up by Christ when he describes it as the type of one who has the
key of knowledge, cannot use it himself, and does not allow other
people to use it, though it may be made to open the gate of God's
Kingdom. His chief war was against the Philistines. That is the
war every child of light has to wage. Philistinism was the note of
the age and community in which he lived. In their heavy
inaccessibility to ideas, their dull respectability, their tedious
orthodoxy, their worship of vulgar success, their entire
preoccupation with the gross materialistic side of life, and their
ridiculous estimate of themselves and their importance, the Jews of
Jerusalem in Christ's day were the exact counterpart of the British
Philistine of our own. Christ mocked at the 'whited sepulchre' of
respectability, and fixed that phrase for ever. He treated worldly
success as a thing absolutely to be despised. He saw nothing in it
at all. He looked on wealth as an encumbrance to a man. He would
not hear of life being sacrificed to any system of thought or
morals. He pointed out that forms and ceremonies were made for
man, not man for forms and ceremonies. He took sabbatarianism as a
type of the things that should be set at nought. The cold
philanthropies, the ostentatious public charities, the tedious
formalisms so dear to the middle-class mind, he exposed with utter
and relentless scorn. To us, what is termed orthodoxy is merely a
facile unintelligent acquiescence; but to them, and in their hands,
it was a terrible and paralysing tyranny. Christ swept it aside.
He showed that the spirit alone was of value. He took a keen
pleasure in pointing out to them that though they were always
reading the law and the prophets, they had not really the smallest
idea of what either of them meant. In opposition to their tithing
of each separate day into the fixed routine of prescribed duties,
as they tithe mint and rue, he preached the enormous importance of