^f During Sunday afternoons in June 1888, Professor Drum- mond delivered a series of religious addresses at Grosvenor House, London. After distinguishing between religion and theology, he said that the truth of Christianity is mani- fest in the fact that there is no real civilization without it, and that the purer the form of Christianity the greater the development of civilization. " Show me," he said, with Matthew
218 THE LEPER
Arnold, " ten square miles outside of Christianity where the life of man or the virtue of woman is safe, and I'll throw over Chris- tianity at once." 1
TJ Chalmers' address at the Exeter Hall meeting of the London Missionary Society in 1886 was the climax of his public work during this visit home. Exeter Hall was crowded, and the main interest of the meeting centred in Tamate's unpolished but thrill- ing eloquence. To recall a few of the most striking passages : " I have had twenty-one years' experience amongst natives. I have seen the semi-civilized and the uncivilized ; I have lived with the Christian native, and I have lived, dined, and slept with the cannibal. I have visited the islands of the New Hebrides; I have visited the Loyalty Group, I have seen the work of missions in the Samoan Group, I know all the islands of the Society Group, I have lived for ten years in the Hervey Group, I know a few of the groups close on the line, and for at least nine years of my life I have lived with the savages of New Guinea ; but I have never yet met with a single man or woman, or a single people, that your civilization without Christianity has civilized. For God's sake let it be done at once ! Gospel and commerce, but re- member this, it must be the Gospel first. Wherever there has been the slightest spark of civilization in the Southern Seas it has been because the Gospel has been preached there, and wherever you find in the Island of New Guinea a friendly people or a people that will welcome you, there the missionaries of the Cross have been preaching Christ. Civilization ! The Kampart can only be stormed by those who carry the Cross." 2
1 G. A. Smith, The Life of Henry Di^ummond, 279. 3 E. Lovett, James Chalmers, 276.
The Physician
Literature.
Black (J.), The Pilgrim Ship, 199.
Bruce (A. B.), The Galilean Gospel, 73.
Campbell (W. M.), Foot-Prints of Christ, 92.
Cox (S.), A Day with Christ, 91.
Griffith-Jones (E.), Faith and Verification, 134.
Hall (R.), Works, iv. 421.
Kingsley (C), The Water of Life, 213.
Maclaren (A.), Expositions : St. Matthew ix.-xvii., 18.
Ross (J. M. E.), The Self -Portraiture of Jesus, 1.
Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xi. (1865), No. 618.
Zahn (T.), Bread and Salt from the Word of God, 227.
Christian World Pulpit, xxv. 385 (F. W. Farrar).
CJiurch of England Magazine, lii. 112 (C. Clayton).
The Physician.
They that are whole have no need of a physician, but they that are sick. — Matt. ix. 12.
1. One of the best known scenes in the gospel story is here placed before our eyes, and the same picture, in all essentials, meets us more than once in the Gospels. On the one side stands Jesus, who sat at meat with publicans and sinners as their friend ; and on the other side the Pharisees, who murmured and found fault with our Lord for so doing. On another day Jesus replied to the murmuring of the Pharisees by the three parables of the Lost Piece of Silver, the Lost Sheep, and the Lost Son. The same opposition was manifested when He sat at meat as the guest of Simon the Pharisee, and, to the astonishment of those who were eating with Him, allowed a woman that was a sinner to wash His feet with her tears, and to wipe them with her hair. To all sorts of people Jesus cried, " Follow Me." There were the honest fishermen by the Lake of Gennesaret ; there was the faithful son who wanted first to go and bury his father ; and to-day it is a publican who is sitting at the receipt of custom at Capernaum. He is named Matthew, and he is the Apostle whose name stands at the head of the Gospel from which the text is taken. The publican must not be missing from the inner circle of Jesus' disciples, from those whom He invited to give up their former calling and become His fellow-workers. He was not only tolerated but even drawn by Jesus to Himself, and brought forward by Him that all might know why Jesus came into the world.
If we ask in amazement how it was that a publican could immediately respond to such a call, and give up the whole course of his life, a satisfactory answer will occur to each of us. The publican Matthew, like many more of his order, must have heard Jesus preaching more than once, and possibly he may even have listened secretly to the preaching of John the Baptist. This
222 THE PHYSICIAN
powerful preaching had opened a new world to him, the very opposite of the world in which he had hitherto lived ; a world of righteousness, of grace, and of peace. Hence sprang his implicit trust in the Man who offered Himself to him as a guide to a new life and a new life-work. He celebrated with a feast the hour in which Jesus made him a sharer in His own work. On the same day he invited many of his own class to a meal in his house. And as they felt drawn to Jesus, so Jesus also seems to have felt at ease in their company. But what a company that was ! Even those who know but little of the conditions of the Holy Land at that time, of the fearful pressure of taxation under which the Jewish people had long groaned, of the habitual embezzlements and extortions of those who farmed out the taxes and of the officials under them, can understand that publicans and sinners were almost interchangeable words. Jesus Himself did not speak of them in any other way. The publicans were branded as sinners ; for they were solemnly excommunicated from the syna- gogue as traitors and renegades, and most of them were, according to Jewish law, beaten with forty stripes save one, before they were cast out, by order of the rulers of the synagogue. Thus branded as traitors and sinners, they were shut out from all decent society, and were compelled to herd together, corrupt and corrupting. Despised, they became despicable, extortionate, base. We cannot wonder that the Pharisees sneered and shook their heads when they asked the disciples of Jesus, " Why eateth your Master with publicans and siuners ? "