te and calumniate you, such a form of prayer and of familiar
address to the Father who is in heaven? Was there ever before anything
like to that, so encouraging, so consoling, in the teaching and the
precepts of the sages? Was that not truly a revelation in the midst of
human morals; and if there be joined to it, what cannot be separated
from it, the totality of such a life, spent in doing good, and that
predication of about three years, crowned by the crucifixion, have we
not a right to say that here was a 'new ideal of a soul perfectly
heroic,' which, under this half Jewish, Galilean form was set before
all coming generations?

"Who talks to us of _myth_, of the realization, more or less
instinctive or philosophical, of the human conscience reflecting
itself in a being who only supplied the pretext and who hardly
existed. What! do you not feel the reality, the living, vibrating,
bleeding, compassionate personality, which, independently of
what belief and enthusiasm may have added, exists and throbs behind
such words? What more convincing demonstration of the beauty and truth
of the entirely historic personage, Jesus, than the Sermon on the
Mount?"

Alluding, then, to the denial of originality in the moral doctrines of
Christianity, M. Sainte-Beuve, after citing from Socrates, Marcus
Aurelius, and others, passages wherein is recommended "charity toward
the human race," declares that all these examples and precepts, all
that makes a fine body of social and philosophical morality, is not
Christianity itself as beheld at its source and in its spirit. "What
characterizes," he proceeds, "the discourse on the mount and the other
sayings and parables of Jesus, is not the charity that relates to
equity and strict justice, to which, with a sound heart and upright
spirit, one attains; it is something unknown to flesh and blood and to
simple reason, it is a kind of innocent and pure exaltation, freed
from rule and superior to law, holily improvident, a stranger
to all calculation, to all positive prevision, unreservedly reliant on
Him who sees and knows all things, and as a last reward counting on
the coming of that kingdom of God, the promise of which cannot fail:--

But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever
shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other
also.

And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy
coat, let him have thy cloak also....

Give to him