"Go ye, and tell that fox," &c. Luke xiii. 32, and, though our Lord endured the most provoking indignities from the licentious soldiery and reviling multitude, in silence, answering not a word, agreeable to that striking character of a suffering Messiah, so minutely described, many ages before, by the prophet Isaiah,[1] yet ye made an apparent distinction between the violence and injustice of these, as individuals, and the injustice of man in a public character, as a chief magistrate; for even in our Lord's state of extreme humiliation, when his hour of sufferings was come, he did not fail to rebuke the injustice of the high priest in his judicial capacity, because, instead of proceeding against him by the legal method of examination by witnesses, he had attempted to draw out matter of accusation from his own mouth, against himself, by interrogatories, according to the baneful method of arbitrary courts!
But our Lord soon put a stop to his imperitent questions, by referring him to the legal method of finding evidence by witnesses:—Why askest thou me? Ask them which heard me, what I have said unto them: behold, they know what I said." John xviii. 21. Upon which, a time
- ↑ "He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter; and, as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth. He was taken from prison, and from judgement : and who shall declare his generation? for he was cut off out of the land of the living: for the transgression of my people was he stricken! Isaiah liii. 7, 8,
to fulfil and perfect them. This our Lord did, by living up to those laws himself," (which totally excludes the idea of his dispensing, on account of his own real superiority, with that moral law respecting behaviour to rulers,) "and becoming thereby an example to us, by freeing them from the corrupt glosses, which the teachers among the Jews put upon them, and by expounding them in their fullest sense, and according to their just latitude, shewing that they command not only an outward obedience, but the obedience even of the mind and thoughts, as appears in what our Lord delivers in the following verses:—These laws have their foundation in the reason and nature of things, and therefore their obligations will never cease."
