Another expression in the sermon on the mount in our English version of the New Testament, is:
"Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness; for they shall be filled."
Filled with what? Well, the Book of Mormon version of it is:
"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness; for they shall be filled with the Holy Ghost."
That is more definite, is it not?
But now I come to a more important point, where more light, and light that is very necessary, is added to this sermon on the mount. I commence reading from Matthew vi:24.
"No man can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
"Therefore, I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?"
That is a passage of scripture against which infidels have leveled their sarcasms ever since it was written. They have denounced it as instruction utterly impractical; as false in theory, as it would be impossible in practice; and as giving the evidence that Jesus was a mere idle dreamer, not a practical reformer. For, say they, this doctrine of taking no thought of the morrow, and taking no thought respecting food and raiment, if applied to the world's affairs, would turn the wheels of progress backward, and plunge the world into a state of barbarism. There could be no civilization under such conditions, they argue; and man would go back to the condition of the savage. I have never heard a Christian argument against that assault that has been an answer to it. But I find the key to the situation in this Book of Mormon version of the passage. It throws a flood of light upon this matter that makes the defense of the doctrine of Christ not only possible but easy. The Book of Mormon tells me that those words were not addressed to the multitude, nor are they to be followed by all the members of the Church, nor by the people of the world generally. Jesus confined that instruction in America to twelve men whom he chose from among his disciples, and especially commissioned to go and preach the gospel; and to so completely dedicate themselves unto the Lord that they would give no thought to temporal things, but put heart and soul into the work of their ministry, and their Father in heaven, who knew they had need of food and raiment, would open up the way for them, to obtain such things as they needed, even as he clothed the lilies or cared for the birds of the air. Thus limited, that doctrine is all right, is it not? And as Jesus turned from the multitude to deliver this doctrine especially adapted to the Twelve here in America, so, doubtless, if we had the fullness of the truth as delivered in Judea I believe he would be represented as confining those remarks unto the men whom he had specially called into the ministry in that land.
So I say the Fifth Gospel places in our hands the means of meeting the scoffs of the unbeliever, and vindicates the doctrines of Jesus Christ as reasonable now that we have the word of the Lord rightly divided.
I cannot leave this passage without calling your attention to the closing sentence of the sixth chapter of Matthew: "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." In III Nephi it stands: "Sufficient is the day unto the evil thereof." In the first instance you note that the evil is made sufficient for the day. The fifth gospel has it that the day is made sufficient for the evil. Don't you think that is better? Three learned commentators say of that sentence, as it stands in Matthew: "An admirable practical maxim, better rendered in our version (King James' translation) than in any other, not excepting the preceding English ones. Every day brings its own cares, and to anticipate is only to double them." If they can thus speak in high praise of the saying of the Savior as it stands in Matthew, how much more reason they would have for praising it as it is found in III Nephi.