logical contradiction.  For religion is in its essential nature a living thing, for the very reason that it is part of the experience of a living person.  As experience is not merely alive, but the sum of all our vital powers, it is ever growing, both in breadth and in intensity.  So far then as we are in any true sense religious men, our religion, as part and parcel of our experience, must be alive with an intense and vigorous activity, growing in the direction in which our experience grows.  Hence a dead religion is a logical contradiction, as we have said.  But, as truth is stranger than fiction, so life contains anomalies and monstrosities which simply

set logic at defiance.  A dead religion is indeed a monstrum, something portentous, which refuses to be reconciled with any canons of rationality.  But it exists—that is the astonishing fact about it; and it found its almost perfect expression and embodiment in the normal and average Pharisee of our Lord’s time.  There are three characteristic features about a dead religion, and all of them receive a perfect illustration in the well-known picture in the gospels of Pharisaic religion.

(a)  It tends less and less to rest on experience, and more and more to repose upon tradition.  It is academic, a thing on which scribes may lecture, while the voice of the scholastic pedant with blatant repetitions overpowers the living, authoritative voice within the soul.  “They marvelled, because He taught with authority, and not as the scribes.  A fresh (not new) teaching, with authority!”

(b)  It removes the living God to an infinite distance from human life.  Religion is a matter of rules, of minute obedience to a code of morals and of ceremonial imposed from without, not of a fellowship of the human with the Divine.  In fact, God is banished to a point on the far circumference, and the centre is occupied by the Law.  He is retained in order to give authority to that Law, as the source of sanctions in the way of rewards and punishments.  In short, the idea of the living God degenerates into the necessary convention of an ecclesiastical tradition.

(c)  Closely connected with this second feature is the third characteristic of a dead religion—its inhumanity.  When men substitute obedience to a code for service of the living God, it is no wonder that the truth—the central truth of religion—fades rapidly from their minds, that the service of God is identical with the highest service rendered to our fellow-men.  “This commandment have we from Him, that he who loveth God, love his brother also.”  This explains why the Pharisee held aloof from the outcast and the sinner.  They might be left to perish—it mattered not to him.

Now, all through the Gospel history our Lord appears as standing in absolute and sternest opposition to the dead religion of the Pharisees.  He could make no manner of terms with it.  He acted against it.  He denounced it at every point.  He rebuked them for “making the commandment of God of none effect” by that tradition which they loved so dearly.  He brought the idea of a living God into closest touch with the actual lives of men.  He deliberately consorted with publicans and sinners.  And, finally, He condemned, in set discourse, the whole system, traditional, Godless, inhuman, with scathing emphasis.  Christ died, not only because His words and acts ran counter to the prejudice of the people, but because He spoke and acted in opposition to the dead religion of the Pharisees.

3.  The third historical cause of the death of Christ

was the love of gain and the political ambition of the Sadducees.  Their hatred, indeed, would have been powerless if our Lord had not already provoked the enmity of the people and of the Pharisees; but that enmity, in turn, without the unscrupulous intrigues of the Sadducees, a small but most influential section, would never have proceeded to its fatal and murderous issue.  The Pharisees gave up the conflict in despair: “Perceive ye that ye prevail nothing?  Behold, the whole world is gone after Him.”  It was the Sadducean High Priest who gave the counsel of death.  “It is expedient that one man should die for the people.”

We must remember that the Sadducees represented the aristocracy of Judæa, and that, as resulted necessarily from the nature and constitution of the Jewish state, was an ecclesiastical aristocracy, an hierarchy.  They are the party denoted several times in the New Testament by the term “the High Priests.”  The nearest analogy to their position is supplied by the political popes and bishops of the Middle Ages.  Their interests were political rather than spiritual.  A considerable amount of independence had been left to the Jews in their own land.  The Sanhedrin, the native court, exercised still very considerable power.  And the Sadducean minority possessed a predominating influence in its consultations.  What political power could be wielded in a subject state of the Empire was in their hands. 

Incidentally, a large and flourishing business was conducted under their control and management in the very Temple Courts, in “the booths of the sons of Hanan.”  Our Lord struck a blow at their financial interests when He drove out these traders in sacrificial victims and other requisites.  But, much more, and this was the head and front of His offence, by His influence with certain classes of the people, and by the danger thus presented of a popular movement which might arouse the suspicion of the imperial authorities, and lead to very decisive action on their part, He threatened the political position of the Sadducean aristocracy.  So with complete absence of scruples, but with great political sagacity, Caiaphas uttered the momentous words, an unconscious prophecy, as St. John points out, at that meeting of the Sanhedrin when the death of Jesus was finally resolved upon.

Thus the main historical causes of the Crucifixion were these three, prejudice on the part of the people, a dead religion on the part of the Pharisees, love of gain and political ambition on the part of the Sadducees.

We may see then how absolutely true St. Peter was to the facts of the case.  “Him . . . through the hand of lawless men, ye affixed to a cross and slew.”  God was not the cause of the death of Jesus Christ, as in popular and ditheistic theory, forgetting “I am in the Father, and the Father in Me.”  The

real causes of His Death were the definite sins of lawless, of wicked men.  God’s part was a purely negative one.  He held His hand, and allowed sin to work out to its fatal issue.  The Resurrection, indeed, is the sublime act of God’s interference, at the most critical point in all human history, at the one point supremely worthy of such Divine interposition, in order to finally and completely vindicate the cause of moral goodness.  But up till then, sin was allowed to have its own way, to display fully its malign character, to reach its ultimate result in the Death of the Sinless One.

But behind the historical causes of our Lord’s death, were deeper and spiritual causes.  “Him being by the determined counsel and foreknowledge of God delivered up. . . .”  God foreknew the result.  There is no difficulty here.  But in what sense can He be said to have “determined” it?

The answer leads us to a consideration of decisive importance.  God works by law, in the spiritual, no less than in the physical region.  The Death of the Christ, at the hand of lawless men, came about in virtue of the