human
sorrows.

But while the spurious compassion is thus vile and worthless, the true
is beyond expression beautiful and good. It breaks forth in power, and
sweeps down whatever obstacles may be thrown in its way. In this parable
the Lord expressly points to the fountain of compassion opened before he
invites us to follow the stream of beneficence in its course.

The nationality of the compassionate traveller is an important feature
of the parable; he was a Samaritan. The Jews and Samaritans were locally
nearest neighbours, but morally most unneighbourly. An enmity of
peculiar strength and persistency kept the communities asunder from age
to age. The alienation, originating in a difference of race, was kept
alive by rivalry in religion. The Samaritans endeavoured to cover the
defects of their pedigree by a zealous profession of orthodox forms in
divine worship. The temple which they presumed to erect on Gerizzim as a
rival to that of Jerusalem was naturally more odious to the Jews than
others that were more distant in space, and more widely diverse in
profession. Distinct traces of the keen reciprocal enmity that raged
between the Jews and the Samaritans crop out here and there incidentally
in the evangelical history, as in chapter ix. 54.

Most certainly the Lord does not here intend to intimate that all the
priests and Levites were cruel, and all Samaritans tender-hearted: to
apply them so would be to wrest his words. This teacher grasps his
instrument by the extremity, first one extremity and then the other,
that his lesson may reach further than if he had grasped it by the
middle. The honourable office, and even the generally high character, of
priest and Levite will not cover the sin of selfishly neglecting the
sufferings of a fellow-creature: self-sacrificing love is approved by
God and useful to men as well in a Samaritan as in a Jew. There is no
respect of persons with God. It is quite certain that there were
benevolent priests and unkind Samaritans; and it is also certain that
the Lord would not overlook kindness in the one, nor sanction cruelty in
the other. The lesson was addressed to a Jew; and therefore the lesson
is so constructed as to smite at one blow the two poles on which a vain
Jewish life in that day turned--"they trusted in themselves that they
were righteous, and despised others." That high thing, the scribe's
self-righteous trust in his birth-right, the Lord will by the parable
bring low; an