—is there not in this an explanation that may well appall the sinner, of the compassion, the grief, the yearning expostulations of Jesus? It was an awful testimony to the grandeur of the event that was taking place when, at the death of Jesus, the sun in heaven was darkened, and the solid earth beneath was rent; but surely it testifies to a still more terrible catastrophe, when the face, not of the sun, but the sun’s Creator, is overshadowed—when, not the material earth is moved, but the spirit of him who made it is rent with anguish. Surely it is impossible for imagination to conceive a more awful measure of the guilt and danger of sin than the grief of Jesus. C.

THOUGH there are three paths from the mount to the Holy City, the triumphal entry was by that round the southern base of Olivet. Paths, like wells, are in the East the most unchanging of human institutions. It is little more than fifteen furlongs. Bethany stands in a shallow hollow, scooped out of the shoulder of the hill. The path follows this till the descent begins at a turn where the first view of the temple is caught. First appeared the castles and walls of the City of David; and immediately afterward the glittering roofs of the temple, and the gorgeous royal arcade of Herod, with its long range of battlements overhanging the southern edge of Moriah. H. B. T.—The triple temple of Jerusalem—the lower court standing on its magnificent terraces, the inner court raised on its platform in the centre, and the temple itself rising out of the group and crowning the whole—must have formed, when combined with the beauty of the situation, one of the most splendid architectural combinations of the ancient world. Fergusson.

L. 41. As they approached the shoulder of the hill, where the road bends downward to the north, Jerusalem in its glory rose before them. The City of God, seated on her hills, shone at the moment in the morning sun. Straight before stretched the vast white walls and buildings of the temple, its courts, glittering with gold, rising one above the other; the steep sides of the hill of David crowned with lofty walls; the mighty castles towering above them; the sumptuous palace of Herod in its green parks, and the picturesque outlines of the streets. Over all rested the spell of a history of two thousand years; and the mystic Holy of Holies linked the seen to the invisible. The whole scene was overpowering to Jesus. He was crossing the ground on which, a generation later, the tenth Roman legion would be encamped, as part of the besieging force destined to lay all the splendor before him in ashes. Knowing the future as he did, his heart was filled with indescribable sadness. G.

Forgetting his own momentary glory, he beheld only the mighty misery of the rebellious people. He knew what lay beneath that fair exterior; the queenly city, overflowing that very hour with streams of pilgrims, that Zion of the prophets, was an accursed city, which had not “known the day of her visitation.” Glory and suffering are with him always inseparable, and in this triumphant King of Zion we behold the man of sorrows! De P.—He had dropped silent tears at the grave of Lazarus; here he wept aloud. All the shame of his mockery, all the anguish of his torture, was powerless, five days afterward, to extort from him a single groan, or to wet his eyelids with one trickling tear; but here, all the pity that was within him overmastered his human spirit. F.

42. “In this thy day, when, all his other messengers rejected, the Father has sent forth his own Son to thee—if thou in thy day hadst known the things belonging to thy peace spoken so often, so earnestly by him.” The sentence is cut short. For a moment the bright vision rises of all that Jerusalem might have been had she but known the time of her visitation. The pause, the tears, the lament over the doomed city, must have produced a deep impression on those around. How little could they understand the meaning of what Christ said, or the source of the emotion he displayed! One thing was clearly shown: the absence of all anticipation on the part of Jesus of any present individual success and triumph. How impressively are we here taught that the day of grace, the opportunity of return to and reconciliation with God, has its fixed limits,

Mount of Olives.

narrower often than the day of life! Apparently Jerusalem’s day of grace extended for years beyond the time when he uttered the words of doom, and let fall the tears of sympathy. Miracles were wrought in her streets, exhortations and remonstrances addressed to her children; but to that all-seeing eye before which the secret things of God’s spiritual kingdom lie open, the things belonging to her peace were from that time hid from her eyes. The door was shut, the doom was sealed. H.

43,44. Sternly, literally, terribly, within fifty years, was that prophecy fulfilled. F.—A trench—rampart: first of wood, and, when this was burnt, a built wall, four miles circuit, built in three days—so determined were they. This “cut off all hope of escape,” and consigned the city to unparalleled horrors. B.—Who save he to whom the future was as the present could have spoken as Jesus did of the days when the enemy should cast a trench, and raise a mound, and compass it round, and keep it in on every side? Josephus tells us how to the very letter all this was fulfilled—how at an early stage of the four months’ siege, Titus, the Roman general in command, summoned a council of war, at which three plans were discussed: to storm the city, or to repair and rebuild the engines that had been destroyed, or to blockade the city and starve it into surrender. The third was the method adopted, and by incredible labor, the whole army engaging in the work, a wall was raised, which compassed the city round and round, and hemmed it in on every side. H.

