which conspicuously refer to
entirely different matters, and do not mean at all what he suggests
(Matt. 2:15, 23). The Hebrew with the Old Testament, like the Greek
of those days with Homer, made what play he pleased; if the words
fitted his fancy, he took them regardless of connexion or real
meaning; if he was pressed for a defence, he would take refuge in
allegory. A fashion was set for the Church which bore bad fruit. The
Old Testament was emptied of meaning to fortify the Christian faith
with "proof texts." When Jesus quotes the Old Testament, it is for
other ends and with a clear, incisive sense of the prophet's
meaning. "Go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy and
not sacrifice" (Matt. 9:13 and 12:7, quoting Hosea 6:6). He not
merely quotes Hosea, but it is plain that he has got at the very
heart of the man and his message. Similarly when he reads Isaiah in
the Synagogue at Nazareth (Luke 4:17), he lays hold of a great
passage and brings out with emphasis its value and its promise. He
touches the real, and no lapse of time makes his quotations look odd
or quaint. When he is asked which is the first commandment of all,
he at once, with what a modern writer calls "a brilliant flash of
the highest genius," links a text in Deuteronomy with one in
Leviticus--"Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord, and thou
shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy
soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength" (Deut.
6:4-5), and, he adds, "the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt
love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment
greater than these" (Levit. 19:18; Mark 12:29-31). Thus his instinct
for God and his instinct for the essential carry him to the very
centre and acme of Moses' law. At the same time he can use the Old
Testament in an efficient way for dialectic, when an "argumentum ad
hominem" best meets the case (Mark 7:6; Luke 20:37, 44).

Going to fact directly and reading his Bible on his own account, he
is the great pioneer of the Christian habit of mind. He is not idly
called the Captain by the writer to the Hebrews (Heb. 2:10, 12:2).
Authority and tradition only too readily assume control of human
life; but a mind like that of Jesus, like that which he gave to his
followers, will never be bound by authority and tradition. Moses is
very well, but if God has higher ideas of marriage--what then? The
Scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat (Matt. 23:2