Matthew 5:17
Great Texts of the Bible
A Conservative Reformer

Think not that I came to destroy the law or the prophets: I came not to destroy, but to fulfil.—Matthew 5:17.

Christ, the new Prophet and Teacher, has gone up upon the Mount and is about to speak to the people. He is sitting down to preach. The villages will be empty soon, for the news has gone abroad and great excitement has seized the people. What new thing will He tell them? What daring message is this Revolutionary about to give them? They throng the slopes; they hang upon His words; there is the silence of a great expectation upon the multitude. And Christ begins to preach. What is His subject? What is He saying?

Not a syllable about what they called religion, law, and Sabbath, and temple worship, and fasts; simply the Beatitudes, the inner virtues of the heart, the duty to show light. He moves the conscience of the people by bringing them straight into the presence of their Father. He recalls them to the consciousness of God, whom they are forgetting. His words move them as nothing had ever moved them before. They feel for an instant the pressure and the nearness of God Himself. At such a moment, in presence of a higher religion, what to them were law, and ceremonial, and priest? The murmur goes round that old things have passed away; it is a new world; away with remnants of exploded superstition and bygone forms of worship! It is to meet this inarticulate thought that Christ stops and says, “Think not that I came to destroy the law or the prophets: I came not to destroy, but to fulfil.” There is to be entire continuity with the past.

With absolute decisiveness He states the purpose of His coming. He knows the meaning of His own work, which so few of us do, and it is safe to take His own account of what He intends, as we so seldom do. His opening declaration is singularly composed of blended humility and majesty. Its humility lies in His placing Himself, as it were, in line with previous messengers, and representing Himself as carrying on the sequence of Divine revelation. It would not have been humble for anybody but Him to say that, but it was so for Him. Its majesty lies in His claim to “fulfil” all former utterances from God.

My love of, and trust in, our Lord, after I had seen Him in a vision, began to grow, for my converse with Him was so continual. I saw that, though He was God, He was man also; that He is not surprised at the frailties of men, that He understands our miserable nature, liable to fall continually, because of the first sin, for the reparation of which He had come. I could speak to Him as to a friend, though He is my Lord.… O my Lord! O my King! who can describe Thy Majesty? It is impossible not to see that Thou art Thyself the great Ruler of all, that the beholding of Thy Majesty fills men with awe. But I am filled with greater awe, O my Lord, when I consider Thy humility, and the love Thou hast for such as I am. We can converse and speak with Thee about everything whenever we will; and when we lose our first fear and awe at the vision of Thy Majesty, we have a greater dread of offending Thee,—not arising out of the fear of punishment, O my Lord, for that is as nothing in comparison with the loss of Thee!1 [Note: The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus (trans. by D. Lewis), 367.]

I

Christ the Revolutionary


After the multitude had heard those wonderful teachings contained in the Beatitudes, most of which were new and startling, one might well suppose that the question uppermost in every heart would be, Are those laws and institutions which have lasted for two thousand years now to undergo complete change—are they to be superseded by those precepts which we have now just heard propounded by this Great Teacher, who seems to be the Founder of an entirely new law; for what Jewish Rabbi ever gave utterance to such precepts as the proclaiming of blessedness to the poor in spirit, the meek, the humble, the mourning, the persecuted? In the text the Saviour corrects this view.

1. “Think not,” He says, “that I came to destroy.” It is noticeable at once that Christ uses a word for “destroy” which seems to be merely an echo of some confused popular sayings about the Messiah. It is indeed not easy to state clearly what is meant by destroying a law or a set of laws, still less easy to say what would be the meaning of “destroying the prophets.” Laws may no doubt be repealed, but it is not conceivable that any clearheaded man anticipated that the Messiah would repeal the Ten Commandments, or was going to forbid the Old Testament to be read. Strictly speaking, this is the only rational sense which attaches itself to the words. It is probable that Christ was here merely putting on one side a rough popular description of the rôle which He was supposed to be going to play.

It is not obvious at first sight what Christ means by “fulfilling the law.” He does not mean taking the written law as it stands, and literally obeying it. That is what He condemns, not as wrong, but as wholly inadequate. He means rather, starting with it as it stands, and bringing it on to completeness; working out the spirit of it; getting at the comprehensive principles which underlie the narrowness of that letter. These the Messiah sets forth as the essence of the revelation made by God through the Law and the Prophets. Through them He has revealed His will, and it is impossible that His Son should attempt to pull down or undo this revelation of the Father’s will, or that His will, in the smallest particular, should fail of fulfilment. It is not the Law or the Prophets that Jesus proposes to abolish, but the traditional misinterpretations of these authorities. To destroy these misinterpretations is to open the way for the fulfilment of the Law and the Prophets; and He thus substituted free development of spiritual character for servile obedience to oppressive rules.1 [Note: A. Plummer.]