Thy children within thee. While Titus was completing his preparations at Cesarea, almost the whole Jewish population left in the desolated country districts flocked to Jerusalem, to keep the

Passover of A. D. 70, just one generation after that Passover at which they had refused their day of visitation and cut off the Messiah. Her children were still within her when, after an attempt to storm the city, the siege was converted into a blockade, and the fugitives, who fled from the unutterable horrors of famine and faction within the walls, perished between the lines, or were crucified in attitudes of cruel mockery to deter imitators. S.—

Even with the ground. The Romans burnt the most extreme parts of the city, and dug up the foundations of the walls, reserving only three towers, and a part of the wall, as a memorial of their own valor, and for the better encampment of the soldiers. Afterward, we read in the Jewish Talmud, and in Maimonides, that Terentius Rufus, who was left to command the army, did with a plough-share tear up the foundation of the temple; thereby signally fulfilling the prophecy of Micah 3: 12. Eusebius too affirms that it was ploughed up by the Romans, and that he saw it lying in ruins. So literally were our Saviour’s words accomplished, in the ruin and desolation of the city and of the temple! G. T.—Titus did not wish to sacrifice the temple—nay, he made every possible effort to save it—but he was forced to leave it in ashes. He did not intend to be cruel to the inhabitants, but the deadly fanaticism of their opposition so extinguished all desire to spare them, that he undertook the task of wellnigh exterminating the race—of crucifying them by hundreds, of exposing them in the amphitheatre by thousands, of selling them into slavery by myriads. Josephus tells us that, even immediately after the siege of Titus, no one, in the desert waste around him, would have recognized the beauty of Judea. F. (Read Section 185.)

M. 15. Even in the temple itself, the children prolong the acclamations; and as the sick, the infirm, the afflicted with different maladies are restored at once to health or the use of their faculties, the same uncontrolled acclamations from the younger part of the multitude are renewed with increasing fervor. H. M.—Pleasant ever to the eye of Jesus was childhood with its charm of freshness, simplicity, buoyant freedom and open ardent love and trust, and sweet ever to his ear the strains of juvenile devotion, but never so pleasant as when he saw these bands of children clustering round him in the temple; never so sweet as when—no others left to do it—they lifted up their youthful voices in those hosannas, the last accents of earthly praise that fell upon his ear. H.

16. Have ye never read?** Psalm 8:2. This Psalm is frequently cited in the New Testament of Christ. In understanding such citations as this, we must bear in mind that the external fulfilment of a prophecy is often itself only a type and representation of that inner, deeper sense of the prophecy which belongs to the spiritual dealings of God. A.—He did not finish the passage, but left it to them to supply the words, “that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.” N. A.

We must imagine the agitation and tumult of the crowded city, or we shall be unable fully to enter into the beauty of the calm and unostentatious dignity with which Jesus pursues his course. He preserves the same equable composure in the triumphant procession into the temple, and in the hall of Pilate. At every step he feels himself more inextricably within the toils. Yet he moves onward with the self-command of a willing sacrifice, intimating that his death was necessary, to secure indescribable benefits for his followers and for mankind. Yet there is no needless exasperation of his enemies; he observes the utmost prudence, though so fully aware that his prudence can be of no avail; he never passes the night within the city. And it is only by the treachery of one of his followers that the Sanhedrim at length make themselves masters of his person. H. M.

Mk. 13. A fig-tree having leaves. There is a kind of tree which bears a large green-colored fig that ripens very early. I have plucked them in May, from trees on Lebanon, a hundred and fifty miles north of Jerusalem, and where the trees are nearly a month later than in the south of Palestine; it does not, therefore, seem impossible but that the same kind might have had ripe figs at Easter, in the warm, sheltered ravines of Olivet. The reason why he might seek fruit from this particular tree at that early day, was the ostentatious show of leaves. The fig often comes with or even before the leaves, and especially on the early kind. If there was no fruit on this leafy tree, it might justly be condemned as barren. W. M. T.—In walking along this same Bethany road we came upon just such a precocious fig-tree. It was, in all likelihood, the very road on which our Lord had travelled; it was the same week in the year, for it was the Passover week when we were on Olivet; and while in general the few fig-trees that we saw were showing little more than the first signs of life, there was one more favorably placed, which was several weeks in advance of all the others, all green with foliage, and with ripe fruit underneath it. We plucked a branch and brought it home with us. The large leaves had shrivelled, but the fruit was still sweet, two months afterward. A. Thomson.

13,14. The fig-tree was the type of the Jewish people (L. 13:6-9). They had the law, the temple, all rites of worship, the externals of righteousness; but bore none of its fruits. Andrews.—Yesterday, he had bewailed the foreseen desolation of Israel, as having been unfaithful to her covenant promises, and about to frustrate her covenant hopes. To-day, he teaches the same fact by symbols. The tree is Israel. He—the same who planted it in times of old—goes to it, expecting the fruit which its fair appearance warranted; but finding none, he pronounces judicially upon it the sentence of destruction. K.—They had a divine revelation to guide them, by which they were distinguished from all nations; they had the worship of God established among them; they had the appearance of sanctity and religion, but all was outside show, hypocrisy, and dissimulation, without any solid and substantial goodness: they had nothing besides leaves, and therefore, by a just judgment, that which they had was to be taken from them. Jortin.

