those who gather and hoard, not those who lay down the law to their
neighbours, not those that condescend, any more than those that shrug
the shoulder and shoot out the lip, that have any share in the kingdom
of the Father. That kingdom has no relation with or resemblance to the
kingdoms of this world, deals with no one thing that distinguishes their
rulers, except to repudiate it. The Son of God will favour no smallest
ambition, be it in the heart of him who leans on his bosom. The kingdom
of God, the refuge of the oppressed, the golden age of the new world,
the real Utopia, the newest yet oldest Atlantis, the home of the
children, will not open its gates to the most miserable who would rise
above his equal in misery, who looks down on any one more miserable than
himself. It is the home of perfect brotherhood. The poor, the beggars in
spirit, the humble men of heart, the unambitious, the unselfish; those
who never despise men, and never seek their praises; the lowly, who see
nothing to admire in themselves, therefore cannot seek to be admired of
others; the men who give themselves away--these are the freemen of the
kingdom, these are the citizens of the new Jerusalem. The men who are
aware of their own essential poverty; not the men who are poor in
friends, poor in influence, poor in acquirements, poor in money, but
those who are poor in spirit, who _feel themselves poor creatures_; who
know nothing to be pleased with themselves for, and desire nothing to
make them think well of themselves; who know that they need much to make
their life worth living, to make their existence a good thing, to make
them fit to live; these humble ones are the poor whom the Lord calls
blessed. When a man says, I am low and worthless, then the gate of the
kingdom begins to open to him, for there enter the true, and this man
has begun to know the truth concerning himself. Whatever such a man has
attained to, he straightway forgets; it is part of him and behind him;
his business is with what he has not, with the things that lie above and
before him. The man who is proud of anything he thinks he has reached,
has not reached it. He is but proud of himself, and imagining a cause
for his pride. If he had reached, he would already have begun to forget.
He who delights in contemplating whereto he has attained, is not merely
sliding back; he is already in the dirt of self-satisfaction. The gate
of the kingdom is closed, and he outside. The child who, clinging to his
Father, dares not think he has in any sense attained while as yet he is
not as his Father--his Father's heart, his Father's heaven is his
natural home. To find himself thinking of himself as above his fellows,
would be to that child a shuddering terror; his universe would contract
around him, his ideal wither on its throne. The least motion of
self-satisfaction, the first thought of placing himself in the forefront
of estimation, would be to him a flash from the nether abyss. God is his
life and his lord. That his father should be content with him must be
all his care. Among his relations with his neighbour, infinitely
precious, comparison with his neighbour has no place. Which is the
greater is of no account. He would not choose to be less than his
neighbour; he would choose his neighbour to be greater than he. He looks
up to every man. Otherwise gifted than he, his neighbour is more than
he. All come from the one mighty father: shall he judge the live
thoughts of God, which is greater and which is less? In thus denying,
thus turning his back on himself, he has no thought of saintliness, no
thought but of his father and his brethren. To such a child heaven's
best secrets are open. He clambers about the throne of the Father
unrebuked; his back is ready for the smallest heavenly playmate; his
arms are an open refuge for any blackest little lost kid of the Father's
flock; he will toil with it up the heavenly stair, up the very steps of
the great white throne, to lay it on the Father's knees. For the glory
of that Father is not in knowing himself God, but in giving himself
away--in creating and redeeming and glorifying his children.
The man who does not house self, has room to be his real self--God's
eternal idea of him. He lives eternally; in virtue of the creative power
present in him with momently, unimpeded creation, he _is_. How should
there be in him one thought of ruling or commanding or surpassing! He
can imagine no bliss, no good in being greater than some one else. He is
unable to wish himself other than he is, except more what God made him
for, which is indeed the highest willing of the will of God. His
brother's wellbeing is essential to his bliss. The thought of standing
higher in the favour of God than his brother, would make him miserable.
He would lift every brother to the embrace of the Father. Blessed are
the poor in spirit, for they are of the same spirit as God, and of
nature the kingdom of heaven is theirs.
'Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,' expresses the
same principle: the same law holds in the earth as in the kingdom of
heaven. How should it be otherwise? Has the creator of the ends of the
earth ceased to rule it after his fashion, because his rebellious
children have so long, to their own hurt, vainly endeavoured to rule it
after theirs? The kingdom of heaven belongs to the poor; the meek shall
inherit the earth. The earth as God sees it, as those to whom the
kingdom of heaven belongs also see it, is good, all good, very good, fit
for the meek to inherit; and one day they shall inherit it--not indeed
as men of the world count inheritance, but as the maker and owner of the
world has from the first counted it. So different are the two ways of
inheriting, that one of the meek may be heartily enjoying his
possession, while one of the proud is selfishly walling him out from the
spot in it he loves best.
The meek are those that do not assert themselves, do not defend
themselves, never dream of avenging themselves, or of returning aught
but good for evil. They do not imagine it their business to take care of
themselves. The meek man may indeed take much thought, but it will not
be for himself. He never builds an exclusive wall, shuts any honest
neighbour out. He will not always serve the wish, but always the good of
his neighbour. His service must be true service. Self shall be no umpire
in affair of his. Man's consciousness of himself is but a shadow: the
meek man's self always vanishes in the light of a real presence. His
nature lies open to the Father of men, and to every good impulse is as
it were empty. No bristling importance, no vain attendance of fancied
rights and wrongs, guards his door, or crowds the passages of his house;
they are for the angels to come and go. Abandoned thus to the truth, as
the sparks from the gleaming river dip into the flowers of Dante's
unperfected vision, so the many souls of the visible world, lights from
the father of lights, enter his heart freely; and by them he inherits
the earth he was created to inherit--possesses it as his father made him
capable of possessing, and the earth of being possessed. Because the man
is meek, his eye is single; he sees things as God sees them, as he would
have his child see them: to confront creation with pure eyes is to
possess it.
How little is the man able to make his own, who would ravish all! The
man who, by the exclusion of others from the space he calls his, would
grasp any portion of the earth as his own, befools himself in the
attempt. The very bread he has swallowed cannot so in any real sense be
his. There does not exist such a power of possessing as he would
arrogate. There is not such a sense of having as that of which he has
conceived the shadow in his degenerate and lapsing imagination. The real
owner of his demesne is that pedlar passing his gate, into a divine
soul receiving the sweetnesses which not all the greed of the so-counted
possessor can keep within his walls: they overflow the cup-lip of the
coping, to give themselves to the footfarer. The motions aerial, the
sounds, the odours of those imprisoned spaces, are the earnest of a
possession for which is ever growing his power of possessing. In no wise
will such inheritance interfere with the claim of the man who calls them
his. Each possessor has them his, as much as each in his own way is
capable of possessing them. For possession is determined by the kind and
the scope of the power of possessing; and the earth has a fourth
dimension of which the mere owner of its soil knows nothing.
The child of the maker is naturally the inheritor. But if the child try
to possess as a house the thing his father made an organ, will he
succeed in so possessing it? Or if he do nestle in a corner of its case,
will he oust thereby the Lord of its multiplex harmony, sitting regnant
on the seat of sway, and drawing with 'volant touch' from the house of
the child the liege homage of its rendered wealth? To the poverty of
such a child are all those left, who think to have and to hold after the
corrupt fancies of a greedy self.