2. To destroy—that is the creed of the revolutionary. In the French Revolution, Robespierre and his confederates went so far as to obliterate the septennial division of time, insisting that the week should consist of ten rather than seven days. New names were affixed to the days, to the streets, and to the officials of the State. But it was not thus that Christ inaugurated His work. He answered the thoughts of His age, saying, “Think not that I came to destroy.” Every “jot and tittle” of the ancient code was dear to Him. Jesus was no iconoclast.

3. For there is nothing to be gained by destruction. There are men who think that the best means of heralding the new dawn is to fling a bomb into a crowd of harmless people. There are those who believe, with Bakunin, that the only way to regenerate society is to wipe it out by utter destruction, on the supposition that a new and better order will surely be evolved out of chaos. It never has been so, and it never can be so. Such methods can only delay the advance of progress. You can, indeed, cast out devils by Beelzebub. You cannot keep them out; only angels can do that. “His kingdom shall not stand”; for by fulfilment, not by destruction, the old passes into the new.

Carlyle could not reverence Voltaire, but he could not hate him. How could he hate a man who had fought manfully against injustice in high places, and had himself many a time in private done kind and generous actions? To Carlyle, Voltaire was no apostle charged with any divine message of positive truth. Even in his crusade against what he believed to be false, Voltaire was not animated with a high and noble indignation. He was simply an instrument of destruction, enjoying his work with the pleasure of some mocking imp, yet preparing the way for the tremendous conflagration which was impending. In the earlier part of his career Carlyle sympathized with and expected more from the distinctive functions of revolution than he was able to do after longer experience. “I thought,” he once said to me, “that it was the abolition of rubbish. I find it has been only the kindling of a dunghill. The dry straw on the outside burns off; but the huge damp rotting mass remains where it was.”1 [Note: J. A. Froude, Thomas Carlyle, 1795–1835, ii. 54.]

“Think not (comp. Matthew 3:9, Matthew 10:34) that I came to destroy the law or the prophets.” Such an expression implies that Christ knew that there was danger of the Jews thinking so, and possibly that some had actually said this of Him. The Pharisees would be sure to say it. He disregarded the oral tradition, which they held to be equal in authority to the written Law; and He interpreted the written Law according to its spirit, and not, as they did, according to the rigid letter. Above all, He spoke as if He Himself were an authority, independent of the Law. Even some of His own followers may have been perplexed, and have thought that He proposed to supersede the Law. They might suppose “that it was the purpose of His mission simply to break down restraints, to lift from men’s shoulders the duties which they felt as burdens. The law was full of commandments; the Prophets were full of rebukes and warnings. Might not the mild new Rabbi be welcomed as one come to break down the Law and the Prophets, and so lead the way to less exacting ways of life? This is the delusion which our Lord set Himself to crush. The gospel of the Kingdom was not a gospel of indulgence” (Hort, Judaistic Christianity, 15). He was not a fanatical revolutionary, but a Divine Restorer and Reformer.1 [Note: A. Plummer.]

II

Christ the Conserver


If Christ is not to destroy the law and the prophets, what then is He to do with this old faith of the Jews? How is He to treat this partial, this imperfect, faith which is already on the ground? He may do either of two things. He may destroy or He may preserve. With the most deliberate wisdom He chooses one method and rejects the other. To the conservative, Christ comes with reassurance.

1. Nothing of the old that is valuable or strong shall be lost. Examine the new, and we shall find the old at the heart of it. Study the channel where the new current is running and we shall find the water of the old channel there. That is a very suggestive fact; it appears everywhere. Study the real forward movement of thought and we shall find it true. There will always be petty disturbances, offshoots here and there which have no reference to the real advance of thought; they may cut loose from the old truth, but they are short-lived and passing. In the main movements, down the main stream, the old is never lost.

