But probably no subject in the line of human thought has given rise to so many different opinions as the subject of how righteousness is to be attained.  The Jewish leaders and representatives in our Lord’s day upon earth were very exact in their outward lives.  They kept clean the outside of the cup and of the platter.  Their external conduct was ordered to a rigid conformity to divine law.  They endeavored to establish a righteousness of their own; and to all human appearance they succeeded; for the Lord himself said to them:  “Ye make clean the outside”—­as vessels may appear clean externally.  He also compared them to beautiful monuments of marble sculptured after the highest style of art and polished to shining perfection, set up over the dead.  But of this very class of men he said:  “Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise enter the kingdom of heaven.”  This proves that the righteousness which they had was not the righteousness of the kingdom of heaven.

Self-respect, or self-love, inclines almost every one, except the very abandoned, to make a show of righteousness; that is, they want others to think they are living right lives.  No man who holds himself up to respectability is willing to be called a thief, or a liar, or an adulterer, or any other thing that is vile.  He may be any or all of these, yet he is not willing that it should be known, or even suspected.  Even he desires to make a fair show in the flesh.

Others, again, who make no profession of religion, but who yet believe in a supreme God and a future state of existence, desire to be righteous before God and man.  They are not like the scribes and Pharisees, who attached virtue and merit to their rigid observance of the ceremonial law of ordinances in their religion.  These that I now speak of are simply good moral men, who are honest in their dealings and careful of the conduct of their lives generally.  These do not really desire to make any display of their righteousness.  They wish rather to be esteemed for their real worth; and not for any fancied or spurious excellencies.  They desire to live above the just reproaches of men, and the condemnation of God.  They persuade themselves to think that their righteousness is all that God can require.

But the most numerous of all the classes that seek after righteousness is composed of those who trust in the righteousness of faith.  Righteousness or justification by faith was the password of the Reformation.  Martin Luther, misapplying Paul’s utterance that “a man is justified or made righteous by faith without the deeds of the law,” set a large part of Europe going with the impression that salvation, in the highest sense, is attainable on the easy terms of merely assenting to the statement that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.  Many passages can be adduced from the epistolary writings in plausible