The Hope of the Gospel Part 3

Yet verily, earth as well as heaven may be largely possessed even now.

Two men are walking abroad together; to the one, the world yields thought after thought of delight; he sees heaven and earth embrace one another; he feels an indescribable presence over and in them; his joy will afterward, in the solitude of his chamber, break forth in song;--to the other, oppressed with the thought of his poverty, or ruminating how to make much into more, the glory of the Lord is but a warm summer day; it enters in at no window of his soul; it offers him no gift; for, in the very temple of G.o.d, he looks for no G.o.d in it. Nor must there needs be two men to think and feel thus differently. In what diverse fas.h.i.+on will any one _subject_ to ever-changing mood see the same world of the same glad creator! Alas for men, if it changed as we change, if it grew meaningless when we grow faithless! Thought for a morrow that may never come, dread of the dividing death which works for endless companions.h.i.+p, anger with one we love, will cloud the radiant morning, and make the day dark with night. At evening, having bethought ourselves, and returned to him that feeds the ravens, and watches the dying sparrow, and says to his children 'Love one another,' the sunset splendour is glad over us, the western sky is refulgent as the court of the Father when the glad news is spread abroad that a sinner has repented. We have mourned in the twilight of our little faith, but, having sent away our sin, the glory of G.o.d's heaven over his darkening earth has comforted us.

_SORROW THE PLEDGE OF JOY._

'Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.'--_Matthew_ v. 4.

Grief, then, sorrow, pain of heart, mourning, is no part.i.tion-wall between man and G.o.d. So far is it from opposing any obstacle to the pa.s.sage of G.o.d's light into man's soul, that the Lord congratulates them that mourn. There is no evil in sorrow. True, it is not an essential good, a good in itself, like love; but it will mingle with any good thing, and is even so allied to good that it will open the door of the heart for any good. More of sorrowful than of joyful men are always standing about the everlasting doors that open into the presence of the Most High. It is true also that joy is in its nature more divine than sorrow; for, although man must sorrow, and G.o.d share in his sorrow, yet in himself G.o.d is not sorrowful, and the 'glad creator' never made man for sorrow: it is but a stormy strait through which he must pa.s.s to his ocean of peace. He 'makes the joy the last in every song.' Still, I repeat, a man in sorrow is in general far nearer G.o.d than a man in joy.

Gladness may make a man forget his thanksgiving; misery drives him to his prayers. For we _are_ not yet, we are only _becoming_. The endless day will at length dawn whose every throbbing moment will heave our hearts G.o.dward; we shall scarce need to lift them up: now, there are two door-keepers to the house of prayer, and Sorrow is more on the alert to open than her grandson Joy.

The gladsome child runs farther afield; the wounded child turns to go home. The weeper sits down close to the gate; the lord of life draws nigh to him from within. G.o.d loves not sorrow, yet rejoices to see a man sorrowful, for in his sorrow man leaves his heavenward door on the latch, and G.o.d can enter to help him. He loves, I say, to see him sorrowful, for then he can come near to part him from that which makes his sorrow a welcome sight. When Ephraim bemoans himself, he is a pleasant child. So good a medicine is sorrow, so powerful to slay the moths that infest and devour the human heart, that the Lord is glad to see a man weep. He congratulates him on his sadness. Grief is an ill-favoured thing, but she is Love's own child, and her mother loves her.

The promise to them that mourn, is not _the kingdom of heaven_, but that their mourning shall be ended, that they shall be comforted. To mourn is not to fight with evil; it is only to miss that which is good.

It is not an essential heavenly condition, like poorness of spirit or meekness. No man will carry his mourning with him into heaven--or, if he does, it will speedily be turned either into joy, or into what will result in joy, namely, redemptive action.

Mourning is a canker-bitten blossom on the rose-tree of love. Is there any mourning worthy the name that has not love for its root? Men mourn because they love. Love is the life out of which are fas.h.i.+oned all the natural feelings, every emotion of man. Love modelled by faith, is hope; love shaped by wrong, is anger--verily anger, though pure of sin; love invaded by loss, is grief.

