The New Dispensation is sometimes set in opposition to the Old, and Christ is represented as teaching a less rigid morality than that of Moses and the prophets.  But the mildness of Christ is not seen, certainly, in the ethical and preceptive part of His religion.  The Sermon on the Mount is a more searching code of morals than the ten commandments.  It cuts into human depravity with a more keen and terrible edge, than does the law proclaimed amidst thunderings and lightnings.  Let us see if it does not.  The Mosaic statute simply says to man:  “Thou shalt not kill.”  But the re-enactment of this statute, by incarnate Deity, is accompanied with an explanation and an emphasis that precludes all misapprehension and narrow construction of the original law, and renders it a two-edged sword that pierces to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit.  When the Hebrew legislator says to me:  “Thou shalt not kill,” it is possible for me, with my propensity to look upon the outward appearance, and to regard the external act alone, to deem myself innocent if I have never actually murdered a fellow-being.  But when the Lord of glory tells me that “whosoever is angry with his brother” is in danger of the judgment, my mouth is stopped, and it is impossible for me to cherish a conviction of personal innocency, in respect to the sixth commandment.  And the same is true of the seventh 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