II.]

HOW TO DEAL WITH CASES.

51

sight of God, testing the application of each principle to each particular case, knowing that no case can be out of the range of a principle, but always reasonably diffident of our own power of showing how the one governs the other. Above all, if we have this spirit, we shall not doubt that God must desire that His creatures, one and all, should enter into His rest, and we shall confess that it is our own unbelief and hardness of heart which have excluded ourselves, and our fellow-men from the enjoyment of it.

SERMON III.

THE CRYSTAL PALACE.

Preached at Lincoln's Inn, Nov. 14th, 1852.

MATT. XII, 7: But if ye had known what this meaneth, I will have mercy and not sacrifice,' ye would not have condemned the guiltless.

HEN I was speaking, two Sundays ago, of

WHEN

I

our Lord's acts on the Sabbath-day, and of His discourses respecting it, I did not allude to the incident which called forth these words. wished you to see how He himself interpreted His healing on that day, to be not the relaxation of the Jewish law, but the fulfilment of it; how He proved that the Pharisees were violating the letter of the rule, and justifiably violating it, for their own ends; how He claimed a right as the Son of man, to use it for the blessing of the sons of how He declared that the works which the Father did on that day, He as the Son might do likewise. But I passed over the story of the

men;

disciples' walking through the corn-fields, plucking the ears and rubbing them in their hands,' and the complaint of the Pharisees, They do that which is not lawful to do on the Sabbath-day.' For this story refers not to the Lord, but to the servants. He is not asserting his own right to do good on the day which had been consecrated as a witness for God's goodness and against man's selfishness. He is justifying an ordinary unnecessary act, which had no show of benevolence in it, yet which shocked rabbinical prejudices as much as any greater one could have done. You might have expected Him to dismiss such a charge, either by acknowledging that his disciples were wrong, or by treating it as frivolous. He takes He treats the objection most seriously, as if it involved, like the other reasonings of the Pharisees on this subject, a mischievous and ungodly principle. He answers it first by appealing to the case of David, who went into the house of God, and took the shew-bread to satisfy the hunger of himself and his followers— next to the case of the priests, whose very services in the Temple on the Sabbath-day violate the letter of the law so far as it prohibits work. Thirdly, he refers to a passage in Hosea, in which God

neither of these courses.

declares 'He will have mercy and not sacrifice.' Finally, He proclaims the great law which He applied in other cases, The Son of man is Lord of the Sabbath-day.'

The allusions to the Jewish king and priest are full of instruction, and should be considered in the light of the great truth, that He, the king and high priest of humanity, came to claim all God's institutions, as witnesses of man's redemption. The quotation from the old prophet expounds these allusions, and brings them home to the conscience of the Jews. The words were familiar to them. They had them ready to cast at a moment's notice against any Heathen or any Jew, whom they supposed to be adopting heathen practices. But they had never known what they meant. Hosea and the prophets generally, warned their countrymen that they were forgetting the God who had made a covenant with their fathers, and had revealed Himself as the God of mercy and truth, and were making gods like those of the nations, whom they must propitiate with sacrifices of their own. The Jews, in the days of our Lord's incarnation, while they pretended to worship the God of Abraham, had fallen into the same sin. They did not see that the ordinances of God were

III.]

MERCY NOT SACRIFICE.

55

revelations of His goodness and mercy to the children of men. They did not proclaim them to their own countrymen or to the world in that character, but merely as injunctions by which the Jew was to be distinguished from other men, and the respectable religious Jew from the publican and sinner. They were thus unfitting themselves to receive Christ in that character of a Son of man, which He claimed for Himself so continually in express words; which He more gloriously vindicated to Himself by His death and resurrection.

I take the sentence which He adopted from the Old Testament as my guide in the task which I undertook to perform this afternoon. I have tried

to set before you the principle of the Jewish and of the Christian Sabbath. I have wished you to feel, that one ordinance is the expansion and fulfilment of the other. It remains for me to show that the principle is not a dead one; but one which we may apply to our own conduct and our present emergencies. But since the words 'conduct' and 'emergencies' may convey only a vague impression to your minds, I will address myself directly to the topic which is occupying the thoughts of so many at this time. I would rather avoid one which is so exciting; but if I did,