The Christian Commonwealth, London, publishes a sermon by some one of the leading English preachers every week. The sermon in a recent number is from the pen of Prof. T. K. Cheyne, who is the acknowledged leader of the most advanced wing of the English critics. So radical is he in his critical theories that I was curious to see how he would handle the word of God in preaching to the people; so I read the sermon with eagerness. I must furnish my readers with a few extracts from the sermon, so as to afford them the same gratification which it has given me. Remember, that the gratification which I mean is gratification of curiosity. I would be ashamed to spend the preaching-hour on a Lord's Day in hearing a sermon for curiosity, but to read one in a day of the week for that purpose may not be wrong.

      The text of this sermon is Matt. 5:4, 5, the second and third of the Beatitudes. It begins with these sentences:

      It is a beautiful tradition, preserved for us by Matthew, and in itself historically probable, that when the Lord Jesus first opened his mouth in public teaching, he uttered the sweet words, "Blessed are the poor: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." Suppose that the devout disciple, Matthew, or some other who compiled the great sermon, had given the first place to a saying [84] like this, "Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven," what a different effect would have been produced!

      Notice how uncertain this preacher is about the source of his text. First, it is a "beautiful tradition" that Jesus used the words referred to at the beginning of his teaching. Second, this "beautiful tradition" is "preserved for us by Matthew." Third, it was preserved by Matthew, or "some other who compiled the great sermon." How strengthening to the faith of his auditors it must have been to hear this scholarly preacher thus throw uncertainty over the source of this "beautiful tradition." How much more precious to them must Matthew's Gospel have appeared as they listened to such preaching!

      Notice again how accurately this eminent scholar quotes the Scripture on which he is commenting: "Blessed are the poor: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." And then, how accurate he is in his historical information, to represent Matthew, or the "some other who compiled the sermon," as saying that these words were uttered when "Jesus first opened his mouth in public teaching." "The devout disciple Matthew, or some other who compiled the great sermon," had just said, at the close of the immediately preceding sentence, that the great multitudes who heard this sermon had been drawn together by previous teaching and healing (4:23-25); yet this preacher has it that this "beautiful tradition" represents the first Beatitude as the first public utterance of Jesus as a teacher! What is the matter with the preacher? Has he studied the criticism of this Gospel so much as not to become acquainted with its contents? This would be at least a charitable conclusion. [85]

      Notice yet again the very "different effect this sermon would have produced" if it had begun with the saying, "Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven." But where does this saying occur? Not, indeed, in the first verse of the chapter, but in the twentieth, with sixteen short verses between the two. If then, according to this preacher, the twentieth verse had occupied the place of the third verse of this chapter, and vice versa, "what a different effect would have been produced"!

      In the latter passage the true reading of the first Beatitude seems to come to the preacher's memory, and we have the following luminous remarks about the Beatitudes preserved respectively by Matthew and Luke:

      In taking this view of the meaning of the first Beatitude, we harmonize the two extant versions of it in Matthew and in Luke. In Matthew we have a Beatitude of the poor in spirit; in Luke, more generally of the oppressed poor, as distinguished from the oppressing rich. In another point, however, we are forced to agree with Matthew against Luke. The latter states that Jesus "lifted up his eyes on his disciples and said, Blessed are ye poor;" the former, that he broadly asserted the blessedness of all who were poor in spirit. It is clear that Matthew's version must be the most correct.

      From this we gather that in quoting the first Beatitude at the beginning he was not aiming to quote what Matthew said, but what he ought to have said, in order to give the meaning correctly. In order to reconcile the two writers, we must take away the words "in spirit" from Matthew. But while Matthew was wrong in adding this expression, Luke was wrong in making Jesus say "ye poor." By such remarks as these the preacher made his audience see that he knows much better than Matthew or Luke either what Jesus did say on any [86] occasion, so that he can stand between the two, and, slapping first one and then the other in the face, let us less unfortunate mortals know what were the actual words of our Lord. I wonder if the good people in that audience did not clap their hands, and thank God that another "Daniel has come to judgment"?

