e of God. Yet, when the Son of Jehovah, whose name they were
called by, appeared amongst them, they rejected Him and took away His
life. Many a time, as I have followed Jesus step by step through His
lifelong conflict with their illwill and contradiction, the question
has pressed itself painfully upon my mind: If He were to come to the
earth now and intervene in our affairs, how would the religious
classes receive Him? and on which side would I be myself? If to any
this question may seem fantastic, let them change it into this other,
which cannot appear idle, though it means exactly the same thing: What
is the attitude of the religious classes to the manifestations of the
spirit of Jesus in the life of to-day? do they welcome them and back
them up? or have the new ideas and movements in which Christ is
marching onward to the conquest of the world to reckon on opposition,
even from those who call themselves most loudly by His name?

The other circumstance which has often affected my mind in the same
way is that which comes before us to-day--that the true prophets of
the Old Testament had to face the opposition, not of heathens, and not
of the openly irreligious among their own countrymen only, but of
those who had the name of God in their mouths and were publicly
recognised as His oracles. To us these are now false prophets, because
time has found them out and the Word of God has branded them with the
title they deserve; but in their own day they were regarded as true
prophets; and doubtless many of them never dreamed that they were not
entitled to the name.

They must have been a numerous and powerful body. Jeremiah mentions
them again and again along with the king, the princes and the priests,
as if they formed a fourth estate in the realm; and Zephaniah mentions
them in the same way along with the princes, the judges and the
priests. They evidently formed a separate and conspicuous class in the
community. They cannot have been equally bad in every generation; and
there may have been many degrees of deviation among them from the
character of the true prophet; but as a body they were false, and the
true servants of God had to reckon them among the anti-religious
forces which they had to overcome.

This is an appalling fact--that the public representatives of religion
should ever have been the worst enemies of religion; but it cannot be
denied that even in Christendom, and that not once or twice, the same
condition of