THE SIXTH BEATITUDE

     ’Blessed are the pure in heart:  for they shall see God.’—­MATT. v.
     8.

AT first hearing one scarcely knows whether the character described in this great saying, or the promise held out, is the more inaccessible to men.  ‘The pure in heart’:  who may they be?  Is there one of us that can imagine himself possessed of a character fitting him for the vision of God, or such as to make him bear with delight that dazzling blaze?  ’They shall see God,’ whom ‘no man hath seen at any time, nor can see.’  Surely the requirement is impossible, and the promise not less so.  But does Jesus Christ mock us with demands that cannot be satisfied, and dangle before us hopes that can never be realised?  There have been many moralists and would-be teachers who have done that.  What would be the use of saying to a man lying on a battlefield sore wounded, and with both legs shot off, ‘If you will only get up and run, you will be safe’?  What would be the use of telling men how blessed they would be if they were the opposite of what they are?  But that is not Christ’s way.

These words, lofty and remote as they seem, are in truth amongst the most hopeful and radiant that ever came from even His lips.  For they offer the realisation of an apparently impossible character, they promise the possession of an apparently impossible vision; and they soothe fears, and tell us that the sight from which, were it possible, we should sometimes fain shrink, is the source of our purest gladness.  So there are three things, it seems to me, worth our notice in these great words—­How hearts can be made pure; how the pure heart can see God; and how the sight can be simple blessedness.

I. How hearts can be made pure.

Now, the key which has unlocked for us, in previous sermons, the treasures of meaning in these Beatitudes, is especially necessary here.  For, as I have said, if you take this to be a mere isolated saying, it becomes a mockery and a pain.  But if you connect it, as our Lord would have us connect it, with all the preceding links of this wreathed chain describing the characteristics of a devout soul, then it assumes an altogether different appearance.  ‘The pure in heart’ are they who have exercised and received the previous qualifications and bestowments from God.  That is to say, there must precede all such purity as is capable of the divine vision, the poverty of spirit which recognises its true condition, the mourning which rightly feels the gravity and awfulness of that condition, the desire for its opposite, which will never be the ‘hunger and thirst’ of a soul, except it is preceded by a profound sense of sin and the penitence that ensues thereupon.