great multitudes of people from Galilee, and from Decapolis, and from Jerusalem, and from Judea, and from beyond Jordan." What a picture is this of unrecorded goodness, of unwritten wisdom! Yet question not God! Who has ever profited as he should by what he was permitted to know of his Son?

IV. Saint Matthew, who was selected by his brethren to write out their official witness to the words and works of their Lord in Galilee, like Michael Angelo, was a man of many gifts; and like him he was more of an architect than a painter. He built a temple enriched with much that makes a shrine complete, but distinctively Saint Matthew was a sculptor. On broad canvas painting displays many figures. Sculpture molds one. Painting has color. Sculpture has form. Painting weaves shadows. Sculpture chisels the rock. Painting presents the varied scenes of man's life. Its eternal moments are the sculptor's.

It often happens that when a writer has to choose between facts that find favor in his eyes he cannot give up this one for its novelty, that one for its beauty, another for its truth. His riches so embarrass and bewilder him that he piles up a shapeless mound of costly materials. That Saint Matthew was free from such weakness is proved by those thirteen verses which cover all the time and space between the temptation and the sermon. He there alludes to a throng of miracles and to circuits of preaching, but he does not there preserve one of our Lord's sayings, does not there describe one of those many miracles; and yet with his own eyes the evangelist beheld some of them, and of some he afterward told. Hitherto there has been no solution of the singular problem

of those thirteen verses. Color-blind critics take them as evidence of the fragmentary character of the earliest gospel; yet Saint Matthew must have had a good reason for saying nothing distinctive of any of the numerous and great events in the busy time of that section; and when the reason for the manner and form of those thirteen verses is discovered in their relation to the Sermon on the Mount they become unmistakable and luminous evidence of the constructive wisdom of the inspired evangelist.

Saint Matthew wished and intended to make Christ Jesus known at once as the Lord of a universal, spiritual, eternal kingdom, by the Incarnation, by the wonders and signs at the baptism, by the defeat of Satan in the wilderness, and by the Sermon on the Mount. They were above the common course of things in the sacred life. They have greater power than its miracles to convince and subdue. And, meaning by these pre-eminent things to give unity to the opening of his gospel, Saint Matthew did not interpose any lesser events between the great victory and the great He gave with unbroken effect the Gospel of Christ Jesus, acknowledged as the beloved Son, overcoming Satan and reaching for a time his fullest selfrevelation in the Sermon on the Mount. This is the reason why, in those thirteen verses, he told nothing he could leave untold-why he merely named the miracles of months, generalizing every thing, passing over all that would have too much diverted the mind from the serinon. His soul is bent on our hearing Christ. With him, as with Saint John, Christ is the Word.

sermon.

One fact alone is enough to prove that such was

his design in the construction of those thirteen verses. He knew and felt that if he, a citizen of Capernaum, recited Saint Peter's call and gave no hint of the great miracle, some would say there was no such miracle. And the evangelist, the lightest touch of whose flying steel was guided by the Holy Spirit, says that in the partnership Jesus found James and John mending their nets." There was some strong reason for noticing so little a thing in such a paragraph; and, though Saint Luke had not written then, yet the allusion to the miracle was plain from the oral gospel.

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Something had to be told of Jesus, of his calling disciples, and of his mighty works to prepare for the Sermon on the Mount; and that is so told as not to turn thought away from Christ himself to his actions. Not winding on its way, the short road runs straight to the mountain.

The view taken can readily be tested by inserting into that short paragraph the bad behavior of the townsmen of Jesus on his first visit to Nazareth, as recorded by Saint Luke, or the healing of the nobleman's son, or any of the numerous miracles before the sermon. Any thing of the kind breaks in upon the unity which, at a great cost, the evangelist secured. And his quotation from Isaiah is in felicitous harmony with his design, in that its undivided interest centers in Christ.

The construction of this part of Saint Matthew's gospel was the premeditated achievement of highest historic genius; but this does not exclude the nobler fact that the Holy Spirit wrought with the human nature and the human effort he did not supersede;

that he guided the mind, determined the judgment, and strengthened the will of his evangelist. Saint Matthew wrought out his gospel, God working with him "to will and to do."

With the modern feeling that the glory of our Lord is more visible in his truth than in his miracles, with the judgment which, reversing the rule as to men, gives higher place to his words than to his acts (save his sacrificial death), Saint Matthew was in sympathy. He thought and felt that before all else Jesus must be heard. But who shall measure the self-control which resisted the telling at once of those miracles of mercy, those words of grace? Strong the temptation! But his genius faltered not, relented not! He was strong in the strength of God.

The evidence of these things is not all in. Much of it has to be deferred to the two chapters that come after the sermon; but enough is in to warrant the saying that the hold which the truth in Christ has upon the world is owing, in some measure, to the way in which the inspired evangelist planned the earlier part of his holy gospel. This has done much to secure a hearing for Christianity; for whoever opens the New Testament will read as far as the sermon; if he reads so far, the sermon will be read through; and when that is read the Gospel of Christ lays a hold upon the heart which cannot be shaken off.

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CHAPTER VI.

THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT-THE BEATITUDES.

DID Saint Matthew weave together as one discourse words spoken at divers times and places, and thus make up the sermon? Scholastics too often say that he did; and thus, whether consciously or not, they charge the holy evangelist with sacrilegious presumption and with falsehood. For Saint Matthew, as carefully as though he foresaw the charge, thus fixes the place and the circumstances "Seeing the multitudes, Jesus went up into a mountain, and when he was set his disciples came unto him, and he taught them, saying" the words he records; and after that "Jesus had ended these sayings (Tovç λoyovs) the people were astonished at his doctrine."

The disproval of the scholastic questioning and de

*Ellicott does say, "This opinion, though adopted by so good an interpreter as Calvin, is now commonly felt to be improbable;" yet the comment that goes in the bishop's name speaks of "possibly a few additions." The German, Neander, interviewing some ancient scribe, thus journalizes: "The original document of Matthew passed through the hands of the Greek editor (?), who inserted other words spoken by Christ on other occasions." The Englishman, Farrar, "sees no objection whatever to the supposition that Matthew combined and summarized many sermons." The Frenchman, Pressensé, "will not deny the sufficient connection, but it is because sayings of Jesus were collected according to their affinity." Godet, the Swiss, feels that such talk tends to make it doubted if there were any sermon-"Assuredly there was a sermon, but Matthew, like a good gardener who puts together magnificent bouquets, has added many words."