es, and pray for them that persecute you." As we listen to words
like these must not we also confess, "Either these sayings are not
Christ's, or we are not Christians"?

(2) Christ's idea of righteousness is further defined by contrast with
that of the Pharisees: "Except your righteousness shall exceed the
righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise enter
into the kingdom of heaven." What was the Pharisees' idea of religion?
Let us take the words which Christ Himself put into the lips of a
representative of his class: "God, I thank Thee, that I am not as the
rest of men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican.
I fast twice in the week; I give tithes of all that I get." This is a
full-length portrait of the finished Pharisee. Religion to him was a
round of prescribed ritual, a barren externalism, a subjection to the
dominion of the letter, which never touched the heart, nor bowed the
spirit down in penitence and humility before God. The Pharisee's whole
concern was with externals; but Christ declared that he who is only
right outwardly is not right at all. There is no such thing, He said, as
goodness which is not from within. The alms-deeds, the prayer, the
fasting of the Pharisee were all done before men, to be seen of them;
and so long as that which men saw was right and seemly, he was
satisfied. But Christ went back behind the outward act to the heart. A
man is really, He said, what he is there. You may hang grapes on a
thorn-bush, that will not make it a vine; you may put a sheep's fleece
on a wolf's back, but that will not change its wolfish heart. And men
are what they are within. Just as to get good fruit you must first of
all make the tree good, so to secure good deeds you must first make good
men. This was the truth which Pharisaism ignored; with what results all
the world knows. In the long history of man, it remains, perhaps, the
supreme illustration of the fatal facility with which religion and
morality are divorced when once the emphasis is laid upon the outward
and ceremonial instead of the inward and spiritual. All experience helps
us to understand how the system works. There is no deliberate intention
of setting ritual above righteousness, but it is so much easier to count
one's beads than to curb one's temper, so much easier to fast in Lent
than to be unswervingly just, that if once the easier thing gets
attached to it an exaggerated importance, fidelity in it is al