is your neighbour, stranger and Samaritan no less than friend and Jew. Or we may ask, What form must my love to my neighbour take? His answer is, All things whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, even so do ye also unto them.1 But what particularly shall we do to them? For a brief answer this: Give and forgive. The world says, Get. The Master says, Give. When thou makest a feast, bid the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind; and thou shalt be blessed, because they have not wherewith to recompense thee.2 If you have money, employ it to make friends who will be able to receive you in the heavenly mansions.3 Again, the world says, Stand on your rights, retaliate an injury. The Master says, Resist not evil. Forgive the brother that has sinned against you, not seven times only, but as often as he sins.4 And never judge men. Be faithful in rebuke, but never cease to love. Be careful too not to throw obstacles in your brother's way.

In a word, love to our neighbour is a humble, unselfish, tender, untiring beneficence to every one that comes within our reach.

Or we may ask, What does He understand by love to the Father, the strenuous and complete love which His words describe? The answer is given in the prayer which the children of God are to address to their Father. It is the humble and reverent devotion which places the hallow

1 Matt. vii. 12.

2 Luke xiv. 14.

3 Luke xvi. 9.

4 Matt. xviii. 22. The seventy times seven is evidently an indefinite number.

ing of the Father's name and the coming of His kingdom before all personal desires. It is the trustful confidence in His perfect goodness, His love which anticipates and supplies all our needs. It is the sincere and heartfelt subjection of other interests to His. His great foe, Mammon, is dethroned. Goods, friends, relatives, are all subordinated to the Father's will. It is God first, and the rest by comparison nowhere.

And yet this exclusiveness of love to God is not, in the thought of Jesus, exclusive at all. God includes all. In this absorbing devotion to God, and in this alone, all objects of affection recover their worth-yes, even self, which otherwise would be lost, is restored.1 Like a water-plant which grows in the ooze of the river-bed but only flowers when it gets above the surface into the upper air, we are so made that until we get above ourselves, above our surroundings, and penetrate victoriously into the love of God, there is no blossom or flower, no right love for men, no wholesome occupation with the things of sense and time. Until we are employed in Him, we stand all the day idle.2

Thus the second commandment which is like unto it grows out of the first. Disappointment is in store for those who put the second before the first. A human heart is not large enough to love the neighbour until it has been expanded by the love of God. Love is a great achievement, which makes demands on heart and soul and mind and strength, that is, on 2 Matt. xx. 6.

1 Matt. xvi. 26.

everything which goes to make up a man. It is achieved only by an active exercise towards the source of love, God Himself. When the tendrils of this plant have all been wrapped about God, the plant acquires a miraculous expansiveness and can reach out to men on every side.

Love God, and you will love men, is the way in which Jesus understands the Old Law and frames the New. Know your love to God by the growth of your love to men, is His test and criterion of inward religion, nor does He obscurely intimate that until a soul is thus developed into its full power of selfless love, it is and must be a lost soul.

This then, in its startling directness and simplicity, was the New Law. It did not so much abrogate the Old Law as fulfil it. Yet the Old was bound to pass when the New was once understood. For here was the strong wine of the kingdom which could not be put into the old bottles. No ecclesiastical forms had, or have, been discovered which could contain or express this thrilling truth-for it is the truth which forms the nexus of the universe and binds all created things and all righteous wills about the throne of God. Here was the new Temple which could only rise when the external Temple of marble and gold had been razed in the dust. The Church has greatly diverged from the teaching of the Lord-but has she improved upon it? Bent on putting the new wine into old bottles she has lost both. Determined to rebuild the Temple and to magnify her gorgeous buildings and her ceremonials of outward show, she has only succeeded in produc

ing a petrified religion. Scandalised at the lowly mount on which the Sermon was delivered, she has crept back to Sinai, readopted the stone tables of the Law, the Tabernacle, the Altar and the Priest. And where is her Lord's idea of righteousness; what place does it hold in her practice, or even in her teaching? It is to her a heterodoxy-a counsel of perfection-a bundle of extravagant precepts, to be decently explained away.

But again we must repeat that His Law holds, His testimony cannot be antiquated: to the Law and to the Testimony; if they speak not according to this word surely there is no morning for them.

the

SALVATION

LUKE xix. 9.

Twould do little towards saving men.

O utter the Law of the kingdom, if that were all,

As that

Law is more inward and more exacting than the Law of Moses, it would of itself suggest only a more divine despair, a desire working like a passion, and a disappointment cruel as death. A high ideal does not necessarily carry with it an enabling power; and its presence, unless it is realised, must be a condemnation. Jesus Himself was often conscious of this, and said that it was better for those who had never heard, than for those who had heard and disobeyed.

The Kiung-Tsze, or Princely Scholar, of Confucius is a noble and attractive picture of what a Chinaman should be, but there does not seem to be in the life of Chinamen even a tendency to realise the ideal. And if there has been some effective striving of at least a few souls in Christendom to realise the Sermon on the Mount, it has been because Jesus had something else than a mere law of righteousness to declare.

So beautiful is that Law, so intrinsically attractive; and so perplexing is the comparative neglect