service does not follow these, there is good reason for supposing that these are spurious, and worth very little.  The service of man is the outcome of the love of God.  He who begins with poverty of spirit is perfected when, forgetting himself, and coming down from the mountain-top, where the Shekinah cloud of the Glory and the audible voice are, he plunges into the struggles of the multitude below, and frees the devil-ridden boy from the demon that possesses him.  Begin by all means with poverty of spirit, or you will never get to this—­’Blessed are the peacemakers.’  But see to it that poverty of spirit leads to the meekness, the mercifulness, the peace-bringing influence which Christ has pronounced blessed.

II.  What is the peace which Christ’s peacemakers bring?

This is a very favourite text with people that know very little of the depths of Christianity.  They fancy that it appeals to common sense and men’s natural consciences, apart altogether from minutenesses of doctrine or of Christian experience.  They are very much mistaken.  No doubt there is a surface of truth, but only a surface, in the application that is generally given to these words of our text, as if it meant nothing more than ’he is a good man that goes about and tries to make contending people give up their quarrels, and produces a healing atmosphere of tranquillity wherever he goes.’  That is perfectly true, but there is a great deal more in the text than that.  If we consider the Scriptural usage of this great word ‘peace,’ and all the ground that it covers in human experience; if we remember that it enters as an element into Christ’s own name, the ‘Peace-Bringer,’ the ‘Prince of Peace’; and if we notice, as I have already done, the place which this Beatitude occupies in the series, we shall be obliged to look for some far deeper meaning before we can understand the sweep of our Lord’s intention here.

I do not think that I am going one inch too far, or forcing meanings into His words which they are not intended to bear, when I say that the first characteristic of the peace, which His disciples have been passed through their apprenticeship in order to fit them to bring, is the peace of reconciliation with God.  The cause of all the other fightings in the world is that men’s relation to the Father in heaven is disturbed, and that, whilst there flow out from Him only amity and love, these are met by us with antagonism often, with opposition of will often, with alienation of heart often, and with indifference and forgetfulness almost uniformly.  So the first thing to be done to make men at peace with one another and with themselves is to rectify their relation to God, and bring peace there.