2. The blindness of the Jews was the blindness of moral indifference. For years they had been sinking into cold spiritual indifference, while they were clinging all the more strongly to the outward formalities of religion. And then came their rejection of Christ, which consummated their ruin. They knew what tithes the poor man must pay into the treasury, but they could not understand a Christ who came to heal the broken- hearted. They knew that Jerusalem was the place where men ought to worship, and that the Samaritans were heretics; they could not understand One who came to give men life and rest in God. It was their cold-hearted indifference that thus blinded their eyes to the mission of Jesus, and it was this that caused them to destroy Him. They had found a Man who said religion was a reality — who spoke in kindling words of a spiritual world, and pointed the weary to an all-present Father ; and when they found they could not put to shame a truth that clashed with their cold-heartedness, they hurried Him to the judgment-hall and the cross.
^ If we go back to the time of the Greeks, and ask what to the Greek mind was the greatest sin, we find that it was insolence.
^ F. W. Robertson.
404 THE IMPENITENT CITY
To them insolence meant the failure of a man to realize what was his true attitude to life, to understand that he was bound, if he would be a true man, to face life boldly and fearlessly with all its issues, to think through its problems, to recognize the limits under which his life had to be lived. Still the same thing is needed. We still ask you to look at your life straight, to see what it means, to see what are the things that will destroy it. And we are forced to conclude with the old Greeks that it is insolence which destroys a man's life. What the Greeks called insolence, we call irreverence ; and irreverence is at the bottom of it indifference. It means the want of self-sacrifice, of self- restraint, the want of manliness, the want of a desire to think things out, to face life and its issues broadly and courageously.^
3. Such a process of hardening may be very gradual. Little by little we lose our keen delight in God, our warm loyalty to our Saviour, our exquisite pleasure in noble things, our cordial sympathy with spiritual people and their aims ; little by little we decline into godlessness and worldliness. There is a growing deadness of nerve, a creeping paralysis which leaves us more and more untouched and unmoved by the high and glorious things of our faith, which renders us more and more careless about the tragic possibilities of life.
Life must be a movement — a progress of some kind. We cannot stand still — rise or fall we must. Unless, therefore, we have a restraining power within us conquering those hidden evil tendencies, our life must be gradually sinking. But indifference — the mere absence of positive Christian earnestness — has no restraining influence. Not what we are not, but what we are, forms character. We resemble that which we supremely love. That rectitude of life and conduct which is not the result of choice or effort, and which may exist in the absence of temptation, is purely negative, and, unless supported by some earnest positive principle, is in peril when the slumbering evil tendencies are wakened into power by temptation. We may go a step farther, and affirm that spiritual indifference actually prepares the way for open sin. " He that is not with me is against me," said Christ, and then followed His parable of the unclean spirit returning in sevenfold might to the empty house. The mere expulsion of evil which leaves the heart vacant and indifferent is a false reforma-
* Lift and Letters of Mandell Crexghton, ii. 26.
ST. LUKE XIX. 41, 42 405
tion. Take away corrupt love, and leave the soul's chamber empty, and it will come again in gigantic force. Thus indifference is the commencement of a blindfold descent into spiritual ruin.
T[ You have seen the snow-flakes falling — at first they lay like beautiful winter flowers, but gradually they formed an icy crust that hardened and thickened with every snow shower. So, a man may receive the truth of Christ in the freezing atmosphere of cold indifference, until he is girded round with a mass of dead belief which no spiritual influence can penetrate.^
V 4. These Jews knew not the day of their visitation and yet they were always expecting it. Their prophets had foretold it ; in their prayers they cried out for it. Even at this very time they were looking for their Messiah. But they had made up their minds as to the way in which the visitation would be made. When at last it came in God's way — so simply, so quietly — they could not receive it.
How many there are who are still living in carelessness, never really ranging themselves on the side of Christ, never really giving to Him their hearts and souls ; and all the time they have a sort of vague idea that some day the Lord will come and visit their hearts ! They do not mean to die in their irreligion. They half imagine that suddenly and unexpectedly God will call them and convert them ; then the King will enthrone Himself in their hearts, and all will be well ; then they must needs give up sin, and delight in religion. So now they are content to wait; till that day it does not matter much, they think, what lives they lead. All the time Jesus is with them ; but they know Him not ; they know not the time of their visitation ; they are expecting a visitation of some strange, sensational, or terrible kind. If some storm or tempest of passion shook their being, they might yield to that ; if God were to afflict them by laying them permanently on a bed of sickness, or by taking from them all that makes life dear, they would count that as a visitation of God, and would expect to be converted. Our ordinary language seems to counten- ance this notion. It is " a visitation of God," we say, when a city is smitten with cholera or plague, or when death cannot be accounted for. It would be well for us all if we could realize more fully that, although God's voice may be heard in the whirl-