shine naturally and unconsciously out of the face and behaviour of every Christian.

16. It is wrong to act for appearance's sake. We should have a higher principle of conduct than the praise of men. Our foremost aim should be to glorify our Father in heaven. His glory, the greatness and goodness of his character, is hidden from the sight of the worldly. But in the good man it flames out, and the blindest can see it. A virtuous being is the most noble manifestation of the glory of God in the world. For example, the purest splendors of the Deity stream forth from the face of Jesus Christ. He made God to be known, revered, and obeyed, and consequently glorious in the eyes of men. Every Christian, however humble the sphere of his action, can do something toward the same holy end. He can praise his Father, can acknowledge his resplendent attributes, can win others" to work and worship so divine." The goodness and happiness of mankind are the glory of the Creator. And the humblest creature that lives can advance that goodness, and augment that happiness in himself and others. No matter if he is poor, sick, ignorant, and unknown; he shines, a cheering and a guiding light, if he has caught the spirit of religion. His lowly hovel is illuminated with a serene ray, his comfortless chamber is irradiated with a light above the brightness of the sun; the star of God's glory, that never sets, comes and stands over the place where that good spirit tabernacles and suffers. He lives with the best effect, though unaware of his influence.

"How far the little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed on a naughty world." 17. Think not that I am come to destroy, but to fulfil. After showing in the Beatitudes, that the worldly hopes of the Jews were without basis, Jesus proceeds to anticipate and correct an erroneous impression, which would naturally and immediately arise, that he came to destroy the Jewish system. He came not, he says, as they might hastily infer from what he had been saying, for the purpose of destruction, but of fulfilment. He came not to substitute violently one scheme for another, but to supersede an old system, established for temporary uses, 66 a shadow of good things to come,' " with a new and perpetual one. His was the completion of that splendid line of revelations of which the law and the prophets were the beginnings. He was so far from wishing to destroy, subvert, or impair the venerable authority of the Law and the Prophets, that the very end of his mission was to fulfil, finish, crown those disclosures of God, with others in harmony with them, but more advanced, and for the reception of which those had served to prepare the world. The law, i. e. the Pentateuch, or five books of Moses, or, more specifically, the Mosaic legislation. The prophets, i. e. the books and compositions which the prophets had written, or the course of religious teaching which had succeeded the Mosaic legislation. The Jewish revelation was designed for a particular people and a limited time. It was preparatory to a universal and permanent religion. It was the schoolmaster to train men for the coming

of the Great and Perfect Teacher. The master idea, running as a staple through the whole Jewish economy, is THE UNITY OF GOD. Line upon line, precept upon precept, this truth was wrought through centuries into the core of the Jewish heart. This noble principle, with the inferences which diverged from it in every direction, and reached to every motive of life, and every hope of the soul, opened the way for those fuller, tenderer disclosures of truth, which Jesus lived and died to make. The Jewish dispensation is not therefore to be judged by the Christian, nor the Christian by the Jewish. Each has its purpose in the counsels of Heaven, and each, when rightly understood, is seen to bear those beautiful characters of wise design, and benevolent adaptation, which are written all over the universe.

18. This verse expands and confirms the sense of the latter clause of the preceding. – · Verily. The Greek work is amen, which is used at the end of prayers. It expresses strong affirmation, so be it, truly, certainly. Our Master uses it in many places, to emphasize what he says. Compare Matt. xvi. 28, with Luke ix. 27. Till heaven and earth pass. Wakefield thus paraphrases the verse: "For verily I say unto you, the heaven and the earth will sooner pass away, than one jot or one tittle of the law be destroyed, and fail of its accomplishment.' See Luke xvi. 17. The heaven and earth signify the whole creation, the universe. The expression was no doubt a proverbial one, fit ted to convey a vivid idea of its perpetuity, to say that a thing would last as long as the universe itself.

One jot. Jot or yod, is the name of, the smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet. - One tittle. This signifies the small points, or the flourishes, made underneath or at the corners of the Hebrew letters, and on the accuracy of which the meaning of a word or sentence often depended. The Rabbins were accustomed to say, that an alteration of one of these little marks would destroy the world, because it would change the divine commandments. In transcribing the Old Testament, it was a sufficient reason for destroying the whole manuscript, if a mistake had been committed in reference to these small points and curvatures. The idea is, not only that the law in general was permanent, but that even its least requisitions, and the spirit they breathed, were of fresh, eternal obligation. The smallest part of God's commandments never can become null. The ceremonial and judicial institutions of the Jews were intended, at the time they were made, to be only temporary. But the moral truths, the spiritual requisitions, of Judaism were not to be abated one atom, but to be carried out to perfection, fulfilled by the Messiah. Till all be fulfilled, i. e. till all the purposes, contemplated in the Mosaic dispensation, are effected; till the gracious designs of God, commencing in the earliest revelations, are completed under Christianity. The Jews would suspect, from what Jesus had said, that he came to subvert the law and the prophets. By no means, is his language. The spirit of those revelations is strictly imperishable; it is to last and deepen till the final consummation of all things. I came to breathe into it

new energy, and send it forth over the globe, conquering and to conquer, till the purposes of God are at last all accomplished.

