which is the sure answer of God to our poverty, mourning, and longing.  Such purity is plainly progressive, and as it increases, so does the vision of God grow.  The more the glasses of the telescope are cleansed, the brighter does the great star shine to the gazer.  ‘No man hath seen God,’ nor can see Him, either amid the mists of earth or in the cloudless sky of heaven, if by seeing we mean perceiving by sense, or full, direct comprehension by spirit.  But seeing Him is possible even now, if by it we understand the knowledge of His character, the assurance of His presence, the sense of communion with Him.  Our earthly consciousness of God may become so clear, direct, real, and certain, that it deserves the name of vision.  Such blessed intuition of Him is the prerogative of those whose hearts Christ has cleansed, and whose inward eye is therefore able to behold God, because it is like Him.  ’Unless the eye were sunlike, how could it see the sun?’ We can blind ourselves to Him, by wallowing in filth.  Impurity unfits for seeing purity.  Swedenborg profoundly said that the wicked see only blackness where the sun is.

Like all these Beatitudes, this has a double fulfilment, as the kingdom has two stages of here and hereafter.  Purity of heart is the condition of the vision of God in heaven.  Without holiness, ’no man shall see the Lord.’  The sight makes us pure, and purity makes us see.  Thus heaven will be a state of ever-increasing, reciprocally acting sight and holiness.  Like Him because we see Him, we shall see Him more because we have assimilated what we see, as the sunshine opens the petals, and tints the flower with its own colours the more deeply, the wider it opens.

VII.  Once more we have the alternation of a grace exercised to men.  If we give due weight to the order of these Beatitudes, we shall feel that Christ’s peacemaker must be something more than a mere composer of men’s quarrels.  For he has to be trained by all the preceding experiences, and has to be emptied of self, penitent, hungering for and filled with righteousness, and therefore pure in heart as well as, in regard to men, meek and merciful, ere he can hope to fill this part.  That apprenticeship deepens the conception of the peace which Christ’s subjects are to diffuse.  It is, first and chiefly, the peace which enters the soul that has traversed all these stages; that is to say, the Christian peacemaker is first to seek to bring about peace between men and God, by beseeching them to be reconciled to Him, and then afterwards, as a consequence of this, is to seek to diffuse through all human relations the blessed unity and amity which flow most surely from the common possession of the peace of God.  Of course, the relation which the subjects of the true King bear to all wars and fightings, to all discord and strife, is not excluded, but is grounded on this deeper meaning.  The centuries that have passed since the words were spoken, have not yet brought up the Christian conscience to the full perception of their meaning and obligation.  Too many of us still believe that ‘great doors and effectual’ can be blown open with gunpowder, and regard this Beatitude as a counsel of perfection, rather than as one of the fundamental laws of the kingdom.