We cannot see the world as God means it, save in proportion as our souls
are meek. In meekness only are we its inheritors. Meekness alone makes
the spiritual retina pure to receive God's things as they are, mingling
with them neither imperfection nor impurity of its own. A thing so
beheld that it conveys to me the divine thought issuing in its form, is
mine; by nothing but its mediation between God and my life, can anything
be mine. The man so dull as to insist that a thing is his because he has
bought it and paid for it, had better bethink himself that not all the
combined forces of law, justice, and goodwill, can keep it his; while
even death cannot take the world from the man who possesses it as alone
the maker of him and it cares that he should possess it. This man leaves
it, but carries it with him; that man carries with him only its loss. He
passes, unable to close hand or mouth upon any portion of it. Its
_ownness_ to him was but the changes he could make in it, and the
nearness into which he could bring it to the body he lived in. That body
the earth in its turn possesses now, and it lies very still, changing
nothing, but being changed. Is this the fine of the great buyer of land,
to have his fine pate full of fine dirt? In the soul of the meek, the
earth remains an endless possession--his because he who made it is
his--his as nothing but his maker could ever be the creature's. He has
the earth by his divine relation to him who sent it forth from him as a
tree sends out its leaves. To inherit the earth is to grow ever more
alive to the presence, in it and in all its parts, of him who is the
life of men. How far one may advance in such inheritance while yet in
the body, will simply depend on the meekness he attains while yet in the
body; but it may be, as Frederick Denison Maurice, the servant of God,
thought while yet he was with us, that the new heavens and the new earth
are the same in which we now live, righteously inhabited by the meek,
with their deeper-opened eyes. What if the meek of the dead be thus
possessing it even now! But I do not care to speculate. It is enough
that the man who refuses to assert himself, seeking no recognition by
men, leaving the care of his life to the Father, and occupying himself
with the will of the Father, shall find himself, by and by, at home in
the Father's house, with all the Father's property his.
Which is more the possessor of the world--he who has a thousand houses,
or he who, without one house to call his own, has ten in which his knock
at the door would rouse instant jubilation? Which is the richer--the man
who, his large money spent, would have no refuge; or he for whose
necessity a hundred would sacrifice comfort? Which of the two possessed
the earth--king Agrippa or tent-maker Paul?
Which is the real possessor of a book--the man who has its original and
every following edition, and shows, to many an admiring and envying
visitor, now this, now that, in binding characteristic, with
possessor-pride; yea, from secret shrine is able to draw forth and
display the author's manuscript, with the very shapes in which his
thoughts came forth to the light of day,--or the man who cherishes one
little, hollow-backed, coverless, untitled, bethumbed copy, which he
takes with him in his solitary walks and broods over in his silent
chamber, always finding in it some beauty or excellence or aid he had
not found before--which is to him in truth as a live companion?
For what makes the thing a book? Is it not that it has a soul--the mind
in it of him who wrote the book? Therefore only can the book be
possessed, for life alone can be the possession of life. The dead
possess their dead only to bury them.
Does not he then, who loves and understands his book, possess it with
such possession as is impossible to the other? Just so may the world
itself be possessed--either as a volume unread, or as the wine of a
soul, 'the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and
treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.' It may be possessed as a
book filled with words from the mouth of God, or but as the
golden-clasped covers of that book; as an embodiment or incarnation of
God himself; or but as a house built to sell. The Lord loved the world
and the things of the world, not as the men of the world love them, but
finding his father in everything that came from his father's heart.
The same spirit, then, is required for possessing the kingdom of heaven,
and for inheriting the earth. How should it not be so, when the one
Power is the informing life of both? If we are the Lord's, we possess
the kingdom of heaven, and so inherit the earth. How many who call
themselves by his name, would have it otherwise: they would possess the
earth and inherit the kingdom! Such fill churches and chapels on
Sundays: anywhere suits for the worship of Mammon.
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 God, he looks for no God in it. Nor must there needs
be two men to think and feel thus differently. In what diverse fashion
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 companionship,
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 God'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 partition-wall
between man and God. So far is it from opposing any obstacle to the
passage of God'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 God share in his sorrow, yet
in himself God is not sorrowful, and the 'glad creator' never made man
for sorrow: it is but a stormy strait through which he must pass 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 God 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 Godward; 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. God loves not sorrow, yet rejoices to see a man
sorrowful, for in his sorrow man leaves his heavenward door on the
latch, and God 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 fashioned 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 God 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 God because restored to an absence of sorrow? Such a
God were fitly adored only where not one heart worshipped 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_, God
forbid I should mean _other!_ I mean the same bliss, divinely enlarged
and divinely purified--passed 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.
God's comfort must ever be larger than man's grief, else were there gaps
in his Godhood. Mere restoration would leave a hiatus, barren and
growthless, in the development of his children.