That which is holy. — The words point to the flesh which has been offered for sacrifice, the “holy thing” of Leviticus 22:6-7; Leviticus 22:10; Leviticus 22:16, of which no un clean person or stranger, and à fortiori no unclean beast, was to eat. To give that holy flesh to dogs would have seemed to the devout Israelite the greatest of all profanations. Our Lord teaches us that there is a like risk of desecration in dealing with the yet holier treasure of divine truth. Another aspect of the same warning is brought out in the second clause. The fashion of the time had made pearls the costliest of all jewels, as in the parable of Matthew 13:45 (comp. also 1 Timothy 2:9), and so they too became symbols of the preciousness of truth. The “dogs” and the “swine,” in their turn, represent distinct forms of evil, the former being here, as in Philippians 3:2; Revelation 22:15, the type of impurity, the latter (as in Psalms 80:13) of ferocity. The second comparison may possibly imply, as in a condensed fable, the disappointment and consequent rage of the swine at finding that what they took for grain was only pearls. We are to beware lest we so present the truth, either in direct teaching or by an undiscerning disclosure of the deeper religious emotions of the soul, to men, that we make them worse and not better than before.
We are met by the questions, Are we, then, to class our fellow-men under these heads, and to think of them as dogs and swine? Is not this to forget the previous teaching, and to judge with the harshest judgment? The answer to these questions must be found, we may believe, in thinking of the dogs and swine as representing not men and women as such, but the passions of this kind or that which make them brutish. So long as they identify themselves with those passions, we must deal cautiously and wisely with them. St. Paul did not preach the gospel to the howling mob at Ephesus, or to the “lewd fellows of the baser sort” at Thessalonica, and yet at another time he would have told any member of those crowds that he too had been redeemed, and might claim an inheritance among those who had been sanctified. We need, it might be added, to be on our guard against the brute element in ourselves not less than in others. There, too, we may desecrate the holiest truths by dealing with them in the spirit of irreverence, or passion, or may cynically jest with our own truest and noblest impulses.