What! do you not feel the reality, the living, vibrating,
bleeding, compassionate personality, which, independently of
what belief and enthusiasm may have added, exists and throbs behind
such words? What more convincing demonstration of the beauty and truth
of the entirely historic personage, Jesus, than the Sermon on the
Mount?"
Alluding, then, to the denial of originality in the moral doctrines of
Christianity, M. Sainte-Beuve, after citing from Socrates, Marcus
Aurelius, and others, passages wherein is recommended "charity toward
the human race," declares that all these examples and precepts, all
that makes a fine body of social and philosophical morality, is not
Christianity itself as beheld at its source and in its spirit. "What
characterizes," he proceeds, "the discourse on the mount and the other
sayings and parables of Jesus, is not the charity that relates to
equity and strict justice, to which, with a sound heart and upright
spirit, one attains; it is something unknown to flesh and blood and to
simple reason, it is a kind of innocent and pure exaltation, freed
from rule and superior to law, holily improvident, a stranger
to all calculation, to all positive prevision, unreservedly reliant on
Him who sees and knows all things, and as a last reward counting on
the coming of that kingdom of God, the promise of which cannot fail:--
But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever
shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other
also.
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