and consoling, from the Power that lives and makes him live--that in his
hungering and thirsting he is blessed, for he shall be filled. His
hungering and thirsting is the divine pledge of the divine meal. The
more he hungers and thirsts the more blessed is he; the more room is
there in him to receive that which God is yet more eager to give than
he to have. It is the miserable emptiness that makes a man hunger and
thirst; and, as the body, so the soul hungers after what belongs to its
nature. A man hungers and thirsts after righteousness because his nature
needs it--needs it because it was made for it; his soul desires its own.
His nature is good, and desires more good. Therefore, that he is empty
of good, needs discourage no one; for what is emptiness but room to be
filled? Emptiness is need of good; the emptiness that desires good, is
itself good. Even if the hunger after righteousness should in part
spring from a desire after self-respect, it is not therefore _all_
false. A man could not even be ashamed of himself, without some 'feeling
sense' of the beauty of rightness. By divine degrees the man will at
length grow sick of himself, and desire righteousness with a pure
hunger--just as a man longs to eat that which is good, nor thinks of the
strength it will restore.
To be filled with righteousness, will be to forget even righteousness
itself in the bliss of being righteous, that is, a child of God. The
thought of righteousness will vanish in the fact of righteousness. When
a creature is just what he is meant to be, what only he is fit to be;
when, therefore, he is truly himself, he never thinks what he is. He
_is_ that thing; why think about it? It is no longer outside of him that
he should contemplate or desire it.
God made man, and woke in him the hunger for righteousness; the Lord
came to enlarge and rouse this hunger. The first and lasting effect of
his words must be to make the hungering and thirsting long yet more. If
their passion grow to a despairing sense of the unattainable, a
hopelessness of ever gaining that without which life were worthless, let
them remember that the Lord congratulates the hungry and thirsty, so
sure does he know them of being one day satisfied. Their hunger is a
precious thing to have, none the less that it were a bad thing to retain
unappeased. It springs from the lack but also from the love of good, and
its presence makes it possible to supply the lack. Happy, then, ye
pining souls! The food you would have, is the one thing the Lord would
have you have, the very thing he came to bring you! Fear not, ye
hungering and thirsting; you shall have righteousness enough, though
none to spare--none to spare, yet enough to overflow upon every man. See
how the Lord goes on filling his disciples, John and Peter and James and
Paul, with righteousness from within! What honest soul, interpreting the
servant by the master, and unbiassed by the tradition of them that would
shut the kingdom of heaven against men, can doubt what Paul means by
'the righteousness which is of God by faith'? He was taught of Jesus
Christ through the words he had spoken; and the man who does not
understand Jesus Christ, will never understand his apostles. What
righteousness could St Paul have meant but the same the Lord would have
men hunger and thirst after--the very righteousness wherewith God is
righteous! They that hunger and thirst after such only righteousness,
shall become pure in heart, and shall see God.
If your hunger seems long in being filled, it is well it should seem
long. But what if your righteousness tarry, because your hunger after it
is not eager? There are who sit long at the table because their desire
is slow; they eat as who should say, We need no food. In things
spiritual, increasing desire is the sign that satisfaction is drawing
nearer. But it were better to hunger after righteousness for ever than
to dull the sense of lack with the husks of the Christian scribes and
lawyers: he who trusts in the atonement instead of in the father of
Jesus Christ, fills his fancy with the chimeras of a vulgar legalism,
not his heart with the righteousness of God.
Hear another like word of the Lord. He assures us that the Father hears
the cries of his elect--of those whom he seeks to worship him because
they worship in spirit and in truth. 'Shall not God avenge his own
elect,' he says, 'which cry day and night unto him?' Now what can God's
elect have to keep on crying for, night and day, but righteousness? He
allows that God seems to put off answering them, but assures us he will
answer them speedily. Even now he must be busy answering their prayers;
increasing hunger is the best possible indication that he is doing so.
