LECTURES ON THE DIATESSARON. PART III. 20. JESUS commenced his ministry by purifying the temple from the mercenary traders who sold the animals used in sacrifice, and who, for the convenience of worshippers, exchanged money within its precincts. He nearly closed it with a similar act, (Matt. xxi.) which must not be confounded with this, which is recorded by John alone. On that occasion he referred to Isaiah's prophecy, (lvi. 7.) "It is written, My house shall be called an house of prayer for all people," thus claiming it as his own, and literally fulfilling Malachi's prediction, (iii. 1.) “ Jehovah, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple; but who may abide the day of his coming? and who shall stand when he appeareth ?" He now calls it his Father's house, in a sense higher than that in which it could be used by those who were only God's children by adoption, and which was suitable to no one but the Messiah, and that he was so understood, is plain from the interrogation, By what right or authority doest thou these things? Jesus did not spring from Levi, but was of another tribe, Judah, of which no man gave attendance at the altar, (Heb. vii.) it must therefore have been as the proprietor of the temple, as the God of Israel, to whose service it was dedicated, that he drave from it those who had polluted it; and this is intimated in his reply, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up ;" by which he also signified, that his body, of which this temple built with hands was a type, was the residence of the Deity, more fully than that material edifice. After his resurrection, his disciples understood this saying, and they also called to mind a 66 passage, in which the Psalmist says, as representing the Messiah, "The zeal of thine house has eaten me up;" that is, I burn with an ardent desire to purify thy habitation and ordinances from every corruption, and can have no ease till I have accomplished it. His enemies by a perversion of his words, bore witness against him. "Make not my Father's house a house of merchandize." The last time, his remark was, You have made it a den of robbers," from which it should seem, that they were not only covetous but dishonest in their traffic. These mercenary traders must have been numerous, especially at the passover, and a multitude of worshippers must have been assembled; yet Jesus, a man in humble life, and hitherto little known, without influence, without attendants, or arms, except a scourge made at the moment out of the ropes with which the cattle were confined, drove them all before him, though pride, covetousness, and resentment, disposed them to resistance; but their consciences made them timid, and his majesty overawed them. The antithesis is striking, for he contrasts the holy use for which the temple was designed, with their gross profanation of it; and it is the more impressive, since the two clauses are brought from their own prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah vii. 11. His reference to the latter was calculated to alarm these self-righteous worshippers, which declares, that unless they amended their ways," the Lord would do unto this house as he had done to Shiloh where he set his name at the first.”* St. John adds, "Many believed, seeing his miracles;" now the only one he has yet mentioned, was that performed at a distance from Jerusalem, at Cana; from this observation, therefore, and others, we learn that his miracles were far more numerous than we are apt to suppose. Chorazin, for example, is mentioned by Christ himself, as the scene of miracles which would have converted Tyre and Sidon; yet none of the evangelists ever speak of his visiting that town. Why then, we may incline to ask, among the multitude out of which they had to select, did the different evangelists so often give us the same? Those recorded were perhaps the most memorable on account of their greater celebrity or from their results. As the temple will be often mentioned, and as in the *The same chapter might be present to the mind of Josephus, when writing a passage, which is the best commentary upon this speech: "You are not ashamed of those crimes which seek concealment; thefts, I mean, circumventions, and adulteries, while the temple itself is become the receptacle of all these abominations; and that consecrated place, which even the Romans venerate from afar, is polluted by Jewish hands," v. 9. epistles, particularly in those to the Ephesians and the Hebrews, the Christian doctrines are expressed in language borrowed from that building and its services, it is desirable that we should have a clear idea of it. The different nature of our religious worship and that of the Israelites, has occasioned an equal difference in the places appropriated to that purpose. Where it consists in prayer and exhortation, a capacious building must be provided for the congregation; where sacrifice is the principal act, an altar is most conveniently placed in the open air, and the building, which is merely the symbolical residence of the Deity, which the laity have no need to enter, and from which, indeed, they were by the Mosaic ritual excluded, may be of small dimensions. None, therefore, of the religious edifices of the ancients, (for the principle is as applicable to heathen temples, as to that of the true God,) will bear any comparison in extent to our larger cathedrals. As soon, therefore, as the primitive Christians were able to provide themselves with places of public worship, the model upon which they built was not the temple, but the basilica, or court of justice, and hence that name is still given to the more distinguished of the ancient churches of Rome, erected by the first Christian emperor and his successors. The Naos, or temple, properly so called, was ninety feet long, by thirty wide, into which, our Saviour, not being "a priest after the order of Aaron," never entered; but it stood within an Iegov, or sacred enclosure, within which he and other worshippers attended; and this is a distinction carefully preserved by the evangelists, though seldom retained by translators, and altogether disregarded by ours. The consecrated area formed a square of half a mile in circumference; the scite was a