thus stand for God before the world, must
themselves be morally sound. 'He that is without sin among you, let
him first cast a stone at her.' It is moral conformity, not merely
orthodoxy, which qualifies us to act for God. It is then precisely
this attitude of Christ towards the Jews zealous for the law, which St.
Paul is reproducing in the passage which we have just read.

He suggests also in its last words--where he is playing on the meaning
of the name of Judah--another deep element in Christ's depreciation of
the religious spirit of the Jews. Their religion was a matter of
public opinion--with all the stagnancy which belongs to the public
opinion of a compact society--not a matter which lived with ever fresh
life in the inner relation of the conscience to God. 'How can ye
believe which receive glory one of another, and the glory which cometh
from the only God ye seek not?' {97} St. Paul then is certainly right
in his estimate of Jewish religion. One indeed who describes with as
vivid reality as he does the pride of a Jew in his religious
privileges--one who had all the reason that Saul of Tarsus had for
knowing what it was to feel this emotion from within--could hardly have
been wrong in his estimate of its weaknesses.

And if the particular moral defects which St. Paul attributes to the
religious Jew are surprisingly grave--theft, adultery, and
temple-robbery--here too what he says out of his own experience is
confirmed from other quarters. Avarice was a notorious sin of Jews.
Our Lord accuses the Scribes of 'devouring widows' houses[4]' under
cloak of religion, and denounces the Pharisees also for leaving their
outwardly purified cups and platters inwardly full of 'extortion.' It
is only a subtler form of theft that He alludes to when He denounces
them for sanctioning the practice of dedicating property as a 'corban'
to the purposes of religion in order to evade the righteous claims of
parents. The story of Susanna, the brief but stern words of our Lord
about the seventh commandment in His Sermon on the Mount, and His {98}
significant language on the occasion already alluded to of the woman
taken in adultery, interpret St. Paul's language as to sins of the
flesh. And the language of the town clerk at Ephesus in exculpating
St. Paul and his company, suggests that 'temple-robbery' was a not
unfamiliar imputation upon Jews. It appears that with all their horror
of idols--and though everything connected w