Thus, dear friends, we have to be content to take the place of recipients, and to accept, not to work out for ourselves, this righteousness for which, more or less feebly, and all of us too feebly, we do sometimes long.  Oh, believe me, away from Him you will never receive into your characters a goodness that will satisfy yourselves.  Siberian prisoners sometimes break their chains and escape for some distance.  They are generally taken back and again shut up in their captivity.  If we are able, as we are in some measure, to break the bondage of evil in ourselves, we are not able to complete our emancipation by any skill, effort, or act of ours.  We must be content to receive the blessing.  There is no loom of earth which can weave, and no needle that man’s hands can use which can stitch together, the pure garment that befits a soul.  We must be content to take the robe of righteousness which Jesus Christ has wrought, and to strip off, by His help, the ancient self, splashed with the filth of the world, and spotted by the flesh:  and to ‘put on the new man,’ which Christ, and Christ alone, bestows.

As for the future fulfilment of this promise—­desire will live in heaven, desire will dilate the spirit, the dilated spirit will be capable of fuller gifts of God-likeness, and increased capacity will ensure increased reception.  Thus, through eternity, in blessed alternation, we shall experience the desire that brings new gifts and the satisfying that produces new desires.

Dear friends, all that I have been trying to say in this sermon is gathered up into the one word—­’that I may be found in Him, not having my own righteousness, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith.’

THE FIFTH BEATITUDE

     ’Blessed are the merciful:  for they shall obtain mercy.’—­MATT. v.
     7.

THE divine simplicity of the Beatitudes covers a divine depth, both in regard to the single precepts and to the sequence of the whole.  I have already pointed out that the first of the series Is to be regarded as the root and germ of all the subsequent ones.  If for a moment we set it aside and consider only the fruits which are successively developed from it, we shall see that the remaining members of the sequence are arranged in pairs, of which each contains, first, a characteristic more inward and relating to the deep things of individual religion; and, second, a characteristic which has its field of action in our relations to men.  For example, the ‘mourners’ and the ‘meek’ are paired.  Those who ’hunger and thirst after righteousness’ and the ‘merciful’ are paired.  ’The pure in heart’ and ‘the peacemakers’ are paired.