An American missionary in Japan, Dr. S. L. Gulick, writes thus: “The Christian preacher should constantly take the ground that every good teaching in the native faith is a gift of God the Father of all men, and is a preparation for the coming of His fuller revelation in Jesus Christ. We should show our real and deep respect for the ‘heathen’ religions; we should take off our hats at their shrines, as we expect them to do in our churches. We should ever insist that Christianity does not come to destroy anything that is good or true in the native faiths, but rather to stimulate, to strengthen, and fulfil it—to give it life and real energy. The trouble with the native religions is not that they possess no truth, but that the truth they have is so mixed up with folly and superstition that it is lost; it has no power—no life-giving energy.”1 [Note: World Missionary Conference, 1910: Report of Commission IV., 95.]

2. Nothing is to be remitted—no rule of purity, no necessity of righteousness. How can it be, when we are brought, by entering this Kingdom, nearer to God, who must be of purer eyes than to behold iniquity? No slackening of the spiritual code is possible, is conceivable. To suppose this is to mistake all the meaning of mercy, all the purpose of pardon. Let no one make such a disastrous blunder. “Think not that I came to destroy the law or the prophets: I came not to destroy, but to fulfil.”

“Think not that I will dispense with any of the rules of morality, prescribed by Moses, and explained by the prophets,” is Blair’s rendering of this verse. “I came not to destroy, but to fulfil” (both the law and the prophets): “To fulfil,” that is, to render full obedience to those great commandments (see Matthew 5:19) which it is the pre-eminent aim of the Scriptures to inculcate and enforce. Jesus came to render this full obedience in His own person, and also to secure that it should be rendered increasingly, and ever increasingly, in the persons of His disciples, the subjects of His Kingdom. It is this latter idea that was prominently in His mind on the present occasion, as is evident from the 19th and 20th verses. He came, not to introduce licence and licentiousness into His Kingdom, but to establish holiness. Some expositors suppose that the word “fulfil” means to supplement or perfect; and they imagine that Christ is here referring to His legislative authority. But such an interpretation of the term is at variance with Matthew 5:18-19, and with its use in kindred passages, such as Romans 13:8, Galatians 5:14. Theophylact, among other interpretations, says that Christ fulfilled the law as a painter fills up the sketch of his picture. But it is a different “full-filling” that is referred to. When commandments are addressed to us, they present, as it were, empty vessels of duty, which our obedience is to “fill full.”2 [Note: J. Morison.]

3. The Old Testament is not as it were the scaffolding necessary for the erection of the Christian Church, needing to be taken down in order that the full symmetry and beauty of the building may be seen, and only to be had recourse to from time to time when repairs are needed. It is an integral part of the structure. Ye are “built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the chief corner stone.” How could it be otherwise? we ask with reverence. It was God who spoke “through the prophets,” it is God who speaks “in a Son.” Every Divine word must be of eternal import. God’s truth does not vary; there is no mutability of purpose in the eternal present of the Divine mind.

The Old Testament leads us up to Christ, and Christ takes it and puts it back into our hands as a completed whole. He bids us study it as “fulfilled in him,” and “put ourselves to school with every part of it.” The old lesson-book is not to be thrown away or kept as an archæological curiosity; it is to be re-studied in this fresh light of further knowledge.

The πλήρωσις of the law and the prophets is their fulfilment by the re-establishment of their absolute meaning, so that now nothing more is wanting to what they ought to be in accordance with the Divine ideas which lie at the foundation of their commands. It is the perfect development of their ideal reality out of the positive form, in which the same is historically apprehended and limited.… Luther well says: “Christ is speaking of the fulfilment, and so deals with doctrines, in like manner as He calls ‘destroying’ a not acting with works against the law, but a breaking off from the law with the doctrine.” The fulfilling is “showing the right kernel and understanding, that they may learn what the law is and desires to have.” The Apostle Paul worked quite in the sense of our passage; his writings are full of the fulfilment of the law in the sense in which Christ means it; and his doctrine of its abrogation refers only to its validity for justification to the exclusion of faith. Paul did not advance beyond this declaration, but he applied his right understanding boldly and freely, and in so doing the breaking up of the old form by the new spirit could not but necessarily begin, as Jesus Himself clearly recognized (cf. Matthew 9:16; John 4:21; John 4:23 f.) and set forth to those who believed in His own person and His completed righteousness. But even in this self-representation of Christ the new principle is not severed from the Old Testament piety, but is the highest fulfilment of the latter, its anti-typical consummation, its realized ideal. Christianity itself is in so far a law.1 [Note: H. A. W. Meyer.]

