128 Is the Sermon on the Mount a dead letter?

form and its force to the sincere Christian life. That life is a loyal homage of the intellect, of the heart, and of the will, to a Divine King, with Whom will, heart, and intellect are in close and constant communion, and from Whom there flows forth, through the Spirit and the Sacraments, that supply of light, of love, and of resolve, which enriches and ennobles the Christian soul. My brethren, I am not theorizing or describing any merely ideal state of things; I am but putting into words the inner experience of every true Christian among you; I am but exhibiting a set of spiritual circumstances which, as a matter of course, every true Christian endeavours to realize and make his own, and which, as a matter of fact, blessed be God! very many Christians do realize, to their present peace, and to their eternal welfare.

Certainly it is not uncommon in our day to be informed, that 'the Sermon on the Mount is a dead letter in Christendom.'

In consequence (so men speak) of the engrossing interest which Christians have wrongly attached to the discussion of dogmatic questions, that original draught of essential Christianity, the Sermon on the Mount, has been wellnigh altogether lost sight of. Perhaps you yourselves, my brethren, ere now have repeated some of the current commonplaces on this topic. But have you endeavoured to ascertain whether it is indeed as you say? You remark that you at least have not met with Christians who seemed to be making any sincere efforts to turn the Sermon on the Mount into practice. It may be so. But the question is, where have you looked for them? Do you expect to meet them rushing hurriedly along the great highways of life, with the keen, eager, self-asserting multitude? Do you expect, that with their eye upon the Beatitudes and upon the Cross, they will throng the roads which lead to worldly success, to earthly wealth, to temporal honour? Be assured that those who know where moral beauty, aye, the highest, is to be found, are not disappointed, even at this hour, in their search for it. Until you have looked more carefully, more anxiously than has probably been the case, for the triumphs of our Lord's work in Christian souls, you may do well to take upon trust the testimony of others. You may at least be sufficiently generous, aye, and sufficiently reasonable, to believe in the existence at this present time of the very highest types of Christian virtue. It is a simple matter of fact that in our day, multitudes of men and women do lead the life of the Beatitudes; they pray, they fast, they do alms to their Father Which seeth in secret. These are

Is the Sermon on the Mount a dead letter? 129

Christians who take no thought for the morrow. These are Christians whose righteousness does exceed that worldly and conventional standard of religion, which knows no law save the corrupt public opinion of the hour, and which inherits in every generation the essential spirit of the Scribes and Pharisees. These are Christians who shew forth the moral creativeness of Jesus Christ in their own deeds and words; they are living witnesses to His solitary and supreme power of changing the human heart. They were naturally proud; He has enabled them to be sincerely humble. They were, by the inherited taint of their nature, impure; He has in them shed honour upon the highest forms of chastity. They too were, as in his natural state man ever is, suspicious of and hostile to their fellow-men, unless connected with them by blood, or by country, or by interest. But Jesus Christ has taught them the tenderest and most practical forms of love for man viewed simply as man; He has inspired them with the only true, that is, the Christian, humanitarianism. Think not that the moral energy of the Christian life was confined to the Church of the first centuries. At this moment, there are millions of souls in the world, that are pure, humble, and loving. But for Jesus Christ our Lord, these millions would have been proud, sensual, selfish. At this very day, and even in atmospheres where the taint of scepticism dulls the brightness of Christian thought, and enfeebles the strength of Christian resolution, there are to be found men, whose intelligence gazes on Jesus with a faith so clear and strong, whose affection clings to Him with so trustful and so warm an embrace, whose resolution has been so disciplined and braced to serve Him by a persevering obedience, that, beyond a doubt, they would joyfully die for Him, if by shedding their blood they could better express their devotion to His Person, or lead others to know and to love Him more. Blessed be God, that portion of His one Fold in which He has placed us, the Church of England, has not lacked the lustre of such lives as these. Such assuredly was Ken; such was Bishop Wilson; such have been many whose names have never appeared in the page of history. Has not one indeed quite lately passed from among us, the boast and glory of this our University, great as a poet, greater still, it may be, as a scholar and a theologian, greatest of all as a Christian saint? Certainly to know him, even slightly, was inevitably to know that he led a life distinct from, and higher than, that of common men. To know him well, was to revere and to love in him the manifested beauty of his Lord's presence; it was to trace the

130

Social results of Christianity.

sensibly perpetuated power of the Life, of the Teaching, of the Cross of Jesus k.

4. On the other hand, look at certain palpable effects of our Lord's work which lie on the very face of human society. If society, apart from the Church, is more kindly and humane than in heathen times, this is due to the work of Christ on the hearts of men. The era of 'humanity' is the era of the Incarnation. The sense of human brotherhood, the acknowledgment of the sacredness of human rights, the recognition of that particular stock of rights which appertains to every human being, is a creation of Christian dogma. It has radiated from the heart of the Christian Church into the society of the outer world. Christianity is the power which first gradually softened slavery, and is now finally abolishing it. Christianity has proclaimed the dignity of poverty, and has insisted upon the claims of the poor, with a success proportioned to the sincerity which has welcomed her doctrines among the different peoples of Christendom. The hospital is an invention of Christian philanthropyl; the active charity of the Church of the fourth century forced into the Greek language a word for which Paganism had had no occasion. The degradation of woman in the Pagan world has been exchanged. for a position of special privilege and honour, accorded to her by the Christian nations. The sensualism which Pagans mistook for love has been placed under the ban of all true Christian feeling; and in Christendom, love is now the purest of moral impulses; it is the tenderest, the noblest, the most refined of the movements of the soul. The old, the universal, the natural feeling of bitter hostility between races, nations, and classes of men is denounced by Christianity. The spread of Christian truth inevitably breaks down the ferocities of national prejudice, and prepares the world for that cosmopolitanism which, we are told, is its most probable future. International law had no real existence until the nations, taught by Christ, had begun to feel the bond of brotherhood. International law is now each year becoming more and more powerful in regulating the affairs of the civilized world. And if we are sorrowfully reminded that the prophecy of a world-wide peace within the limits of Christ's kingdom has not yet been realized; if Christian lands, in our