19. This verse is intelligible only when we learn that the Scribes and Pharisees, the teachers and casuists most in vogue, were accustomed to make distinctions between moral precepts; calling some of greater, and others of less obligation, and holding that the transgression of one of the less commandments was a venial offence. This method humored the bad propensities of mankind, and vitiated all strictness of morality. Matt. xxii. 36. One of these least commandments, i. e. more properly rendered, one of the least of these commandments, i. e. the laws of Moses, though some with less probability refer the sentence to the doctrines of Jesus which follow. He appears to continue the thought started in the preceding verses. Suppose not, he says, that I have any hostility to the Mosaic system; on the contrary, those will be lightly esteemed among my followers, who set themselves up as violators and disparagers of that dispensation of God, or who, like the Scribes and Pharisees, whilst they profess great fidelity to it, virtually nullify its injunctions by their traditions, and divisions of the law into duties of greater and less weight; but they will be the most honored who practise and inculcate universal obedience, and who, in becoming the advocates of Christianity, acknowledge also the finger of God in the law and the prophets. So at the present day, whosoever

shall break, or undervalue one class of duties, one set of divine laws; whosoever shall discard morality in his zeal for piety, or neglect piety because he is a good moral man, falls under the rebuke of this verse. Whilst one who does and teaches all the commandments, gives to every duty its place, is faithful to man, and God, and his Saviour, shall be great in the spiritual kingdoin, and an eminent Christian.

20. Your righteousness, your virtue, goodness. The righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees. They professed great piety and benevolence. They thanked God, that they were not as other men are. Their claims to superior virtue seem to have been acquiesced in by their countrymen. For it was a common saying, that, if but two men were admitted into the kingdom of heaven, one of them would be a Pharisee, and the other a Scribe. But, notwithstanding their bold pretensions, our Saviour, looking at the heart, detected and exposed their hypocrisy. They tithed the smallest herbs, but omitted those vast concerns, judgment, mercy, and faith. Their religion was of appearance, not of reality. They held, that the thoughts of the heart were not sinful. They were scrupulous to a fault in things of small consequence, but they indulged with the greater latitude in selfishness and sensuality. They appeared beautiful outwardly, no garnished sepulchre more so, but it was with numbers only a fair seeming; descending within, as Jesus did, a mass of moral corruption, as of the charnel

decision of the sovereign in whose stead he acts. Worldly teachers had glossed over the strict truth with their own interpretations; Jesus rends them away, and, backed by the power and wisdom of God, uses the simple but lofty form of address: "But I say unto you.' Such an expression, in any but a special, divinely authorized, supernaturally gifted messenger of God, would excite any thing but respect. In Jesus it is natural and graceful. He utters his great truths with an easy air of authority, notwithstanding his humble origin, which convinces us that he had a right from above to decide, and that his word was final. Angry with his brother without a cause. 1 John iii. 15.Brother means any man. All mankind, in the view of Christianity, are brothers. Angry without a cause, i. e. either without an adequate reason, or to an excessive degree. This is to be understood in the two last clauses, as well as the first. Jesus calls not only the overt act of violence criminal and punishable, but also the state of feeling from which the act originated, the bad passions causelessly and excessively inflamed. He deals with the heart. - In danger of the judgment, i. e. liable to the condemnation of the inferior court of judicature; or rather, to express the exact sense, is liable to such a punishment from God as may be parallel with that which this tribunal commands to be inflicted. Raca. A Syriac or Chaldaic word, expressing great contempt, equivalent to fool, dolt, simpleton. A commandment of God may be violated in spirit, when it is kept in the letter. The feeling

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of bitterness and contempt, which prompts men to call each other by opprobrious names, often results in the actual deed of violence and murder. So far as these are its natural consequences, the feeling itself is of the like dark guilt as its results. The council, i. e. the Sanhedrim, the chief tribunal among the Jews. It was established in the time of the Maccabees, about two hundred years before our Saviour. Civil and ecclesiastical cases fell beneath its jurisdiction. It could pass sentence of death, but depended upon the Roman governor to carry it into effect. Its number was about seventy, consisting of the highest officers of the Jewish commonwealth. They commonly held their sessions at Jerusalem in a room near the temple. Mention is often made of this court in the New Testament. Our Saviour was condemned by it, and his apostles were arraigned before it. The sense is, that he who used a word of contempt and scorn towards his fellowman, would expose himself to a condemnation and punishment, under the government of God, equivalent and parallel to that which it came within the jurisdiction of the Thou Sanhedrim to pronounce. fool. This translation is nearer the sense of Raca, used before, than of the word in the original. The term is Moreh. It means not fool, but impious, apostate, wretch; implying a low moral condition, as Raca does a contemptible intellect.

Hell fire. In the Greek, the Gehenna of fire. Gehenna is a word of Hebrew origin, signifying the valley of Hinnom. It was situated near the city of Jerusalem on