Bible Commentaries
Matthew 5

Verse 3

The First Beatitude

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.— Matthew 5:3.

1. The Beatitudes, which stand in the forefront of Christ’s moral system, are not meant to convey an exhaustive description of the Christian character; they refer to moral qualities of which society can take no cognizance and to which it offers no rewards—unobtrusive qualities which press no claims and exact no recognitions, and which depend for their existence on a man’s own inward self-regulation. No doubt the qualities here described issue in action, and often in very striking action. They are the motive power of many noble acts, they inspire much of the heroism of the world, their results win the praise, the enthusiasm, the homage of mankind; but in themselves they must exist, before anything of this kind can take place, as deliberately chosen laws of character and of inward being. They do not easily lend themselves to that self-advertisement which is the bane of our modern quasi-religious movements, and it would be hard to construct out of them materials for a thrilling biography; and yet, when accepted as a basis of character, they are full of power—their un-self-conscious influence is the strongest thing in the world, the thing that still works miracles, the thing that attracts, and moves, and sways, and tells in spite of every external gulf. They are to be cultivated for themselves, not for their results; for a man would find it hard, if not impossible, to cultivate any one of them for the value of the power and influence it would give him. The passion of the heart must love them for their own sake, if it would take them in perfectly and distribute all around their precious results. They come down from heaven, and none may summon the gifts of heaven for any ulterior reason; those who would win them must love them for themselves, for their own intrinsic beauty. Every one of them, if rightly looked at, will kindle within us that sense of beauty, that desire, that longing, which is the first step towards possession. It is something to admire, to envy, to long for them, to be able to appreciate their moral beauty, to have “eyes to see and ears to hear,” even if one fails grievously to reproduce them in oneself. And the very tone and temper of our day, while in some ways it is a hindrance, comes in here to help us. In an age when men were weary of the rules of ecclesiastics, the hair-splittings of mere ceremonialists and of moral expedients, Christ first uttered them, and their simple ethical beauty went into the hearts of those who heard them. Who can say that there is not much in our modern conditions of the same weariness, produced, too, by much the same means?

Last night I spent at home; I meant to dedicate the time to writing, but I was in a mood too dark and hopeless to venture. The exhaustion of Sunday remained; I tried light reading in vain. At last Charley came in from school, and I made him do his Latin exercise before me; all the while I kept my eyes fixed on that engraving of the head of Christ by Leonardo da Vinci, which I have had framed, and felt the calm majesty of the countenance by degrees exerting an influence over me, which was sedative. Then I made him read over, slowly, the Beatitudes, and tried to fix my mind and heart upon them, and believe them; explaining them to him afterwards, and to myself as I went on. “Blessed are”—not the successful, but “the poor in spirit.” “Blessed,” not the rich, nor the admired, nor the fashionable, nor the happy, but “the meek and the pure in heart, and the merciful.” They fell upon my heart like music. 1 [Note: Life and Letters of the Rev. F. W. Robertson, 442.]

2. Our Lord begins His reckoning of blessedness with poverty in spirit. And this is evidently just; for if blessedness depends upon attainments, then the first step is to be conscious of poverty. He who thinks himself already rich, why should he desire increase? Poverty in spirit leads to mourning and to hunger and thirst for righteousness. The heavenly throne is given to those for whom it is prepared; but they must previously have been prepared, and preparation of heart involves the poverty in spirit from which the golden ladder of the Beatitudes climbs upward to blessedness. Earthly thrones are generally built with steps up to them; the remarkable thing about the thrones of the eternal kingdom is that the steps are all down to them. We must descend if we would reign, stoop if we would rise, gird ourselves to wash the feet of the disciples as a common slave in order to share the royalty of our Divine Master.

The world has its own idea of blessedness. Blessed is the man who is always right. Blessed is the man who is satisfied with himself. Blessed is the man who is strong. Blessed is the man who rules. Blessed is the man who is rich. Blessed is the man who is popular. Blessed is the man who enjoys life. These are the beatitudes of sight and this present world. It comes with a shock, and opens a new realm of thought, that not one of these men entered Jesus’ mind when He treated of blessedness. 1 [Note: John Watson, The Mind of the Master, 55.]

