Eternal: 'This people honour me with their lips, but have removed their heart far from me, and their fear toward me is taught by the precept of men.'[1] With little or no power of distinguishing between what was rule of ceremonial and what was rule of conduct, they followed the prescriptions of their religion with a servile and sullen mind, 'precept upon precept, line upon line, here a little and there a little,'[2] and no end to it all. What a change since the days when it was joy to the just to do judgment![3] The prophets saw clearly enough the evil, nay, they could even point to the springs which must be touched in order to work a cure. But they could not press these springs steadily enough or skilfully enough to work the cure themselves.
Jesus Christ's new and different way of putting things was the secret of his succeeding where the prophets failed. And this new way he had of putting things is what is indicated by the expression epieikeia,—an expression best rendered, as I have elsewhere said,[4] by the phrase: 'sweet reasonableness.' For that which is epieikes is that which has an air of truth and likelihood: and that which has an air of truth and likelihood is prepossessing. Now, never were there utterances concerning conduct and righteousness,—Israel's master-concern, and the master-topic of the New Testament as well as of the Old,—which so carried with them an air of consummate truth and likelihood as Jesus Christ's did; and never, therefore, were any utterances so irresistibly prepossessing. He put things in such a way that his hearer was led to take each rule or fact of conduct by its inward side, its effect on the heart and character; then the reason of the thing, the meaning of what had been mere matter of blind rule, flashed upon him. The hearer could distinguish between what was only ceremony, and
- ↑ Is., xxix, 13.
- ↑ Is., xxviii, 13.
- ↑ Prov., xxi, 15.
- ↑ St. Paul and Protestantism, preface, p. xix.