For some divine reason it is well they should not yet know in themselves
that he is answering their prayers; but the day must come when we shall
be righteous even as he is righteous; when no word of his will miss
being understood because of our lack of righteousness; when no
unrighteousness shall hide from our eyes the face of the Father.
These two promises, of seeing God, and being filled with righteousness,
have place between the individual man and his father in heaven directly;
the promise I now come to, has place between a man and his God as the
God of other men also, as the father of the whole family in heaven and
earth: 'Blessed are the peace-makers, for they shall be called the
children of God.'
Those that are on their way to see God, those who are growing pure in
heart through hunger and thirst after righteousness, are indeed the
children of God; but specially the Lord calls those his children who, on
their way home, are peace-makers in the travelling company; for, surely,
those in any family are specially the children, who make peace with and
among the rest. The true idea of the universe is the whole family in
heaven and earth. All the children in this part of it, the earth, at
least, are not good children; but however far, therefore, the earth is
from being a true portion of a real family, the life-germ at the root of
the world, that by and for which it exists, is its relation to God the
father of men. For the development of this germ in the consciousness of
the children, the church--whose idea is the purer family within the more
mixed, ever growing as leaven within the meal by absorption, but which
itself is, alas! not easily distinguishable from the world it would
change--is one of the passing means. For the same purpose, the whole
divine family is made up of numberless human families, that in these,
men may learn and begin to love one another. God, then, would make of
the world a true, divine family. Now the primary necessity to the very
existence of a family is peace. Many a human family is no family, and
the world is no family yet, for the lack of peace. Wherever peace is
growing, there of course is the live peace, counteracting disruption and
disintegration, and helping the development of the true essential
family. The one question, therefore, as to any family is, whether peace
or strife be on the increase in it; for peace alone makes it possible
for the binding grass-roots of life--love, namely, and justice--to
spread throughout what were else but a wind-blown heap of still drifting
sand. The peace-makers quiet the winds of the world ever ready to be up
and blowing; they tend and cherish the interlacing roots of the
ministering grass; they spin and twist many uniting cords, and they
weave many supporting bands; they are the servants, for the truth's
sake, of the individual, of the family, of the world, of the great
universal family of heaven and earth. They are the true children of that
family, the allies and ministers of every clasping and consolidating
force in it; fellow-workers they are with God in the creation of the
family; they help him to get it to his mind, to perfect his father-idea.
Ever radiating peace, they welcome love, but do not seek it; they
provoke no jealousy. They are the children of God, for like him they
would be one with his creatures. His eldest son, his very likeness, was
the first of the family-peace-makers. Preaching peace to them that were
afar off and them that were nigh, he stood undefended in the turbulent
crowd of his fellows, and it was only over his dead body that his
brothers began to come together in the peace that will not be broken. He
rose again from the dead; his peace-making brothers, like himself, are
dying unto sin; and not yet have the evil children made their father
hate, or their elder brother flinch.
On the other hand, those whose influence is to divide and separate,
causing the hearts of men to lean away from each other, make themselves
the children of the evil one: born of God and not of the devil, they
turn from God, and adopt the devil their father. They set their God-born
life against God, against the whole creative, redemptive purpose of his
unifying will, ever obstructing the one prayer of the first-born--that
the children may be one with him in the Father. Against the heart-end of
creation, against that for which the Son yielded himself utterly, the
sowers of strife, the fomenters of discord, contend ceaseless. They do
their part with all the other powers of evil to make the world which the
love of God holds together--a world at least, though not yet a
family--one heaving mass of dissolution. But they labour in vain.
Through the mass and through it, that it may cohere, this way and that,
guided in dance inexplicable of prophetic harmony, move the children of
God, the lights of the world, the lovers of men, the fellow-workers with
God, the peace-makers--ever weaving, after a pattern devised by, and
known only to him who orders their ways, the web of the world's history.
But for them the world would have no history; it would vanish, a cloud
of windborne dust. As in his labour, so shall these share in the joy of
God, in the divine fruition of victorious endeavour. Blessed are the
peace-makers, for they shall be called the children of God--_the_
children because they set the Father on the throne of the Family.
