Editorial March 26, 1921 Issue

The Sermon on the Mount

Frederick Dixon

The Sermon on the Mount sums up the Christian religion. As Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 174 of Science and Health, "The thunder of Sinai and the Sermon on the Mount are pursuing and will overtake the ages, rebuking in their course all error and proclaiming the kingdom of heaven on earth. Truth is revealed. It needs only to be practised." In the Ten Commandments Moses set down the primary demands of law; in the ninety-first psalm David insisted on the protecting power of Truth; in the Sermon on the Mount Christ Jesus ranged the whole field of spiritual metaphysics, concluding with the warning that those who did not put into practice what he was teaching them would pay the inevitable penalty of their neglect. How much those who listened to his words understood of what he was saying it is, of course, impossible to tell. But this, at any rate, is certain, that they could not begin to put into practice his teaching until they began to live in accordance with it. The failure to do this was the initial failure of Christendom, with the result that, as time went on, the temptation grew to regard the Sermon not as a practical rule of everyday life but as a counsel of perfection, not as a standard attainable upon earth but as a condition to be reached in some future life. In this way the whole animus of Christianity was perverted. Theology added excuse after excuse for avoiding the challenge, until a Christian bishop wrote off the entire conception as an unattainable ideal.

It was about this time that Science and Health was given to the world, and that the attempt was made by Mrs. Eddy to clarify the human conception of metaphysics, and to show the world that the Sermon on the Mount was the most scientific pronouncement to which it had ever listened, a pronouncement of no shadowy nature, but ablaze with the quintessence of realism, when realism was once understood to be spiritual and not material. Here then, at the very outset, Mrs. Eddy boldly stated the original dilemma, the refusal to grapple with which had been the cause of the church's failure to demonstrate the power of Principle in the perpetuation of what is known as the miracle. And, indeed, it is not difficult to comprehend how the men of those centuries when the known world lay, as it were, in the maw of the Romans, watching the spread of that amazing civilization rolling over mountain ranges and jumping seas, should have come to believe that there was nothing without the range of their material senses, and should have set down their philosophy in the words of Juvenal, Orandum est, ut sit mens sana in corpore sano, "To possess a healthy mind in a healthy body is a thing to be prayed for." What could such a generation be expected to make of that saying, uttered to a solitary visitor, in the silence of the Syrian night, "That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again." Much more astounding, to the multitude on the hillside, above Capernaum, must have been the very first words of the wonderful Sermon, "Blessed are the poor in spirit: for their's is the kingdom of heaven."

From those words until he reaches the words of the final warning, the careful reader must be aware that it is one denunciation following another of the reality of matter and of human subserviency to material conditions that is being urged upon him. And as he reads on, the conclusion must be forced upon him that all this would mean nothing, would indeed be nothing but mere words, were it not possible for him to prove the nothingness of this matter, and to rise above the evidence of the senses. For it is now that Jesus brings the old morality into comparison with the new, and shows that it is not the mere material action which condemns a man, but the thought behind it, "Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; ... But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment." To-day the revised text has dropped the words, "without a cause," and the pure metaphysical fact stands out that murder is but the expression of a mental condition which is at once the cause of the material action and a counterfeit of spiritual reality. In just the same way, Christ Jesus insisted that the Mosaic law prescribed the punishment for adultery, but that it was the lust which leads to adultery that Christianity denounced, and in just the same way, he pointed out, that it was not perjury that was specially sinful, but the ignorance of Truth which makes light of a departure from Principle.

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