I

The Poor

1. Whom did Jesus mean by the poor in spirit? It is usually supposed that He meant the humble-minded, but this was probably not His meaning, as we see from the corresponding passage in St. Luke’s Gospel. There we find the Beatitude in a simpler form: “Blessed are ye poor”; and this phrase must be taken in a literal sense of material poverty, because it is followed by the words, “Woe unto you that are rich!” and it is impossible, of course, to suppose that Jesus would have condemned those who are spiritually rich. We may feel tolerably sure that the very same people whom St. Luke calls simply “poor” are called by St. Matthew “poor in spirit.” But why the variation of phrase, and which of the two phrases did Jesus actually use? The latter question is beside the mark. Strictly speaking, He did not use either. He spoke Aramaic, the language which in His day had superseded Hebrew in Palestine, and the Gospels were written in Greek. Both phrases are therefore translations, and the actual words used are beyond our reach. There is reason, however, to think that St. Matthew’s “poor in spirit” is the later, and St. Luke’s “poor” the earlier, version of the saying.

We might illustrate our Lord’s point of view by a reference to the Psalms. The Psalmist frequently speaks of the poor (the poor and needy) as if they were as a matter of course the servants of God. They are constantly identified with the godly, the righteous, the faithful; they suffer undeservedly; God has a special care of them and listens to their cry. There is a certain amount of truth, no doubt, in this picture of the poor which the Psalms draw. It is true to some extent nowadays. Poverty still has a tendency to wean people from worldliness. Poverty may, of course, be so grinding as to fill the mind continually with sordid anxieties and so make a spiritual life almost impossible. But poor people are often strikingly unworldly.

There is a tendency in all material possession to obscure the needs it cannot satisfy. A full hand helps a man to forget an empty heart. The things that effectually empty life are the things that are commonly supposed to fill it. The man who is busy building barns and storehouses is sometimes shutting out the sweet alluring light of the city of God and the vision of heavenly mansions. “Property” is not the best stimulus to faith. “Blessed are the poor.” There are fewer obstacles and obstructions between them and the Kingdom. They are not compassed about with spurious satisfactions. There are not so many things standing between them and life’s essentials. There is one delusion the less to be swept from their minds. History bears all this out. If you look into the story of the Kingdom, you will find it has ever been the kingdom of the poor. They have ever been the first to enter in.

The poverty which was honoured by the great painters and thinkers of the Middle Ages was an ostentatious, almost a presumptuous poverty: if not this, at least it was chosen and accepted—the poverty of men who had given their goods to feed the simpler poor, and who claimed in honour what they had lost in luxury; or, at the best, in claiming nothing for themselves, had still a proud understanding of their own self-denial, and a confident hope of future reward. But it has been reserved for this age to perceive and tell the blessedness of another kind of poverty than this; not voluntary nor proud, but accepted and submissive; not clear-sighted nor triumphant, but subdued and patient; partly patient in tenderness—of God’s will; partly patient in blindness—of man’s oppression; too laborious to be thoughtful—too innocent to be conscious—too long experienced in sorrow to be hopeful—waiting in its peaceful darkness for the unconceived dawn; yet not without its own sweet, complete, untainted happiness, like intermittent notes of birds before the daybreak, or the first gleams of heaven’s amber on the eastern grey. 1 [Note: Ruskin, Academy Notes, 1858.]

2. Yet the picture which the Psalms put before us is, after all, an ideal one. It is very far from being true that all poor people are, or ever were, followers of righteousness and godliness. Our Lord felt this, just as He also felt the corresponding truth about the rich. He begins by telling His disciples how hard it is for them that have riches to enter into the Kingdom of God, and then He modifies the saying by restricting it to them that trust in riches. Exactly the same modification has taken place in St. Matthew’s version of the Beatitude as compared with St. Luke’s. The blessing is pronounced on the poor, not, however, on the actual poor, but on those who embrace poverty in spirit, even though as a matter of fact they are rich. The man who by the external accident of his position in life is rich is not necessarily debarred from the blessing, because he can be, and indeed ought to be, in spirit poor.