k The author of the Christian Year had passed to his rest during the interval that elapsed between the delivery of the second and the third of these lectures, on March 30, 1866.

1 Hallam's Middle Ages, chap. ix. part i. vol. ii. p. 365.

Perpetuity of the Church.

131 day as before, are reddened by streams of Christian blood; yet the utter disdain of the plea of right, the high-handed and barbarous savagery, which marked the wars of heathendom, have given way to sentiments in which justice can at least obtain a hearing, and which compassion and generosity, drawing their inspirations from the Cross, have at times raised to the level of chivalry.

But neither would any improvements in man's social life, nor even the regenerate lives of individual Christians, of themselves, have realized our Lord's 'plan' in its completeness m. His design was to found a society or Church; individual sanctity and social amelioration are only effects radiating from the Church. The Church herself is the true proof of His success. After the lapse of eighteen centuries the kingdom of Christ is here, and it is still expanding. How fares it generally with a human undertaking when exposed to the action of a long period of time? The idea which was its very soul is thrown into the shade by some other idea; or it is warped, or distorted, or diverted from its true direction, or changed by some radical corruption. In the end it dies out from among the living thoughts of men, and takes its place in the tomb of so much forgotten speculation, on the shelves of a library. Within a short lifetime we may follow many a popular moral impulse from its cradle to its grave. From the era of its young enthusiasm, we mark its gradual entry upon the stage of fixed habit; from this again we pass to its day of lifeless formalism, and to the rapid progress of its decline. But the Society founded by Jesus Christ is here, still animated by its original idea, still carried forward by the moral impulse which sustained it in its infancy. If Christian doctrine

m A reviewer, who naturally must dissent from parts of the teaching of these lectures, but of whose generosity and fairness the lecturer is deeply sensible, reminds him that 'Our Lord came to carry out the counsel of the Eternal Father; and that counsel was, primarily, to establish, through His sacrificial death, an economy of mercy, under which justification and spiritual and eternal life should be realized by all who should penitently rely on Him.' St. John iii. 16, vi. 38-40. Undoubtedly. But this 'economy of mercy' included the establishment of a world-embracing church, within which it was to be dispensed. Col. i. 10-14. Our Lord founded His Church, not by way of achieving a vast social feat or victory, but with a view to the needs of the human soul, which He came from heaven to save. Nevertheless the Church is not related to our Lord's design as an 'inseparable accident.' It is that design itself, viewed on its historical and social side; it is the form which, so far as we know, His redemptive work necessarily took, and which He Himself founded as being the imperishable result of His Incarnation and Death. St. Matt. xvi. 18. Cf. Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine, Dec. 1867, p. 1086.

132 How to account for the success of Christ's' plan?

has, in particular branches of the Church, been overlaid by an encrustation of foreign and earthly elements, its body and substance is untouched in each great division of the Catholic Society; and much of it, we rejoice to know, is retained by communities external to the Holy Fold. If intimate union with the worldly power of the State (as especially in England during the last century) has sometimes seemed to chill the warmth of Christian love, and to substitute a heartless externalism for the spiritual life of a Christian brotherhood; yet again and again the flame of that Spirit Whom the Son of Man sent to 'glorify' Himself, has burst up from the depths of the living heart of the Church, and has kindled among a generation of sceptics or sensualists a pure and keen enthusiasm which confessors and martyrs might have recognised as their own. The Church of Christ in sooth carries within herself the secret forces which renew her moral vigour, and which will, in God's good time, visibly reassert her essential unity. Her perpetuated existence among ourselves at this hour bears a witness to the superhuman powers of her Founder, not less significant than that afforded by the intensity of the individual Christian life, or by the territorial range of the Christian empire.

III. The work of Jesus Christ in the world is a patent fact, and it is still in full progress before our eyes. The question remains, How are we to account for its success?

1. If this question is asked with respect to the ascendancy of such a national religion as the popular Paganism of Greece, it is obvious to refer to the doctrine of the prehistoric mythus. The Greek religious creed was, at least in the main, a creation of the national imagination at a period when reflection and experience could scarcely have existed. It was recommended to subsequent generations, not merely by the indefinable charm of poetry which was thrown around it, not merely by the antiquity which shrouded its actual origin, but by its accurate sympathy with the genius as with the degradations of the gifted race which had produced it. But of late years we have heard less of the attempt to apply the doctrine of the mythus to a series of wellascertained historical events, occurring in the mid-day light of history, and open to the hostile criticism of an entire people. The historical imagination, steadily applied to the problem, refuses to picture the unimaginable process by which such stupendous 'myths' as those of the Gospel could have been festooned around the simple history of a humble preacher of righteousness".

n Luthardt, Grundwahrheiten des Christenthums, p. 234.