2. The second historical cause of the death of our Lord was the existence in His day and place of a dead religion. This is, when we consider the meaning of the phrase, the strangest of paradoxes, the existence in fact of a logical contradiction. For religion is in its essential nature a living thing, for the very reason that it is part of the experience of a living person. As experience is not merely alive, but the sum of all our vital powers, it is ever growing, both in breadth and in intensity. So far then as we are in any true sense religious men, our religion, as part and parcel of our experience, must be alive with an intense and vigorous activity, growing in the direction in which our experience grows. Hence a dead religion is a logical contradiction, as we have said. But, as truth is stranger than fiction, so life contains anomalies and monstrosities which simply set logic at defiance. A dead religion is indeed a monstrum, something portentous, which refuses to be reconciled with any canons of rationality. But it exists--that is the astonishing fact about it; and it found its almost perfect expression and embodiment in the normal and average Pharisee of our Lord's time. There are three characteristic features about a dead religion, and all of them receive a perfect illustration in the well-known picture in the gospels of Pharisaic religion. (_a_) It tends less and less to rest on experience, and more and more to repose upon tradition. It is academic, a thing on which scribes may lecture, while the voice of the scholastic pedant with blatant repetitions overpowers the living, authoritative voice within the soul. "They marvelled, because He taught with authority, and not as the scribes. A fresh (not new) teaching, with authority!" (_b_) It removes the living God to an infinite distance from human life. Religion is a matter of rules, of minute obedience to a code of morals and of ceremonial imposed from without, not of a fellowship of the human with the Divine. In fact, God is banished to a point on the far circumference, and the centre is occupied by the Law. He is retained in order to give authority to that Law, as the source of sanctions in the way of rewards and punishments. In short, the idea of the living God degenerates into the necessary convention of an ecclesiastical tradition. (_c_) Closely connected with this second feature is the third characteristic of a dead religion--its inhumanity. When men substitute obedience to a code for service of the living God, it is no wonder that the truth--the central truth of religion--fades rapidly from their minds, that the service of God is identical with the highest service rendered to our fellow-men. "This commandment have we from Him, that he who loveth God, love his brother also." This explains why the Pharisee held aloof from the outcast and the sinner. They might be left to perish--it mattered not to him.