But observe, what we have here is law――law, not grace. In St. Paul’s phrase, it is letter, not spirit. When St. Paul says that “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life,”[3] he means this――that an external written commandment (that is, the letter) is capable of informing our consciences, of telling us what God’s will is, of bowing us down to the dust with a sense of our inability to fulfil it; but it is not capable of going further. Thus it “killeth”; it makes us conscious of our sin, of our powerlessness, but it leaves it for something else to put life into us to do the thing we ought. That life-giving power is the Spirit. Thus the law, by informing, kills us: the Spirit, by empowering, gives us life. Observe, it is a good, a necessary thing to be thus killed. The perilous state is “to be alive without the law,”[4] that is, to have an unenlightened conscience and be living in a false peace. “If the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness.” The first thing is to know what we ought to do; and the very fact that we feel our powerlessness to do it, makes us ready to offer the cry, the appeal for divine help. Again I would ask you to notice a sentence of Augustine’s, which is full of meaning: “The law was given that men might seek grace; grace was given that the law might be fulfilled.”[5] Thus what we have here, in the Sermon on the Mount, is the climax of law, the completeness of the letter, the letter which killeth; and because it is so much more searching and thorough than the Ten Commandments, therefore does it kill all the more effectually. It makes us all the more conscious of sin; all the more full of the clamorous demand that God, who asks such things of us, shall give us also the power to fulfil them. But just as in many departments of human life “man’s necessity is God’s opportunity,” just as in some well-constructed drama the very culminating moment of difficulty suggests the immediate arrival of release, so it is here. The divine requirement is pressed home with unequalled force upon the conscience, but it is pressed home not in the form of mere laws of conduct, but (as we shall see) as a type of character,――not out of the thick darkness by an inaccessible God, but by the Divine Love manifested in manhood and pledging His own faithfulness that he who hungers shall be satisfied and he who asks shall be heard. The hard demand of the letter is here in the closest possible connexion with the promise of the Spirit. II