You will often see it noticed that a resemblance to some of the precepts in the Sermon on the Mount is to be discovered, not only in the Old Testament, on which the whole is confessedly based, but in the sayings of Jewish fathers, or in heathen philosophers and writers, like Confucius among the Chinese, and Socrates or Plato among the Greeks; and this has at times distressed Christians jealous of the unique glory of their religion. Thus they have sometimes sought to account for the coincidences between “inspired” and “uninspired” authors, or between the divine and the human speakers, by supposing that even heathen writers borrowed from the Old Testament. They were forgetting surely a great truth, a truth of which in the early centuries the minds of men were full: that Christ is the Word; and it is through fellowship in the Word, who is also the Reason of God, that all men are rational. Christ, therefore, is the light which in conscience and reason lightens every man from end to end of history. Christ has been at work, moving by His Spirit in the consciousness of man, so that the whole moral development of mankind, the whole moral education of the human race, is of one piece from end to end. There moves in it the same Spirit, there expresses itself the same Word. So that, as we should expect, there are fragments of the moral truth which in the Sermon on the Mount is completely delivered, fragments――greater or smaller, we need not now discuss――to be found among the Chinese, the Japanese, the Greeks, the Indians, because God left Himself nowhere without witness, the witness of His Word and Spirit in the hearts of men.[6] But what we also find to be true is, that the moral law here given supersedes the moral law as it is found among heathen nations or even among the Jews, by including it in a greater whole. We may compare the morality of this Sermon with that expressed by other religious teachers in several ways.