"I imagine that it was more for the sake of rebuking hypocrisy than to defend the improvidence of his disciples that Christ spoke as he did on the occasion referred to," said the judge. "But he declared the binding force of the law more than once, and he not only urged it upon the people, but increased its scope and severity by explaining that obedience should not be only to the letter, but to the spirit of the heavenly commands. Mercy, love, and compassion are not at all inconsistent with the closest application of the law, though men have strangely come to imagine that they are. In this same matchless sermon we are studying you will find his definition of some methods of violating the seventh commandment. The spiritual rule from which Christ deduced these conclusions may be applied to all the other commandments with results equally startling. 'Thou shalt not steal,' is the simple letter of the eighth commandment, but according to the new method prescribed by Christ for the translation of the law according to Moses, to deprive a man of his peace, of his patience, of his faith in mankind, even if done in ways permissible in business circles, is as truly theft as is the depriving a man of his money by actual robbery. And as I am a member of the bar, as I have been a law-maker, and an adjudicator of legal questions, I feel that I am severe upon no one more than my own old self, when I say that to recover the amount of a debt by legal means which compel the debtor to part with property of value several times greater than that of the property upon which the debt is based, is theft of the most heinous description, for even under the most merciful construction of the most careless law, the only theft at all pardonable is that of small amounts in cases of dire necessity; whereas my experience in legal collections is that not once in a hundred times are they made excepting of men in the direst distress, and of utter inability to pay." "But Christ mercifully forbore to give such interpretations to all the commandments," said Mr. Jodderel, "and I have always thought his refraining from doing so was one of the sure proofs of his divinity. Of course he saw the people around him--his own disciples, even--doing hundreds of things that were wrong; but he knew their natures were too feeble to live up to the holy ideas which were natural enough to _Him_, so he said little, except to exhort them to sin no more."