that
the truth--the central truth of religion--fades rapidly from their minds,
that the service of God is identical with the highest service rendered to
our fellow-men. "This commandment have we from Him, that he who loveth
God, love his brother also." This explains why the Pharisee held aloof
from the outcast and the sinner. They might be left to perish--it
mattered not to him.

Now, all through the Gospel history our Lord appears as standing in
absolute and sternest opposition to the dead religion of the Pharisees.
He could make no manner of terms with it. He acted against it. He
denounced it at every point. He rebuked them for "making the commandment
of God of none effect" by that tradition which they loved so dearly. He
brought the idea of a living God into closest touch with the actual lives
of men. He deliberately consorted with publicans and sinners. And,
finally, He condemned, in set discourse, the whole system, traditional,
Godless, inhuman, with scathing emphasis. Christ died, not only because
His words and acts ran counter to the prejudice of the people, but
because He spoke and acted in opposition to the dead religion of the
Pharisees.

3. The third historical cause of the death of Christ was the love of
gain and the political ambition of the Sadducees. Their hatred, indeed,
would have been powerless if our Lord had not already provoked the enmity
of the people and of the Pharisees; but that enmity, in turn, without the
unscrupulous intrigues of the Sadducees, a small but most influential
section, would never have proceeded to its fatal and murderous issue. The
Pharisees gave up the conflict in despair: "Perceive ye that ye prevail
nothing? Behold, the whole world is gone after Him." It was the
Sadducean High Priest who gave the counsel of death. "It is expedient
that one man should die for the people."

We must remember that the Sadducees represented the aristocracy of Judaea,
and that, as resulted necessarily from the nature and constitution of the
Jewish state, was an ecclesiastical aristocracy, an hierarchy. They are
the party denoted several times in the New Testament by the term "the
High Priests." The nearest analogy to their position is supplied by the
political popes and bishops of the Middle Ages. Their interests were
political rather than spiritual. A considerable amount of independence
had been left to the Jews in their own land. The Sanhedrin, the native
court, exercised