The main practical difficulty, with some at least of the peace-makers,
is, how to carry themselves toward the undoers of peace, the disuniters
of souls. Perhaps the most potent of these are not those powers of the
church visible who care for canon and dogma more than for truth, and for
the church more than for Christ; who take uniformity for unity; who
strain at a gnat and swallow a camel, nor knowing what spirit they are
of; such men, I say, are perhaps neither the most active nor the most
potent force working for the disintegration of the body of Christ. I
imagine also that neither are the party-liars of politics the worst foes
to divine unity, ungenerous, and often knowingly false as they are to
their opponents, to whom they seem to have no desire to be honest and
fair. I think, rather, they must be the babbling liars of the social
circle, and the faithless brothers and unloving sisters of disunited
human families. But why inquire? Every self-assertion, every form of
self-seeking however small or poor, world-noble or grotesque, is a
separating and scattering force. And these forces are multitudinous,
these points of radial repulsion are innumerable, because of the
prevailing passion of mean souls to seem great, and feel important. If
such cannot hope to attract the attention of the great-little world, if
they cannot even become 'the cynosure of neighbouring eyes,' they will,
in what sphere they may call their own, however small it be, try to make
a party for themselves; each, revolving on his or her own axis, will
attempt to self-centre a private whirlpool of human monads. To draw such
a surrounding, the partisan of self will sometimes gnaw asunder the most
precious of bonds, poison whole broods of infant loves. Such real
schismatics go about, where not inventing evil, yet rejoicing in
iniquity; mishearing; misrepresenting; paralyzing affection; separating
hearts. Their chosen calling is that of the strife-maker, the child of
the dividing devil. They belong to the class of _the perfidious_, whom
Dante places in the lowest infernal gulf as their proper home. Many a
woman who now imagines herself standing well in morals and religion,
will find herself at last just such a child of the devil; and her misery
will be the hope of her redemption.
But it is not for her sake that I write these things: would such a woman
recognize her own likeness, were I to set it down as close as words
could draw it? I am rather as one groping after some light on the true
behaviour toward her kind. Are we to treat persons known for liars and
strife-makers as the children of the devil or not? Are we to turn away
from them, and refuse to acknowledge them, rousing an ignorant strife of
tongues concerning our conduct? Are we guilty of connivance, when silent
as to the ambush whence we know the wicked arrow privily shot? Are we to
call the traitor to account? or are we to give warning of any sort? I
have no answer. Each must carry the question that perplexes to the Light
of the World. To what purpose is the spirit of God promised to them that
ask it, if not to help them order their way aright?
One thing is plain--that we must love the strife-maker; another is
nearly as plain--that, if we do not love him, we must leave him alone;
for without love there can be no peace-making, and words will but
occasion more strife. To be kind neither hurts nor compromises. Kindness
has many phases, and the fitting form of it may avoid offence, and must
avoid untruth.
We must not fear what man can do to us, but commit our way to the Father
of the Family. We must be nowise anxious to defend ourselves; and if not
ourselves because God is our defence, then why our friends? is he not
their defence as much as ours? Commit thy friend's cause also to him who
judgeth righteously. Be ready to bear testimony for thy friend, as thou
wouldst to receive the blow struck at him; but do not plunge into a nest
of scorpions to rescue his handkerchief. Be true to him thyself, nor
spare to show thou lovest and honourest him; but defence may dishonour:
men may say, What! is thy friend's esteem then so small? He is unwise
who drags a rich veil from a cactus-bush.
Whatever our relation, then, with any peace-breaker, our mercy must ever
be within call; and it may help us against an indignation too strong to
be pure, to remember that when any man is reviled for righteousness-sake,
then is he blessed.
_THE REWARD OF OBEDIENCE._
'Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.' 'Blessed are
they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the
kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and
persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for
my sake. Rejoice and be exceeding glad, for great is your reward in
heaven; for so persecuted they the prophets which were before
you.'--_Matthew_, v. 7, 10 11, 12.