Our Lord had already spoken the parable of the fig-tree that bore no fruit. This miracle was but the acted parable. Here was an opportunity in their very path of enforcing, by a visible sign proceeding from himself, one of the most important truths he had striven to teach them. He condemned the tree to become in appearance that which it was in fact—a useless thing. McD.—Christ did not attribute moral responsibilities to the tree, when he smote it because of its unfruitfulness, but he did attribute to it a fitness for representing moral qualities. All our language concerning trees, a good tree, a bad tree, a tree which ought to bear, is exactly the same continual transfer to them of moral qualities, and a witness for the natural fitness of the Lord’s language—the language indeed of an act, rather than of words. He did not, like Moses and Elijah, make the assertion of God’s holiness and his hatred of evil at the cost of many lives, but only at the cost of a single unfeeling tree. His miracles of mercy were unnumbered, and on men; his miracle of judgment was but one, and on a tree. It was punished not for being without fruit, but for proclaiming by the voice of those leaves that it had such—not for being barren, but for being false. And this was the guilt of Israel, a guilt so much deeper than the guilt of the nations. The other trees had nothing, but they did not pretend to have anything; this tree had nothing, but it gave out that it had much. So was it severally with Gentile and with Jew. The Gentiles were bare of all fruits of righteousness, but they owned it; the Jews were bare, but they vaunted that they were full. T.—And as the fruitless tree, failing to realize the aim of its being, was destroyed, so the theocratic nation, for the same reason, was to be overtaken, after long forbearance, by the judgments of God, and shut out from his kingdom. N.

The tree was a fit type of that premature outward show of devotion with which he was even now welcomed by the people, the fruit of whose “Hosannas” would soon be “Crucify him!” and it was on such a deceitful show that his sentence really fell.

In any case, let us remember that he was the Lord of the creation; and this, his only miracle of destruction, furnished a most emphatic warning to the people who had often been described as trees of the Lord’s planting, but as often warned that they would be rooted up, if they bare no fruit worthy of repentance. S.—And should the great Creator desire to deal with any barren human spirit as he dealt with that barren fig-tree, what has he to do in order to punish it for its barrenness? He has but to desert that spirit, and call away after him as he goes all those powers and influences that had been at work there so long and so fruitlessly, to leave it finally and forever to itself. Poor, solitary, forsaken spirit, cut off from God, and cast adrift upon a wild and shoreless sea, with thine own vulture passions in thee, let loose from all restraint, to turn upon thee and torture thee, and prey upon thee forever! What darker, drearier hell than that? The soul breeding within it the worm that never dies; itself kindling the fire it cannot quench. H.

Section 120.—Cleansing of the Temple. Lesson of the Withered Tree.

Monday and Tuesday.

Mk. 15 And they come to Jerusalem. And Jesus went into the temple of God and began to cast out them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the money-changers, and the seats of them that sold doves; and would not suffer that any man should carry any vessel through the temple. And he taught, saying unto them, Is it not written, My house shall be called, of all nations, the house of prayer? but ye have made it a den of thieves. And he taught daily in the temple. But the chief priests, and the scribes, and the chief of the people heard, and sought how they might destroy him; and could not find what they might do: for they feared him, because all the people were very attentive to hear him, and were astonished at his doctrine. And when even was come, he went out of the city.

L. 37 And in the day-time he was teaching in the temple; and at night he went out, and abode in the mount that is called the mount of Olives. And all the people came early in the morning to him in the temple, for to hear him.

Mk. 20 And in the morning as they passed by, when the disciples saw the fig-tree dried up from the roots, they marvelled, saying, How soon is the fig-tree withered away! And Peter, calling to remembrance, saith unto him, Master, behold the fig-tree which thou cursedst is withered away. And Jesus answering, saith unto them, Have faith in God. For verily I say unto you, That if ye have faith, and doubt not, ye shall not only do this which is done to the fig-tree; but also whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; it shall be done, and he shall have whatsoever he saith. Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them; and all things ye

25 shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive. And when ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have ought against any: that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive you 26 your trespasses. But if ye do not forgive, neither will your Father which is in heaven forgive your trespasses.

THOUGH Jesus taught that prayer is influential as a direct appeal to our Father in heaven, he also announced certain conditions upon which prayer, to be efficacious, must proceed. The object prayed for must be in harmony with the divine wisdom as seeing, and the divine love as choosing always that which is best for the suppliant. Mere importunity ought not to procure for us anything which, upon the whole, is not for our good. Prayer must be offered in faith; not as an experimental essay with Providence, nor for the manipulation of our own feelings; but with the earnest conviction that the thing we pray for will be bestowed, if, on the whole, this is best for us, and if, under all the circumstances, this is wisely possible. In praying for temporal benefits we should have in view chiefly the spiritual benefit to be attained through freedom from worldly anxieties. By the virtue that is lodged in the prayer of faith, whosoever will may approximate himself to God in character. “This is the will of God, even your sanctification.” J. P. T.