III

Christ the Fulfiller


Continuity with the old is part of Christ’s teaching. He came to conserve. But He came to do more than that—infinitely more than that. He came also to fulfil. “To fulfil.” Do we not often limit the idea of “fulfilment” to what are called the typical and prophetic parts of the Old Testament, and regard the fulfilment as just the counterpart of the type or prediction, as the reality of which only the reflection had hitherto been visible? But “fulfilment” is far more than this. It is the completion of what was before imperfect; it is the realization of what was shadowy; it is the development of what was rudimentary; it is the union and reconciliation of what was isolated and disconnected; it is the full growth from the antecedent germ.

1. Christ fulfilled the law.—The law (νόμος) is not to be restricted here to the Decalogue; it is to be taken in its more extended signification as denoting the entire law. The moral law was an expression of the mind of God, of God’s moral nature—a revelation, or rather expansion, of the law of nature which He originally wrote in the heart of man. Sin blinded men to such an extent that it was necessary to have the law promulgated; hence God wrote it on two tables of stone. And it stood as a public warning against sin, and as a standard of moral duty. It disclosed wants that it was incapable of satisfying, it aggravated the evil it could not heal; and, compelling men to see their own weakness, it taught them to look forward to One who would be capable of fulfilling all its demands. This is the “fulfilling” of which Christ speaks, the completion of that which for two thousand years had been imperfect and ineffectual. “Christ fulfilled the law and the prophets,” says Bishop Wordsworth, “by obedience, by accomplishment of types, ceremonies, rites, and prophecies, and by explaining, spiritualizing, elevating, enlarging, and perfecting the moral law, by writing it on the heart, and by giving grace to obey it, as well as an example of obedience by taking away its curse; and by the doctrine of free justification by faith in Himself, which the law prefigured and anticipated, but could not give.”

Let us look shortly at three main ways in which Christ fulfilled the law.

(1) Christ fulfilled the law by meeting its requirements.—From first to last the life of our Lord was the fulfilment, in spirit and letter, of the ancient ritual. As a son of the law, He obeyed the initial rite of Judaism on the eighth day after birth, and there was no item of the law, even to the dots of the i’s or the crossing of the t’s, which He omitted or slurred. He died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures. What could be only partially true of His Apostle was literally true of the Lord: as touching the righteousness which is of the law, He was found blameless. Our Lord fulfilled the ceremonial law and fulfilled the moral law, since He was Jesus Christ “the Righteous.” He honoured the law by His obedience “even to death,” atoning for its breach and violation by mankind, and giving, through His unknown sufferings an answer to its just dues and demands, such as could not have been afforded though the whole race had been mulcted to the uttermost farthing of penal consequences. His fulfilment, therefore, was not for Himself alone, but as the second Adam, the representative man, and for us all.

(2) Christ fulfilled the law by spiritualizing it.—Were we to enter a room in the early morning where a company were sitting or drowsing, with sickly hue, by the dull glimmer of candles, which never had given a sufficient light, and were now guttering, neglected, and burning down to the socket, we would not think we were destroying the light by flinging open the casement, and letting in the clear sunshine upon them. We would, on the contrary, feel that by this process alone could they get the full light which they needed. Now, much in the same way the Lord Jesus came into the world, and found there, as it were, the old seven-branched candlestick of the tabernacle still burning, though dim and low, for it was not well trimmed in those neglectful years; found there the old law of Moses, moral, ceremonial, and judicial, still recognized, though a good deal obscured by traditions; and what He did was to purify and spiritualize the law. He opened upon it the windows of His spirit, illumining its every part, showing its perfection and comprehensiveness. Other teachers had taken the law, the law as it stood, and had so dealt with it as to present it in all its bareness and outwardness, its narrowness and burdensomeness; Jesus Christ took the same law, the law as it stood, but He so dealt with it as to present it in all its fulness and inwardness, its breadth and goodness.

(3) Christ fulfilled the law by generalizing it.—He broke down all class distinctions in morality. Heathenism divided mankind into two classes, the learned and the ignorant, and between these two it erected a high partition wall. These distinctions, though discountenanced in Jewish law, were admitted in Jewish practice. “This people who knoweth not the law are cursed.” Christ boldly demolished the wall of partition built high and broad between the cultured and the illiterate. He entered the granary of Divine truth, took out the golden grain, and scattered it broadcast on the face of the common earth. The truths of the favoured few He made the common property of the uncultured many. He alone of all His contemporaries or predecessors perceived the intrinsic worth and vast possibilities of the human soul.