Mercy cannot get in where mercy goes not out. The outgoing makes way for
the incoming. God takes the part of humanity against the man. The man
must treat men as he would have God treat him. 'If ye forgive men their
trespasses,' the Lord says, 'your heavenly father will also forgive you;
but if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your father
forgive your trespasses. And in the prophecy of the judgment of the Son
of man, he represents himself as saying, 'Inasmuch as ye have done it
unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.'
But the demand for mercy is far from being for the sake only of the man
who needs his neighbour's mercy; it is greatly more for the sake of the
man who must show the mercy. It is a small thing to a man whether or not
his neighbour be merciful to him; it is life or death to him whether or
not he be merciful to his neighbour. The greatest mercy that can be
shown to man, is to make him merciful; therefore, if he will not be
merciful, the mercy of God must compel him thereto. In the parable of
the king taking account of his servants, he delivers the unmerciful
debtor to the tormentors, 'till he should pay all that was due unto
him.' The king had forgiven his debtor, but as the debtor refuses to
pass on the forgiveness to his neighbour--the only way to make a return
in kind--the king withdraws his forgiveness. If we forgive not men their
trespasses, our trespasses remain. For how can God in any sense forgive,
remit, or send away the sin which a man insists on retaining?
Unmerciful, we must be given up to the tormentors until we learn to be
merciful. God is merciful: we must be merciful. There is no blessedness
except in being such as God; it would be altogether unmerciful to leave
us unmerciful. The reward of the merciful is, that by their mercy they
are rendered capable of receiving the mercy of God--yea, God himself,
who is Mercy.
That men may be drawn to taste and see and understand, the Lord
associates reward with righteousness. The Lord would have men love
righteousness, but how are they to love it without being acquainted with
it? How are they to go on loving it without a growing knowledge of it?
To draw them toward it that they may begin to know it, and to encourage
them when assailed by the disappointments that accompany endeavour, he
tells them simply a truth concerning it--that in the doing of it, there
is great reward. Let no one start with dismay at the idea of a reward of
righteousness, saying virtue is its own reward. Is not virtue then a
reward? Is any other imaginable reward worth mentioning beside it? True,
the man may, after this mode or that, mistake the reward promised; not
the less must he have it, or perish. Who will count himself deceived by
overfulfilment? Would a parent be deceiving his child in saying, 'My
boy, you will have a great reward if you learn Greek,' foreseeing his
son's delight in Homer and Plato--now but a valueless waste in his eyes?
When his reward comes, will the youth feel aggrieved that it is Greek,
and not bank-notes?
The nature indeed of the Lord's promised rewards is hardly to be
mistaken; yet the foolish remarks one sometimes hears, make me wish to
point out that neither is the Lord proclaiming an ethical system, nor
does he make the blunder of representing as righteousness the doing of a
good thing because of some advantage to be thereby gained. When he
promises, he only states some fact that will encourage his
disciples--that is, all who learn of him--to meet the difficulties in
the way of doing right and so learning righteousness, his object being
to make men righteous, not to teach them philosophy. I doubt if those
who would, on the ground of mentioned reward, set aside the teaching of
the Lord, are as anxious to be righteous as they are to prove him
unrighteous. If they were, they would, I think, take more care to
represent him truly; they would make farther search into the thing, nor
be willing that he whom the world confesses its best man, and whom they
themselves, perhaps, confess their superior in conduct, should be found
less pure in theory than they. Must the Lord hide from his friends that
they will have cause to rejoice that they have been obedient? Must he
give them no help to counterbalance the load with which they start on
their race? Is he to tell them the horrors of the persecutions that
await them, and not the sweet sympathies that will help them through?
Was it wrong to assure them that where he was going they should go also?
