Happy are they whom nothing less than such restoration will comfort!  But would such restoration be comfort enough for the heart of Jesus to give?  Was ever love so deep, so pure, so perfect, as to be good enough for him?  And suppose the love between the parted two had been such, would the mere restoration in the future of that which once he had, be ground enough for so emphatically proclaiming the man blessed now, blessed while yet in the midnight of his loss, and knowing nothing of the hour of his deliverance?  To call a man blessed in his sorrow because of something to be given him, surely implies a something better than what he had before!  True, the joy that is past may have been so great that the man might well feel blessed in the merest hope of its restoration; but would that be meaning enough for the word in the mouth of the Lord?  That the interruption of his blessedness was but temporary, would hardly be fit ground for calling the man blessed in that interruption. Blessed is a strong word, and in the mouth of Jesus means all it can mean.  Can his saying here mean less than—­’Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted with a bliss well worth all the pain of the medicinal sorrow’?  Besides, the benediction surely means that the man is blessed because of his condition of mourning, not in spite of it.  His mourning is surely a part at least of the Lord’s ground for congratulating him:  is it not the present operative means whereby the consolation is growing possible?  In a word, I do not think the Lord would be content to call a man blessed on the mere ground of his going to be restored to a former bliss by no means perfect; I think he congratulated the mourners upon the grief they were enduring, because he saw the excellent glory of the comfort that was drawing nigh; because he knew the immeasurably greater joy to which the sorrow was at once clearing the way and conducting the mourner.  When I say greater, God forbid I should mean other! I mean the same bliss, divinely enlarged and divinely purified—­passed again through the hands of the creative Perfection.  The Lord knew all the history of love and loss; beheld throughout the universe the winged Love discrowning the skeleton Fear.  God’s comfort must ever be larger than man’s grief, else were there gaps in his Godhood.  Mere restoration would leave a hiatus, barren and growthless, in the development of his children.

But, alas, what a pinched hope, what miserable expectations, most who call themselves the Lord’s disciples derive from their notions of his teaching!  Well may they think of death as the one thing to be right zealously avoided, and for ever lamented!  Who would forsake even the window-less hut of his sorrow for the poor mean place they imagine the Father’s house!  Why, many of them do not even expect to know their friends there! do not expect to distinguish one from another of all the holy assembly!  They