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 the Christian system that condemns man to everlasting destruction, but throws away the very and the only part of it that takes off the burden and the curse.

It is not, then, a correct idea of Christ that we have, when we look upon Him as unmixed complacency and unbalanced compassion.  In all aspects, He was a complex personage.  He was God, and He was man.  As God, He could pronounce a blessing; and He could pronounce a curse, as none but God can, or dare.  As man, He was perfect; and into His perfection of feeling and of character there entered those elements that fill a good being with peace, and an evil one with woe.  The Son of God exhibits goodness and severity mingled and blended in perfect and majestic harmony; and that man lacks sympathy with Jesus Christ who cannot, while feeling the purest and most unselfish indignation towards the sinner’s sin, at the same time give up his own individual life, if need be, for the sinner’s soul.  The two feelings are not only compatible in the same person, but necessarily belong to a perfect being.  Our Lord breathed out a prayer for His murderers so fervent, and so full of pathos, that it will continue to soften and melt the flinty human heart, to the end of time; and He also poured out a denunciation of woes upon the Pharisees (Matt, xxiii.), every syllable of which is dense enough with the wrath of God, to sink the deserving objects of it “plumb down, ten thousand fathoms deep, to bottomless perdition in adamantine chains and penal fire.”  The utterances, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do:  Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers! how can ye escape the damnation of hell?” both fell from the same pure and gracious lips.

It is not surprising, therefore, that our Lord often appeals to the principle of fear.  He makes use of it in all its various forms,—­from that servile terror which is produced by the truth when the soul is just waked up from its drowze in sin, to that filial fear which Solomon affirms to be the beginning of wisdom.