That men may be drawn to taste and see and understand, the Lord associates reward with righteousness.  The Lord would have men love righteousness, but how are they to love it without being acquainted with it?  How are they to go on loving it without a growing knowledge of it?  To draw them toward it that they may begin to know it, and to encourage them when assailed by the disappointments that accompany endeavour, he tells them simply a truth concerning it—­that in the doing of it, there is great reward.  Let no one start with dismay at the idea of a reward of righteousness, saying virtue is its own reward.  Is not virtue then a reward?  Is any other imaginable reward worth mentioning beside it?  True, the man may, after this mode or that, mistake the reward promised; not the less must he have it, or perish.  Who will count himself deceived by overfulfilment?  Would a parent be deceiving his child in saying, ’My boy, you will have a great reward if you learn Greek,’ foreseeing his son’s delight in Homer and Plato—­now but a valueless waste in his eyes?  When his reward comes, will the youth feel aggrieved that it is Greek, and not bank-notes?

The nature indeed of the Lord’s promised rewards is hardly to be mistaken; yet the foolish remarks one sometimes hears, make me wish to point out that neither is the Lord proclaiming an ethical system, nor does he make the blunder of representing as righteousness the doing of a good thing because of some advantage to be thereby gained.  When he promises, he only states some fact that will encourage his disciples—­that is, all who learn of him—­to meet the difficulties in the way of doing right and so learning righteousness, his object being to make men righteous, not to teach them philosophy.  I doubt if those who would, on the ground of mentioned reward, set aside the teaching of the Lord, are as anxious to be righteous as they are to prove him unrighteous.  If they were, they would, I think, take more care to represent him truly; they would make farther search into the thing, nor be willing that he whom the world confesses its best man, and whom they themselves, perhaps, confess their superior in conduct, should be found less pure in theory than they.  Must the Lord hide from his friends that they will have cause to rejoice that they have been obedient?  Must he give them no help to counterbalance the load with which they start on their race?  Is he to tell them the horrors of the persecutions that await them, and not the sweet sympathies that will help them through?  Was it wrong to assure them that where he was going they should go also?  The Lord could not demand of them more righteousness than he does:  ’Be ye therefore perfect as your father in heaven is perfect;’ but not to help them by word of love, deed of power, and promise of good, would have shown him far less of a brother and a saviour.  It is the part of the enemy of righteousness to increase the difficulties in the way of becoming righteous, and to diminish