He suggests also in its last words--where he is playing on the meaning of the name of Judah--another deep element in Christ's depreciation of the religious spirit of the Jews. Their religion was a matter of public opinion--with all the stagnancy which belongs to the public opinion of a compact society--not a matter which lived with ever fresh life in the inner relation of the conscience to God. 'How can ye believe which receive glory one of another, and the glory which cometh from the only God ye seek not?' {97} St. Paul then is certainly right in his estimate of Jewish religion. One indeed who describes with as vivid reality as he does the pride of a Jew in his religious privileges--one who had all the reason that Saul of Tarsus had for knowing what it was to feel this emotion from within--could hardly have been wrong in his estimate of its weaknesses. And if the particular moral defects which St. Paul attributes to the religious Jew are surprisingly grave--theft, adultery, and temple-robbery--here too what he says out of his own experience is confirmed from other quarters. Avarice was a notorious sin of Jews. Our Lord accuses the Scribes of 'devouring widows' houses[4]' under cloak of religion, and denounces the Pharisees also for leaving their outwardly purified cups and platters inwardly full of 'extortion.' It is only a subtler form of theft that He alludes to when He denounces them for sanctioning the practice of dedicating property as a 'corban' to the purposes of religion in order to evade the righteous claims of parents. The story of Susanna, the brief but stern words of our Lord about the seventh commandment in His Sermon on the Mount, and His {98} significant language on the occasion already alluded to of the woman taken in adultery, interpret St. Paul's language as to sins of the flesh. And the language of the town clerk at Ephesus in exculpating St. Paul and his company, suggests that 'temple-robbery' was a not unfamiliar imputation upon Jews. It appears that with all their horror of idols--and though everything connected with an idol was expressly declared to be 'an abomination,' unless it had been already desecrated by Gentiles[5]--they could not always resist the opportunity of appropriating the rich stores of the temples. The 'religious' Scribes and Pharisees (though not of course the best of them) were, in fact, as a body truly hypocrites, as our Lord summarily said they were.