"Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for
they shall be filled," is the central beatitude; in a measure it
embraces all the others, for every virtue they inculcate is included in
righteousness. But it is often rejected as impracticable because
fanciful teachers who substitute subtle definitions for simple duties
have twisted its plain words until righteousness is made something so
unreasonable as to be repulsive to a right mind. As a matter of fact,
it means no more than rightness; the hunger and thirst for
righteousness is but the earnest, supreme desire and endeavour to be
right and to do right at all times, the appetite for the right.
Theological righteousness may mean some strange imputed quality laid on
a man like a cloak to cover his real condition or a bill of health
given to a sick man. But men who live next to real things care nothing
one way or the other for theoretical rightness; they want the real
article. And a right man will not be satisfied to have even the Most
High think of him as being perfectly right when he knows he falls far
short of it. He would rather be the faltering pursuer of actual
rightness than the possessor of a hypothetical, ascribed perfection.
The great Teacher cares nothing about imaginary virtues; He praises
those who ardently seek the real ones. He knows that in the market of
character cash alone is currency; here you cannot draw checks on some
other person's deposits. To Him it is better by far to die facing the
right than to live in smug content with borrowed merits. This world
will never be content with a gospel that offers only vicarious virtues;
at its heart it knows too well its need of the genuine usable ones; it
has at least the dormant faculties of an appetite for rightness.
And all this world story is but a record of the struggle for rightness.
All human progress is but its fruitage. In every age there have been
glorious souls who have made this passion a thing that glowed in their
lives and became a light to their day. In every man the divine
discontent that divides him from the animal is the sign of this desire
in some form; it shows man seeking to find more perfect, more nearly
right relations with the things about him. As the things about him
come to include God and heaven and things unseen so will his search for
rightness become wider and deeper and more spiritual. Every form of
spiritual aspiration, every religion, no matter how uncouth and
strange, is still the soul of man seeking right relations to the
infinite.
What a glorious thing is this passion for the right; what visions it
has seen, what strength it has given to their realization. It is the
great tide that, moving restless and resistless in our bosoms, has
carried us on towards God. We cannot but believe it is born of him.
It does not originate in him, for it disturbs his peace, it stirs him
from sloth, it spurs him to new and often unwelcome endeavours. It
ever holds before him the shining possibility of a perfect being in a
perfect world.
No wonder Christ used the figure of hunger and thirst. Literal
appetites have been the motives back of the world's struggle for
physical rightness; yet these cravings have not been more general or
more forceful than those of the soul. But for hunger and thirst man
would have lived in perfect content with the form and facts of life as
he found them; progress, all that we call civilization, would not have
been.
Man is happy in proportion as necessity compels him to heed these
cravings. So is it in the moral world; the struggle has been our
salvation. To cease to strive for rightness is to cease to live.
Individually and nationally they are happy who accept the rigorous
climate of lofty ethical ideals, who are not content to take life as
they find it, but who seek to cultivate flowers and fruits of paradise
on the sterile, rocky soil of the human heart. This is the life that
Jesus shows, the life that seeks and finds the truth, that with
passionate ardour seeks right relations both with His fellows and with
His Father. Out of the fullness of experience, in the midst of His own
struggle He encourages all who strive; they shall be satisfied. No
ideal, no noble passion, no glorious sacrifice, no honest endeavour for
the right was ever in vain; the soul finds itself in seeking the
supreme good.