The garment of mourning is oftenest a winding-sheet; the loss of the loved by death is the main cause of the mourning of the world. The Greek word here used to describe the blessed of the Lord, generally means _those that mourn for the dead_. It is not in the New Testament employed exclusively in this sense, neither do I imagine it stands here for such only: there are griefs than death sorer far, and harder far to comfort--harder even for G.o.d himself, with whom all things are possible; but it may give pleasure to know that the promise of comfort to those that mourn, may specially apply to those that mourn because their loved have gone out of their sight, and beyond the reach of their cry. Their sorrow, indeed, to the love divine, involves no difficulty; it is a small matter, easily met. The father, whose elder son is ever with him, but whose younger is in a far country, wasting his substance with riotous living, is unspeakably more to be pitied, and is harder to help, than that father both of whose sons lie in the sleep of death.

Much of what goes by the name of comfort, is merely worthless; and such as could be comforted by it, I should not care to comfort. Let time do what it may to bring the ease of oblivion; let change of scene do what in it lies to lead thought away from the vanished; let new loves bury grief in the grave of the old love: consolation of such sort could never have crossed the mind of Jesus. Would The Truth call a man blessed because his pain would sooner or later depart, leaving him at best no better than before, and certainly poorer--not only the beloved gone, but the sorrow for him too, and with the sorrow the love that had caused the sorrow? Blessed of G.o.d because restored to an absence of sorrow? Such a G.o.d were fitly adored only where not one heart wors.h.i.+pped in spirit and in truth.

'The Lord means of course,' some one may say, 'that the comfort of the mourners will be the restoration of that which they have lost. He means, "Blessed are ye although ye mourn, for your sorrow will be turned into joy."'

Happy are they whom nothing less than such restoration will comfort! But would such restoration be comfort enough for the heart of Jesus to give?

Was ever love so deep, so pure, so perfect, as to be good enough for him? And suppose the love between the parted two had been such, would the mere restoration in the future of that which once he had, be ground enough for so emphatically proclaiming the man blessed now, blessed while yet in the midnight of his loss, and knowing nothing of the hour of his deliverance? To call a man _blessed_ in his sorrow because of something to be given him, surely implies a something better than what he had before! True, the joy that is past may have been so great that the man might well feel blessed in the merest hope of its restoration; but would that be meaning enough for the word in the mouth of the Lord?

That the interruption of his blessedness was but temporary, would hardly be fit ground for calling the man _blessed_ in that interruption.

_Blessed_ is a strong word, and in the mouth of Jesus means all it can mean. Can his saying here mean less than--'Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted with a bliss well worth all the pain of the medicinal sorrow'? Besides, the benediction surely means that the man is blessed _because_ of his condition of mourning, not in spite of it. His mourning is surely a part at least of the Lord's ground for congratulating him: is it not the present operative means whereby the consolation is growing possible? In a word, I do not think the Lord would be content to call a man blessed on the mere ground of his going to be restored to a former bliss by no means perfect; I think he congratulated the mourners upon the grief they were enduring, because he saw the excellent glory of the comfort that was drawing nigh; because he knew the immeasurably greater joy to which the sorrow was at once clearing the way and conducting the mourner. When I say _greater_, G.o.d forbid I should mean _other!_ I mean the same bliss, divinely enlarged and divinely purified--pa.s.sed again through the hands of the creative Perfection. The Lord knew all the history of love and loss; beheld throughout the universe the winged Love discrowning the skeleton Fear.

G.o.d's comfort must ever be larger than man's grief, else were there gaps in his G.o.dhood. Mere restoration would leave a hiatus, barren and growthless, in the development of his children.

But, alas, what a pinched hope, what miserable expectations, most who call themselves the Lord's disciples derive from their notions of his teaching! Well may they think of death as the one thing to be right zealously avoided, and for ever lamented! Who would forsake even the window-less hut of his sorrow for the poor mean place they imagine the Father's house! Why, many of them do not even expect to know their friends there! do not expect to distinguish one from another of all the holy a.s.sembly! They will look in many faces, but never to recognize old friends and lovers! A fine saviour of men is their Jesus! Glorious lights they s.h.i.+ne in the world of our sorrow, holding forth a word of darkness, of dismallest death! Is the Lord such as they believe him?