15,16. For the convenience of the Jews from a distance who wished to offer sacrifices, booths had been erected in the temple-court, in which everything necessary for the purpose was kept for sale, and money-changers were also allowed to take their stand there; but, as might have been expected from the existing corruption of the Jewish people, many foul abuses had grown up. The merchants and brokers made everything subservient to their avarice, and their noisy huckstering was a great disturbance to the worship of the temple. N.—The second cleansing of the courts of the temple appears to have taken the custodians of the holy place as much by surprise as did the first. They made no attempt to interrupt it, nor did they interfere with Jesus in the use to which he turned the courts that he had cleansed. He remained to keep guard over the place, not suffering any man to carry even a common vessel across the court, which the Jews had turned into a common thoroughfare. He remained for hours to occupy it unchallenged; the people flocked into it, and he taught them there. All this while the priests and the Levites, the rulers and the temple-guard, are looking on bewildered, their earlier antipathy kindled into a tenfold fervor of hate. H.

17. My house shall be called the house of prayer. All the sacrifices which were offered from the beginning of the world, all the incense of the tabernacle, all the smoke of the altar, were the vehicles of prayer, intercession, and atonement. Prayer ever was, and ever will be, the vital part of religion: without it there is no religion. The devotion of the congregation upon earth is preparatory to the felicity of heaven; and he must pray with Christians in this vale of tears, who would join in the worship of angels in the sanctuary above. An.

As once near the beginning, so here at the close of his great work of life, the Son of God cleanses his Father’s house, with holy and indignant zeal, of its secular profanations. What does the purifying mean? It means that every true, right work in this world must begin and end with the reverent acknowledgment of God our Father; it means that in every Christian life, of man or woman, youth or child, large and clean and unobstructed place must be made for prayer; it means that business must be marked off from worship with a fully drawn and definite line, not suffered under any pretext or apology to take more than its share of time or thought, or to intrude into the sanctuary, or to do what is just as bad—hold men out of the sanctuary. It means that neither outwardly, in sordid acts, nor inwardly, in selfish, exclusive, uncharitable dispositions, are we to make our Father’s house a house of merchandise. F. D. H.

18. At the rebuke and the quotation, the baffled scribes and high-priests retire to mature their plans, to wait for the morrow, and see what it will bring forth. So closed the last day but one of the active ministry of Jesus. H.

20. Trees were made for men; they have no volition, and therefore cannot sin, and have no feeling of punishment. And this barren fig-tree, withered by Christ’s word, bears fruit forever in the garden of Scripture by the warning it gives against hypocritical ostentation and luxuriant unfruitfulness. Our Lord was going to his crucifixion, and he therefore confirmed the minds of his disciples by this assurance of his power. W.

23. Say to this mountain, Be thou removed. It was a common saying among the Jews, when they intended to commend any of their doctors for dexterity in solving difficult questions, that he was a rooter up of mountains. In allusion to this adage, Christ tells his disciples that if they had faith they might say to a mountain, Be thou removed and be thou cast into the sea, and it should be done; that is, in confirmation of the Christian faith, they should be able to do the most difficult things. Burder.—Shall not doubt. Whoever does not make a difference between great and lesser miracles, or hesitate because he thinks the miracle too great, but really believes that God can do it, and has commissioned him to do it, shall undoubtedly succeed. It shall be to him whatever he may say, i. e., command or predict in God’s name and by his authority. J. A. A.—We accept it then as true to its whole extent, that at that time, and as to these men, there was no miracle of power needful or useful for the furtherance of their apostolic work, which their faith, had it been perfect, might not have enabled them to accomplish.

Prayer, it has been said, moves the arm that moves the universe. But it is faith which gives to prayer the faculty of linking itself in this way with Omnipotence, and calling it to human aid. And so you find that Jesus couples faith and prayer together. Wonderful words, assigning an absolutely unlimited efficacy to faith and prayer—but words of truth and soberness, notwithstanding the compass of their embrace, if we remember that true faith will confide in God or Christ only for that as to which he invites and so warrants its confidence; and true prayer will ask for that alone which is agreeable to the will of God, and will promote the spiritual and eternal good of him upon whom it is bestowed. These are the conditions—natural and reasonable—which underlie all that Christ has said of the power of faith and prayer. H.—From the nature of the case put by our Lord—that they might wish a mountain removed—it is quite plain that what he designed to teach was the great lesson that no obstacle shall be able to stand before a confiding faith in God. And certainly when one thinks of the “mountains” that have already been “removed and cast into the sea” by the victorious faith of Christ’s disciples—the towering paganisms of the old world which have fallen before the Church of Christ—we may well exclaim of all other obstacles whatever to the triumphs of the cross, “Who art thou, O great mountain? Before Zerubbabel thou shalt become a plain.” B.

