Our Lord rejects the appellation “Good Master.” In these terms, scholars addressed the Rabbi at whose feet they sat, they accepted his dicta, and gave up all independent judgment of their own. But our Lord, fostering and, in some sort, respecting the individual principle in each man, would free them from fetters of all kinds, those of the Rabbis among the rest. Here He would say, “Why do you run to a human master” (for as such only could the mass regard our Lord) “to tell you what it is right to do? About this no authority can be absolute but God, and His commandments you know.” These commandments the young ruler had kept, indeed it was hardly possible that one in his position could have done otherwise, but an empty place was still left in his soul. Life he felt sure must have a higher meaning and more satisfying occupations than any he had yet found. Surely he thought “The Master cannot mean to put me off with telling me to keep the commandments;” and he was right. He had known of no other guide to virtuous life than rules of conduct, and so he had come asking for a fresh set of such rules; but a new light was breaking on his soul and what he really wanted was for the clouds to be cleared away. This young man had a noble soul and our Lord “looking on him loved him.” The scribe, spoken of above, would do best by remaining where he was; but this young man would do best by following. He was worth rescuing from the conventionalities and littlenesses of his every day life and lifting into communion with God. Had he the force to wrench asunder the bonds, slender singly but countless in number, which fastened him down, and to give up, not merely soft living—that he would abandon with joy—but the social consideration and what went with it, personal connections and all, which he would fling away by doing as Christ bade? This was the question. Our Lord had not told the scribe to sell all he had and give to the poor. He laid no such rule on His disciples, but here it was these possessions and, more than all, the position they conferred that clogged the soul and prevented its rise. The “giving to the poor” is not enjoined merely as benevolence; in that virtue it was not likely that this young man would fail, it is only a means of disposing of the weight that drags him down; the magnitude of the sacrifice required staggered the young ruler and he went sorrowful away; but perhaps there was more hope of him than if, at our Lord’s word, he had impulsively surrendered all that he had. He may have been one of those who afterwards sold their land or houses “and brought the prices of the things that were sold and laid them at the Apostles’ feet.”(291) From this interview our Lord draws the moral, “How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the Kingdom of God;” this is not a denunciation of the rich but rather a commiseration of them, owing to the peculiar and insidious temptations to which they are unceasingly exposed.