We have a singular example of the perfect absence of all moral discernment in the reasoning of Mr. N. in his reference to the Lord's conduct in purifying the temple. A father chastises his child, and the profound wisdom of the infidel discusses whether it is a warrant for its brother to beat it. "Could it authorize me to plait a whip of small cords, and flog a preferment-hunter out of the pulpit?" (Phases, p. 151.) How sovereignly ridiculous such a remark in a moral point of view! Yet Mr. N. is treating it as a moral question. Now there are cases where the offensive character of an act puts the scourge in everybody's hand; and it was really such in this case. The men whom Christ drove out were making God's temple and God's worship an occasion of trafficking extortion as to the poor who had victims to buy. But this is by no means all. The Lord distinctly presents Himself as Jehovah; and (in one of the instances in which He thus cleared the temple) as at the same time the King, the Son of David, the Messiah, to whom such an office belonged. In the early case in John He says "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." "He spake of the temple of his body." In the other, He sends for the ass, to accomplish the prophecy of Zechariah, saying "The Lord hath need of him," and enters publicly into Jerusalem as the King Messiah. Think of Mr. Ν. asking if it would authorize him so to act! He must forgive me saying "such questions go very deep into the heart" of the moral (perhaps I should say, common) sense of the writer.