words of mine and doeth them, a Christian lyric has been composed to the effect

Doing is a deadly thing, doing ends in death.

If we come to ask what explanation they would give who have thus contrived to exactly reverse the word of their Lord, we get the answer, which has already been hinted at, that they are following the doctrine of St. Paul. "He gave us the apple," they say, “and we did eat." How indignant Paul would be at this suggestion, as if he, and not Christ, had been crucified for us! What could be more evidently fallacious than to set Paul against his Master, whose slightest word was law to him. Personally

I am persuaded that St. Paul, rightly understood, and put in his due subordination to the teaching of his Lord and ours, does not contradict Jesus. As this study proceeds we shall come quite naturally to the meeting-point, where the thought of the servant dovetails with that of his Master. But while there is any apparent collision, while to an imperfectly trained spiritual sense Paul seems to teach one doctrine and our Lord another, it is of vast importance that we should unhesitatingly give the preference to our Lord. The Sermon on the Mount comes before the Epistles of St. Paul, and must interpret them. Nothing could be more misleading than to use the Pauline Epistles to discredit the Sermon on the Mount. The result of a shallow and ignorant play upon words may easily be to make Paul explain the Teaching of Jesus away. Lithro But we are touching now on a sin of the Church,

rather than a sin of inexpert and amateur theologians. It is not the individual that has buried the teaching of the Gospels under the metaphysics of the Epistles. That is the work of the Fathers, the authoritative Teachers of the Church, the Church itself. Indeed, with sorrow and shame we must as Churchmen confess that we have committed a sin against Christ. We have repeated the offence which Judah committed when the Book of the Law was lost in some dusty and cobwebbed chamber of the Temple. We' need a new Josiah who will bring out from its hiding the first grand Law of the kingdom of heaven, the Law of the Sermon on the Mount, which lies covered and practically lost under the piles of ecclesiastical decisions, and under the burden of a traditional exegesis.

As this Law is read in our hearing-oh that we had ears to hear; oh that our ears were not dull and deaf with age-long prejudice !—as we study this Law, we are exceedingly filled with confusion. There is hardly a part of our practice or our creed, hardly an institution in the Church or in the State, which does not betray a departure from the faultless Law. So startling is the contrast, that a great prelate of the English Church ventured to say openly that the Law was a counsel of perfection and could not be realised in practice. To this has it come even in the most enlightened part of Christendom. But we must firmly insist: "To the law and to the testimony, if they speak not according to this word surely there is no morning for them." The morning will break

1 Isaiah viii. 20.

upon Christendom when we take the Sermon on the Mount seriously and practically as our law of life.

Now we will look at this Law of the kingdom as a whole. It is essential to look at it as a whole. For unlike all other laws, its precepts are not divisible. The Law is one. We are lost if we lose ourselves in detail. Let us fairly contemplate these two vital characteristics of the Law as a whole.

First, it is directed from first to last against ritualism, against the tendency to exalt tradition, against the accumulated authority of an ecclesiastical system which supersedes the immediate authority of God. The righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, the conception of religion which finds its expression in a series of outward observances, the mode of judging conduct by that which meets the eye of men and not by that which meets the eye of God —these are the things which come under condemnation. It can therefore occasion small wonder that the Church, in resuscitating all these features of a bygone system, has sought to repress the teaching of Jesus; or that in England, when increasingly the popular religion leans on the example of pre-Christian Judaism, and when those ideas of Temple and Priesthood and Altar, which Jesus came to supersede, are made the essence of Christianity, the teaching of Jesus is ingeniously explained away. In the Church the stress is laid on things which have no place in the teaching of Jesus at all. He attaches no virtue to church-going. He makes no distinction between clergy and laity. He says nothing about sacred buildings, vestments, external ordinances, as the

means of grace. order of ideas. on such matters as, being reconciled with your brother before you draw near to worship,1 or, to use His own contrast with the elaborate prescriptions of earthly religions, on judgment and the love of God.2 His favourite quotation from the Scriptures is not some description of the worship in the Tabernacle or the Temple, but a word from the prophets to the effect that what God wants from men is not sacrifices but Mercy.

All these things belong to another With Him the whole stress is laid

Mercy! Think of that beautiful word. How merciless Churches and dogmas are! Yet how can we catch the spirit of His teaching while we think that our sacrifices, our Churches, our dogmas, are more important than mercy? He flamed into wrath against those who fasted and made long prayers, and wore religious vestments, and yet overlooked judgment and the love of God.2 How scathing He was to those who kept the Sabbath, or made gifts to the church, and advanced these religious deeds as a plea for neglecting some service of love and pity to man!

Second. But if the first broad feature of His Law is antagonism to a lifeless ritual, the second is His rejection of Casuistry in moral conduct. With clear insight, and a convincing simplicity, which in any one else we should call genius, He penetrates the thousand and one precepts of the Scribes, and comes to the root of all right conduct. In one thought of inexhaustible import He supersedes, not 2 Luke xi. 42.

1 Matt. v 24.

only the Judaism which was before Him, but all the complicated and confusing systems of Jesuits and Canonists, that have come after him. Musty volumes and illegible parchments shrivel up in the flame of His zeal. He brings us to the one perennial source of religion and goodness in the twofold precept: thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength. And, thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.1

All the breaches of the moral law, murder, adultery, divorce, swearing, retaliation, and indeed all human actions, are referred to this one principle. You will not escape here on quibbles and legal technicalities. There are no formularies which human chicanery may twist or evade. Everything is tried at once by the essential test of Love, love to God, love to man. This goes to the foundation of the matter. Here everything is at once proved, good or bad, of what sort it is. Whatever comes from a fervent love to God, and men, is good, though it may blundering, and ineffectual. apparent worth, working out in ing the applause of men, are yet bad if they do not proceed from this twofold love. Not only hate, but egotism, is ruinous to religion, and from God's standpoint, to morality.

an equal love to seem misguided, All the deeds of useful results, gain

When all is thus simplified we may yet have questions to put. For example, Who is my neighbour? His answer is, Every one whom you can help

1 Mark xii. 30, 31.