o a few officials: 1. The Syro-Chaldaic,--the
language of business and daily life, the spoken language of the common
people. 2. The Greek,--the language of the courts of justice and
official documents; the spoken and written language of the foreign
traders, the aristocracy, and most of the more cultivated people in the
great towns. 3. The old Hebrew,--the written and spoken language of the
learned, of theological schools, of the priests; the language of the Old
Testament. It seems Jesus understood all three.

At that time the thinking people had outgrown the old forms of religion,
inherited from their fathers, just as a little girl becomes too stout
and tall for the clothes which once fitted her babyhood; or as the
people of New England have now become too rich and refined to live in
the rough log-cabins, and to wear the coarse, uncomfortable clothes,
which were the best that could be got two hundred years ago. For mankind
continually grows wiser and better,--and so the old forms of religion
are always getting passed by; and the religious doctrines and ceremonies
of a rude age cannot satisfy the people of an enlightened age, any more
than the wigwams of the Pequod Indians in 1656 would satisfy the white
gentlemen and ladies of Boston and Worcester in 1856. The same thing
happens with the clothes, the tools, and the laws of all advancing
nations. The human race is at school, and learns through one book after
another,--going up to higher and higher studies continually. But at that
time cultivated men had outgrown their old forms of religion,--much of
the doctrine, many of the ceremonies; and yet they did not quite dare to
break away from them,--at least in public. So there was a great deal of
pretended belief, and of secret denial of the popular form of religion.
The best and most religious men, it seems likely, were those who
had least faith in what was preached and practised as the authorized
religion of the land.

In the time of David, many years before the birth of Jesus, the Hebrew
nation had been very powerful and prosperous; afterwards there followed
long periods of trouble and of war, civil and domestic; the union of the
tribes was dissolved, and many calamities befell the people. In their
times of trouble, religious men said, "God will raise us up a GREAT KING
like DAVID, to defend and deliver us from our enemies. He will set
all things right." For the Hebrews looked on David as the Americans
on WASHINGTON, call