Nothing is said about the effect which such kindness to professed enemies may have. But there is no question that if we treat people as if they were permanently and necessarily what they are at the moment, we fix or do our best to fix them in their present condition. To make people better, we must believe that God intends them to be better and treat them as if we believed them in fact to be better than they are. The clever barrister, Sidney Carton, in Dickens’ _Tale of Two Cities_, who had been his own enemy, who had fallen from bad to worse, who had ceased to believe in himself as his friends also had ceased to believe in him, was recovered by a good and merciful woman who refused to take him at the general estimate and would not give him up――recovered, after many relapses, to the point of a final act of heroism by which he lost his own life to save his true friend’s husband. So if we refuse to treat people as our enemies, we have the best possible chance of winning them to be our friends. God has redeemed men by treating them, not as they are, but as they are capable of becoming. Our Lord calls our attention to the fact that He is requiring such conduct of us as only a supernatural motive, the motive of fellowship with God, can account for. This is a consideration which we can apply to other parts of Christian duty――for instance, to the obligation of purity. But our Lord here applies it to kindliness. “You are kind to your friends. Are not the publicans the same?” The publicans proper were capitalists who “farmed” the Roman taxes, undertaking to hand over a certain sum for a certain district and then getting as much as they could out of the inhabitants. But the name was also applied to their subordinates, the custom-house officers, as in the New Testament. These were held in special odium by their countrymen and generally justified a character for rapacity. But even such men are kind to their friends. It requires no other motive than human convenience, the most ordinary social virtue. But what our Lord asks of us is something which requires the supernatural or divine motive to account for it. Here then we have a serious question. Consider your actions, your ordinary dealings with others. Are they such as can be accounted for by convenience and social requirement, or does your conduct require the divine motive, the motive of fellowship with God, to explain it and to make it possible? It is only this latter sort of conduct that makes it――so to speak――worth while that Jesus Christ should have come down from heaven and sacrificed Himself for you. Are you walking worthily of the vocation wherewith ye are called? For your principle of conduct is to be nothing less than a real striving after the perfection of God, which is indeed the character of Christ. “Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”