24. What ye desire, ye shall have.** Longing desire prayeth always, though the tongue be silent. If thou art ever longing, thou art ever praying.

When stayeth prayer? When desire groweth cold. Aug.—All things ye ask, believing, ye shall receive. Not, believing that ye shall receive what ye ask, but, believing in God as a faithful promise* who will answer your prayer; it may be, by giving the thing asked, or by giving something else which he sees more desirable and better for you. The spirit in you, of faith, is the thing upon which the receiving turns. Without this, no receiving. With this, always a receiving, either the object asked, or something better. J. G. B.—Who, it may be said, ever received all the blessings he prayed for? But this is answered by asking again, Who ever, when he prayed, believed that he received what he asked for in the full meaning of our Saviour’s words? For by such belief it should seem that he meant full trust in him, and entire submission to his will. Any person thoroughly willing to let God choose for him, would in reality always believe that he receives of God what he prays for. For he would be more sure of God’s love and disposition to do the very best for him, than of his own love for himself. Therefore, how earnestly soever he may feel and utter any particular wish, it will always be tempered with this conviction that, however God may appear to deny him, yet the blessing he asks for will come somehow, in a way which God knows to be better. Keble.

25,26. To prevent the obvious inference from the fulfilment of his malediction against the fig-tree, Jesus mingles with his promise of power to his apostles to perform acts as extraordinary, the strictest injunctions to the milder spirit inculcated by his precept and his example. These prayers were to be for the forgiveness, not for the providential destruction, of their enemies. H. M.—When praying, forgive. Our Lord has reference to the twelve apostles still; and after stating the necessity of faith and of believing prayer in working miracles, reminds them that the same moral dispositions were required in this as in all other prayer, particularly specifying that forgiving temper which he may have seen to be especially deficient in some of them. J. A. A.—The connection between the two is so constant, invariable, that neither can you ever find the humble, contrite heart, which sues for mercy at the throne of grace, without finding there also the meek and gentle spirit that goes forth forgivingly toward others; nor do you ever meet with such free, full, generous forgiveness of others, as from those who have themselves partaken of the pardoning grace of God. H.

Section 121.—His Authority questioned. The Two Sons.

The Temple. Tuesday.

Mk. 27 AND on one of those days they come again to Jerusalem: and when he was come into the temple, it came to pass, as he was walking, as he taught the people and preached the gospel, there came unto him the chief priests, and the scribes, and the L. 2 elders of the people: and spake unto him, saying, Tell us by what authority doest thou 3 these things? or who is he that gave thee this authority? And Jesus answered and said unto them, I will also ask you one thing, which, if ye tell me, I in like wise will tell you by 4 what authority I do these things. The baptism of John, whence was it? from heaven, or 5 of men? answer me. And they reasoned with themselves, saying, If we shall say, From 6 heaven; he will say unto us, Why then believed ye him not? But if we shall say, Of men, we fear the people: all the people will stone us, for they all be persuaded 7 that John was a prophet indeed. And they answered and said unto Jesus, We cannot 8 tell whence it was. And Jesus answering said unto them, Neither tell I you by what authority I do these things. Mk. 1 And he began to speak unto them and to the people by parables. But what think ye? M. 28 A certain man had two sons; and he came to the first, and said, Son, go work to-day 29 in my vineyard. He answered and said, I will not: but afterward he repented, and 30 went. And he came to the second, and said likewise. And he answered and said, I 31 go, sir: and went not. Whether of them twain did the will of his father? They say unto him, The first. Jesus saith unto them, Verily I say unto you, That the publicans 32 and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you. For John came unto you in the way of righteousness, and ye believed him not; but the publicans and the harlots believed him: and ye, when ye had seen it, repented not afterward, that ye might believe him.

SIN may have its enormity measured in speculation without being bitterly repented of and forsaken. God and his ways may be justified without being loved. The plan of salvation through atoning blood may be saluted as a grand solution of a stupendous moral problem, without being made the stay of hope; welcomed as a relief to reason, but not applied as a healing power to the wounded heart. “The head can as easily amuse itself with a living and justifying faith in the blood of Jesus, as with any other notion.” As of the doctrines, so also of the duties of our religion. These duties may be objects merely of belief, arrayed in well-ordered systems, and acknowledged to be the proper code of life, without being actually reduced to practice. The study of God’s word, the keeping of holy time, prayer and praise, a clean heart and a clean life, with self-denying exertions, in all feasible and hopeful ways, for the good of others, may all be clearly recognized as Christian duties, without being discharged. The most sacred duty may thus decay into a dogma, asking only to be believed. “I go, sir,” answered the son in the parable, “but went not.” R. D. H.

