James 1:25

But whoso looketh The word involves primarily the idea of stooping down and bending over that on which we look, as with a fixed gaze. See for its literal use Mark 16:5; Luke 24:12, and for its spiritual application, "which things the angels desire to look into," in 1 Peter 1:12. In Sir 14:23, it is used of the "prying in," the eager gaze of the seeker after wisdom; in Sir 21:23 of the intrusive gaze of the fool. Here it implies, like our word "attend," the fixing the whole mind on that which the mirror of the Divine Word discloses to us, but as the act itself might, like the "beholding" of the previous verse, be but transient, St James adds the further condition, "and continueth therein."

the perfect law of liberty The words appear at first to be wide and general, and to echo the language in which Psalmists and others had spoken of "the law of the Eternal" (Psalms 19:7; Psalms 111:7; Psalms 119:1). On the other hand, we have to remember that at the Council at which St James presided, the law of Moses, as such, was described as "a yoke" of bondage (Acts 15:10), even as St Paul spoke of it (Galatians 5:1), and that our Lord had spoken of the Truth as that by which alone men could be made "free indeed" (John 8:32). It follows from this, almost necessarily, that St James speaks of the new Law, the spiritual code of ethics, which had been proclaimed by Christ, and of which the Sermon on the Mount remains as the great pattern and example. That Law was characterised as giving to the soul freedom from the vices that enslave it. To look into that Law and to continue in it was to share the beatitudes with which it opened. That the writer was familiar with that Sermon we shall see at well nigh every turn of the Epistle.

being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work Literally, becoming not a hearer of forgetfulness. The construction is the same as in the "steward of injustice" for the "unjust steward" (Luke 16:8; Luke 18:6), the genitive of the characteristic attribute being used instead of the adjective. As the one clause balances the other the words that follow probably meant an active worker or "doer." In any case the article, as in the Greek, should be omitted, " a doer of work."

this man shall be blessed in his deed Once again, as if shewing on what his thoughts had been dwelling, as the law of liberty, St James returns to the formula of a beatitude, and brings together, in so doing, the beginning and the end of the Sermon on the Mount.