TJ There was nothing in Eoman tax-gathering which made vice in that calling a necessary thing. In point of fact, the vice came from the outside. The master-publicans were men of rank and credit ; but they put their work into the hands of subordinates who were often taken from the slums. The vices these exhibited in their profession were brought with them into their profes- sion ; they came from the previous corruptions of human nature, and no trade is chargeable with them. We cannot morally label Matthew by calling him " Matthew the Publican." The truth is, the obloquy with which Matthew was regarded by his country- men did not proceed from the fear that he was a bad man, but from the certainty that he was a bad Jew. The most galling fact to the Israel of later days was the fact that she paid tribute to another land. Ideallv she claimed to be the mistress of the world
ST. MATTHEW ix. 12 223
— the nation into whose treasury all tribute should flow. That such a nation should pay taxes to a foreign people, a Gentile people, was an awful thought. It was a pain worse than lacera- tion, more cruel than a blow. But there was the possibility of a pain more poignant still. It was bad enough that the tribute of homage from Israel should be collected by a Roman. But what if the man who gathered it should be a son of Israel herself ! What if the man who taunted her with her misfortunes should be one born within her pale, bred within her precincts, sheltered within her privileges — one from whom was due the veneration for her sanctuary and the reverence for her God ! Now, this often happened ; and it happened in the case of Matthew. Here was a Jew who had lost the last shred of patriotism. He had for- gotten the traditions of his ancestors ! He had not only accepted without a blush the domination by the stranger ; he had taken part with the stranger in his domination ! He had attached him- self to the enemies of his country — had become a collector of their tribute from his own conquered land ! The man who acted thus was bound to be execrated by his race. He was execrated on that ground alone. No amount of personal vices would in the eyes of his countrymen have added to the enormity of his sin, and no amount of personal virtues would in the slightest degree have minimized that sin. His deed was itself to them the acme of all iniquity, from which nothing could detract and which nothing could intensify. The blackness of Matthew's character in the eyes of the Jew was the fact of his apostasy.1
2. It seems as though the disciples of those times were em- barrassed by the question. Jesus Himself was obliged to give the answer in their stead. He replied with the proverb : " They that are whole have no need of a physician, but they that are sick." He sheltered His work as a healer of men's souls behind the example of those who healed men's bodies. " Physicians go where they are needed " (so ran His argument). " They do not haunt the houses of the healthy. They go where the disease is, and you honour them for their devotion to duty. Even so I also go where I am needed. And if there be any cases specially serious, specially hopeless, specially friendless, there, above all, must I go. There My work calls Me, and there My heart leads Me." It was a great argument, simple as the common speech of men, yet deep as the Everlasting Love.
1 G. Matheson, The Representative Men of the New Testament, 188.
224 THE PHYSICIAN
Tf In 1842, when Dr. Hutchison Stirling was a young man and uncurtain whether to follow medicine or literature as a profession, he wrote to Carlyle, who, in course of his reply, said : " Practi- cally, my advice were very decidedly that you kept by medicine ; that you resolved faithfully to learn it, on all sides of it, and make yourself in actual fact an 'larpbg, a man that could heal disease. I am very serious in this. A steady course of professional industry has ever been held the usefullest support for mind as well as body : I heartily agree with that. And often I have said, What pro- fession is there equal in true nobleness to medicine? He that can abolish pain, relieve his fellow-mortal from sickness, he is the indisputably usefullest of all men. Him savage and civilized will honour. He is in the right, be in the wrong who may. As a Lord Chancellor, under one's horse-hair wig, there might be mis- givings ; still more perhaps as a Lord Primate, under one's cauli- flower ; but if I could heal disease, I should say to all men and angels without fear, ' En ecce I'"1
3. The proverb Christ employed was in common use both by the Hebrew Eabbis and by the heathen historians and poets. We find it in the Talmud, and in Greek and Roman authors. It was one of that kind of sayings — the gnomic — which the Rabbis spent their lives in making, learning, repeating. And on our Lord's lips, as they would instantly feel, it took a tone of rebuke. They professed to be healers in Israel. They professed to have a vast store of medicinal words with which they could minister to the mind diseased, and give saving health to the distempered soul. But what kind of healers were those who administered their remedies only to the hale and robust, who shrank from the sick lest they should expose themselves to infection ? Yet this was precisely what these professed " healers " were doing. They had wisdom for the wise, but none for the foolish. They would explain the secrets of righteousness to the devout, but not to the sinful. They taught the spiritually healthy how health might be preserved, but left the sick multitude, the people altogether born in sin, to languish and perish in their iniquities.