It is very hard to be both firm and tolerant, not letting the foolish heart expand into a lazy glow of benevolence to all beliefs, and so perilling one’s own, nor letting intense adherence to our own convictions darken into impotent wrath against their harshest opponents.  But let us remember that as God is our great example of mercy, so Christ is our great example of patience, both under the world’s unbelief and the world’s persecution.

II.  God’s Gift to the persecuted.

‘The kingdom of heaven.’

This last promise is the same as the first—­to express completeness, a rounded whole.  All the others are but elements of this.

That highest reward given to the perfectest saint is but the fuller possession of what is given in germ to the humblest and sinfullest at the very first.  The poor in spirit gets it at the beginning.

It is not implied by this promise that a Christian man’s blessedness depends on the accident of some other person’s behaviour to him, or that martyrs have a place which none others can reach.  But theirs is the kingdom of heaven as a natural result of the character which brings about persecution, and as a natural result of the development of that character which persecution brings about.  This promise, like all the others, has its twofold fulfilment.

There is a present recompense.

Persecution is the result of a character which brings Christians into the kingdom.  Theirs is the kingdom—­they are subjects.  To them it is given to enter.

Persecution makes the present consciousness of the possession of the kingdom more vivid and joyous.  It brings the enforced sense of a vocation separate from the hostile world’s.  As Thomas Fuller puts it somewhere, in troublous times the Church builds high, just as the men do in cities where there is little room to expand on the ground level.

Persecution brightens and solidifies hope, and thus may become infinitely sweet and blessed.  How often it has been given to the martyr, as it was given to Stephen, to see heaven opened and Jesus standing at the right hand of God, as if risen to His feet to uphold as well as to receive His servant.  Paul and Silas made the prison walls ring with their praises, though their backs were livid with wales and stained with blood.  And we, in our far smaller trials for Christ’s sake, may have the same more conscious possession of the kingdom and brightened hope of yet fuller possession of it.

There is a future recompense in the perfect kingdom, where men are rewarded according to their capacities.  And if the way in which we have met the world’s evil has been right, then that will have made us fit for a fuller possession.

In closing we recur to the thought of all these Beatitudes as a chain and the beginning of all as being penitence and faith.

Many a poor man, or many a little child, may have a higher place in heaven than some who have died at the stake for their Lord, for not our history, but our character, determines our place there, and all the fulness of the kingdom belongs to every one who with penitent heart comes to God in Christ, and then by slow degrees from that root brings forth first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear.