We have seen that being is the gift promised to the lovers of wisdom,
and that the promise may either be referred to the possession of God,
who is the fountain of all being, or to the true possession of
ourselves, which is a consequence of our possession of Him. In either
aspect, that possession is blessedness. If we have God, we have real
life. We truly own ourselves when we have God. We really live when God
lives in us, the life of our lives. We are ourselves, when we have
ceased to be ourselves, and have taken God to be the Self of
ourselves.
Such a life, God-possessing, brings the one good which corresponds to
our whole nature. All other good is fragmentary, and being fragmentary
is inadequate, as men's restless search after various forms of good
but too sadly proves. Why does the merchantman wander over sea and
land seeking for many goodly pearls? Because he has not found one of
great price, but tries to make up by their number for the
insufficiency of each. But the soul is made, not to find its wealth in
the manifold but in the one, and no aggregation of incompletenesses
will make up completeness, nor any number of partial satisfactions of
this and the other appetite or desire make a man feel that he has
enough and more than enough. We must have all good in one Person, if
we are ever to know the rest of full satisfaction. It will be fatal to
our blessedness if we have to resort to a hundred different sources
for different supplies. The true blessedness is simple and yet
infinitely complex, for it comes from possessing the one Person in
whom dwell for us all forms of good, whether good be understood as
intellectual or moral or emotional. That which cannot be everything to
the soul that seeks is scarcely worth the seeking, and certainly is
not wisely proposed as the object of a life's search, for such a life
will be a failure if it fails to find its object, and scarcely less
tragically, though perhaps less conspicuously, a failure if it finds
it. All other good is but apparent; God is the one real object that
meets all man's desires and needs, and makes him blessed with real
blessedness, and fills the cup of life with the draught that slakes
thirst and satisfies the thirstiest.