would live in luxury; every borrower would spend at will. Nay more;
those who did wrong would be rewarded, and would be thus encouraged to
go on in their evil ways. Meanwhile, the man who was insulted would be
again struck; the poor man who had lost one thing would lose two; the
hard-working, frugal labourer would have to support the beggar and the
borrower out of the fruits of his toil. Such is Christ's code of civil
laws: he is deliberately abrogating the Mosaic code, "an eye for an eye
and a tooth for a tooth," and is replacing it by his own. If the Mosaic
law is to be taken literally--as it was--that which is to replace it
must also be taken literally, or else one code would be abolished, and
there would be none to succeed it, so that the State would be left in a
condition of lawlessness. Suppose, however, that we allow that the
passage is to be taken metaphorically, what then? A metaphor must mean
_something_: what does this metaphor mean? It can scarcely signify the
exact opposite of what it intimates, and yet the exact opposite is true
morality. Only a system of taking Christ's words "contrariwise" can make
them useful as civil rules, and even "oriental exaggeration" can
scarcely be credited with saying the diametrically contrary of its real
meaning. But it is urged that, if all men were Christians, then this
teaching would be right, and Christ was bound to give a perfect
morality. That is to say, if people were different to what they are,
this teaching of Christ would not be injurious because--it would be
unneeded! If there were no robbers, and no assaulters, and no borrowers,
then the morality of the Sermon on the Mount would be most harmless.
High praise, truly, for a legislator that his laws would not be
injurious when they were no longer needed. Christ should have remembered
that the "law is made for sinners," and that such a law as he gives here
is a direct encouragement to sin.

We can scarcely wonder that, inculcating a course of conduct which must