Still further, here our Lord claims specifically and expressly to fulfil not only law but prophets.  That is to say, He sets Himself forth as the Reality which had filled the imaginations and the hearts of a whole nation for centuries; as the living Reality which had been meant by all those lofty words of seers and prophets in the past.  He declares that all those rapturous forecastings, all those dim anticipations, all those triumphant promises, were not left to swing in vacuo, or to float about unfulfilled, but that He stood there, the actual Realisation of them all; and in Him, wrapped up as in a seed, the Kingdom of Heaven was among men.

And still further, He claims not only personal purity and completeness, and the fulfilment of all prior and prophetic anticipation, but also He claims to have, and He exercises, the power of moulding, expanding, interpreting, and in some cases brushing aside, laws which He and they alike knew to be the laws of God.  I do not need to specify in detail the instances which are contained in this Sermon on the Mount.  But I simply ask you to consider the formula with which our Lord introduces each of His references to that subject.  ’Ye have heard that it hath been said to them of old time’ so-and-so,—­and then follows a command of the Mosaic law; but ‘I say unto you’ so-and-so,—­and then follows a deepening or a modification or a repeal, of statutes acknowledged by Him and His hearers to be divine.  He certainly claims to speak with the same right and authority as the old Law did.  He as certainly claims to speak with incomparably higher authority than Moses did, for the latter never professed to give precepts of his own.  He was not the Lawgiver, as he is often called, but only the messenger of the Lawgiver.  But Christ is Himself the fountain of the laws of His Kingdom.  Nor only so, but He puts Himself without apology or explanation in front of Moses and asserts power to modify, to set aside, or to re-enact with new stringency, the precepts of the divine law.

One supposition alone accounts for Christ’s attitude to law and prophets in this Sermon, and that is that the Eternal Wisdom and Personal Word of God, which at sundry times and in ‘divers manners’ spake to the old world by Moses, itself at last, in human form and personal guise, came here on earth and spake to us men.  It is the same Voice that breathed through the prophets of old, and that spake on the lips of the Christ of Nazareth; the same Eternal Word who manifested Himself in a ‘fiery law’ on Sinai, and in words of no less majesty and of deepened gentleness, when He gathered the people round about Him, and said to them, ’It hath been said to them of old time, ... but I say unto you ...’

Here is the sum and climax of all revelation, the last word of the divine mind and will and heart, to the world.  Moses and Elias stand beside Him on the Mount of Transfiguration, witnesses of His superiority and servants at His feet, and they vanish into mist and darkness, and leave there, erect, white-robed, solitary, the unique figure of the One Lawgiver and the perfect Revealer of God to men.