posed blameless state, and Essenes were withdrawing from human life more and more, and various religionists were playing hermit, shunning a world which they could not resist or overcome, the disciples of the new kingdom of the spirit, inspired by a Divine influence, and living in an atmosphere uncontaminated by the lower passions, were to go boldly forth into life, taking hold of human affairs, seeking to purify the household, to reclaim the selfishness and the sordidness of material life, to infuse a spirit of justice and of goodness into laws and magistrates, and to make the power of their new life felt in every fibre of human society. "Ye are the salt of the earth!" "Ye are the light of the world!"

The opening portion of the Sermon on the Mount must not have the canons of modern philosophy applied to it. Its organic relations with the rest of the discourse must not be pressed too far. It depicts the moral qualities which are to give character to the new life, but does not include all the elements of it, nor even the most important ones. Hope, faith, and love are not mentioned. It is plain, therefore, that the principle of selection was largely an external one. Jesus was about to criticise the national religion. He fixed his eye upon the living officers and exemplars of that religion, and emphasized with his benediction those qualities which most needed to be made prominent, and which were signally lacking in the spirit of the Pharisee.

Just as little should we attempt to exhibit in the Beatitudes a natural progression, or philosophic order of qualities. There is no reason why the second Beatitude should not stand first, nor why the fifth, sixth, and seventh might not be interchanged. The fourth might without impropriety have begun the series. The order in which they stand does not represent the order of the actual evolution of moral qualities. On the contrary, we perceive that the spirit of God develops the new life in the human soul in no fixed order. Men who have gone far in overt wickedness may find their first moral impulse to spring from a condemning conscience; but others are more affected by the sweetness and beauty of moral qualities as seen in some goodly life. Sometimes hope, sometimes sym

pathy, sometimes fear, and sometimes even the imitativeness that becomes contagious in social life, is the initiatory motive. For the human soul is like a city of many gates; and a conqueror does not always enter by the same gate, but by that one which chances to lie open. It is true that a general sense of sinfulness precedes all effort after a higher life. But a clear discrimination of evil, and an exquisite sensibility to it, such as are implied in the first two Beatitudes, do not belong to an untrained conscience first aroused to duty, but are the fruits of later stages of Christian experience.

The Beatitudes constitute a beautiful sketch of the ideal state, when the glowing passions, which in the day of Christ controlled even the religious leaders, and still so largely rule the world, shall be supplanted by the highest moral sentiments. The ostentatious wealth and arrogant pride of this sensuous life shall be replaced in the new life by a profound humility. The conceit and base content of a sordid prosperity shall give way to ingenuous spiritual aspiration. Men shall long for goodness more than the hungry do for food. They shall no longer live by the force of their animal life, but by the serene sweetness of the moral sentiments. Meekness shall be stronger than force. The spirit of peacemaking shall take the place of irritation and quarrelsomeness. But as we can come to the mildness and serenity of spring only through the blustering winds and boisterous days of March, so this new kingdom must enter through a period of resistance and of persecution; and all who, taking part in its early establishment, have to accept persecution, must learn to find joy in it as the witness that they are exalted to a superior realm of experience, to the companionship of the noblest heroes of the prophetic age, and to fellowship with God.

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FTER pronouncing the Beatitudes, and before entering upon his criticism of the current religious ideas, Jesus put his disciples on their guard lest they should suppose that he meant to overturn the religion of their fathers. Think not that I am come to destroy the Law or the Prophets. If men's moral beliefs were the result of a purely logical process, their religious faith might be changed upon mere argument, and with as little detriment to their moral constitution as an astronomer experiences when, upon the recalculation of a problem, he corrects an error. But men's moral convictions spring largely from their feelings. The intellect but gives expression to the heart. The creed and worship, however they may begin in philosophy, are soon covered all over with the associations of the household; they are perfumed with domestic love; they convey with them the hopes and the fears of life, the childhood fancies, and the imaginations of manhood. To change a man's religious system is to reconstruct the whole man himself. Such change is full of peril. Only the strongest moral natures can survive the shock of doubt which dispossesses them of all that they have trusted from childhood. There are few strong moral natures. The mass of men are creatures of dependent habits and of unreasoning faith. Once cut loose from what they have always deemed sacred, they find it impossible to renew their reverence for

new things, and sink either into moral indifference or into careless scepticism. Men must, if possible, see in the new a preservation of all that was valuable in the old, made still more fruitful and beautiful. It is the old in the new that preserves it from doing harm to untaught natures.

The recognition of this truth is nowhere more remarkable than in the progress of Christianity under the ministration of Jesus and of his Apostles. Although surrounded by a people whose hatred of foreign religions was inordinate and fanatical, the Jews did not hear from the lips of Jesus even an allusion to heathenism. If the narratives of the Gospel are fair specimens of his manner, there was not a word that fell from him which could have wounded an honest heathen; and, afterwards, his Apostles sought to find some ground of common moral consciousness from which to reason with the idolatrous people among whom they came. We are not to suppose that Jesus made an abrupt transition from the religious institutions of Moses to his own spiritual system. He said no word to unsettle the minds of his countrymen in the faith of their fathers. He was careful of the religious prejudices of his times. The very blows directed against the glosses and perversions of the Pharisees derived their force from the love which Jesus showed for the Law and the Prophets. He pierced through the outward forms to the central principle of Mosaism, and made his new dispensation to be an evolution of the old.

Think not that I am come to destroy the Law or the Prophets : I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.

Here is the law of development announced by an inspired Hebrew to a peasant and mechanic crowd in obscure Galilee, ages before the philosophy of evolution was suspected or the laws of progress were found out. Jesus did not come to destroy old faiths, but to carry them forward by growth to the higher forms and the better fruit that were contained within them.

This tenderness for all the good that there was in the past of the Jewish nation is in striking contrast with the bitter spirit of hatred against the Jews which afterwards grew up in the Christian Church. No man can be in sympathy with Jesus

1 The word "heathen," Matt. vi. 7, and xviii. 17, is used rather as a designation than as a criticism.

who has no affection for the Jew and no reverence for the oracles of the old Hebrew dispensation.

It was peculiarly appropriate, at the beginning of a discourse designed to search the received interpretations of the Law with the most severe criticism, that Jesus should caution his disciples against a tendency, often developed in times of transition, to give up and abandon all the convictions and traditions of the past. Jesus therefore amplified the thought. The central truths of Hebraism were fundamental and organic. The ceremonies and institutions which surrounded them might change, but the enshrined principles were permanent. Heaven and earth should pass away before one jot or tittle of them should perish. No man must seek notoriety by a crusade against his father's religion. He who should break one of the least commandments, or should inspire others to do so, should be least in the kingdom of heaven. The temper of the new life was not to be destructive, but constructive. Even that part of the old religion which was to pass away must not be destroyed by attack, but be left to dry up and fall by the natural development of the higher elements of spiritual life contained within it. And that should not be till the old was "fulfilled" in the new the blossom should be displaced only by the fruit.

Jesus was now prepared to pass under review the ethical mistakes which his countrymen had made in interpreting the Law of Moses. He began by declaring that the reigning religious spirit was totally insufficient. No one under its inspiration could rise into that higher life which was opening upon the

world.

Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.

This may be called the theme of the whole sermon following. From this text Jesus now developed his view of the ethics of the new life. He furnished the ideals towards which men must strive, setting forth the morality of the teleologic state of mankind. For this purpose he selected a series of cases in which the great laws of purity and of love were the most violated in the practical life of his times, and applied to them the ethics of the final and perfect state of manhood. This he did, not as a legislator, nor as a priest. He was not attempt