of courts of justice, as there was amongst the Jews in our Saviour’s time, to hear and determine divers sorts of crimes, as the judges and the council? Shall not all judicature appertain to Christ and His apostles? To understand therefore this text, we are not to consider it solitarily, but jointly with the words precedent and subsequent. Our Saviour in this chapter interpreteth the law of Moses; which the Jews thought was then fulfilled when they had not transgressed the grammatical sense thereof, howsoever they had transgressed against the sentence or meaning of the legislator. Therefore whereas they thought the sixth commandment was not broken but by killing a man: nor the seventh but when a man lay with a woman not his wife; our Saviour tells them the inward anger of a man against his brother, if it be without just cause, is homicide. You have heard, saith He, the law of Moses, “Thou shalt not kill,” and that “Whosoever shall kill, shall be condemned before the judges,” or before the session of the Seventy: but I say unto you to be angry with one’s brother without cause, or to say unto him “Raca” or “Fool,” is homicide, and shall be punished at the day of judgment and session of Christ and His apostles with hell fire. So that those words were not used to distinguish between divers crimes, and divers courts of justice, and divers punishments; but to tax the distinction between sin and sin, which the Jews drew not from the difference of the will in obeying God, but from the difference of their temporal courts of justice; and to show them that he that had the will to hurt his brother, though the effect appear but in reviling, or not at all, shall be cast into hell fire, by the judges and by the session, which shall be the same, not different, courts at the day of judgment. This considered, what can be drawn from this text to maintain purgatory I cannot imagine.
The sixth place is Luke 16:9: “Make ye friends of the unrighteous Mammon; that when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting tabernacles.” This he alleges to prove invocation of saints departed. But the sense is plain, that we should make friends with our riches of the poor; and thereby obtain their prayers whilst they live. “He that giveth to the poor, lendeth to the Lord.”