The Sermon on the Mount: A Practical Exposition — John Shaqi
The Sermon on the Mount: A Practical ExpositionGore, Charles
Religion
The Sermon on the Mount: A Practical Exposition
Gore, Charles
Sermon on the mount
1. The Sermon on the Mount compared with the summaries of moral
duty belonging to other religions is comprehensive while they are
fragmentary. No moral code can be produced which approaches this in
completeness or depth. There is no other moral code belonging to an
accepted and ancient religion for which any educated European could
even claim finality and completeness. We know what John Stuart Mill,
though not a believer, said about our Lord’s moral teaching. He said
“Not even now would it be easy, even for an unbeliever, to find a
better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the
concrete, than to endeavour so to live that Jesus Christ would approve
our life.” And Dr. Pusey commented on that by saying “If men would set
this before themselves, there would be fewer unbelievers.”[7] There is
then, I say, no other moral summary belonging to an ancient religion on
behalf of which a man of modern enlightenment could, with a reasonable
chance of being listened to, make the claim that its principles can
never be outgrown or found insufficient for any race of men. This is
to others as the comprehensive to the fragmentary.
2. It is as the pure to the partially corrupt or mixed. Origen, in
commenting on the words of the twelfth Psalm, “the words of the Lord
are pure words, even as the silver which from the earth is tried and
purified seven times in the fire,” contrasts in this respect the sacred
writings of the heathen with those of the Christians. “For though there
are _noble_ words among those who are not Christians, yet they are not
_pure_, because they are mixed up with so much that is false.” Take
for an example the Symposium of Plato. You find in it much that is
most noble about divine love; but you find this noble element mixed
with dross, that is with acquiescence in some of the foulest practices
of Greek life. The same is true of the sacred books of Buddhism. The
Sermon on the Mount, then, is to other moral codes as the pure to the
mixed or partially corrupt.
3. It is as teaching for grown men, who are also free, compared
to teaching for children and slaves. It teaches, not by negative
enactments or by literal enactments at all, but by principles, positive
and weighty principles, embodied in proverbs which must be apprehended
in their inner spirit and reapplied continually anew as circumstances
change.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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