nth commandment, and the
eighth commandment, and of all the statutes in the decalogue. He who
reads, and ponders, the whole Sermon on the Mount, is painfully conscious
that Christ has put a meaning into the Mosaic law that renders it a far
more effective instrument of mental torture, for the guilty, than it is
as it stands in the Old Testament. The lightnings are concentrated. The
bolts are hurled with a yet more sure and deadly aim. The new meaning is
a perfectly legitimate and logical deduction, and in this sense there is
no difference between the Decalogue and the Sermon,--between the ethics
of the Old and the ethics of the New Testament. But, so much more
spiritual is the application, and so much more searching is the reach of
the statute, in the last of the two forms of its statement, that it looks
almost like a new proclamation of law.

Our Lord did not intend, or pretend, to teach a milder ethics, or an
easier virtue, on the Mount of Beatitudes, than that which He had taught
fifteen centuries before on Mt. Sinai. He indeed pronounces a blessing;
and so did Moses, His servant, before Him. But in each instance, it is a
blessing upon condition of obedience; which, in both instances, involves
a curse upon disobedience. He who is meek shall be blest; but he who is
not shall be condemned. He who is pure in heart, he who is poor in
spirit, he who mourns over personal unworthiness, he who hungers and
thirsts after a righteousness of which he is destitute, he who is
merciful, he who is the peace-maker, he who endures persecution
patiently, and he who loves his enemies,--he who is and does all this in
a perfect manner, without a single slip or failure, is indeed blessed
with the beatitude of God. But where is the man? What single individual
in all the ages, and in all the generations since Adam, is entitled to
the great blessing of these beatitudes, and not deserving of the dreadful
curse which they involve? In applying such a high, ethereal test to human
character, the Founder of Christianity is the severest and sternest
preacher of law that has ever trod upon the planet. And he who stops with
the merely ethical and preceptive part of Christianity, and rejects its
forgiveness through atoning blood, and its regeneration by an indwelling
Spirit,--he who does not unite the fifth chapter of Matthew, with the
fifth chapter of Romans,--converts the Lamb of God into the Lion of the
tribe of Judah. He makes use of everything in th