you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you, that ye may be the children of”—­that is, may be like—­“your Father which is in Heaven.”  The second essential peculiarity of Christianity—­and this, too, is an essential peculiarity of this Sermon—­is, that it teaches and enforces the law of self-sacrifice.  “If thy right eye offend thee pluck it out; if thy right hand offend thee cut it off.”  This, brethren, is the law of self-sacrifice—­the very law and spirit of the blessed cross of Christ.

How deeply and essentially Christian, then, this Sermon on the Mount is, we shall understand if we are enabled in any measure to reach the meaning and spirit of the single passage which I have taken as my text.  It tells two things—­the Christian aim and the Christian motive.

 1st.  The Christian aim—­perfection. 2nd.  The Christian
 motive—­because it is right and Godlike to be perfect.

I. The Christian aim is this—­to be perfect.  “Be ye therefore perfect.”  Now distinguish this, I pray you, from mere worldly morality.  It is not conformity to a creed that is here required, but aspiration after a state.  It is not demanded of us to perform a number of duties, but to yield obedience to a certain spiritual law.  But let us endeavour to explain this more fully.  What is the meaning of this expression, “Be ye perfect?” Why is it that in this discourse, instead of being commanded to perform religious duties, we are commanded to think of being like God?  Will not that inflame our pride, and increase our natural vainglory?  Now the nature and possibility of human perfection, what it is and how it is possible, are both contained in one single expression in the text.  “Even as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect.”  The relationship between father and son implies consanguinity, likeness, similarity of character and nature.  God made the insect, the stone, the lily; but God is not the Father of the caterpillar, the lily, or the stone.

When therefore, God is said to be our Father, something more is implied in this than that God created man.  And so when the Son of Man came proclaiming the fact that we are the children of God, it was in the truest sense a revelation.  He told us that the nature of God resembles the nature of man, that love in God is not a mere figure of speech, but means the same thing as love in us, and that divine anger is the same thing as human anger divested of its emotions and imperfections.  When we are commanded to be like God, it implies that God has that nature of which we have already the germs.  And this has been taught by the incarnation of the Redeemer.  Things absolutely dissimilar in their nature cannot mingle.  Water cannot coalesce with fire—­water cannot mix with oil.  If, then, Humanity and Divinity were united in the person of the Redeemer, it follows that there must be something kindred between the