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I. THESE PHARISAIC WORTHIES DID CHEAP AND OSTENTATIOUS HOMAGE TO DEAD AND DISTANT VIRTUE. They "built the tombs of the prophets, and garnished the sepulchres of the righteous." Monuments of the illustrious and pious dead were common in Jerusalem. These memorials the Pharisees held in most officious veneration, repairing, ornamenting, or building them anew. Pious acts, one might deem. Could such grave-visaged votaries be other than God-fearing men? Alas for poor human nature! A certain homage to virtue it doubtless was, this rearing of monumental honours to prophets long dead. Even in the worst of men, such acts are not without their value in testifying to a conscience within them, and a God above them. We blame not the instinct for monuments, nor need we, for it is as deep as human nature, as old as history: witness the pyramids, Assyria, Egypt, Greece, Rome. We see it in the rude stone or cairn that marks some hard-fought field, or the spot where some old mailed king grimly bit the ground. It continues to fill our squares with statues, our graveyards with sculptures, our cathedrals with "storied urn and animated bust." Yea, it fills our houses with portraits and other relics of the dear departed, over whom memory contests it stoutly with the very grave, and makes it "give us back the dead, even in the loveliest looks they wore." Need I add that Christianity, too, which has a true and kindly side for everything natural, has its monumental institutions? But, with all this, monumental zeal is but a cheap, and often vulgar homage. Stone memorials may be projected and erected by very stony hearts. The tomb-building rage is often symptomatic of a degenerate time, in which the nation has passed its zenith, has stopped producing heroes, and now produces only their statues, or it may be, like Jerusalem, their persecutors and killers. Illustrations of this tendency are not far to seek, though we are very far from calling ours a degenerate age. In one of our minor capitals, any visitor may find in a certain spacious street, standing in a row, the express image of royal sensuality, supported on the one side by that of political tyranny, and on the other by that of political corruption. Some years ago, twenty-five thousand pounds were subscribed to erect a statue to a public person whose only known accomplishment was railway gambling, and whose only public virtue was success. The old prophets, persecuted through life, and at last stoned out of it, did come, in a future age, to get recognition. "The memory of the just is blessed," while "the memory of the wicked shall rot"; and thus, even from foes, the good may get posthumous instalments of the honours that await them in full measure before assembled worlds. But this homage they never get till they are fairly out of the way. A dead prophet's tomb called only for the cheap surrender of a little pelf. The living prophet himself would have demanded the right hand or the right eye, the immolation of the darling lust, the consecration of the whole man. To deny due honour to the prophet, and pay mock honours to his tomb, was truly a lie in livery. So is it still. Wesley is lauded by many in our day who, were he alive, would brand him, as did even his pious contemporary Toplady, as "an inveterate troubler of Israel." Why? Because Wesley is out of their way — he has" ceased from troubling"; and thus be whom, living, men classed among troublers, may, now that he is dead, be enrolled among the saints. Thus death or distance lends enchantment to the view. The noblest monument we can rear to a prophet, is to gather up his teachings into our experience, and reproduce his character in our life. For the real monument of the heroes and martyrs that founded England's greatness — circumspice! — if you ask where it is, we answer, Where is it not? The true Wallace monument is not the rock-dwarfed thing which, under that name, disfigures a picturesque and memorable spot, but is seen in a nation of patriots who had the good sense to be indifferent to that structural anachronism, and who have often contributed many times its cost, in one of their cities alone, for modern patriotic objects common and dear to the United Kingdom. No tribute to such men as Watt and the Stephensons could equal that which thunders in every factory and steams on every sea.

II. THOSE PHARISEES BORE CHEAP AND OSTENTATIOUS TESTIMONY AGAINST DEAD AND DISTANT SIN. They said, "If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets." Pious men! Blushing crimson for being sons of prophet-murdering sires! Such was their profession in regard to the dead. What now was their actual practice in regard to the living? You may read it here (verse 33) in the words "serpents," "vipers." Our Lord thereby describes them as men whose hearts were venom-bags, whose mouths were open sepulchres, whose tongues were rooted, and floated, in the poison of asps. There had already come among them a prophet, yea, and more than a prophet, even the Son of the Highest. And how did those saintly tomb-builders receive Him? "It is certain that a Herod and a Herodias to John the Baptist, would have been an Ahab and a Jezebel to Elijah." Let this bring home to us the humiliating lesson of our fatal proneness to glide into the delusive persuasion that this or that sin is what we, for our parts, are wholly incapable of committing — that, though all men should fall into it, yet will not we. Where is the Bible reading youth who has not in his inexperience marvelled at Israel's murmurings in the desert, and at the sad falls of some of the most eminent of the Old Testament saints? But riper views, and deeper spiritual experiences, not only correct this mistake, but let us see in the very facts we once deemed so stumbling, striking evidence of the truth and divinity of the book that records them. The holiest man will be the least disposed to declare himself incapable of this or that sin.

III. BY ALL THIS THESE PHARISEES EXPOSED AND CONDEMNED THEMSELVES (see verses 30, 31). In conclusion, note one thing they ought to have done, but left undone; nay, did the opposite; that of humbly owning their oneness with the prophet-killing fathers. Paradoxical as it may sound, this was the first step to standing out from their fathers' crime.

(T. Guthrie, D. D.)

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KJV: Woe unto you! for ye build the sepulchres of the prophets, and your fathers killed them.

WEB: Woe to you! For you build the tombs of the prophets, and your fathers killed them.