Hence, our Lord began His Sermon on the Mount in these words:  “Blessed are the poor in spirit; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.  Blessed are they that mourn; for they shall be comforted.  Blessed are the meek; for they shall inherit the earth.  Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness; for they shall be filled."[3] The very opening of this discourse, which He intended should go down through the ages as a manifesto declaring the real nature of His kingdom, and the spirit which His followers must possess, asserts the necessity of a needy, recipient, asking mind, upon the part of a sinner.  All this phraseology implies destitution; and a destitution that cannot be self-supplied.  He who hungers and thirsts after righteousness is conscious of an inward void, in respect to righteousness, that must be filled from abroad.  He who is meek is sensible that he is dependent for his moral excellence.  He who is poor in spirit is, not pusillanimous as Thomas Paine charged upon Christianity but, as John of Damascus said of himself, a man of spiritual cravings, vir desideriorum.

Now, all this delineation of the general attitude requisite in order to the reception of the Christian religion is summed up again, in the declaration of our text:  “Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.”  Is a man, then, sensible that his understanding is darkened by sin, and that he is destitute of clear and just apprehensions of divine things?  Does his consciousness of inward poverty assume this form?  If he would be delivered from his mental blindness, and be made rich in spiritual knowledge, he must adopt a teachable and recipient attitude.  He must not assume that his own mind is the great fountain of wisdom, and seek to clear up his doubts and darkness by the rationalistic method of self-illumination.  On the contrary, he must go beyond his mind and open a book, even the Book of Revelation, and search for the wisdom it contains and proffers.  And yet more than this.  As this volume is the product of the Eternal Spirit himself, and this Spirit conspires with the doctrines which He has revealed, and exerts a positive illuminating influence, he must seek communion therewith.  From first to last, therefore, the darkened human spirit must take a waiting posture, in order to enlightenment.  That part of “the clean heart and the right spirit” which consists in the knowledge of divine things can be obtained only through a child-like bearing and temper.  This is what our Lord means, when He pronounces a blessing upon the poor in spirit, the hungry and the thirsting soul.  Men, in their pride and self-reliance, in their sense of manhood, may seek to enter the kingdom of heaven by a different method; they may attempt to speculate their way through all the mystery that overhangs human life, and the doubts that confuse and baffle the human understanding; but when they find that the unaided intellect only “spots a thicker gloom” instead of pouring a serener ray, wearied and worn they return, as it were, to the sweet days of childhood, and in the gentleness, and tenderness, and docility of an altered mood, learn, as Bacon did in respect to the kingdom of nature, that the kingdom of heaven is open only to the little child.