These words of Jesus were spoken to the Scribes and Pharisees, and combine in themselves a defense of His own course in mingling with sinners, and a keen rebuke of the spirit of those who brought against him an accusation of associating with sinners, as well as the declaration of the object of His mission into this poor darkened world. And does it not seem strange that a man should be required to defend himself for going to spend and be spent for the good of those who are most sorely in need of help and relief? But it has always been so. Men are so selfish, so utterly without concern for the interests of others that they want to monopolize and swallow up everything that is good. So when Jesus of Nazareth was revealed to the Jewish people, and made Himself conspicuous and famous by the daily performance of astonishing miracles, the Scribes and Pharisees, who thought that everything ought to be subservient to their own personal interests and aggrandizement, fell out with Jesus because He did not fall in with notions of what He ought to be and do. They did not care a baubee for the people, the rabble, the mob, the human cattle. Indeed they utterly despised them, and would have nothing to do with them. They might perish and rot so far as the Scribes and Pharisees were concerned, provided these latter could hold the places of honor and gain. And so utterly possessed were they by this feeling of all-consuming selfishness, that when they saw this Jesus of Nazareth going with sinners, talking with sinners and eating with sinners, they set it down as a conclusion they would never give up that He was not, and could not be, and should not be, their Messiah. So that Jesus was thus forced to reason with them, and to make His defense before these self-constituted judges of His, and tell them why it was that He pursued the course He did. So it was in the time of John Wesley in England. He went among sinners, talked with them, taught them, and drew them by the magic force of his great love to follow him wherever he went to preach; and they so crowded the churches to hear the words of grace and tenderness that fell from his lips, that the doors were shut upon him, and he had to go out on the commons and into the fields beneath the sky of that God and Father whose words he was preaching, and whose lost children he was trying to save. This has been the experience of other zealous and earnest ministers of Christ. And they, too, have had to defend themselves for such a course. Our dear Brother Morris felt himself pressed to say why he went to the courthouse steps to try to lift up the fallen and save the wretched and the lost. But the words of Jesus contain also a scathing rebuke of the self-righteous spirit of those hard-headed, hard-hearted Scribes and Pharisees. It was the same as saying, "you claim that you are the righteous of the world. You are not willing to be classed with sinners, or to be called sinners, or to believe yourselves sinners.