It is our Lord’s way to point the drift of a whole discourse by a pregnant sentence at the end, in which the expositor finds the key to the whole. Such a saying we have here, in the closing words, “And wisdom is(182) justified of all her children.”(183) The meaning of the passage turns on the sense given to the word “justified.” It is employed, near the beginning of the discourse, in the same sense which it has here at the end, and this helps us to understand its particular meaning in this place. I refer to the passage: “And all the people when they heard, and the publicans, _justified_ God, being baptized with the baptism of John. But the Pharisees and the lawyers rejected for themselves the counsel of God, being not baptized of him.”(184) The word “justified” is used in this passage in the sense it has when we say “my son has justified all my outlay,” or “the event justified all my precautions.” The publicans by accepting the baptism of John shewed that God’s good offices in their behalf were not thrown away, that they had not been regarded with excessive hopefulness or a too indulgent eye; but the Scribes and Pharisees frustrated God’s good purpose in their behalf. So far as they were concerned his measures were of no effect. They would have none of them. The fact was, that, though they talked about God, they were in fact God-blind, and when asked to follow His teachers they found special reasons for declining in each particular case. John renewed an ideal which had passed out of sight; he appeared in the ascetic garb of the prophets of old; his strict life and his outspoken words disturbed their consciences and they put him aside by the readiest of expedients, they declared that he was mad. Then came our Lord declaring Himself the Son of Man, living as other men did, and consecrating thereby the ordinary course and usages of human life. In His case also the Scribes had an objection to make. A messenger from God, they thought, would come upon the earth in a different way from other men, and all his doings would be of an exceptional kind: whereas Christ lived to all appearance just as they did themselves. In the same way that courtiers surround a prince by a wall of etiquette in order to elevate him and hold him apart from the people, so would the Scribes have encompassed God’s messenger with hallowed observances. They were not likely to understand that the closer Jesus kept to the ordinary and universal ways of men which were of natural growth, the more He was at home in the Kingdom of His Father who had made the world and ordered the ways of men.