rocky eminence, and the side of the valley opposite the mount of Olives, was lined by a stupendous wall 450 feet high, of blocks of white stone, of a prodigious magnitude. Some of them, we learn from Josephus, (art. xv.) were not less than forty-five cubits in length; the disciples therefore, pointing them out to their Lord, might well say, what very large stones (worado). were there. The outer enclosure was entered by nine gates, one of which of Corinthian brass, higher and more magnificent than the rest, is supposed to be that called in the New Testament the beautiful gate. It was called the court of the Gentiles, because they were not permitted to proceed any farther; it was surrounded by colonnades, one of which was called Solomon's, because it stood upon the terrace which he had raised from the valley in order to enlarge the arca. Josephus calls it the royal portico, and he says that πτερυγίου no one could look down from its flat roof without being seized with dizziness; the south-east corner of it is supposed to be the guy from which Satan tempted Christ to precipitate himself. As the Jews did not worship in this outer court, they conceived that it might be used for secular purposes, and here therefore were the money changers, and sellers of cattle. Within this court was the court of the Israelites, divided into two parts, the inner for the men, and the outer for the women. The latter was parted from that of the Gentiles by a low stone wall, upon which were pillars, with the inscription, "Let no alien enter the holy place.' This explains the metaphor in the Ephesians, (ii. 13.) by which St. Paul describes the union of Jewish and Gentile converts, in one church a mystery, as he observes, which he was commissioned to make known, "But now in Christ Jesus, ye who sometime were afar off, are made nigh by the blood of Christ; for he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us. In this court was the treasury where the people brought their voluntary offerings for the purchase of victims and defraying the expences of the temple. An ascent of fifteen steps led from this court into that of the men; they were called together the court of the Israelites, and here they worshipped, each apart, in silent prayer, while the priest on duty was offering up incense within the sanctuary. Again, within this was the Priest's court, enclosing the altar. Magnificent as these courts with their buildings were, they were surpassed by the temple which arose beyond the altar; and which unlike most Christian churches faced the west, as does the celebrated Roman basilica of St. Peter, From its elevation, it was visible from a distance; and it is described by one who had frequently seen it, (Josephus,) as a snowy mountain, for it was built of the whitest stone; it was roofed with plates of gold; and he says, that when the sun shone upon it, it was too dazzling to look upon. The building was divided into two parts by a double veil, which was rent in twain at the crucifixion, emblematically denoting, that that event abolished the distinction between the Israelites and Gentiles, and that the privilege of the High Priest of entering within this most holy part of the temple, was now communicated to all believers, who through the Mediator's death have access by a great and living way to the Almighty upon his mercy-seat, Heb. x. In the outer division, or holy place, were the altar of incense, the golden candlestick, and the table with the shew-bread. The inner, or holy of holies, was a cube of thirty feet. In the first temple it contained the ark, in which were deposited the stone tables on which the ten commandments were inscribed, Aaron's rod which budded, and the pot of manna kept as a specimen of the miraculous food which sustained their ancestors in the desert. The cover was called the mercy-seat, over which two cherubim leant forward stooping down, and above it was the shekinah or visible glory of the Deity. The High Priest entered only on the day of atonement, when he touched the mercy-seat with the blood of the sacrifices, to shew that it was only by such a propitiation that the Deity could be approached. These sacred articles perished with the first temple in the holy of holies. In that of the second there is said to have been nothing. It is described as empty, upon the authority of Pompey, the only Roman who ever presumed to enter it, and he, it has been observed, never prospered afterwards. The tabernacle, or moveable place of worship constructed by Moses, according to the pattern shewn him in the mount, though on a smaller scale, was precisely on the same plan as the temple erected by Solomon. The latter was burnt when Jerusalem was taken; and the true God remained without a place in which he could be worshipped in the manner he had been pleased to appoint, till it was rebuilt by Zerubbabel. That building, after the lapse of about five centuries, falling into decay, it was gradually restored by Herod the Great, but as it was not taken down at once, it was still considered as the second temple. He employed upon it 18,000 workmen for nine years; yet the Jews continued to adorn it and to enlarge it with additional buildings, expending upon it the sacred treasure; so that they are justified in asserting that it had been forty-six years in building. It occupied the highest ground in the city, but was itself commanded by the tower Antonia, which Herod had erected, and named after his original patron Mark Antony. That communicated with the temple, and was occupied by a Roman garrison, and is the castle out of which the chief captain and soldiers issued to rescue Paul from the populace, Acts xxi. Jerusalem is on a rocky eminence of secondary limestone, of steep ascent on every side except the north, and enclosed within an amphitheatre of higher hills, Ps. cxxv. Its name signifies the vision of peace; it did not become the capital till David conquered it from the Jebusites, and was no longer such under the Romans, who transferred the seat of government to Cæsarea; Josephus states its circumference at four miles and a half, that of the modern city does not exceed three. The temple, of which it is well known that not a vestige remains, has been succeeded by a mosque, N |