of hands before sitting down to meat; who, for pretence, made long prayers, loved greetings in the market-places, and the chief seats in the synagogues, and devoured widows' houses; who constantly attended our Saviour on his missions, and were ever endeavouring (as we shall shortly perceive an instance of) to ensnare him by some crafty and dexterously applied interrogative. But though many of the Pharisees may have answered to this description, it does not by any means follow that they all did, or even a greater part, or even, relatively speaking, any considerable number; so far from it, it is extremely probable, that many of this way of thinking were to be found amongst the disciples of our Lord, as they were most numerous in the middle and lower ranks; and from these, in exact conformity to the prediction of the psalmist, "Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained

strength," such as were the first to acknowledge the Messiah, came. I am apprehensive I may have dwelt too long upon this subject; but my wish has been to rescue a generally deserving class of men from a reproach, which, as it seems to me, has been rather too lightly cast upon them.

The Sadducees took their name from

Sadoc, a priest, who lived about two centuries and a half before the birth of our Saviour; they partook a good deal of the old Epicurean which, as near as may be, corresponds to the modern man of pleasure; they had some peculiar opinions, but which, as they were not anxious to spread them, an infallible argument of sincerity, it may be doubted whether they set any particular value by. They denied a resurrection, either angel or spirit; they admitted the authority of the sacred writings; but refused to receive the traditions of the elders, perhaps as much as any thing, because

the Pharisees, to whom, in a political sense, they were diametrically opposed, did receive them. They entertained several other notions; but these two are the most remarkable. With these explanations, we will proceed to the subject matter of the present discourse: "When the Pharisees had heard that he had put the Sadducees to silence, they were gathered together." The occasion was this. The Sadducees, who, as I have said before, denied a resurrection, put to our Saviour the following case: they supposed there to have been seven brethren, the first of whom marrying, died without issue; his next brother then (as the Jewish laws ordained in such circumstances) married the widow; he dying childless as well, the next married her, and so on to the last, who, leaving no issue, and the wife, also dying childless, having outlived them all, the question which arose was, whose wife, in the

resurrection, should she become, since all the brethren had an equal claim to her? But this question going on the presumption that the affairs of a future life were to be regulated precisely by the standard of the present, which presumption our Saviour having shown to be unfounded, the difficulty vanished at once; besides this, by reminding them of a well-known declaration in the sacred writings, "I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob," and the thing speaking for itself, that "God is not the God of the dead, but of the living," our Lord gave the strongest confirmation to the doctrine of the resurrection that the subject was capable of. The multitude, we are told,

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were astonished at his doctrine," as they reasonably might, having never heard any thing so convincing before, and the Sadducees completely put to confusion; but no sooner did the Pharisees,

-the bad Pharisees, mind-hear of the discomfiture of their opponents, than they came up in a body, trusting to their superior acuteness to succeed, where the Sadducees had failed. "Then one of them, which was a lawyer"-in this country the practice of the law is divided into several departments; we have common law, equity law, ecclesiastical law, and other arrangements which I do not at present recollect; the Jewish law was all in one, civil and ecclesiastical inseparably united:" then one of them which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying-Master, which is the great commandment in the law?" It appears from some of the best commentators, that this question, which the lawyer put to our Saviour from a malicious motive, was one frequently agitated among the Jews, some inclining to give the preference to a ceremonial ordinance, others to a moral; whatever reply, there