What St. James calls the Royal Law, is mentioned as far back as the time of Moses. It is one of the two commands to which our Lord gave new incidence, into which He put fresh meaning. There has been, I hardly need remind you, endless debate about the source of some of Christ's most characteristic sayings. Was He original in His teaching, as we use the word, or was He eclectic, gathering together the most luminous things that had been said? Jewish scholars, as we might expect, have not been slow to point out that many of the sayings attributed to Jesus, and certainly many of His ideas, are to be found in the old Rabbinical writings; that many of His highest truths had been announced by saints and seers of His race long before He came. We need not question that there is truth in this representation. But we must question the inference from these words, "long before He came." For time has known no such solitude. He, which is, and was, and is to come, has ever been in the world teaching men how to pray, inspiring them what to say. He had taught "them of old time." "Before Abraham was," He says, "I am." And St. John tells us that "He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not." Originality is no mere traffic with words however skilfully manipulated. There is a language of God transcending all words, and intelligible only when we meet Him spirit to spirit in the secret places of His eternity. "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." Observe the setting of this admonition when first given: "Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." This word "neighbour" connoted something that was a distinct advance in the upward trend of the race. It did, at any rate, a little to lift the Israelite out of himself into the lives of others. But it meant to him, at the most, only those who were of the same tribe or nation. In the fulness of time--when the world was ready--Jesus took up His own word spoken through Moses, and limited in its interpretation by the moral intelligence of that day; took up His own word, and made it co-extensive with humanity. This is what I mean by a language of God transcending all speech. "You have been told," says Jesus, "to love your neighbour"; and to the question, "Who is my neighbour?" He makes the answer reach out to its full circumference--"Thy neighbour is he or she who bears thy nature." By the law which declares that God has made of one blood all the nations of the earth, the physical unity of the race is implied; so by the operation of the law of love the moral unity, or, what we now call the "solidarity of humanity," is intended.