Christ also broke down all national distinctions in morality. The intense nationalism of the Jews in the time of the Saviour is proverbial; they surrounded sea and land to make one proselyte. Instead of trying to make Judaism commensurate with the world, they tried to make the world commensurate with Judaism. However, Jewish morality here, as in every other instance, was superior to contemporaneous pagan morality. Notwithstanding its intense nationalism, Judaism always inculcated kindness to strangers. “The stranger within thy gates”—the recurrence of that phrase in the Mosaic ethics lifts them above all other ancient ethics whatever. What Moses only began, Jesus Christ beautifully perfected. He made morality absolutely human. It is no longer Greek under obligation to Greek, but man under obligation to man. What the Greek poet only momentarily conceived, Jesus Christ has converted into a powerful element in modern civilization—“I also am a man, and nothing human is foreign to me.”

Jesus felt Himself called of God to a lot within the chosen people, because He was Himself the culmination of the revelation made to them in the past. As that revelation had been through a special nation, so it had to complete itself there. That He Himself lived within the limits of Judaism was not a confession that He was merely the crown of a national or racial faith, but rather the vindication of the older religion as an inherent part of a world-revelation. It was not the lowering of His message to the particularism of the Jewish religion, but the elevation of the latter into a universal significance first fully revealed in Him. The problem which Jesus had to solve was not the destruction of Judaism, but its consummation, the liberation of its spiritual content from the restrictions of its form. That He should have indicated the supersession of Jewish privilege is not at all unlikely; but manifestly this could not be His usual or characteristic tone, if He were to implant in Jewish minds the germs of His wider faith. He had largely to put Himself in their place, and work through the forms of their thought. Primarily, therefore, His universalism had to be implicit. He did not so much give them new religious terms as fill the old terms with a new meaning and reference. Hence it was only after He had at least partly accomplished this in the case of a chosen circle of followers, and attached them unalterably to Himself, that He spoke openly and frequently of the larger issues of His gospel, and the ingathering of the “nations.” Jesus saw that if He were to conserve the eternal element in the Jewish religion, He must work within its lines. He broke, indeed, with the existing authorities, but only because He maintained that they misrepresented it. The principle on which He acted, as regards both the teaching of His ministry and the subsequent development of His Church, was to sow germinal truths which could come to maturity only through the reaction of individual thought, and the enlarging of experience. Therefore, while He did not leave the disciples wholly without plain announcements of the universality of His mission, He did not so emphasize this as to impair their confidence in the unity and continuity of the old and the new faiths.1 [Note: D. W. Forrest, The Christ of History and of Experience, 418.]

2. Christ fulfilled the prophets.—We are familiar with the idea of the “fulfilment” of prophecy, though that idea is often unduly limited. Prophecy is not “inverted history”: it was not a reflection beforehand by which men could foreknow what was to come: it was but as the seed out of which plant and flower and fruit were to be developed. Prophecy kept men’s eyes fixed upon the future; it created a sense of need, it stirred deep and earnest longings; it stimulated hope. And then the fulfilment gathered into one unimagined reality all the various lines of thought and longing and hope, in a completeness far transcending all anticipation. The fulfilment could not have been conjectured from the prophecy, but it answers to it, and shows the working of the one Divine purpose, unhasting, unresting, to its final goal of man’s redemption.

The prophets’ great teachings were all centred round the figure of the Deliverer of the future. There were three things concerning the person and work of this Messiah upon which they laid special emphasis.

(1) The Messiah was to be humble in the circumstances of His life.—His birthplace, His lowly outward condition, His having no visible grandeur to attract the world’s eye, had all been noted by the pen of inspiration. If He had been born in any other place than Bethlehem, if He had appeared as a rich Prince instead of being the son of a poor family, there would have been reason to say that the words of Scripture were against Him; for it was prophesied regarding Him, “Thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting.”

Christian religion beginneth not at the highest, as other religions do, but at the lowest. It will have us to climb up by Jacob’s ladder, whereupon God Himself leaneth, whose feet touch the very earth, hard by the head of Jacob. Run straight to the manger, and embrace this Infant, the Virgin’s little babe, in thine arms; and behold Him as He was born, nursed, grew up, was conversant amongst men; teaching; dying; rising again; ascending up above all the heavens, and having power over all things. This sight and contemplation will keep thee in the right way, that thou mayest follow whither Christ hath gone.1 [Note: Luther, Commentary on the Galatians, 102.]

