CHAPTER XI.

A Jewish Sabbath.

COMING to Jerusalem for this feast of Purim, and walking near the great pool of Bethesda, in the sheep-market, a spot which he had to pass daily on his way from Olivet to the Temple hill, JESUS saw on the banks of this pool a crowd of sick persons, some halt, some aged, and some blind; for, like many of the wells in Gaul and Britain, the spring of Bethesda possessed healing virtues; and the poor people of the country, apt to personify nature, had a legendary belief that an angel visited the great Pool and agitated the water, and that when the water had been stirred by this angel the first man who stepped into it would be cured, just as many Franks in the middle ages imagined that the wells could only cure them through the blessing of a saint.

It was the Sabbath day.

In the Temple hard by, these wretches could hear the groaning of bulls under the mace, the bleating of lambs under the sacrificial knife, the shouting of dealers as they sold doves and shekels. Bakers were hurrying through with bread, the Captain of the Temple was on duty with his guards. Priests were marching in procession; and crowds of

worshippers standing about the holy place. Tongues of flame leaped faintly from the altars, on which the priests were sprinkling blood.

This Pool of Bethesda lay outside the Gentile court; on the north side of the Temple, near to the wall; but the wretches who lay around it on their quilts and rugs, the blind, the leprous, and the aged poor, drew no compassion from the busy priests. One man, weakest of the weak, had been helpless no less than thirty-eight years. Over this man JESUS paused and said:

"Wilt thou be made whole?"

"Rabbi, I have no man, when the water is troubled, to put me into the pool; but while I am coming, another steppeth down before me." The Compassionate answered him: "Rise. Take up thy bed and walk!"

At once the life leaped quickly into the poor man's limbs. Rising from the ground, he folded up his quilt, taking it on his arm to go away; but some of the Pharisees, seeing him get up and roll his bed into a coil, run towards him, crying: "It is the Sabbath day; it is not lawful for thee to carry thy bed." It was certainly an offence against the Oral Law.

Among the many marks which stamped the Jews as a peculiar people, Sabbath observance was perhaps the one mark most distinctive and conspicuous. A Greek had his religious feast, a Syrian his gathering in the temple, an Egyptian his sacrifices and his prayers. Many orders of men besides Jews had the rite of circumcision; to wit, the priests of Memphis,

the Edomite sheikhs, the princes of Tyre. But no other people in the world had a seventh day of peculiar sanctity, a God's day, on which no man would labour for the things that perish. The Greek knew no sabbath. The Philistine never ceased from his plough, the Sidonian from his ships. In Tiberias, in Ptolemais, one day was like another day. A division of time into weeks was unknown in Athens, and became known in Rome only when the legions, learning it from the people of Alexandria, carried it westward from the Nile. The name, and the thing, were borrowed from the Jews, of whom it had long been a singular and striking sign. Heathen poets, like Ovid and Juvenal, distinguished a Jew by his Sabbath even more than by his physiognomy and his garb.

But like every other virtue of his race, the Jew had debased his Sabbath virtue into vice. The Sabbath had been given to man as a blessing; the Pharisees made of it a curse. Proud of this gift of God to his fathers, he fenced it about with edicts, toyed with it, made an idol of it, set it above every other rite, until the mere ritual observance came to occupy in his heart the place of God.

In carrying out the rule of observance, a Jew was forbidden to do many trifling and some necessary things. From the moment of hearing the ram's horn, a sacred trumpet called the shofa, blown from the Temple wall, announcing that the Sabbath had commenced, he was not allowed to light a fire, to make a bed, to boil a pot; he could not pull his

ass from a ditch, nor raise an arm in defence of his life. When thousands of men had been lost in war, the last of these clauses had been abolished by the Maccabees, after which change a Jew was allowed to defend his life on the Sabbath day. But no other clause in this stern code had been softened. A Jew could not quit his camp, his village, or his city on the day of rest. He might not begin a journey; if going along a road, he must rest from sundown till the same event of the coming day. He might not carry a pencil, a kerchief, a shekel in his belt; if he required a handkerchief for use, he must tie it round his leg. If he offended against one of these rules, he was held to deserve the doom awarded to the vilest sinners. Some rabbins held that a man ought not to change his position; but that whether he was standing or sitting when the shofa sounded, he should stand or sit, immovable as a stone, until the Sabbath had passed away.

It was only in the synagogue and the Temple, chiefly in the Temple, that this ancient rule could be set at nought. A law which put an end to gifts and sacrifices in the Temple would not have suited the chief priests and high priests, and these smiling Sadducees clung to the sacerdotal rule that there must be no Sabbath in holy things. A cripple could not carry his rug a mile, a hungry man could not pluck a grain of wheat; but the Temple fires might be lit, the shew-bread might be baked, the altars might be trimmed and guarded, the shekels might be paid in to the receivers, the doves and heifers might be slain, and the victims might be burnt with

fire. In the Temple courts, the Seventh day was the busiest day of the week, for on the Sabbath every Jew who made an offering to God was expected to present two shekels instead of one shekel, two doves instead of one dove, and two rams instead of one

ram.

So, when the Jews who came crowding about the poor cripple now made whole, shouted to him that he must not lift his quilt and go home, because it was the Sabbath, he answered that He who had cured him had also told him to take up his bed and walk. These facts were strange. A man had cured this aged cripple by a word, and that very same man had told him to break the law! The Jews questioned him more sharply, as to what sort of man this was who had done this thing; but he could not tell them, his physician having gone away.

Later in the day, JESUS met him in the Temple court, and said to him:

"Behold, thou art made whole: sin no more; lest a worse thing befall thee."

The cripple now heard from those about him that the man was called Jesus of Nazareth, and he forthwith told the Pharisees where they might find him. These Jews would have killed Jesus if they had dared, because he had broken their Sabbath day; and, to escape their fury, he returned into the Lake Country of Galilee.

He broke their Oral Law, that he might bring his followers to a sense of its degrading spirit. When he came back into the Lake Country, he walked out