27. The teachings contained in Sections 121-127 were all given publicly in the temple on Tuesday. They constitute the close of Christ’s public ministry. Tuesday, the 4th day of April, was by far the most eventful in the life of Christ, prior to his passion and death. When he first entered the temple, it was evident that systematic plans had been formed to silence him. Pharisees, Sadducees, and Herodians united against him; assumed to be his disciples; mingled their questions with those of honest inquirers; endeavored to entrap him into answers that should arouse popular prejudice or embroil him with the Roman government. L. A.

Chief priests, scribes, elders. Of these three sections of the Sanhedrim, the first was composed of priests (perhaps heads of the twenty-four classes, not deposed high-priests); the second, of expounders and transcribers of the law; the third, of the heads of the principal families of Israel. E.—The chief priests, the learned scribes, the leading rulers, representatives of all the constituent classes of the Sanhedrim, were there, to overawe him—whom they despised as the poor ignorant prophet of despicable Nazareth—with all that was venerable in age, eminent in wisdom, or imposing in authority in the great council of the nation. F.—The qualifications for membership of this court, as stated by Jewish writers, are curious. They must be religious, and learned in arts and languages. They must have some skill in physic, arithmetic, astronomy, astrology, and be acquainted with what belonged to magic, sorcery, and idolatry, that they may know how to judge of them. They must be without maim or blemish of body; men of years, but not extremely old, because such are commonly of too great severity; and they must be fathers of children, that they might be acquainted with tenderness and compassion. When Judea became a Roman province, the Sanhedrim either, as is more likely, assumed for the first time, or recovered, its station as a kind of senate or representative body of the nation; possessed itself of such subordinate functions of the government as were not actually administered by the Roman procurator. It is the Sanhedrim, under the name of the chief priests, scribes, and elders of the people, who take the lead in all the transactions recorded in the gospels. Jesus Christ was led before the Sanhedrim, and by them denounced before the tribunal of Pilate. H. M.

L. 2. They demanded of him his warrant for thus publicly assuming the functions of rabbi and prophet, for riding into Jerusalem amid the hosannas of attendant crowds, for purging the temple of the traffickers, at whose presence they connived. F.—Their question seems a fit and fair one. They are the constituted keepers of the temple, of the only public building of the city that the Romans have left entirely under Jewish control. There has been a manifest invasion of the territory committed to their guardianship, of the offices that they alone are held competent to discharge; for who is this that, being neither priest nor Levite, nor scribe nor elder, deals with the sacred place as if it were his own? H.

4. The Baptism of John, whence?** The Sanhedrim had heard two years before (J. 1 : 19) from the mouth of the Baptist an indirect answer to the very question they were now proposing; meet, then, was it that they should first declare the estimation in which they held him who had so answered them. E.—If they had recognized the divine mission of John, they must also have acknowledged the authority by which Jesus did these things, for John expressly declared that he was sent to testify of him, and bore witness to having seen the Holy Spirit descend and rest upon him. A.

7. We cannot tell.** It was ignorance in a sphere wherein ignorance was for them inexcusable. They, the appointed explainers of the law—they, the accepted teachers of the people—and yet to be compelled, against their real convictions, to say, and that before the multitude, that they could not tell whether a man of immense and sacred influence, a man who acknowledged the Scriptures which they explained, and carried into practice the customs which they reverenced—was a divinely-inspired messenger or a deluding impostor! F.—They could at least have told what they themselves believed. They could, but dared not; and so by this piece of cowardice and hypocrisy they forfeit the title to have any other or fuller satisfaction given them as to the nature and origin of that authority which Jesus exercised, beyond that which was already in their hands. H.

8. Neither tell I you.** An answer, not to their outward words, “We know not,” but to their inward thoughts, “We will not tell.” A.—He well knew—as the form of his answer showed—that their “do not know” was a “do not choose to say.” Since, however, their failure to answer clearly absolved him from any necessity to tell them further of an authority about which, by their own confession, they were incompetent to decide. F.

Mk. 1. Our Lord now becomes himself the assailing party, and commences that series of parables, in which his adversaries might see themselves, the impurity of their hearts, their neglect of the charge laid upon them, their contempt of the privileges afforded them, the aggravated guilt of that outrage against himself which they were already meditating in their hearts. T.—In this series of parables and discourses of our Lord with his enemies, he develops, more completely than ever before, his hostility to their hypocrisy and iniquity—and so they are stirred up to compass his death. A.

M. 28. A certain man had two sons. Here, as at L. 15 : 11, are described, under the image of two sons of one father, two great moral divisions of men, under one or other of which might be ranged almost all with whom our blessed Lord came in contact. In one are included all who have sought a righteousness through the law, and by the help of it have been kept in the main from open outbreakings of evil. In the second class are contained all who have thrown off the yoke, openly and boldly transgressed the laws of God, done evil with both hands earnestly.

