Our Lord’s way of proceeding is always positive, never merely negative. He leaves the Law, but He sows seed which will grow up and displace the spirit of blind subservience to it: just as some particular species in the herbage of a land is often ousted when a more robust one is brought in. The Apostles had, up to the end, many wrong notions, and we may wonder why our Lord did not set them right; but it would have shaken the whole fabric of their belief if He had so done; and the sure teaching of circumstances would, as He knew, dissipate the errors in time. So far we have dealt chiefly with the _matter_ of our Lord’s teaching of the multitudes, but something must be said about its _form_. One striking point in our Lord’s practice in contrast with that of the scribes, is this. He cites no authorities, all comes from Himself; there is hardly a text of Scripture in the fifth chapter of St Matthew, except those which are quoted in order to be extended or gainsaid. The scribes depended on their learning, they overwhelmed men with quotations, they laid text by text, and built up their conclusions upon an array of authorities. Now a preacher, or a teacher of any kind, is sure to lose hold of his audience when he goes away from himself and gives other people’s opinions instead of his own. They look to him for guidance; and when he says, “This is one man’s view and that is another’s,” and not, “This is _mine_,” then they turn from the trumpet of uncertain sound. The multitude suppose that in all questions there is a right and a wrong—just as there is a right and a wrong answer to a sum—and they do not want to know what one authority says or the other, but what they are to accept. Again, rightly to apprehend the form of this discourse, we must bear in mind that it is not a written collection of precepts,—though St Matthew may have appended some delivered at a later time—and that still less is it a Code of Laws. It is an oral address to a crowd of villagers gathered on the top of the fell. We mark in it the natural rhetoric of earnest speech: the first necessity is always to win men to listen, and thus the speaker at the opening strikes His most impressive chords. Words of blessing fell on the ears of those who were used only to hear of their shortcomings and to be treated as outcasts; and when their attention was caught by the unusual sound and they listened to hear who it was who were blessed, they found it was not the strong and the wealthy and the high spirited—those whom they regarded as having the good things of existence while they themselves had the bad—but the blessed are the poor in spirit, and this Kingdom of Heaven, newly proclaimed, belonged to them. The attention caught by the opening is kept alive by the unexpected nature of the matter.