rather than personal, an affair of outward duties rather than of inward dispositions. Soon after the very words we have just quoted from him, the second Isaiah adds: 'If thou take away from the midst of thee the yoke, the putting forth of the finger and speaking vanity, and if thou draw out thy soul to the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted soul, then shall thy light rise in obscurity and thy darkness be as the noon day, and the Eternal shall guide thee continually and make fat thy bones.'[1] This stands, or at least appears to stand, as a full description of righteousness; and as such, it is unsatisfying.
What was wanted, then, was a fuller description of righteousness. Now, it is clear that righteousness, the central object of Israel's concern, was the central object of Jesus Christ's concern also. Of the development and of the cardinal points of his teaching we shall have to speak more at length by-and-by; all we have to do here is to pass them in a rapid preliminary review. Israel had said: 'To him that ordereth his conversation right shall be shown the salvation of God.'[2] And Jesus said: 'Except your righteousness exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees,'—that is, of the very people who then passed for caring most about righteousness and practising it most rigidly,—ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven.'[3] But righteousness had by Jesus Christ's time lost, in great measure, the mighty impulse which emotion gives; and in losing this, had lost also the mighty sanction which happiness gives. 'The whole head was sick and the whole heart faint;'[4] the glad and immediate sense of being in the right way, in the way of peace, was gone; the sense of being
