The passage: Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they will be filled. Blessed are the peace-makers, for they will be called the children of God. (Matthew v. 8, 6, 9.)
The deepest cry in man has always been to see God. It was the cry of Moses and Job, of psalmist and prophet, and to it a coming answer was faintly heard. In the fullness of time the Son proclaims that a certain class of men shall behold the Father: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” He who always saw God, and sees him now, says, “Be pure, and you also shall see him.” Seeing God was the Lord’s own eternal happiness, so he knew that the essential bliss of the creature is to behold the creator’s face. In that face lies the mystery of a man’s own nature; only one who knows God a little can understand himself or his fellow. The blessed in Dante’s Paradise read each other’s thoughts in God: looking to him, they find their neighbour. All the creature needs or can see or know is the face of him from whom he came. Without it he will never rest; with it, existence remains a mystery and an awe, but no longer a dismay. To know that one exists, unable either to continue or to cease, must be sheer terror to any soul alive enough to feel it, unless it also knows the Power by which it exists as one with it. The man who feels that Power in him loses loneliness, anxiety and fear; he is no longer an orphan astray on the cold waste of a helpless consciousness. “Father,” he cries, “hold me fast to your creating will, that I may know myself its willed embodiment and rejoice without trembling. Let me know I am your child, born to obey you. Do you not justify your deed to yourself by your tenderness toward me, and to your child by revealing his claim on you, since you parted him from yourself and he depends wholly on you? Father, you are in me, else I could not be in you, and my soul would have no house to dwell in nor any world to walk in.”
These truths are, I believe, necessities of fact, but a man does not always know them. Yet he must know these spiritual relations to his Origin, and have them always present and potent, the all-pervading substance of his consciousness. To have seen them once is not always to see them. Often the cares of this world, which have no right to any part in our thought (since either they are unreasonable or God is imperfect), so blind the soul’s eyes that it sees the eternally true only as something that ought to be true, not must be; true perhaps in thought but not in fact. Our senses, filled with passing things, add to the doubt. Had we once seen God face to face, would we not be sure of him for ever? We have had only glimpses. And if we had seen him and then become impure of heart, if that fearful thought is possible, we would no longer believe we had ever beheld him, for a sin-beclouded soul could never recall a vision whose essential truth was its only proof. None but the pure in heart see God; only the growing-pure hope to see him. Even those who saw the Lord, the express image of God’s person, did not see God. They saw only Jesus, and only the outside Jesus or a little more. Not being pure in heart, they saw him with their eyes but not with the eyes that alone can see God, which were not yet born in them. Neither the eyes of the resurrection body nor those of unembodied spirits can see God; only the eyes of that eternal something of God’s very essence, thought-eyes, truth-eyes, love-eyes. Nor is it because we are created and he uncreated that we cannot see him. If he took a shape and we saw it, we would not thereby see God. Even if we were told it was a shape of God and believed it, but did not see the Godness and so could not recognize him without being told, we would see only the tabernacle he dwelt in for the moment, not the presence that could only be God.
To see God is to stand on the highest point of created being. Only when we see God, not in some partial, passing embodiment but as the abiding presence, do we stand on our own mountain-top, the height of existence he has given us and is leading us up to. That is the end of our creation. This truth is at the heart of everything, and no language will compass it. Nor shall we ever know God perfectly, any more than we shall absolutely know any man, woman or child; yet we may know him as we never can know a human being, or ourselves. We not only may but must so know him, and it can never be until we are pure in heart. Then we shall know him with an ever-growing knowledge, infinite.
“What is it, then, to be pure in heart?”
I answer that it is not necessary to define this purity or have a clear form of it in mind; to know perfectly what purity of heart is, were that possible, 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 know no definition of purity, you know enough to begin to be pure. You do not know what a man is, yet you know how to make his acquaintance, perhaps even win his friendship. Your brain does not know what purity is, but your heart has some acquaintance with it, and the brain’s seeking may even hinder the heart in deepening that friendship. A man must already be pure to know what purity is; but whoever can ask the question knows enough to begin to become pure. If you determine this moment to start, your conscience will tell you where to begin. If you answer, “My conscience says nothing definite,” I reply, “You are only playing with your conscience. Determine, and it will speak.”
If you care to see God, be pure. If you will not, you will grow more and more impure, and instead of seeing God will find yourself face to face with a vast inane, filled by a single inhabitant, that devouring monster, your own false self. If you do not care even for that, 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 want others to seek it, do not labour on the stony ground of their intellect, explaining what purity is. Give their imagination the one pure man; call up their conscience to witness against their own deeds; urge them to resolve to be pure. At a soul’s first endeavour toward her, Purity begins to draw near, asking admittance, and he will never need to stop and ask what is required next: the demands of the indwelling Purity will always run ahead of his slow-labouring obedience.
If someone says, “Alas, I am not pure in heart; I am shut out from this blessing and shall never see God!” here is another word from the same eternal heart, making his grief its own consolation. We would be unhappy men if God were the God only of the perfected and not of the growing. Blessed, says the Lord of the not yet pure, are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled. Filled with righteousness, they are pure; pure, they shall see God.