'Good-bye, then, good Master!' cries the human heart. 'I thought thou couldst save me, but, alas, thou canst not. If thou savest the part of our being which can sin, thou lettest the part that can love sink into hopeless perdition: thou art not he that should come; I look for another! Thou wouldst destroy and not save me! Thy father is not my father; thy G.o.d is not my G.o.d! Ah, to whom shall we go? He has not the words of eternal life, this Jesus, and the universe is dark as chaos! O father, this thy son is good, but we need a greater son than he. Never will thy children love thee under the shadow of this new law, that they are not to love one another as thou lovest them!' How does that man love G.o.d--of what kind is the love he bears him--who is unable to believe that G.o.d loves every throb of every human heart toward another? Did not the Lord die that we should love one another, and be one with him and the Father, and is not the knowledge of difference essential to the deepest love? Can there be oneness without difference? harmony without distinction? Are all to have the same face? then why faces at all? If the plains of heaven are to be crowded with the same one face over and over for ever, but one moment will pa.s.s ere by monotony bliss shall have grown ghastly. Why not perfect spheres of featureless ivory rather than those mult.i.tudinous heads with one face! Or are we to start afresh with countenances all new, each beautiful, each lovable, each a revelation of the infinite father, each distinct from every other, and therefore all blending toward a full revealing--but never more the dear old precious faces, with its whole story in each, which seem, at the very thought of them, to draw our hearts out of our bosoms? Were they created only to become dear, and be destroyed? Is it in wine only that the old is better? Would such a new heaven be a thing to thank G.o.d for? Would this be a prospect on which the Son of Man would congratulate the mourner, or at which the mourner for the dead would count himself blessed? It is a shame that such a preposterous, monstrous unbelief should call for argument.

A heaven without human love it were inhuman, and yet more undivine to desire; it ought not to be desired by any being made in the image of G.o.d. The lord of life died that his father's children might grow perfect in love--might love their brothers and sisters as he loved them: is it to this end that they must cease to know one another? To annihilate the past of our earthly embodiment, would be to crush under the heel of an iron fate the very idea of tenderness, human or divine.

We shall all doubtless be changed, but in what direction?--to something less, or to something greater?--to something that is less we, which means degradation? to something that is not we, which means annihilation? or to something that is more we, which means a farther development of the original idea of us, the divine germ of us, holding in it all we ever were, all we ever can and must become? What is it const.i.tutes this or that man? Is it what he himself thinks he is?

a.s.suredly not. Is it what his friends at any given moment think him? Far from it. In which of his changing moods is he more himself? Loves any lover so little as to desire _no_ change in the person loved--no something different to bring him or her closer to the indwelling ideal?

In the loveliest is there not something not like her--something less lovely than she--some little thing in which a change would make her, not less, but more herself? Is it not of the very essence of the Christian hope, that we shall be changed from much bad to all good? If a wife so love that she would keep every opposition, every inconsistency in her husband's as yet but partially harmonious character, she does not love well enough for the kingdom of heaven. If its imperfections be essential to the individuality she loves, and to the repossession of her joy in it, she may be sure that, if he were restored to her as she would have him, she would soon come to love him less--perhaps to love him not at all; for no one who does not love perfection, will ever keep constant in loving. Fault is not lovable; it is only the good in which the alien fault dwells that causes it to seem capable of being loved. Neither is it any man's peculiarities that make him beloved; it is the essential humanity underlying those peculiarities. They may make him interesting, and, where not offensive, they may come to be loved for the sake of the man; but in themselves they are of smallest account.

We must not however confound peculiarity with diversity. Diversity is in and from G.o.d; peculiarity in and from man. The real man is the divine idea of him; the man G.o.d had in view when he began to send him forth out of thought into thinking; the man he is now working to perfect by casting out what is not he, and developing what is he. But in G.o.d's real men, that is, his ideal men, the diversity is infinite; he does not repeat his creations; every one of his children differs from every other, and in every one the diversity is lovable. G.o.d gives in his children an a.n.a.lysis of himself, an a.n.a.lysis that will never be exhausted. It is the original G.o.d-idea of the individual man that will at length be given, without spot or blemish, into the arms of love.

Such, surely, is the heart of the comfort the Lord will give those whose love is now making them mourn; and their present blessedness must be the expectation of the time when the true lover shall find the restored the same as the lost--with precious differences: the things that were not like the true self, gone or going; the things that were loveliest, lovelier still; the restored not merely more than the lost, but more the person lost than he or she that was lost. For the things which made him or her what he or she was, the things that rendered lovable, the things essential to the person, will be more present, because more developed.

