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!