The Christian who moves thus among men seeking to diffuse everywhere the peace with God which fills his own soul, and the peace with all men which they only who have the higher peace can preserve unbroken in their quiet, meek hearts, will be more or less recognised as God-like by men, and will have in his own heart the witness that he is called by God His child.  He will bear visibly the image of his Father, and will hear the voice that speaks to him too as unto a son.

VIII.  The last Beatitude crowns all the paradoxes of the series with what sounds to flesh as a stark contradiction.  The persecuted are blessed.  The previous seven sayings have perfected the portraiture of what a child of the kingdom is to be.  This appends a calm prophecy, which must have shattered many a rosy dream among the listeners, of what his reception by the world will certainly turn out.  Jesus is not summoning men to dominion, honour, and victory; but to scorn and suffering.  His own crown, He knew, was first to be twisted of thorns, and copies of it were to wound His followers’ brows.  Yet even that fate was blessed; for to suffer for righteousness, which is to suffer for Him, brings elevation of spirit, a solemn joy, secret supplies of strength, and sweet intimacies of communion else unknown.  The noble army of martyrs rose before His thoughts as He spoke; and now, eighteen hundred years after, heaven is crowded with those who by axe and stake and gibbet have entered there.  ’The glory dies not, and the grief is past.’  They stoop from their thrones to witness to us that Christ is true, and that the light affliction has wrought an eternal weight of glory.

THE FIRST BEATITUDE

     ’Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of
     Heaven.’—­MATT. v. 2.

’Ye are not come unto the mount that burned with fire, nor unto the sound of a trumpet, and the voice of “awful” words.’  With such accompaniments the old law was promulgated, but here, in this Sermon on the Mount, as it is called, the laws of the Kingdom are proclaimed by the King Himself; and He does not lay them down with the sternness of those written on tables of stone.  No rigid ‘thou shalt’ compels, no iron ‘thou shalt not’ forbids; but each precept is linked with a blessing, and every characteristic that is required is enforced by the thought that it contributes to our highest good.  It fitted well Christ’s character and the lips ‘into which grace is poured,’ that He spake His laws under the guise of these Beatitudes.

This, the first of them, is dead in the teeth of flesh and sense, a paradox to the men who judge good and evil by things external and visible, but deeply, everlastingly, unconditionally, and inwardly true.  All that the world commends and pats on the back, Christ condemns, and all that the world shrinks from and dreads, Christ bids us make our own, and assures us that in it we shall find our true blessing.  ’The poor in spirit,’ they are the happy men.