go to the merchant to buy goods, he gives us the
paper and the pack-thread to the bargain. Well, those children and fools
in Israel actually threw away the goods and hoarded and boasted over the
paper and the pack-thread. Our old Scottish lawyers have made us
familiar with the distinction in the church between _spiritualia_ and
_temporalia_. Well, the Jews let the _spiritualia_ go to those who cared
to take such things, while they held fast to the _temporalia_. And all
that went on till His disciples had the effrontery to clip and coin under
our Lord's very eyes, and even to ask Him to hold the coin while they
sharpened their shears. 'O faithless and perverse generation! How long
shall I be with you? How long shall I suffer you? Have I been so long
with you, and yet hast thou not known Me, Philip? O fools, and slow of
heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! And beginning at
Moses and all the prophets He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the
things concerning Himself.'

2. But those who live in glass houses must take care not to throw
stones. And thus the greatest fool in Israel is safe from you and me.
For, like them, and just as if we had never read one word about them, we
bend our hearts and our children's hearts to things seen and temporal,
and then, after things seen and temporal have all cast us off, we begin
to ask if there is any solace or sweetness for a cast-off heart in things
unseen and eternal. There are great gaps clipt out of our Bibles that
not God Himself can ever print or paste in again. Look and see if half
the Book of Proverbs, for instance, with all its noble promises to a
godly youth, is not clipt clean out of your dismembered Bible. That fine
leaf also, 'My son, give Me thine heart,' is clean gone out of the twenty-
third chapter of the Proverbs years and years ago. As is the best part
of the noble Book of Daniel, and almost the whole of Second Timothy.
'Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and meat and
drink, and wife and child shall be added unto you.' Your suicidal shears
have cut that golden promise for ever out of your Sermon on the Mount. So
much so that if any or all of these temporal mercies ever come to you,
they will come of pure and undeserved mercy, for the time has long passed
when you could plead any promise for them. Still, there are two most
excellent uses left to which you can even yet put your mangled and
dismembered Bible. Y