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."’