31. The Lord immediately makes the application of the words which have been reluctantly wrung from them, “Verily, I say unto you, that the publicans and harlots go into the kingdom of God before you." When he says, they “go before you,” or take the lead of you, he would indicate that the door of hope was not yet shut upon them—the others indeed had preceded them, but they might still follow, if they would. T.—True repentance saves the greatest sinners; a false righteousness does but blind and harden the worldly-wise the more. Men recover more easily from gross disorders than from a false righteousness and secret pride, which corrupt the whole life and lull the sinner asleep. Q.

32. Ye repented not, that ye might believe him. It was the treatment given to John and to his ministry that Jesus had been setting forth in the conduct of the two sons to their father. They, the chief priests and elders of the people, were the second son; and those publicans and harlots, who repented at the preaching of the Baptist, were the first. H.—When the Baptist came unto them “in the way of righteousness,” and summoned to earnest repentance, to a revival of God’s work in the hearts of the entire people, then many of those hitherto openly profane were baptized, confessing their sins; and like the son who at first contumaciously refused obedience to his father’s bidding, “repented and went;” while, on the other hand, the real unrighteousness of the Pharisees, before concealed under a show of zeal for the law, was evidently declared: professing willingness to go, they yet “went not.” T.

In its modern application, the parable teaches, not that there is more hope for a flagrant sinner than for a virtuous man, but that the flagrant sinner who forsakes his sins enters the kingdom of heaven before the orthodox and moral man who clings to his sins. The first son is commended, not because of the daring wickedness of his reply, but because he regretted it and showed his regret by his action. The second son is not condemned for his answer, but in spite of it, and because, having promised obedience, he refused to render it. L. A.

Section 122.—The Faithless Husbandmen.

The Temple. Tuesday.

M. 33 HEAR another parable: There was a certain householder, which planted a vineyard, and hedged it round about, and digged a winepress in it, and built a tower, and let it out to husbandmen; and went into a far country for a long time. And at the season, when the time of the fruit drew near, he sent to the husbandmen a servant, that he might receive from the husbandmen of the fruit of the vineyard. But the husbandmen caught him, and beat him, and sent him away empty. And again he sent unto them another servant; and at him they cast stones, and wounded him in the head; and they beat him also, and entreated him shamefully, and sent him away empty. And again he sent a third; and they wounded him also, and cast him out. And again he sent another; and him they killed, and many others; beating some and killing some. Then the lord of the vineyard, having yet one son, his well-beloved, said, What shall I do? I will send my beloved son: it may be they will reverence him when they see him. Therefore he sent him also, last of all, unto them. But when the husbandmen saw the son, they reasoned among themselves, saying, This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and let us seize on his inheritance, and it shall be ours. And they caught him, and cast him out of the vineyard, and slew him. When the lord therefore of the vineyard cometh, what will he do unto those husbandmen? He shall come and miserably destroy those wicked men, and will let out his vineyard unto other husbandmen, which shall render him the fruits in their seasons. And when they heard it, they said, God forbid. And Jesus beheld them, and said, Did ye never read in the scriptures this that is written, The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner: this is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes? Therefore say I unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the

44 fruits thereof. And whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken: but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder. 45 And when the chief priests and the scribes and Pharisees had heard his parables, they perceived that he had spoken against them; and the same hour they sought to lay hands 46 on him; but they feared the multitude, because they took him for a prophet. And they left him, and went their way.

THE guilty consciences of the chief priests and Pharisees addressed, felt instinctively that in these parables he had pointed to them. The vineyard of God, separated from the wilderness of heathenism, was clearly Israel. The husbandmen were the priests, rabbis, and Pharisees, to whom he had left his vineyard, with the charge to tend it, and to render him duly its fruits. The servants sent were the prophets, from their first appearance in the distant past to John the Baptist. They had been despised, beaten, martyred. Only one could follow them—the last and highest representative of God, who should have commanded respect even from murderers—his only and well-beloved Son, the Messiah; who had come, not as the nation fancied, to bring them political glory and earthly prosperity, but to receive the fruits which, kept back for hundreds of years, could no longer be left unrendered. But Jesus, the Messiah, had long foreseen his fate. He had had it before his eyes every hour since his public entry to Jerusalem. He, the rightful heir of the vineyard, had been received by the husbandmen with jealous eyes and deadly purposes. The revolt he had come to end had grown rampant. It had risen from a refusal to render the fruits, to a rejection of their dependence and a daring resolution to take the vineyard into their own hands: to cast out God in casting out him whom he had sent. The fierce anger of God could not long delay. The rebels, smitten by his wrath, must perish. The vineyard must pass into other hands. But “the others” could only be the heathen whom Israel despised. Loyal to the Son whom Israel had rejected and slain, disciples and followers gathered from other nations, would be intrusted with the inheritance. Changing the figure, these would willingly accept, as the foundation and chief corner-stone of the new kingdom of God, him whom the first builders—of whom those now before him were the representatives—had rejected. Was there any doubt that God would transfer that kingdom to those thus loyal to his Son? G.—By the great Architect he had been laid of old in Zion, the chief foundation of the great spiritual edifice to be reared out of the ruins of the Fall. For many a generation he had been a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence. All these wrongs of the past he passively had borne, and now in his own person he is to submit to reproach and suffering and death; but the hour that was to see him exalted because of this, and proclaimed to be the head of the corner, was to see him coming also in judgment. H.

