There is an ever-living freshness in the words of Jesus, as recorded in the Gospels. In reading them we are not with mere antiquarian curiosity studying the history of events wholly unconnected with ourselves, or recalling a state of society which belongs entirely to the buried past; rather we find ourselves presented with prophecies of the ever-recurring future, and with anticipations of the principles which may be applied to the interpretation of the great moral and religious problems of modern society. Securely connected beneath the letter of the original utterances there lies ready for our apprehension the eternal spirit, which may be our unerring guide in practice. Such a vitality of utterance we may surely discern in the parabolic saying of the text.
I. What is the interpretation of these parables of the new patch on the old garment, and of the new wine put into the old bottles, or leathern skins after Eastern fashion? Is it not something of this sort? The old forms of piety amid which John and his disciples still move are not suited to the new religious life emanating from Me. The new life needs new forms.
II. Neither Christ nor His Apostles attempted to put the Gospel as a patch upon the old garment of the Mosaic law, to pour the new wine of the spiritual dispensation into the old bottle of legal rules. They offered the Gospel as a system of principles and laws and motives, not of rules and precepts and observances. They invited men to a rejoicing sense of liberty, as the appropriate temper for that reception of the doctrine of salvation by Christ; they urged men towards the attainment of that perfect love which would cast out fear; they proclaimed that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself; they made the ritual and ceremonial element in religion altogether subordinate to the moral and spiritual. Faith working by love, not ceremonial observance, was the characteristic expression of the Christian life.
III. The Christian Church did not at once rise to the grandeur of the new idea of religion. It constantly exhibited tendencies to fall back upon the old. It was afraid of letting liberty degenerate into license. Men who had become accustomed to all the venerable traditions of the old law did not straightway find pleasure in throwing them off. They represented Christianity as a mere reproduction of Judaism under other names. They made the ministry of the Word and sacraments a priesthood, whose main office was to offer material sacrifice; they violated the whole spirit of the New Testament, and the language of the early Church, by calling the Lord's day the Sabbath; they tried to limit the very name of religion to the observance of a rule of life which prescribed the most minute precepts for the conduct of every hour; a rigid asceticism was glorified as the fulfilment of counsels of perfection. "New wine must be put into new bottles" embodies a principle which the Church of Christ in all ages forgets at her peril. That principle is, that new wants create new institutions; a new spirit must express itself in other forms, adapted to the new occasion. There must be in all the arrangements of life an elasticity, a power of self-development, an expansiveness, a fertility of invention, an evoking of new energies. New conditions of society demand different methods.
Canon Ince, Oxford Review,Feb. 18th, 1885.