and through the clear air of the bright spring day spake, what has ever since been known as the 'Sermon on the Mount,' from the place where He sat, or as that 'in the plain' (St. Luke vi. 17), from the place where He had first met the multitude, and which so many must have continued to occupy while He taught.
The first and most obvious, perhaps, also, most superficial thought, is that which brings this teaching of Christ into comparison, we shall not say with that of His contemporaries, since scarcely any who lived in the time of Jesus said aught that can be compared with it, but with the best of the wisdom and piety of the Jewish sages, as preserved in Rabbinic writings. Its essential difference, or rather contrariety, in spirit and substance, not only when viewed as a whole, but in almost each of its individual parts, will be briefly shown in the sequel. For the present we only express this as deepest conviction, that it were difficult to say which brings greater astonishment (though of opposite kind): a first reading of the 'Sermon on the Mount,' or that of any section of the Talmud. The general reader is here at a double disadvantage. From his upbringing in an atmosphere which Christ's Words have filled with heaven's music, he knows not, and cannot know, the nameless feeling which steals over a receptive soul when, in the silence of our moral wilderness, those voices first break on the ear, that had never before been wakened to them. How they hold the soul entranced, calling up echoes of inmost yet unrealised aspiration, itself the outcome of the God-born and God-tending within us, and which renders us capable of new birth into the Kingdom; call up, also, visions and longings of that world of heavenly song, so far away and yet so near us; and fill the soul with subduedness, expectancy, and ecstasy! So the travel-stained wanderer flings him down on the nearest height, to feast his eyes with the first sight of home in the still valley beneath; so the far-of exile sees in his dreams visions of his child-life, all transfigured; so the weary prodigal leans his head in silent musing of mingled longing and rest on a mother's knee. So, and much more; for, it is the Voice of God Which speaks to us in the cool of the evening, amidst the trees of the lost Garden; to us who, in very shame and sorrow, hide, and yet even so hear, not words of judgment but of mercy, not concerning an irrevocable, and impossible past, but concerning a real and to us possible future, which is that past, only better, nearer, dearer, for, that it is not the human which has now to rise to the Divine, but the Divine which has come down to the human.
Or else, turn from this to a first reading of the wisdom of the Jewish Fathers in their Talmud. It little matters, what part be chosen for the purpose. Here, also, the reader is at disadvantage, since his instructors present to him too frequently broken sentences, extracts torn from their connection, words often mistranslated as regards their real meaning, or misapplied as regards their bearing and spirit; at best, only isolated sentences. Take these in their connection and real meaning, and what a terrible awakening! Who, that has read half-a-dozen pages successively of any part of the Talmud, can feel otherwise than by turns shocked, pained, amused, or astounded? There is here wit and logic, quickness and readiness, earnestness and zeal, but by the side of it terrible profanity, uncleanness, superstition and folly. Taken as a whole, it is not only utterly unspiritual, but anti-spiritual. Not that the Talmud is worse than might be expected of such writings
in such times and circumstances, perhaps in many respects much better, always bearing in mind the particular standpoint of narrow nationalism, without which Talmudism itself could not have existed, and which therefore is not an accretion, but an essential part of it. But, taken not in abrupt sentences and quotations, but as a whole, it is so utterly and immeasurably unlike the New Testament, that it is not easy to determine which, as the case may be, is greater, the ignorance or the presumption of those who put them side by side. Even where spiritual life pulsates, it seems propelled through valves that are diseased, and to send the life-blood gurgling back upon the heart, or along ossified arteries that quiver not with life at its touch. And to the reader of such disjointed Rabbinic quotations there is this further source of misunderstanding, that the form and sound of words is so often the same as that of the sayings of Jesus, however different their spirit. For, necessarily, the wine, be it new or old, made in Judaea, comes to us in Palistinian vessels. The new teaching, to be historically true, must have employed the old forms and spoken the old language. But the ideas underlying terms equally employed by Jesus and the teachers of Israel are, in everything that concerns the relation of souls to God, so absolutely different as not to bear comparison. Whence otherwise the enmity and opposition to Jesus from the first, and not only after His Divine claim had been pronounced? These two, starting from principles alien and hostile, follow opposite directions, and lead to other goals. He who has thirsted and quenched his thirst at the living fount of Christ's Teaching, can never again stoop to seek drink at the broken cisterns of Rabbinism.