33. He looks back to the treatment which these men’s forefathers had given to messenger after messenger of the Most High, and he looks forward to that which they, fit sons of such sires, were about to give himself; and bringing the past, the present, and the future into the picture, he tells of a vineyard, well fenced, well furnished, let out to husbandmen. H.—One of the few instances—perhaps the only one—in which an image of the Old Testament is almost exactly repeated in the discourses of Christ. A. P. S.

The explanation of the hedging round the vineyard is suggested by passages like Ephes. 2:14, where the law is described as “the middle wall of partition” between the Jew and Gentile. By their circumscription through the law, the Jews became a people dwelling alone, and not reckoned among the nations. That law was a hedge at once of separation and of defence. Outwardly also Judea, through its geographical position, was hedged round—on the east by the river Jordan and the two lakes, on the south by the desert and mountainous country of Idumea, on the west by the sea, and by Anti-Libanus on the north—for so, observes Vitringa, had God in his counsels determined, who willed that Israel should dwell alone. T.

Built a tower. These watch-towers are sometimes as high as forty or fifty feet. Those which I examined had a small door near the ground, and a level space on the top, where a man could sit and command a view of the plantation. Some of the towers near Hebron are so built as to serve as houses; and, during the vintage, it is said that the inhabitants take up their abode in them in such numbers as to leave the town almost deserted. H. B. H.—Let it out to husbandmen. These must be the spiritual leaders and teachers of the people, while the vineyard itself will then naturally signify the great body of the people, who were to be instructed and taught, to the end that, under diligent cultivation, they might bring forth fruits of righteousness, and so realize the idea of the kingdom of God.

Mk. 5. The servants, that is, the prophets, and other more eminent ministers of God in his theocracy, were sent, being raised up at particular times, having particular missions. The patience of the householder is thus brought out and magnified that it may set forth the yet more wonderful forbearance and long-suffering of God: “Howbeit I sent unto you all my servants the prophets, rising early and sending them, saying, Oh, do not this abominable thing that I hate” (Jer. 44: 4). “Nevertheless they were disobedient, and rebelled against thee, and cast thy law behind their backs, and slew thy prophets who testified against them, to turn them to thee, and they wrought great provocations” (Neh. 9: 26). The whole confession made in that chapter by the Levites is in itself an admirable commentary on this parable. T.

L. 16. He will come and destroy. Our Lord here makes his coming coincide with the destruction of Jerusalem, which is incontestably the overthrow of the wicked husbandmen. They said, God forbid. The people, in whose hearing the parable was delivered. A.—M. 42. Jesus wishes by this quotation to carry on as it were the prophecy of the parable; to show what would be the doom inflicted upon the perpetrators of that dark deed, the murder of the Father’s only and well-beloved Son. H.—The passage forms an exact parallel with this parable. The builders answer to the husbandmen: they were appointed of God to carry up the spiritual building, as these to cultivate the spiritual vineyard. The rejection of the chief corner-stone answers exactly to the denying and murdering the heir. The reason why he leaves for a moment the image of the vineyard, is because of its inadequacy to set forth one important part of the truth which was needful to make the moral complete, namely this, that the malice of the Pharisees should not defeat the purpose of God—that the Son should yet be the heir—that not merely vengeance should be taken, but that he should take it. Now this is distinctly set forth by the rejected stone becoming the head of the corner, on which the builders stumbled and fell, and were broken—on which they were now already thus stumbling and falling, and which, if they set themselves against it to the end, would fall upon them and crush and destroy them utterly. T.

43,44. Our Lord here returns to the parable, and more plainly than ever before announces to the Jews their rejection of God. The “vineyard” is now the “kingdom of God.” The nation here spoken of is not the Gentiles in general, but the Church of the truly faithful. This stone. A reference to Isa. 8: 14, 15, and Dan. 2: 44, and a plain identification of the stone there mentioned with that in Ps. 118. The stone is the whole kingdom and power of the Messiah summed up in himself. Whosoever shall fall on. He that takes offence, that makes it a stone of stumbling, “shall be broken;” “but on whomsoever it shall fall,” as its enemy, it shall come in vengeance, as prophesied in Daniel, “it shall dash him in pieces.” A.—They fall on the stone who are offended at Christ in his low estate. They on whom the stone falls are those who set themselves in self-conscious opposition against the Lord; who, knowing what he is, do yet to the end oppose themselves to him and to his kingdom. These shall not merely fall and be broken; for one might recover himself, though with some present harm, from such a fall as this; but on them the stone shall fall as from heaven, and shall grind them to powder. T.

Section 123.—The Marriage Feast, and the Wedding Garment.

The Temple. Tuesday.