From the beginning, long before the Lord appeared, his spirit worked on earth for righteousness; in the fullness of time he came in person to fulfil all righteousness. He came to his own, who shared his mind and hungered and thirsted after righteousness. They should be filled!
To hunger and thirst after anything implies a sore personal need, a passion. Those who hunger and thirst after righteousness seek with their whole nature the design of that nature, and nothing less will satisfy them. They long to send their sins away and be clean and blessed by their absence, in a word to become God’s men; for with sin gone, all the rest is good. The revolting legal fiction of imputed righteousness arose in no such heart. What they desire is righteousness itself, God’s righteousness, rightness in their own being, in heart and brain and hands. Of such men were Nathanael, in whom was no guile; perhaps Nicodemus, though he came by night; and Zacchaeus. The temple could not deliver them, but by their very futility its observances developed desires they could not meet and made them hunger the more for genuine righteousness. The Lord must bring them this bread from heaven. With him, the live original rightness, in their hearts, they must speedily become righteous; with that Love as their friend, the root and flower of things, they would strive vigorously as well as hunger eagerly. Love is the father of righteousness, which could neither exist nor be hungered after without it. Even the lord of righteousness could not live without the Father in him. Every heart was created for and can live only in and upon love eternal, perfect, pure and unchanging; and love necessitates righteousness. In how many souls has the very thought of a real God waked a longing to be different, pure, right! That a soul can grow dissatisfied with itself and desire a change reveals God as an essential part of its being. The soul knows it cannot set itself right: a need has arisen in it for which it can generate no supply. A presence higher than itself must have caused that need, and a greater power must supply it, for the soul knows its very lack is of something greater than itself.
But the primal need of the human soul is greater still; the longing after righteousness is only one manifestation of it. The need itself is that of existence not self-existent for the consciousness of the presence of the causing Self-existent. It is man’s need of God. A moral, that is, a human, spiritual being must either be God or one with God. This begins to show itself when a man feels he cannot cast out what he hates or be what he loves. That he hates and loves thus is because God is in him, but he finds he has not enough of God. His awakening strength shows itself in his sense of weakness, for only strength can know itself weak; it is a little strength that longs for more, infant righteousness that hungers after righteousness.
To every soul dissatisfied with itself comes this word, at once rousing and consoling, from the Power that lives and makes him live: in his hungering and thirsting he is blessed, for he shall be filled. His hunger is the divine pledge of the divine meal. The more he hungers, the more blessed he is, and the more room there is in him for what God is even more eager to give than he to have. As with the body, so the soul hungers after what belongs to its nature: a man hungers after righteousness because he was made for it. His nature is good and desires more good. So no one need be discouraged that he is empty of good, for what is emptiness but room to be filled? The emptiness that desires good is itself good. Even if the hunger partly springs from a desire for 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 he will grow sick of himself and desire righteousness with a pure hunger, as a man longs to eat what is good without thinking of the strength it will restore.
To be filled with righteousness will be to forget even righteousness in the bliss of being righteous, that is, a child of God. The thought of it will vanish in the fact. A creature who is just what he is meant to be never thinks what he is; he is that thing, and it is no longer outside him to be contemplated or desired.
God made man and woke in him the hunger for righteousness; the Lord came to enlarge it. The first effect of his words must be to make the hungry and thirsty long yet more. If their passion grows into a despairing sense of the unattainable, let them remember that the Lord congratulates the hungry and thirsty, so sure is he they will one day be satisfied. Their hunger is precious, though it would be bad to keep it unappeased: it springs from the lack but also from the love of good, and makes the lack possible to supply. Happy, then, you pining souls! The food you want is the very thing the Lord came to bring! You shall have righteousness enough, none to spare, yet enough to overflow upon every man. See how he goes on filling his disciples, John, Peter, James and Paul, with righteousness from within! What honest soul, interpreting the servant by the master and unbiased by the tradition of those who 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 his words, and whoever does not understand Jesus will never understand his apostles. What righteousness could Paul mean but that which the Lord would have men hunger after, the very righteousness with which God is righteous? Those who hunger and thirst after such righteousness only shall become pure in heart and shall see God.
If your hunger seems long in being filled, it is well that it should. But what if your righteousness tarries because your hunger is not eager? Some sit long at the table because their desire is slow; they eat as if to say, We need no food. In spiritual things, increasing desire is the sign that satisfaction is nearer. But it is better to hunger after righteousness for ever than to dull the sense of lack with the husks of the Christian scribes and lawyers: whoever 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. The Lord assures us that the Father hears the cries of his elect, those who worship him in spirit and in truth: “Shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him?” What can they keep crying for but righteousness? He allows that God seems to delay, but assures us he will answer speedily. Even now God must be answering their prayers; increasing hunger is the best sign of it. For some divine reason they are not yet to know it in themselves; but the day must come when we shall be righteous as he is righteous, when no word of his will be misunderstood for lack of our righteousness and no unrighteousness will hide the Father’s face.
