fruit in words blessing the cursers, and in deeds of goodness, and, highest of all, in prayers for those whose hate is bitterest, being founded on religion, and who are carrying it into action in persecution.  We cannot hate a man if we pray for him; we cannot pray for him if we hate him.  Our weakness often feels it so hard not to hate our enemies, that our only way to get strength to keep this highest, hardest commandment is to begin by trying to pray for the foe, and then we gradually feel the infernal fires dying down in our temper, and come to be able to meet his evil with good, and his curses with blessings.  It is a difficult lesson that Jesus sets us.  It is a blessed possibility that Jesus opens for us, that our kindly emotions towards men need not be at the mercy of theirs to us.  It is a fair ideal that He paints, which, if Christians deliberately and continuously took it for their aim to realise, would revolutionise society, and make the fellowship of man with man a continual joy.  Think of what any community, great or small, would be, if enmity were met by love only and always.  Its fire would die for want of fuel.  If the hater found no answering hate increasing his hate, he would often come to answer love with love.  There is an old legend spread through many lands, which tells how a princess who had been changed by enchantment into a loathly serpent, was set free by being thrice kissed by a knight, who thereby won a fair bride with whom he lived in love and joy.  The only way to change the serpent of hate into the fair form of a friend is to kiss it out of its enchantment.

No doubt, partial anticipations of this precept may be found, buried under much ethical rubbish, elsewhere than in the Sermon on the Mount, and more plainly in Old Testament teaching, and in Rabbinical sayings; but Christ’s ‘originality’ as a moral teacher lies not so much in the absolute novelty of His commandments, as in the perspective in which He sets them, and in the motives on which He bases them, and most of all in His being more than a teacher, namely, the Giver of power to fulfil what He enjoins.  Christian ethics not merely recognises the duty of love to men, but sets it as the foundation of all other duties.  It is root and trunk, all others are but the branches into which it ramifies.  Christian ethics not merely recognises the duty, but takes a man by the hand, leads him up to his Father God, and says:  There, that is your pattern, and a child who loves his Father will try to copy his ways and be made like Him by his love.  So Morality passes into Religion, and through the transition receives power beyond its own.  The perfection of worship is imitation, and when men ‘call Him Father’ whom they adore, imitation becomes the natural action of a child who loves.