But there is another word which Micah but dimly caught uttered amidst the thunders of Sinai, and which you and I have heard far more clearly.  The Prophet read off rightly God’s requirements, but he had not anything to say about God’s gifts.  So his word is a half-truth, and the more clearly it is seen, and the more earnestly a man tries to live up to the standard of the requirements laid down here, the more will he feel that there is something else needed, and the more will he see that the great central peculiarity and glory of Christianity is not that it reiterates or alters God’s requirements, but that it brings into view God’s gifts.  ‘To do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God,’ is possible only through repentance towards God, and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.  And if you suppose that these words of my text disclose the whole truth about God’s relation to men, and men’s to God, you have failed to apprehend the flaming centre of the Light that shines from heaven.

I. So, then, the first thing that I wish to suggest is God’s requirements.

Now, I do not need to say more than just a word or two about the summing-up in my text of the plain, elementary duties of morality and religion.  It covers substantially the same ground, in a condensed form, as does the Decalogue, only that Moses began with the deepest thing and worked outwards, as it were; laying the foundation in a true relation to God, which is the most important, and from which will follow the true relation to men.  Micah begins at the other end, and starting with the lesser, the more external, the purely human, works his way inwards to that which is the centre and the source of all.

‘To do justly,’ that is elementary morality in two words.  Whatever a man has a right to claim from you, give him; that is the sum of duty.  And yet not altogether so, for we all know the difference between a righteous man and a good man, and how, if there is only rigidly righteous action, there is something wanting to the very righteousness of the action and to the completeness of the character.  ‘To do’ is not enough; we must get to the heart, and so ‘love mercy.’  Justice is not all.  If each man gets his deserts, as Shakespeare says, ’who of us shall scape whipping?’ There must be the mercy as well as the justice.  In a very deep sense no man renders to his fellows all that his fellows have a right to expect of him, who does not render to them mercy.  And so in a very deep sense, mercy is part of justice, and you have not given any poor creature all that that poor creature has a right to look for from you, unless you have given him all the gracious and gentle charities of heart and hand.  Justice and mercy do, in the deepest view, run into one.

Then Micah goes deeper.  ‘And to walk humbly with thy God.’  Some people would say that this summary of the divine requirements is defective, because there is nothing in it about a man’s duty to himself, which is as much a duty as his duty to his fellows, or his duty to God.  But there is a good deal of my duty to myself crowded into that one word, ‘humbly.’  For I suppose we might almost say that the basis of all our obligations to our own selves lies in this, that we shall take the right view—­that is, the lowly view—­of ourselves.  But I pass that.