TJ The principle here enunciated is fundamental, underpinning the whole structure of human society. It is equitable, because all men are more nearly on an equality than might be inferred from a consideration of their outward circumstances. It is portable, " like the two-foot rule " which the artisan carries in his pocket for the measurement of any work which he may be called to estimate. The Emperor Severus was so charmed by the excellence of this rule that he ordered a crier to repeat it whenever he had
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occasion to punish any person, and he caused it to be inscribed on the most notable parts of the palace, and on many of the public buildings.1
The History of the Precept.
1. The words of the text are old and familiar. We learn from our infancy to say, " My duty towards my neighbour is to love him as myself, and to do to all men as I would they should do unto me." All Christians accept this as an elementary and fundamental maxim of their religion. But not only are these words not new to ourselves in this age of Chistendom ; they were by no means altogether new to the world when our Lord spoke them. Parallels to them can be found in heathen philosophers, in the sacred books of other religions. The maxim may justly be regarded as human and universal, rather than as specifically Christian.
Christ not only did not claim for the precept any originality, but He expressly disclaimed it ; He gave this as the sanction of the rule, that it was " the law and the prophets," that is to say, that all the precepts which had been given of old concerning our conduct one towards another were briefly comprehended in this one saying, that we should do to all men as we would that they should do to ourselves ; the Lord gave this as a key to the whole, and would have us to understand that if we once master this great principle, and make it the real principle of our conduct, all particular duties will be easily, and as a matter of course, per- formed. And so St. Paul represents the matter. He says, " He that loveth another hath fulfilled the law. For this, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Thou shalt not covet ; and if there be any other commandment it is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. Love worketh no ill to his neighbour : therefore love is the fulfil- ling of the law." What Christ did, then, was to bring together scattered duties under one general head and supply a principle which should be applicable to them all.
1 F. B. Meyer, The Directory of the Devout Life, 179.
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THE GOLDEN RULE
TI In Confucius this Divine instinct of the soul began to break forth in history. He said, "You must not do to others what you would not they should do to you." This was only a refrain. It was a rule telling us what to avoid doing. The grand old Plato went further, and in a kind of prayer says, in the eleventh book of his Dialogues, " May I, being of sound mind, do to others as I would that they should do to me." 1
T| A Gentile inquirer — so the Talmudic story runs — came one day to the great Shammai, and demanded to be taught the law, condensed to a sentence, while he stood on one foot. In anger the Kabbi smote him with his staff and turned away, and the questioner went to Hillel, and Hillel made answer, " Whatsoever thou wouldest that men should not do to thee, that do not thou to them. All our law is summed up in that." And the stranger forthwith became a proselyte. The best of the Scribes went no further than this negative goodness in their approaches to the teaching of our Lord. He teaches that love cannot be satisfied with this cold abstinence from harm-doing. Active, energetic benevolence is the only true outcome of a character which has yielded to, and been moulded by, the Divine bounty. Frigid negatives satisfy neither Law nor Gospel.2
2. Our Lord translated other men's negatives into God's positive. Hitherto, the Golden Kule among men had been in the merely negative form. " That which is hateful to thyself do not do to thy neighbour " ; that is to say, if thou abstainest from certain gross injustices and iniquities, thou hast fulfilled the whole Law. It is not in such a saying as that that all the philanthropies and humanities of Christianity lie dormant. Those great beneficent systems and institutions with which Christian feeling has covered this land and so many others are not the outgrowth of a mere negative ambition to abstain from insulting or injuring one's neighbours. It was Christ's genius that translated the negatives of religion into the positives. With Him the " thou shalt nots " of the Decalogue became the positive constructive doctrine of the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount.
Each time that we turn to the Gospels we find ourselves awed, commanded, moved, as by no other morality. We know nothing deeper, nothing more universal, nothing more practical, than the laws of human conduct which our Lord clothed in