The Lord could not demand of them more righteousness than he does: 'Be
ye therefore perfect as your father in heaven is perfect;' but not to
help them by word of love, deed of power, and promise of good, would
have shown him far less of a brother and a saviour. It is the part of
the enemy of righteousness to increase the difficulties in the way of
becoming righteous, and to diminish those in the way of seeming
righteous. Jesus desires no righteousness for the pride of being
righteous, any more than for advantage to be gained by it; therefore,
while requiring such purity as the man, beforehand, is unable to
imagine, he gives him all the encouragement he can. He will not enhance
his victory by difficulties--of them there are enough--but by
completeness. He will not demand the loftiest motives in the yet far
from loftiest soul: to those the soul must grow. He will hearten the
child with promises, and fulfil them to the contentment of the man.
Men cannot be righteous without love; to love a righteous man is the
best, the only way to learn righteousness: the Lord gives us himself to
love, and promises his closest friendship to them that overcome.
God's rewards are always in kind. 'I am your father; be my children, and
I will be your father.' Every obedience is the opening of another door
into the boundless universe of life. So long as the constitution of that
universe remains, so long as the world continues to be made by God,
righteousness can never fail of perfect reward. Before it could be
otherwise, the government must have passed into other hands.
The idea of merit is nowise essential to that of reward. Jesus tells us
that the lord who finds his servant faithful, will make him sit down to
meat, and come forth and serve him; he says likewise, 'When ye have done
all, say we are unprofitable servants; we have done only that which it
was our duty to do.' Reward is the rebound of Virtue's well-served ball
from the hand of Love; a sense of merit is the most sneaking shape that
self-satisfaction can assume. God's reward lies closed in all
well-doing: the doer of right grows better and humbler, and comes nearer
to God's heart as nearer to his likeness; grows more capable of God's
own blessedness, and of inheriting the kingdoms of heaven and earth. To
be made greater than one's fellows is the offered reward of hell, and
involves no greatness; to be made greater than one's self, is the divine
reward, and involves a real greatness. A man might be set above all his
fellows, to be but so much less than he was before; a man cannot be
raised a hair's-breadth above himself, without rising nearer to God. The
reward itself, then, is righteousness; and the man who was righteous for
the sake of such reward, knowing what it was, would be righteous for the
sake of righteousness,--which yet, however, would not be perfection.
But I must distinguish and divide no farther now.
The reward of mercy is not often of this world; the merciful do not
often receive mercy in return from their fellows; perhaps they do not
often receive much gratitude. None the less, being the children of their
father in heaven, will they go on to show mercy, even to their enemies.
They must give like God, and like God be blessed in giving.
There is a mercy that lies in the endeavour to share with others the
best things God has given: they who do so will be persecuted, and
reviled, and slandered, as well as thanked and loved and befriended. The
Lord not only promises the greatest possible reward; he tells his
disciples the worst they have to expect. He not only shows them the fair
countries to which they are bound; he tells them the truth of the rough
weather and the hardships of the way. He will not have them choose in
ignorance. At the same time he strengthens them to meet coming
difficulty, by instructing them in its real nature. All this is part of
his preparation of them for his work, for taking his yoke upon them, and
becoming fellow-labourers with him in his father's vineyard. They must
not imagine, because they are the servants of his father, that therefore
they shall find their work easy; they shall only find the reward great.
Neither will he have them fancy, when evil comes upon them, that
something unforeseen, unprovided for, has befallen them. It is just
then, on the contrary, that their reward comes nigh: when men revile
them and persecute them, then they may know that they are blessed. Their
suffering is ground for rejoicing, for exceeding gladness. The ignominy
cast upon them leaves the name of the Lord's Father written upon their
foreheads, the mark of the true among the false, of the children among
the slaves. With all who suffer for the world, persecution is the seal
of their patent, a sign that they were sent: they fill up that which is
behind of the afflictions of Christ for his body's sake.
Let us look at the similar words the Lord spoke in a later address to
his disciples, in the presence of thousands, on the plain,--supplemented
with lamentation over such as have what they desire: St Luke vi. 20--26.