These two promises, of seeing God and of being filled with righteousness, hold directly between the individual and his father in heaven. The next holds between a man and God as the God of other men also, 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 on their way to see God, growing pure in heart through hunger and thirst after righteousness, are indeed God’s children; but the Lord specially calls his children those who, on the way home, are peace-makers in the travelling company, for in any family those are specially children who make peace with and among the rest. The true idea of the universe is the whole family in heaven and earth. Not all earth’s children are good, and it is far from a true family; yet the life-germ at the root of the world is its relation to God the father of men. The church, whose idea is the purer family within the more mixed, growing like leaven in meal (though alas not easily told from the world it would change), is one passing means of developing this germ in the children’s consciousness. For the same purpose the divine family is made up of numberless human families, in which men may learn to love one another. God would make the world a true family, and the primary necessity of any family is peace. Many a human family is no family, and the world none yet, for lack of peace. Wherever peace grows, it counteracts disruption. The one question about any family is whether peace or strife is increasing, for peace alone lets the binding grass-roots of life, love and justice, spread through what would else be a wind-blown heap of drifting sand. The peace-makers quiet the world’s winds and tend the interlacing grass-roots, spinning uniting cords and weaving supporting bands. For truth’s sake they serve the individual, the family, the world, the great family of heaven and earth: its true children, and fellow-workers with God in creating the family and perfecting his father-idea. They radiate peace, welcome love but do not seek it, and provoke no jealousy. They are 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 those far off and those near, he stood undefended in the turbulent crowd of his fellows, and only over his dead body did his brothers begin to come together in the peace that will not be broken. He rose again; his peace-making brothers, like him, are dying to sin; and the evil children have not yet made their father hate or their elder brother flinch.
Those whose influence divides, turning men’s hearts away from each other, make themselves children of the evil one: born of God, they turn from him and adopt the devil as father. They set their God-born life against God’s whole creative, redemptive purpose, obstructing the first-born’s one prayer, that the children may be one with him in the Father. The sowers of strife contend ceaselessly against the heart-end of creation, that for which the Son gave himself utterly, and with all the other powers of evil do their part to make the world, which God’s love holds together, one heaving mass of dissolution. But they labour in vain. Through that mass, that it may cohere, move the children of God, the lights of the world, the peace-makers, guided in an inexplicable dance of prophetic harmony, ever weaving the web of the world’s history after a pattern known only to him who orders their ways. But for them the world would have no history; it would vanish, a cloud of windborne dust. As they share his labour, they shall share the joy of God in 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, for some peace-makers at least, is how to behave toward the undoers of peace. Perhaps the most potent of these are not the powers of the visible church who care for canon and dogma more than truth, and for the church more than Christ, who take uniformity for unity and strain at a gnat and swallow a camel, not knowing what spirit they are of. Nor, I imagine, are the party-liars of politics the worst foes of divine unity, ungenerous and often knowingly false as they are to opponents. I think the worst must rather be the babbling liars of the social circle, and the faithless brothers and unloving sisters of disunited families. But why inquire? Every self-assertion, every self-seeking however small or grotesque, is a separating force, and they are multitudinous because mean souls so passionately want to seem great and feel important. If they cannot attract the attention of the great-little world, or even become “the cynosure of neighbouring eyes,” they will try to make a party in whatever sphere they can call their own, each revolving on his own axis, centring a private whirlpool of human monads. To draw such a following, the partisan of self will sometimes gnaw asunder the most precious bonds and poison whole broods of infant loves. Such real schismatics go about, if not inventing evil, rejoicing in iniquity, mishearing, misrepresenting, paralyzing affection, separating hearts. Theirs is the calling of the strife-maker, the child of the dividing devil. They belong to the perfidious, whom Dante places in the lowest infernal gulf. 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 this: would such a woman recognize her likeness if I drew it as closely as words could? I am rather groping for light on how to behave toward her kind. Are we to treat known liars and strife-makers as children of the devil or not? Are we to turn away and refuse to acknowledge them, rousing an ignorant strife of tongues about our conduct? Are we guilty of connivance when silent about the ambush from which we know the wicked arrow is shot? Are we to call the traitor to account, or give warning in some way? I have no answer. Each must carry the question to the Light of the World. To what purpose is God’s spirit promised to those who ask, if not to help them order their way aright?
One thing is plain, that we must love the strife-maker; another nearly as plain, that if we do not love him we must leave him alone, for without love there is no peace-making and words only cause more strife. Kindness neither hurts nor compromises; it has many phases, and the fitting form 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 not be anxious to defend ourselves; and if not ourselves, because God is our defence, then why our friends, who have the same defence? Commit your friend’s cause to him who judges righteously. Be ready to bear testimony for your friend as you would be to take the blow struck at him, but do not plunge into a nest of scorpions to rescue his handkerchief. Be true to him and show you love and honour him; but defence may dishonour, for men may say, What! is your friend’s esteem so small? He is unwise who drags a rich veil from a cactus-bush.
Whatever our relation with any peace-breaker, our mercy must be always within call; and against an indignation too strong to be pure, it may help to remember that anyone reviled for righteousness’ sake is blessed.