Whether or not the Lord was here thinking specially of the mourners for the dead, as I think he was, he surely does not limit the word of comfort to them, or wish us to believe less than that his father has perfect comfort for every human grief. Out upon such miserable theologians as, instead of receiving them into the good soil of a generous heart, to bring forth truth an hundred fold, so cut and pare the words of the Lord as to take the very life from them, quenching all their glory and colour in their own inability to believe, and still would have the dead letter of them accepted as the comfort of a creator to the sore hearts he made in his own image! Here, 'as if they were G.o.d's spies,' some such would tell us that the Lord proclaims the blessedness of those that mourn for their sins, and of them only. What mere honest man would make a promise which was all a reservation, except in one unmentioned point! a.s.suredly they who mourn for their sins will be gloriously comforted, but certainly such also as are bowed down with any grief. The Lord would have us know that sorrow is not a part of life; that it is but a wind blowing throughout it, to winnow and cleanse. Where shall the woman go whose child is at the point of death, or whom the husband of her youth has forsaken, but to her Father in heaven? Must she keep away until she knows herself sorry for her sins?

How should that woman care to be delivered from her sins, how could she accept any comfort, who believed the child of her bosom lost to her for ever? Would the Lord have such a one be of good cheer, of merry heart, because her sins were forgiven her? Would such a mother be a woman of whom the saviour of men might have been born? If a woman forget the child she has borne and nourished, how shall she remember the father from whom she has herself come? The Lord came to heal the broken-hearted; therefore he said, 'Blessed are the mourners.' Hope in G.o.d, mother, for the deadest of thy children, even for him who died in his sins. Thou mayest have long to wait for him--but he will be found.

It may be, thou thyself wilt one day be sent to seek him and find him.

Rest thy hope on no excuse thy love would make for him, neither upon any quibble theological or sacerdotal; hope on in him who created him, and who loves him more than thou. G.o.d will excuse him better than thou, and his uncovenanted mercy is larger than that of his ministers. Shall not _the_ Father do _his_ best to find his prodigal? the good shepherd to find his lost sheep? The angels in his presence know the Father, and watch for the prodigal. Thou shalt be comforted.

There is one phase of our mourning for the dead which I must not leave unconsidered, seeing it is the pain within pain of all our mourning--the sorrow, namely, with its keen recurrent pangs because of things we have said or done, or omitted to say or do, while we companied with the departed. The very life that would give itself to the other, aches with the sense of having, this time and that, not given what it might. We cast ourselves at their feet, crying, Forgive me, my heart's own! but they are pale with distance, and do not seem to hear. It may be that they are longing in like agony of love after us, but know better, or perhaps only are more a.s.sured than we, that we shall be comforted together by and by.

Bethink thee, brother, sister, I say; bethink thee of the splendour of G.o.d, and answer--Would he be perfect if in his rest.i.tution of all things there were no opportunity for declaring our bitter grief and shame for the past? no moment in which to sob--Sister, brother, I am thy slave? no room for making amends? At the same time, when the desired moment comes, one look in the eyes may be enough, and we shall know one another even as G.o.d knows us. Like the purposed words of the prodigal in the parable, it may be that the words of our confession will hardly find place. Heart may so speak to heart as to forget there were such things. Mourner, hope in G.o.d, and comfort where thou canst, and the lord of mourners will be able to comfort thee the sooner. It may be thy very severity with thyself, has already moved the Lord to take thy part.

Such as mourn the loss of love, such from whom the friend, the brother, the lover, has turned away--what shall I cry to them?--You too shall be comforted--only hearken: Whatever selfishness clouds the love that mourns the loss of love, that selfishness must be taken out of it--burned out of it even by pain extreme, if such be needful. By cause of that in thy love which was not love, it may be thy loss has come; anyhow, because of thy love's defect, thou must suffer that it may be supplied. G.o.d will not, like the unjust judge, avenge thee to escape the cry that troubles him. No crying will make him comfort thy selfishness.

He will not render thee incapable of loving truly. He despises neither thy love though mingled with selfishness, nor thy suffering that springs from both; he will disentangle thy selfishness from thy love, and cast it into the fire. His cure for thy selfishness at once and thy suffering, is to make thee love more--and more truly; not with the love of love, but with the love of the person whose lost love thou bemoanest.

For the love of love is the love of thyself. Begin to love as G.o.d loves, and thy grief will a.s.suage; but for comfort wait his time. What he will do for thee, he only knows. It may be thou wilt never know what he will do, but only what he has done: it was too good for thee to know save by receiving it. The moment thou art capable of it, thine it will be.

