shed the work which Thou gavest Me to do.'

Still further, here our Lord claims specifically and expressly to fulfil
not only law but prophets. That is to say, He sets Himself forth as the
Reality which had filled the imaginations and the hearts of a whole
nation for centuries; as the living Reality which had been meant by all
those lofty words of seers and prophets in the past. He declares that
all those rapturous forecastings, all those dim anticipations, all those
triumphant promises, were not left to swing _in vacuo_, or to float
about unfulfilled, but that He stood there, the actual Realisation of
them all; and in Him, wrapped up as in a seed, the Kingdom of Heaven was
among men.

And still further, He claims not only personal purity and completeness,
and the fulfilment of all prior and prophetic anticipation, but also He
claims to have, and He exercises, the power of moulding, expanding,
interpreting, and in some cases brushing aside, laws which He and they
alike knew to be the laws of God. I do not need to specify in detail the
instances which are contained in this Sermon on the Mount. But I simply
ask you to consider the formula with which our Lord introduces each of
His references to that subject. 'Ye have heard that it hath been said to
them of old time' so-and-so,--and then follows a command of the Mosaic
law; but '_I_ say unto you' so-and-so,--and then follows a deepening or
a modification or a repeal, of statutes acknowledged by Him and His
hearers to be divine. He certainly claims to speak with the same right
and authority as the old Law did. He as certainly claims to speak with
incomparably higher authority than Moses did, for the latter never
professed to give precepts of his own. He was not the Lawgiver, as he is
often called, but only the messenger of the Lawgiver. But Christ is
Himself the fountain of the laws of His Kingdom. Nor only so, but He
puts Himself without apology or explanation in front of Moses and
asserts power to modify, to set aside, or to re-enact with new
stringency, the precepts of the divine law.

One supposition alone accounts for Christ's attitude to law and prophets
in this Sermon, and that is that the Eternal Wisdom and Personal Word of
God, which at sundry times and in 'divers manners' spake to the old
world by Moses, itself at last, in human form and personal guise, came
here on earth and spake to us men. It is the same Voice that breathed
through the prophets of old, and th