but respond to all desires which He inspires.  They are premonitions of His purposes, like rosy clouds that run before the chariot of the sunrise.  The desire to be righteous is already righteousness in heart and will, and reveals the true bent of the soul.  Its realisation in life is a question of time.  The progressive fulfilment here points to completeness in heaven, when we shall behold His face in righteousness, and be satisfied when we awake in His likeness.

V. Again we have a grace which is exercised to men.  Mercy is more than meekness.  That implied opposition, and was largely negative.  This does not regard the conduct of others at all, and is really love in exercise to the needy, especially the unworthy.  It embraces pity, charitable forbearance, beneficence, and is revealed in acts, in words, in tears.  It is blessed in itself.  A life of selfishness is hell; a life of mercy is sweet with some savour of heaven.  It is the consequence of mercy received from God.  Poverty of spirit, sorrow, hunger after righteousness bring deep experiences of God’s gentle forbearance and bestowing love, and will make us like Him in proportion as they are real.  Our mercifulness, then, is a reflection from His.  His ought to be the measure and pattern of ours in depth, scope, extent of self-sacrifice, and freeness of its gifts.  A stringent requirement!

Our exercise of mercy is the condition of our receiving it.  On the whole, the world gives us back, as a mirror does, the reflection of our own faces; and merciful men generally get what they give.  But that is a law with many exceptions, and Jesus means more than that.  Merciful men get mercy from God—­not, of course, that we deserve mercy by being merciful.  That is a contradiction in terms; for mercy is precisely that which we do not deserve.  The place of mercy in this series shows that Jesus regarded it as the consequence, not the cause, of our experience of God’s mercy.  But He teaches over and over again that a hard, unmerciful heart forfeits the divine mercy.  It does so, because such a disposition tends to obscure the very state of mind to which alone God’s mercy can be given.  Such a man must have forgotten his poverty and sorrow, his longings and their rich reward, and so must have, for the time, passed from the place where he can take in God’s gift.  A life inconsistent with Christian motives will rob a Christian of Christian privileges.  The hand on his brother’s throat destroys the servant’s own forgiveness.  He cannot be at once a rapacious creditor and a discharged bankrupt.

VI.  If detached from its connection, there is little blessedness in the next Beatitude.  What is the use of telling us how happy purity of heart will make us?  It only provokes the despairing question, ’And how am I to be pure?’ But when we set this word in its place here, it does bring hope.  For it teaches that purity is the result of all that has gone before, and comes from that purifying