GOD’S FAMILY.

‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.’  ’Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.’  ’Blessed are the peace-makers, for they shall be called the children of God.’—­Matthew v. 8, 6, 9.

The cry of the deepest in man has always been, to see God.  It was the cry of Moses and the cry of Job, the cry of psalmist and of prophet; and to the cry, there has ever been faintly heard a far approach of coming answer.  In the fullness of time the Son appears with the proclamation that a certain class of men shall behold the Father:  ’Blessed are the pure in heart,’ he cries, ‘for they shall see God.’  He who saw God, who sees him now, who always did and always will see him, says, ’Be pure, and you also shall see him.’  To see God was the Lord’s own, eternal, one happiness; therefore he knew that the essential bliss of the creature is to behold the face of the creator.  In that face lies the mystery of a man’s own nature, the history of a man’s own being.  He who can read no line of it, can know neither himself nor his fellow; he only who knows God a little, can at all understand man.  The blessed in Dante’s Paradise ever and always read each other’s thoughts in God.  Looking to him, they find their neighbour.  All that the creature needs to see or know, all that the creature can see or know, is the face of him from whom he came.  Not seeing and knowing it, he will never be at rest; seeing and knowing it, his existence will yet indeed be a mystery to him and an awe, but no more a dismay.  To know that it is, and that it has power neither to continue nor to cease, must to any soul alive enough to appreciate the fact, be merest terror, save also it knows one with it the Power by which it exists.  From the man who comes to know and feel that Power in him and one with him, loneliness, anxiety, and fear vanish; he is no more an orphan without a home, a little one astray on the cold waste of a helpless consciousness.  ‘Father,’ he cries, ’hold me fast to thy creating will, that I may know myself one with it, know myself its outcome, its willed embodiment, and rejoice without trembling.  Be this the delight of my being, that thou hast willed, hast loved me forth; let me know that I am thy child, born to obey thee.  Dost thou not justify thy deed to thyself by thy tenderness toward me? dost thou not justify it to thy child by revealing to him his claim on thee because of thy disparture of him from thyself, because of his utter dependence on thee?  Father, thou art in me, else I could not be in thee, could have no house for my soul to dwell in, or any world in which to walk abroad,’