52. First, that throughout the Sermon on this Amiens Mount, Christ never appears, or is for a moment thought of, as the Crucified, nor as the Dead: but as the Incarnate Word--as the present Friend--as the Prince of Peace on Earth,--and as the Everlasting King in Heaven. What His life _is_, what His commands _are_, and what His judgment _will be_, are the things here taught: not what He once did, nor what He once suffered, but what He is now doing--and what He requires us to do. That is the pure, joyful, beautiful lesson of Christianity; and the fall from that faith, and all the corruptions of its abortive practice, may be summed briefly as the habitual contemplation of Christ's death instead of His Life, and the substitution of His past suffering for our present duty. 53. Then, secondly, though Christ bears not _His_ cross, the mourning prophets,--the persecuted apostles--and the martyred disciples _do_ bear theirs. For just as it is well for you to remember what your undying Creator is _doing_ for you--it is well for you to remember what your dying fellow-creatures _have done_: the Creator you may at your pleasure deny or defy--the Martyr you can only forget; deny, you cannot. Every stone of this building is cemented with his blood, and there is no furrow of its pillars that was not ploughed by his pain. 54. Keeping, then, these things in your heart, look back now to the central statue of Christ, and hear His message with understanding. He holds the Book of the Eternal Law in His left hand; with His right He blesses,--but blesses on condition. "This do, and thou shalt live"; nay, in stricter and more piercing sense, This _be_ and thou shalt live: to show Mercy is nothing--thy soul must be full of mercy; to be pure in act is nothing--thou shalt be pure in heart also. And with this further word of the unabolished law--"This if thou do _not_, this if thou art not, thou shalt die." 55. Die (whatever Death means)--totally and irrevocably. There is no word in thirteenth-century Theology of the pardon (in our modern sense) of sins; and there is none of the Purgatory of them. Above that image of Christ with us, our Friend, is set the image of Christ over us, our Judge. For this present life--here is His helpful Presence. After this life--there is His coming to take account of our deeds, and of our desires in them; and the parting asunder of the Obedient from the Disobedient, of the Loving from the Unkind, with no hope given to the last of recall or reconciliation. I do not know what commenting or softening doctrines were written in frightened minuscule by the Fathers, or hinted in hesitating whispers by the prelates of the early Church. But I know that the language of every graven stone and every glowing window,--of things daily seen and universally understood by the people, was absolutely and alone, this teaching of Moses from Sinai in the beginning, and of St. John from Patmos in the end, of the Revelation of God to Israel.