The old Dispensation could not be revivified. It was indeed the very reverse of desirable to revivify it. It could not even be maintained. If it was not dying, it was because it was dead. It had been good for its own day; but it was now an anachronism that was both undesirable and impossible. The new doctrine, then, not being able to cast itself into the form of municipal law, must appeal to the enlightened consciousness of man. Neither could it have any municipal sanctions. The only sanction at that time, and thenceforth, imaginable was that of future rewards and punishments. Still the old Dispensation stood in the way. It was, without being at all adapted to existing requirements, occupying the ground, and hindering the erection of the structure that was to take its place. It must, therefore, be got rid of. Under the conditions of the case, that could be done only argumentatively. But what process of reasoning would serve the purpose? We cannot see any way in which it could have been done, except the one in which it was done. The Author of the new Dispensation addressed Himself to the establishment of the proposition, that God is not, here and now, the Executor either of the municipal law, or even of that which would be the law of the new Dispensation. The end is not yet. It was a corollary to this, which did not escape observation, that the municipal law is Cæsar’s concern, that is to say, that it falls within the sphere of the State. Everything Jesus said in establishment of His main proposition, and by implication of its corollary, was in direct contradiction to the fundamental ideas of Mosaic Dispensation. In fact, the direct opposites of His proposition, and of its corollary, were the old Dispensation itself in its simplest expression: the whole of that Dispensation, just as it stood at work amongst God’s people, and just as it is presented to us in its authentic documents, being only the concrete enlargement, or organized embodiment of these opposites, with a view to the maintenance, under existing conditions, of the order of society.