In saying “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” then, Jesus is saying, Blessed are the unworldly; blessed are they who, though in the world, are not of the world. The world says, Get all you can and keep all you get. Jesus says, Blessed are they who in will and heart at any rate have nothing. He does not say to every one, “Sell that thou hast, and give to the poor.” That is a counsel of perfection beyond the reach of the average man; it needs the spirituality of a Francis of Assisi to hear and obey that command. But He does say to us all, Do not cling to your possessions as though they were your own by some inalienable right. Be ready to resign them freely and cheerfully if need be. Remember that they are a trust from God. Be ready always to use them in His service and for the good of your fellow-men. If you can do all this, you are poor in spirit, and the blessing is yours.

So long as 1700 years ago a tract was written upon this subject by Clement of Alexandria, entitled, Quis dives salvetur? (“What rich man shall be saved?”). The teaching of this ancient Father is still to the point: “Riches in themselves are a thing indifferent; the question with regard to them being this, as to whether they are used as an ὄ?ργανον of good. By those whom He praises as poor in spirit, Christ means to denote those who, be they rich or poor, are in heart loosened from worldly possessions, are therefore poor; and to this idea an admirable parallel passage might be found in 1 Corinthians 7:29, ‘They that possess, as though they possessed not’ (comp. Jeremiah 9:23); and in St. James 1:9-10, ‘But let the brother of low degree glory in his high estate: and the rich, in that he is made low.’ ” 1 [Note: E. G. Loosley.]

II

The Poor in Spirit

The more usual interpretation of “the poor in spirit,” however, has more interest and attractiveness, and deserves consideration.

1. Poverty of spirit is not poverty in the lower soul but in that higher part of man which comes into immediate contact with the Divine, in the higher soul which comes face to face with God, in that spirit with which “the Spirit bears witness that we are the children of God.”

The simplest way to grasp its meaning is perhaps to consider its opposite, i.e., the moral distortion of being lifted up in spirit. This uplifted spirit is the spirit of self-exaltation which filled the heart of Nebuchadnezzar when he contemplated the glories of the great Babylon which he had built. This is the spirit of those who are self-satisfied and at ease, who call their lands after their own names, and look at everything through the medium of their own self-importance. For such the world has no significance except as it affects their interest or their convenience. This is the radical spirit of worldliness; for it is the spirit which makes self the centre of everything. This spirit is the seed-ground of sin. All kinds of wrong become possible to the man who makes his own pleasure or aggrandizement the supreme rule of his life. Conscience has little place in the heart of the man who makes self the axis of reference in all his conduct. This inflated egotism is flat against the order of the universe, and essentially hostile to the Kingdom of God It is in one sense the starting-place of evil; it is in another sense its climax. Egotism in moral life is the cause of most of the heedlessness and sinfulness of the world; and yet it is only after a prolonged indulgence of selfishness that the humane and kindly instincts of nature are destroyed. The evil principle of self works till all the finer, better, and purer feelings and aspirations are brought to naught. It stands out then as the naked antagonist of all that is good.

And so Vergil and Dante come at last to the Angel-Guardian of the Cornice, against the place of ascent to the next ring—the Angel of Humility, “in his countenance such as a tremulous star at morn appears.” He bids them to the steps and beats his wings on Dante’s forehead. There comes to Dante’s ears the sound of sweet voices singing, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” and he notices that, though mounting steep stairs, he is lighter than when walking on the level below. Why is this? Vergil explains that one of the seven Sin-marks on Dante’s brow has been erased by the Angel’s wings, the Pride-mark, and that all the remaining six have, at the same time, become much fainter than before; a beautiful indication this of the doctrine that Pride is the deadliest foe of human salvation. When the last Sin-mark is removed Dante will experience not merely no difficulty in mounting but actual delight. Dante feels his brow on hearing this and finds that only six of the marks remain, and Vergil smiles at this. True humility is not even conscious of being humble. 1 [Note: H. B. Garrod, Dante, Goethe’s Faust, and Other Lectures, 140.]

