the very ideal of human conduct, and, if they have ventured to criticise at all, their criticism has only been that the precepts are too good to be obeyed, and contemplate an ideal that is unreachable in human society.  Be that as it may, there stands the fact that this Man, in this Sermon on the Mount, which so many people say has no doctrinal teaching in it, assumes an attitude which nothing can warrant and nothing explain except the full-toned belief that in Him we have God manifest in the flesh.

But what I desire to point to now is the significance of this demand that He makes, that we shall take His sayings as the foundation of our lives.  The metaphor is a very plain one, by which the principles that underlie or dominate and mould our conduct are regarded as the foundation upon which we build the structure of our lives.  But the Sermon on the Mount is not all of these ‘sayings of Mine.’  It is fashionable in certain quarters to-day to isolate these precepts, and to regard them as being the part of Christian Revelation by which men who set little store by theological subtleties, and reject the mysteries of the Incarnation and the Atonement, may still abide.  But I would have you notice that it is absurd to isolate this Sermon on the Mount, or to deal with it as if it were the very centre of the Christian Revelation.  It is nothing of the sort.  Beautiful as it is, wonderful as it is as a high ideal of human conduct, it is a law still, though it is a perfect law; and it has all the impotences and all the deficiencies that attach to a law, if you take it and rend it out of its place, and insist upon dealing with it as if it stood alone.  There is not a word in it that tells you how to keep its precepts.  There is no power in it, or raying from it, to make a man obey any one of its commandments.  It comes radiant and beautiful, but imperative, and just because no man keeps it to the full, its very beauty becomes menacing, and it stands there over against us, showing us what we ought to be, and, by consequence, what we are not.  And is that all that Jesus Christ came into the world to do?  God forbid!  If He had only spoken this Sermon on the Mount—­which some of you take for the Alpha and the Omega of Christianity as far as you are concerned—­He would not have been different in essence from other teachers,—­though high above them in degree,—­who speak to us of the shining heights of duty that we are to scale, but leave us grovelling in the mire.

The Sermon on the Mount, with its stringent requirements, absolutely demands to be completed by other thoughts and other ‘sayings of Mine.’  And so I remind you, not only that there are other ‘sayings of Mine’ to be kept than it, but also that there is no keeping of it without keeping other sayings first.  For the highest of Christ’s commandments is ‘Believe also in Me,’ and you have to take Him as your Redeemer and Saviour from death before you will ever thoroughly accept Him as your