ich testifies
against them. The old and carnal nature gravitates downward, to
selfishness and sin, as surely as by a law of the physical universe. But
the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus emancipates us from that
law of sin and death--the higher nature doing, by the very quality of
its life, what the lower nature cannot be driven to do, by dread of hell
or by desire of heaven. The creature of earth becomes a creature of air,
and is at home in a new sphere, poised on its wings upon the breeze.
Love is the fulfilling of the law. And the Christian is free from its
dictation, as affectionate men are free from any control of the laws
which command the maintenance of wife and child, not because they may
defy the statutes, but because their volition and the statutes coincide.
Liberty is not lawlessness--it is the reciprocal harmony of law and the
will.

And thus the grand paradox of Luther is entirely true: "Unless faith be
without any, even the smallest works, it does not justify, nay, it is
not faith. And yet it is impossible for faith to be without
works--earnest, many and great." We are justified by faith without the
works of the law, and yet we do not make void the law by faith--nay, we
establish the law.

All this agrees exactly with the contrast, so often urged, between the
giving of the Law and the utterance of the Sermon on the Mount. The
former echoes across wild heights, and through savage ravines; the
latter is heard on the grassy slopes of the hillside which overlooks the
smiling Lake of Galilee. The one is spoken in thunder and graven upon
stone: the other comes from the lips, into which grace is poured, of Him
Who was fairer than the children of men. The former repeats again and
again the stern warning, "Thou shalt not!" The latter crowns a sevenfold
description of a blessedness, which is deeper than joy, though pensive
and even weeping, by adding to these abstract descriptions an eighth,
which applies them, and assumes them to be realised in His
hearers--"Blessed are _ye_." If so much as a beast touched the mountain
it should be stoned. But Simeon took the Divine Infant in his arms.

And this is not because God has become gentler, or man worthier: it is
because God the Lawgiver upon His throne has come down to be God the
Helper. But the beatitudes could never have been spoken, if the law had
not been imposed: the blessedness of a hunger and thirst for
righteousness was created by the majestic and sp