As I said before—take your covenant privileges as the Pharisees took theirs, and they will turn you into devils while you are fancying yourselves God’s especial favourites. Now this was what happened to the Pharisees: they could not help knowing that God had shown especial favour to them; and that He had taught them more about God than He had taught the heathen. But instead of feeling all the more humble and thankful for this, and of remembering day and night that because much had been given to them much would be required of them, they thought more about the honour and glory which God had put on them. They forgot what God had declared, namely, that it was not for their own goodness that He had taught them, for that they were in themselves not a whit better than the heathen around them. They forgot that the reason why He taught them was, that they were to do His work on earth, by witnessing for His name, and telling the heathen that God was their Lord, as well as Lord of the Jews. Now David, and the old Psalmists and Prophets, did not forget this. Their cry is: “Tell it out among the heathen that the Lord is King.” “Worship the Son of God, ye kings of the earth, and make your peace with Him lest He be angry.” “It was in vain,” he told the heathen kings, “to try to cast away God’s government from them, and break His bonds from off them,” for “the Lord was King, let the nations be never so unquiet.” But the Jews gradually forgot this, and their daily boast was, that God had nothing to do with the heathen; that He did not care for them, and actually hated them; that they, as it were, had the true God all to themselves for their own private property; and that He had neither love nor mercy, except for them and their proselytes, that is, the few heathens whom they could persuade and entice not to worship the true God after the customs of their own country—that would not have suited the Jews’ bigotry and pride—but to turn Jews, and forget their own people among whom they were born, and ape them in everything. And so, as our Lord told them, after compassing sea and land to make one of these proselytes, they only made him after all twice as much the child of hell as themselves. For they could not teach the heathen anything worth knowing about God, when they had forgotten themselves what God was like. They could tell them that there was one God, and not two—but what was the use of that? As St. James says, the devils believe as much as that, and yet the knowledge does not make them holy, but only increases their fear and despair. And so with these Pharisees. They had forgotten that God was love. They had forgotten that God was merciful. They had forgotten that God was just. And therefore, while they were talking of God and pretending to worship God, they knew nothing of God, and they did not do God’s will, and act like God; for (as we find from the Gospels) they were unjust, tyrannous, proud, conceited, covetous themselves; and while they