One thing is clear in regard to every trouble--that the natural way with it is straight to the Father's knee. The Father is father _for_ his children, else why did he make himself their father? Wouldst thou not, mourner, be comforted rather after the one eternal fas.h.i.+on--the child by the father--than in such poor temporary way as would but leave thee the more exposed to thy worst enemy, thine own unreclaimed self?--an enemy who has but this one good thing in him--that he will always bring thee to sorrow!

The Lord has come to wipe away our tears. He is doing it; he will have it done as soon as he can; and until he can, he would have them flow without bitterness; to which end he tells us it is a blessed thing to mourn, because of the comfort on its way. Accept his comfort now, and so prepare for the comfort at hand. He is getting you ready for it, but you must be a fellow worker with him, or he will never have done. He _must_ have you pure in heart, eager after righteousness, a very child of his father in heaven.

_G.o.d'S FAMILY._

'Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see G.o.d.' 'Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.' 'Blessed are the peace-makers, for they shall be called the children of G.o.d.'--_Matthew_ v. 8, 6, 9.

The cry of the deepest in man has always been, to see G.o.d. It was the cry of Moses and the cry of Job, the cry of psalmist and of prophet; and to the cry, there has ever been faintly heard a far approach of coming answer. In the fullness of time the Son appears with the proclamation that a certain cla.s.s of men shall behold the Father: 'Blessed are the pure in heart,' he cries, 'for they shall see G.o.d.' He who saw G.o.d, who sees him now, who always did and always will see him, says, 'Be pure, and you also shall see him.' To see G.o.d was the Lord's own, eternal, one happiness; therefore he knew that the essential bliss of the creature is to behold the face of the creator. In that face lies the mystery of a man's own nature, the history of a man's own being. He who can read no line of it, can know neither himself nor his fellow; he only who knows G.o.d a little, can at all understand man. The blessed in Dante's Paradise ever and always read each other's thoughts in G.o.d. Looking to him, they find their neighbour. All that the creature needs to see or know, all that the creature can see or know, is the face of him from whom he came.

Not seeing and knowing it, he will never be at rest; seeing and knowing it, his existence will yet indeed be a mystery to him and an awe, but no more a dismay. To know that it is, and that it has power neither to continue nor to cease, must to any soul alive enough to appreciate the fact, be merest terror, save also it knows one with it the Power by which it exists. From the man who comes to know and feel that Power in him and one with him, loneliness, anxiety, and fear vanish; he is no more an orphan without a home, a little one astray on the cold waste of a helpless consciousness. 'Father,' he cries, 'hold me fast to thy creating will, that I may know myself one with it, know myself its outcome, its willed embodiment, and rejoice without trembling. Be this the delight of my being, that thou hast willed, hast loved me forth; let me know that I am thy child, born to obey thee. Dost thou not justify thy deed to thyself by thy tenderness toward me? dost thou not justify it to thy child by revealing to him his claim on thee because of thy disparture of him from thyself, because of his utter dependence on thee?

Father, thou art in me, else I could not be in thee, could have no house for my soul to dwell in, or any world in which to walk abroad,'

These truths are, I believe, the very necessities of fact, but a man does not therefore, at a given moment, necessarily know them. It is absolutely necessary, none the less, to his real being, that he should know these spiritual relations in which he stands to his Origin; yea, that they should be always present and potent with him, and become the heart and sphere and all-pervading substance of his consciousness, of which they are the ground and foundation. Once to have seen them, is not always to see them. There are times, and those times many, when the cares of this world--with no right to any part in our thought, seeing either they are unreasonable or G.o.d imperfect--so blind the eyes of the soul to the radiance of the eternally true, that they see it only as if it ought to be true, not as if it must be true; as if it might be true in the region of thought, but could not be true in the region of fact.