(2) But the Messiah was to be great in His person.—He was to be of high origin, though He was to take up a lowly position on earth. It was said of Him by one of the prophets, His “goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting.” These words intimated that He who was afterwards to appear in human nature for the deliverance of His people had lived from the beginning, from eternity. The prophet Isaiah had also said with reference to Him, “Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The Mighty God, The Everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.”

The Jews took great offence, we read, because Jesus, being a man, called Himself the Son of God. But did not the Scriptures, which they professed to follow, speak of the Messiah as both God and man? If He had claimed less He would not have been the Deliverer promised to their fathers. And were the actions of Jesus inconsistent with His high claim? When He gave sight to the blind, and hearing to the deaf, and speech to the dumb, and life to the dead by a word, did He not show that He indeed was what the prophet Isaiah had said the Messiah at His coming should be, “The Mighty God”?1 [Note: G. S. Smith, Victory Over Sin and Death, 21.]

(3) He was also to accomplish a matchless work.—He was to bruise the head of the serpent; or, as this first announcement is explained again and again in the prophecies which follow, and particularly in the prophecies of Daniel, He was “to finish transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness.” He was to take away the sins of men which separated them from God, to put an end to the commission of sin, and to bring in the reign of righteousness for ever. He was in consequence called by the prophets in other places “the Lord our righteousness.” Jesus declared when He was upon the earth that this was to be the great purpose of His mission. “The Son of man,” He said, “came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.” He came to take away all burdens and all troubles by taking away sin, which is the cause of them all. “Come unto me,” He said, “all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” And with reference to all that come unto Him, He says, “I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any pluck them out of my hand.”

In St. Paul, Christ is the Deliverer from sins in the past; He is the Defender against sins in the future. God’s love in Christ is emphatically that which delivers the wretched man, beaten in all his endeavours to free himself from the body of this death of sin: it is that which has done through Christ what the law could not do, enabled the righteousness of the law to be fulfilled in His redeemed. Over St. Paul’s mind there ever seems to be resting the shadow of the memory of the past; he remembers how wrong he once went, what a terrible mistake he made. And he remembers how, not by any reflection, not by any study of his own, but by the direct influence of Christ Himself, he first learned how fearfully wrong he was. Hence throughout his life there is present to him a sense of his own weakness. Yet while these thoughts sometimes come across him, and make him more eagerly watchful over all that he does, nothing can shake his firm persuasion that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Jesus Christ our Lord.” To him Christ is emphatically the power which wipes out the past, and which upholds the soul, the power which alone can preserve us blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, whose strength is made perfect in our weakness, who shall one day “change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself.”1 [Note: Archbishop Temple.]

A Conservative Reformer

Literature


Bellars (W.), Our Inheritance, 128.

Campbell (L.), The Christian Ideal, 236.

Chadwick (W. E.), SocialRelationships, 91.

Dawson (G.), Three Books of God, 58.

Drummond (R. J.), Faith’s Certainties, 41.

Holland (H. S.), Pleas and Claims, 292.

Jones (J. C.), Studies in the Gospel accòrding to Matthew, 111.

Lyttelton (E.), Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, 125.

McAfee (C. B.), Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, 55.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions: St. Matthew i.–viii., 199.

Matheson (G.), Rests by the River, 147.

Matheson (G.), Thoughts for Life’s Journey, 51.

Matthew (J.), The Law of Jehovah, 205.

Meyer (F. B.), The Directory of the Devout Life, 47.

Morison (J.), A Practical Commentary on the Gospel according to St. Matthew, 67.

Owen (J. W.), Some Australian Sermons, 88.

Peabody (F. G.), Mornings in the College Chapel, i. 41.

Plummer (A.), An Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel according to St. Matthew, 74.

Shuttleworth (H. C.), in Lombard Street in Lent, 199.

Smith (W. C.), The Sermon on the Mount, 52.

Southouse (A. J.), Men of the Beatitudes, 23.

Tait (A.), The Charter of Christianity, 129.

Thorne (H.), Notable Sayings of the Great Teacher, 54.

Watson (J.), The Inspiration of Our Faith, 147.

Wilson (J. M.), in The Anglican Pulpit of To-Day, 356.

British Weekly Pulpit, iii. 468 (A. F. Kirkpatrick).

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