s, but we are to let kindly emotions bear fruit in
words blessing the cursers, and in deeds of goodness, and, highest of
all, in prayers for those whose hate is bitterest, being founded on
religion, and who are carrying it into action in persecution. We cannot
hate a man if we pray for him; we cannot pray for him if we hate him.
Our weakness often feels it so hard not to hate our enemies, that our
only way to get strength to keep this highest, hardest commandment is to
begin by trying to pray for the foe, and then we gradually feel the
infernal fires dying down in our temper, and come to be able to meet his
evil with good, and his curses with blessings. It is a difficult lesson
that Jesus sets us. It is a blessed possibility that Jesus opens for
us, that our kindly emotions towards men need not be at the mercy of
theirs to us. It is a fair ideal that He paints, which, if Christians
deliberately and continuously took it for their aim to realise, would
revolutionise society, and make the fellowship of man with man a
continual joy. Think of what any community, great or small, would be, if
enmity were met by love only and always. Its fire would die for want of
fuel. If the hater found no answering hate increasing his hate, he would
often come to answer love with love. There is an old legend spread
through many lands, which tells how a princess who had been changed by
enchantment into a loathly serpent, was set free by being thrice kissed
by a knight, who thereby won a fair bride with whom he lived in love and
joy. The only way to change the serpent of hate into the fair form of a
friend is to kiss it out of its enchantment.

No doubt, partial anticipations of this precept may be found, buried
under much ethical rubbish, elsewhere than in the Sermon on the Mount,
and more plainly in Old Testament teaching, and in Rabbinical sayings;
but Christ's 'originality' as a moral teacher lies not so much in the
absolute novelty of His commandments, as in the perspective in which He
sets them, and in the motives on which He bases them, and most of all in
His being more than a teacher, namely, the Giver of power to fulfil what
He enjoins. Christian ethics not merely recognises the duty of love to
men, but sets it as the foundation of all other duties. It is root and
trunk, all others are but the branches into which it ramifies. Christian
ethics not merely recognises the duty, but takes a man by the hand,
leads him up to his Father God, a