Our very senses, filled with the things of our pa.s.sing sojourn, combine to cast discredit upon the existence of any world for the sake of which we are furnished with an inner eye, an eternal ear. But had we once seen G.o.d face to face, should we not be always and for ever sure of him?

we have had but glimpses of the Father. Yet, if we had seen G.o.d face to face, but had again become impure of heart--if such a fearful thought be a possible idea--we should then no more believe that we had ever beheld him. A sin-beclouded soul could never recall the vision whose essential verity was its only possible proof. None but the pure in heart see G.o.d; only the growing-pure hope to see him. Even those who saw the Lord, the express image of his person, did not see G.o.d. They only saw Jesus--and then but the outside Jesus, or a little more. They were not pure in heart; they saw him and did not see him. They saw him with their eyes, but not with those eyes which alone can see G.o.d. Those were not born in them yet. Neither the eyes of the resurrection-body, nor the eyes of unembodied spirits can see G.o.d; only the eyes of that eternal something that is of the very essence of G.o.d, the thought-eyes, the truth-eyes, the love-eyes, can see him. It is not because we are created and he uncreated, it is not because of any difference involved in that difference of all differences, that we cannot see him. If he pleased to take a shape, and that shape were presented to us, and we saw that shape, we should not therefore be seeing G.o.d. Even if we knew it was a shape of G.o.d--call it even G.o.d himself our eyes rested upon; if we had been told the fact and believed the report; yet, if we did not see the _G.o.dness_, were not capable of recognizing him, so as without the report to know the vision him, we should not be seeing G.o.d, we should only be seeing the tabernacle in which for the moment he dwelt. In other words, not seeing what in the form made it a form fit for him to take, we should not be seeing a presence which could only be G.o.d.

To see G.o.d is to stand on the highest point of created being. Not until we see G.o.d--no partial and pa.s.sing embodiment of him, but the abiding presence--do we stand upon our own mountain-top, the height of the existence G.o.d has given us, and up to which he is leading us. That there we should stand, is the end of our creation. This truth is at the heart of everything, means all kinds of completions, may be uttered in many ways; but language will never compa.s.s it, for form will never contain it. Nor shall we ever see, that is know G.o.d perfectly. We shall indeed never absolutely know man or woman or child; but we may know G.o.d as we never can know human being--as we never can know ourselves. We not only may, but we must so know him, and it can never be until we are pure in heart. Then shall we know him with the infinitude of an ever-growing knowledge.

'What is it, then, to be pure in heart?'

I answer, It is not necessary to define this purity, or to have in the mind any clear form of it. For even to know perfectly, were that possible, what purity of heart is, would not be to be pure in heart.

'How then am I to try after it? can I do so without knowing what it is?'

Though you do not know any definition of purity, you know enough to begin to be pure. You do not know what a man is, but you know how to make his acquaintance--perhaps even how to gain his friends.h.i.+p. Your brain does not know what purity is; your heart has some acquaintance with purity itself. Your brain in seeking to know what it is, may even obstruct your heart in bettering its friends.h.i.+p with it. To know what purity is, a man must already be pure; but he who can put the question, already knows enough of purity, I repeat, to begin to become pure. If this moment you determine to start for purity, your conscience will at once tell you where to begin. If you reply, 'My conscience says nothing definite'; I answer, 'You are but playing with your conscience.

Determine, and it will speak.'

If you care to see G.o.d, be pure. If you will not be pure, you will grow more and more impure; and instead of seeing G.o.d, will at length find yourself face to face with a vast inane--a vast inane, yet filled full of one inhabitant, that devouring monster, your own false self. If for this neither do you care, I tell you there is a Power that will not have it so; a Love that will make you care by the consequences of not caring.

You who seek purity, and would have your fellow-men also seek it, spend not your labour on the stony ground of their intellect, endeavouring to explain what purity is; give their imagination the one pure man; call up their conscience to witness against their own deeds; urge upon them the grand resolve to be pure. With the first endeavour of a soul toward her, Purity will begin to draw nigh, calling for admittance; and never will a man have to pause in the divine toil, asking what next is required of him; the demands of the indwelling Purity will ever be in front of his slow-labouring obedience.

If one should say, 'Alas, I am shut out from this blessing! I am not pure in heart: never shall I see G.o.d!' here is another word from the same eternal heart to comfort him, making his grief its own consolation.

For this man also there is blessing with the messenger of the Father.

Unhappy men were we, if G.o.d were the G.o.d of the perfected only, and not of the growing, the becoming! 'Blessed are they,' says the Lord, concerning the not yet pure, 'which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.' Filled with righteousness, they are pure; pure, they shall see G.o.d.

Long ere the Lord appeared, ever since man was on the earth, nay, surely, from the very beginning, was his spirit at work in it for righteousness; in the fullness of time he came in his own human person, to fulfil all righteousness. He came to his own of the same mind with himself, who hungered and thirsted after righteousness. They should be fulfilled of righteousness!