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acts of the people. For centuries the Jews had been binding themselves to the wheel of religious bigotry, and the Puritans accomplished a like task in a shorter time. The length of time was the only difference.
But Jesus knew all the exacting ecclesiastical rules to be man-made. "He himself knew what was in man" and He attempted to disabuse those benighted minds of their error. He tried to make them understand that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. They had wound themselves up in religious ceremonies until their ecclesiastical machinery dominated every act of their lives. Not only were they subjects of their sacred law, but they were its absolute slaves.
It was the mission of Jesus to break down this mental structure which had been reared through ages of blind servitude to form and ritual. The Mosaic law had been made so rigid that it held the Jews in its icy bonds to the exclusion of all reason and common sense. Jesus saw this, and He purposely overstepped the bounds of religious propriety in order that He might more effectively impress on them the fact that the old Mosaic dispensation was at an end. He told them that He did not come to break the law, but to fulfill it. He was speaking of the true law of God, and not their external rules of sacrifice, penance, Sabbath observance, and the like. He knew that these rules were of the letter--purely perfunctory; that they were in reality hindrances to the expression of the inner spiritual life.
Man cannot grow into the understanding of
