The third or scientific method is dry and prosaic. It observes what qualities go together, or refuse to go together, in the swift stream of life; pulls them out of the stream; fixes them in concepts; marks them by names; and states propositions about them. It may go one short step farther: it may arrange its propositions in syllogisms, and deduce general conclusions, or laws. It may take, for instance, as its major premise, Love is the divine secret of blessedness. Then for its minor premise it may take some plain observed fact, Humility is essential to Love. Then the conclusion or law will be, The humble share the divine life and all the blessings it brings. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Of course no one but a pedant draws out his teaching in this laboured logical form. The syllogism is condensed; the major, and perhaps even the minor, premise is omitted, and often only the conclusion appears. At its best this method is hard and dry; yet this is the method employed in such sayings as those handed down in the summary called the Sermon on the Mount. Perhaps that is why the teaching of the "Sermon," in spite of its clear-cut form, is much less studied and understood than the teaching of Jesus' life and parables. To recover this largely lost teaching one must warm and moisten the cold, dry terms; supply, when necessary, omitted premises; use some one word rather than many for the often suppressed middle term; and so draw out the latent logic that underlies these laws. The middle term of all this argument is Love. For that old-fashioned word, in spite of its sentimental associations, much better than its modern scientific synonyms, such as the socialising of the self, expresses that outgoing of the self into the lives of others, which, according to Jesus, is the actual nature of God, the potential nature of man, the secret of individual blessedness and the promise of social salvation. In the two or three cases where the logic of His principle, applied to our complex modern life, points clearly to a modification of His literal precepts, as in the management of wealth and the bestowal of charity, I shall not hesitate to put the logic of the teaching in place of the letter of the precept, citing the latter afterward for comparison. A logical commentary like this will be most helpful if it reverses the order usual in commentaries of mere erudition, and introduces the steps of the argument before rather than after the passage they seek to make clear. In whichever of the three ways it is taught, Love shines by its own light and speaks with its own authority to all who have eyes to see and ears to hear. A person who loves carries with him a generous light-heartedness, a genial optimism, which show all his friends that he has found some secret which it is worth their while to learn.