But the primal need of the human soul is yet greater than this; the longing after righteousness is only one of the manifestations of it; the need itself is that of existence not self-existent for the consciousness of the presence of the causing Self-existent.  It is the man’s need of God.  A moral, that is, a human, a spiritual being, must either be God, or one with God.  This truth begins to reveal itself when the man begins to feel that he cannot cast out the thing he hates, cannot be the thing he loves.  That he hates thus, that he loves thus, is because God is in him, but he finds he has not enough of God.  His awaking strength manifests itself in his sense of weakness, for only strength can know itself weak.  The negative cannot know itself at all.  Weakness cannot know itself weak.  It is a little strength that longs for more; it is infant righteousness that hungers after righteousness.

To every soul dissatisfied with itself, comes this word, at once rousing and consoling, from the Power that lives and makes him live—­that in his hungering and thirsting he is blessed, for he shall be filled.  His hungering and thirsting is the divine pledge of the divine meal.  The more he hungers and thirsts the more blessed is he; the more room is there in him to receive that which God is yet more eager to give than he to have.  It is the miserable emptiness that makes a man hunger and thirst; and, as the body, so the soul hungers after what belongs to its nature.  A man hungers and thirsts after righteousness because his nature needs it—­needs it because it was made for it; his soul desires its own.  His nature is good, and desires more good.  Therefore, that he is empty of good, needs discourage no one; for what is emptiness but room to be filled?  Emptiness is need of good; the emptiness that desires good, is itself good.  Even if the hunger after righteousness should in part spring from a desire after self-respect, it is not therefore all false.  A man could not even be ashamed of himself, without some ’feeling sense’ of the beauty of rightness.  By divine degrees the man will at length grow sick of himself, and desire righteousness with a pure hunger—­just as a man longs to eat that which is good, nor thinks of the strength it will restore.

To be filled with righteousness, will be to forget even righteousness itself in the bliss of being righteous, that is, a child of God.  The thought of righteousness will vanish in the fact of righteousness.  When a creature is just what he is meant to be, what only he is fit to be; when, therefore, he is truly himself, he never thinks what he is.  He is that thing; why think about it?  It is no longer outside of him that he should contemplate or desire it.