      In a passage farther on, our preacher shows that the "beautiful tradition," that the Beatitude in question was uttered when Jesus first opened his mouth in public teaching, is nothing more than a tradition, and an incorrect one at that. Speaking of the Beatitudes as a whole, he says:

      If we ask when they were uttered, we can but confess our ignorance; but when we read in Matt. 4:23, which is supported by Mark 1:39, that "Jesus went about all Galilee teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the good tidings of the kingdom," we are led to suppose that the Beatitudes were first delivered in a synagogue, and that it was after reading some passage of the prophets that men wondered at the gracious words that proceeded out of his mouth.

      A critic of the school to which this preacher belongs can never be certain of a thing, if it is asserted by an apostle, unless it be something which he can use to the disadvantage of him who asserts it. Here our great scholar acknowledges his ignorance as to when Jesus first uttered the Beatitudes, although Matthew tells him plainly when and where. But though he is thus confessedly ignorant, he is able to correct Matthew, and to assert that it is much more likely to have been in a synagogue than on a mountain, where Matthew says it was.

      This great light of the nineteenth century is not only an expert in correcting the mistakes of the apostles, but he is equally at home in dealing with the prophets. He knows the meaning of all their predictions. He knows, [87] better than the apostles did, who wrote them, and he can tell us which of them failed to be fulfilled. He has even discovered that a large part of the mourning referred to in the Beatitude, "Blessed are they that mourn," was that of pious Jews who mourned over the non-fulfillment of some grand predictions of "the Second Isaiah." Hear him:

      This great prophetic writer, the Second Isaiah, had said that the Jews were about to be conducted in triumph to Jerusalem, and that Jehovah, Israel's King, would then visibly reassume his royalty, governing Israel and the world from his capital, Jerusalem. On the face of them, he makes not always quite consistent declarations. Sometimes he leads us to think that the Persian king, Cyrus, would, after being gently converted to the worship of Jehovah, reign as Jehovah's viceroy over the nations of the world except Israel; these nations being forced by conquest to accept the true religion. At other times he gives us sublime and truly Christian descriptions of a personage called "The Servant of the Lord," who is all imaginary embodiment of the ideal of Israel, or, we might almost say, of the true Israel, and who is represented as devoting his life to missionary labors among the Gentiles. Of all these promises only one was in any strict sense realized--the return of the Jews, or a part of them, to Judah--and we can not doubt that to the most spiritually minded Jews in our Lord's time the non-fulfillment of the promise of the conversion of the nations through Jewish instrumentality must have been the source of a pure and noble sorrow. They mourned not only because Judea was still suffering God's judgment upon sin, but because the nations beyond were still ignorant of the true God. They were humble and broken-hearted, not so much because Roman legions trod Jewish soil, as because the world at large did not yet own the divine King.

      This "Second Isaiah" is commonly extolled by the critics as the greatest of all the prophets. He is sometimes called "The Great Unknown." Yet with this preacher, preaching to sinners in London, whom he urges in the latter part of his sermon to become disciples [88] of Christ, the Second Isaiah "makes not always quite consistent declarations;" he made predictions that were not fulfilled; and this failure of fulfillment was a source of such sorrow to his countrymen of a later generation, that Jesus took special pains to try to comfort them. And let us not fail to take in that new revelation at the close of the extract just given, that the Jews of the Saviour's time--that is, the spiritually minded among them--were "humble and broken-hearted, not so much because Roman legions trod Jewish soil, as because the world at large did not yet own the divine King." Poor fellows! How much more sympathetic they were in contemplating the sad condition of the Gentiles than modern Christians are! How much more so than the most zealous missionaries of our day, for where are the Christians of to-day who are "humble and broken-hearted, because the world at large has not yet owned the divine King"? Yes, those spiritually minded Jews were ahead of the early Christians, including the apostles, in sympathy for the poor Gentiles, for do not these same critics tell us with one voice that the original twelve and the church in Jerusalem regarded salvation in Christ as intended for the Jews alone; and that they cared nothing at all for the conversion of the Gentiles? Do they not tell us that Paul taught the "universalism" of the gospel in opposition to the "particularism" taught by Peter and James?

      In conclusion, I have this to say: If any church wants a preacher to edify it after the manner of the higher critics of the most approved pattern, they can judge by this sermon how such preachers would suit them; and then they can hunt around for the preacher. If a sufficient salary is offered, the man can doubtless be found. [89]

[SEBC 84-89]