there had intervened fifteen hundred years; ample time for great changes in opinion and mournful departures from the spirit and true meaning of the law.
Great corruption in faith and practice had, in fact, taken place among the Jews, when our blessed Lord, the great Teacher, came into the world. They were ignorant of the true meaning of their prophetic writings, and earthly in their expectations of the benefits to be derived from the coming of the long promised Messiah, or they would not have rejected and crucified Him, when He came to bless them with His salvation. They were, as our Saviour says, a "wicked generation." (Matt. 12:45.) The Scribes and Pharisees too had, we have seen, corrupted the law by their traditions, and were denounced by the Redeemer as "blind guides," and as a "generation of vipers." And are we to defer to the judgment of such expositors of the law; we who live under the Christian dispensation, and enjoy all its increased light and privileges? The Jewish teachers had, by their tradition, made of none effect that commandment of God which requires us to honor our