We take here our standpoint on St. Matthew's account of the 'Sermon on the Mount,' to which we can scarcely doubt that by St. Luke [a St. Luke vi.] is parallel. Not that it is easy, or perhaps even possibleto determine, whether all that is now grouped in the 'Sermon on the Mount' was really spoken by Jesus on this one occasion. From the plan and structure of St. Matthew's Gospel, the presumption seems rather to the contrary. For, isolated parts of it are introduced by St. Luke in other connections, yet quite fitly. [1 The reader will find these parallelisms in Dean Plumptre's Notes on St. Matthew v. 1 (in Bishop Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers, vol. i. of the N.T. p. 20).] On the other hand, even in accordance with the traditional characterisation of St. Matthew's narrative, we expect in it the fullest account of our Lord's Discourses, [1 Comp. Euseb. H. Eccl. iii. 39.] while we also notice that His Galilean Ministry forms the main subject of the First Gospel. [2 Thus St. Matthew passes over those earlier events in the Gospel-history of which Judaea was the scene, and even over the visits of Jesus to Jerusalem previous to the last Passover, while he devotes not less than fourteen chapters and a half to the half-year's activity in Galilee. If St. John's is the Judaean, St. Matthew's is the Galilean Gospel.] And there is one characteristic of the 'Sermon on the Mount' which, indeed, throws light on the plan of St. Matthew's work in its apparent chronological inversion of events, such as in its placing the 'Sermon on the Mount' before the calling of the Apostles. We will not designate the 'Sermon on the Mount' as the promulgation of the New Law, since that would be a far too narrow, if not erroneous, view of it. But it certainly seems to correspond to the Divine Revelation in the 'Ten Words' from Mount Sinai. Accordingly, it seems appropriate that the Genesis-part of St. Matthew's Gospel should be immediately followed by the Exodus-part, in which the new Revelation is placed in the forefront, to the seeming breach of historical order, leaving it afterwards to be followed by an appropriate grouping of miracles and events, which we know to have really preceded the 'Sermon on the Mount.'
Very many-sided is that 'Sermon on the Mount,' so that different writers, each viewing it from his standpoint, have differently sketched its general outline, and yet carried to our minds the feeling that thus far they had correctly understood it. We also might attempt humble contribution towards the same end. Viewing it in the light of the time, we might mark in it alike advancement on the Old Testament (or rather, unfolding of its inmost, yet hidden meaning), and contrast to contemporary Jewish teaching. And here we would regard it as presenting the full delineation of the ideal man of God, of prayer, and of righteousness, in short, of the inward and outward manifestation of discipleship. Or else, keeping before us the different standpoint of His hearers, we might in this 'Sermon' follow up this contrast to its underlying ideas as regards: First, the right relationship between man and God, or true righteousness, what inward graces characterise and what prospects attach to it, in opposition to Jewish views of merit and of reward. Secondly, we would mark the same contrast as regards sin (hamartology), temptation, &c. Thirdly, we would note it, as regards salvation (soteriology); and, lastly, as regards what may be termed moral theology: personal feelings, married and other relations, discipleship, and the like. And in this great contrast two points would prominently stand out: New Testament humility, as opposed to Jewish (the latter being really pride, as only the consciousness of failure, or rather, of inadequate perfectness, while New Testament humility is really despair of self); and again, Jewish as opposed to New Testament perfectness (the former being an attempt by means external or internal to strive up to God: the latter a new life, springing from God, and in God). Or, lastly, we might view it as upward teaching in regard to God: the King; inward teaching in regard to man: the subjects of the King; and outward teaching in regard to the Church and the world: the boundaries of the Kingdom.
This brings us to what alone we can here attempt: a general outline of the 'Sermon on the Mount.' Its great subject is neither righteousness, nor yet the New Law (if such designation be proper in regard to what in no real sense is a Law), but that which was innermost and uppermost in the Mind of Christ, the Kingdom of God. Notably, the Sermon on the Mount contains not any detailed or systematic doctrinal, [1 On this point there seems to me some confusion of language on the part of controversialists. Those who maintain that the Sermon on the Mount contains no doctrinal elements at all must mean systematic teaching, what are commonly called dogmas, since, besides St. Matt. vii. 22, 23, as Professor Wace has so well urged, love to God and to our neighbour mark both the starting-point and the final outcome of all theology.] nor any ritual teaching, nor yet does itprescribe the form of any outward observances. This marks, at least negatively, a difference in principle from all other teaching. Christ came to found a Kingdom, not a School; to institute a fellowship, not to propound a system. To the first disciples all doctrinal teaching sprang out of fellowship with Him. They saw Him, and therefore believed; they believed, and
