a claim to have voluntarily appeared among men, as well as to be the long-expected Messiah.  With absolute decisiveness He states the purpose of His coming.  He knows the meaning of His own work, which so few of us do, and it is safe to take His own account of what He intends, as it so seldom is.  His opening declaration is singularly composed of blended humility and majesty.  Its humility lies in His placing Himself, as it were, in line with previous messengers, and representing Himself as carrying on the sequence of divine revelation.  It would not have been humble for anybody but Him to say that, but it was so for Him.  Its majesty lies in His claim to ‘fulfil’ all former utterances from God.  His fulfilment of the law properly so called is twofold:  first, in His own proper person and life, He completes obedience to it, realises its ideal; second, in His exposition of it, both by lip and life, He deepens and intensifies its meaning, changing it from a letter which regulates the actions, to a spirit which moves the inward man.

So these first words point to the peculiarity of His coming as being His own act, and make two daring assertions, as to His character, which He claims to be sinless, and as to His teaching, which he claims to be an advance upon all the former divine revelation.  As to the former, He speaks here as He did to John, ’thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness.’  No trace of consciousness of sin or defect appears in any words or acts of His.  The calmest conviction that He was perfectly righteous is always manifest.  How comes it that we are not repelled by such a tone?  We do not usually admire self-complacent religious teachers.  Why has nobody ever given Christ the lie, or pointed to His unconsciousness of faults as itself the gravest fault?  Strange inaugural discourse for a humble sage and saint to assert his own immaculate perfection, stranger still that a listening world has said, ‘Amen!’ Note, too, the royal style here.  In this part of the ‘Sermon’ our Lord twice uses the phrase, ‘I say unto you,’ which He once introduces with His characteristic ‘verily.’  Once He employs it to give solemnity to the asseveration which stretches forward to the end of this solid-seeming world, and once He introduces by it the stringent demand for His followers’ loftier righteousness.  His unsupported word is given us as our surest light in the dark future, His bare command as the most imperative authority.  This style goes kingly; it calls for absolute credence and unhesitating submission.  When He speaks, even if we have nothing but His word, it is ours neither ‘to make reply’ nor ’to reason why,’ but simply to believe, and swiftly to do.  Rabbis might split hairs and quote other rabbis by the hour; philosophers may argue and base their teachings on elaborate demonstrations; moralists may seek to sway the conscience through reason; legislators to appeal to fear and hope.  He speaks, and it is done; He commands, and it stands fast.  There is nothing else in the world the least like the superb and mysterious authority with which He fronts the world, and, as Fountain of knowledge and Source of obligation, summons us all to submit and believe, by that ‘Verily, I say unto you.’