2. Poverty of spirit is not a feeling of self-disgust which comes over us when we compare our gifts and talents with those of others; it is born from no earthly inspiration, it proceeds from coming face to face with God. A man may be poor in spirit while his soul is on fire with enthusiasm for the cause of God, for the good of man. It is born of a double sense, both of the Divine greatness and of the Divine nearness. It is shown in unrepining acquiescence in our present limitations; it is shown in acceptance of the will of God in everything; it is shown not in self-depreciation, but in the strength that comes of trustfulness. It is the attitude which, in the presence of God, recognizes its entire dependence, empties itself, and is as a poor man, not that it may be feeble, but that God may fill it. It is the virtue which sends a man to his knees bowed and humbled and entranced before the Divine Presence, even in the hour of his most thrilling triumph. He cannot vaunt himself, he cannot push himself, he is but an instrument, and an instrument that can work only as long as it is in touch with its inward power; the “God within him” is the source of his power. What can he be but poor in spirit, how can he forget, how can he call out “worship me,” when he has seen the Vision and heard the Voice, and felt the Power of God? Poor in spirit, emptied of mere vain, barren conceit, deaf to mere flattery he must be, because he has seen and known; he has cried “Holy, Holy, Holy”; he knows God, and henceforth he is not a centre, not an idol, but an instrument, a vessel that needs for ever refilling, if it is to overflow and do its mission. His is the receptive attitude; not that which receives merely that it may keep, but that which receives because it must send forth. And so he accepts all merely personal conditions, not as perfect in themselves, but as capable of being transmuted by that inward power which is his own yet not his own—his own because God is within him, not his own because he is the receiver, not the inspirer.

I am sure there must be many who have a difficulty in understanding these words of our Lord—“Blessed are the poor in spirit.” It must almost seem to them as if He had meant to pronounce a blessing on the cowardly and mean-spirited; whereas the blessing is on those who know and keep their place in the Divine hierarchy. We are dependent creatures, not self-existent or self-sufficing; but there is nothing degrading in this dependence, for we share it with the eternal Son. When we forget this, we lose our blessedness, for it consists in the spirit of sonship, by which alone we can receive and respond to our Father’s love. God does not call for the acknowledgment of our dependence as a mere homage to His sovereignty, but because we are His children, and it is only through this acknowledgment that we can receive His fatherly love and blessing. The blessedness arises out of the spirit of dependence, and when that spirit departs the blessedness departs with it; therefore as the spirit of independence is the spirit of this world, we need not wonder at its unblessedness, for that spirit shuts the heart against God and cuts off its supply from the Fountain of Life. 1 [Note: Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, The Spiritual Order, 233.]

3. Only he who has discerned the ideal can feel what is described in the text as poverty of spirit. The man contented with himself, satisfied with his work and his position, to whom no ideal opens itself as something yet unattained, can never feel poverty of spirit. In short, this foundation Beatitude, on which all the other Beatitudes are built up, sets forth a universal law of human life; it describes the attitude of mind characteristic of the wisest, strongest, best of the human family. The greater a man is in any walk of life the wider his vision, and the keener his insight the greater is his poverty of spirit in the presence of the perfection he has seen.

So doth the greater glory dim the less.

A substitute shines brightly as a king

Until a king be by; and then his state

Empties itself, as doth an inland brook

Into the main of waters.

The vision of the greater glory, showing the contrast between what he has seen and what he has in possession, makes the man full of poverty of spirit. The stars shine as brightly during the daylight as they do at night, but they are invisible because of the greater glory of the sun. One can be content with his present state only when he has seen no brighter, clearer vision.

Miss Ellice Hopkins writes her impressions of a visit to the Briary at this time:

“At a very unassuming looking house at the foot of the Downs lived another of the Immortals, our great painter, who always went by the name of the ‘Divine Watts.’ Mrs. Cameron took us to see his studio, and to be introduced to him. We found a slightly built man with a fine head, most courteous in manner, and with the simplicity and humility of the immortal child that so often dwells at the heart of true genius. There was something pathetic to me in the occasional poise of the head, the face slightly lifted, as we see in the blind, as if in dumb beseeching to the fountain of Eternal Beauty for more power to think his thoughts after Him. There is always in his work a window left open to the infinite, the unattainable ideal.” 1 [Note: George Frederic Watts, i. 299.]

4. Poverty of spirit comes first because it must be first. It is the foundation on which alone the fabric of spiritual character can rise. It is the rich soil in which alone other graces will grow and flourish. Hill-tops are barren because the soil is washed off by the rains; but the valleys are fertile because there the rich deposits gather. In like manner proud hearts are sterile, affording no soil in which spiritual graces can grow; but lowly hearts are fertile with grace, and in them all lovely things grow. If only we are truly poor in spirit, our life will be rich in its fruits.

A consciousness of want and shortcoming is the condition of success and excellence in any sphere. Of those who aspire to be doctors, lawyers, painters, musicians, scholars, I would say, “Blessed are the poor in spirit—blessed are they who are conscious of their defect and want—for to them the high places of their professions belong.” The only hopeless people in the world are the self-satisfied people, the people who do not think they need anything. The only man who will ever make a great scholar is the man who is keenly conscious of his own ignorance, who feels, like Sir Isaac Newton, that he has but gathered a few pebbles on the shore of the infinite ocean of truth; who carries the satchel still, like Michel Angelo, into an old age, and who, like J. R. Green, dies learning. But the man who starts by thinking he knows everything dooms himself to lifelong ignorance. A sense of want, humility of mind, is the very condition of excellence and success. 1 [Note: J. D. Jones, The Way into the Kingdom, 31.]

The most marked of all the moral features in Dr. Duncan’s character was humility. He was singularly humble, in consideration of his great talents, of his vast treasures of learning, and of his attainments in the Divine life. But if we set all these aside, and compare him with other Christian men, we cannot but come to the conclusion that out of all the guests bidden in these days by the King within the circle of our knowledge, it was he that took the lowest room at the feast. This lowliness was allied to the childlike simplicity which pervaded his whole Christian course, and was made more evident by the helplessness which rendered him so unfit to guide himself in common matters, and so willing to be guided by others. But its root lay in his sense of the majesty of God, which was far more profound than in other men, and humbled him lower in the dust; in his perception and his love of holiness, and the consciousness of his own defect; in his sense of ingratitude for the unparalleled love of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in his abiding conviction of past sin and of present sinfulness. This habitual humbling was deepened by the wounding of his very tender conscience, through yielding himself to be carried away by what chanced to take hold of his mind. These combined elements rendered him an example of an altogether rare and inimitable humility. Men who may be reckoned holier might be named out of those who served the Lord along with him; but among them all it would be hard to find one so humble. The holiness of Robert M‘Cheyne, if not so deep, was more equal, and more thoroughly leavened the character hour by hour. The holiness of William Burns was in some respects as deep, and it was singularly constant. They were both more watchful, and therefore more evenly holy. But in the race to stoop down into their Lord’s sepulchre, John Duncan outran them both; he was the humblest of the three, and of all the men whom most of us have known. 1 [Note: A. Moody Stuart, Recollections of the late John Duncan, 175.]

5. We must also distinguish between poverty of spirit and self-depreciation. There is a false humility which finds pleasure in calling itself a worm and a miserable sinner, simply as an excuse for being no better. It is a false humility which pleads its humbleness as an excuse for aiming low. It is a false humility which says, “We are no better than our fathers were,” as an excuse for not trying to rise to a higher level, and for maintaining a low standard and perpetuating abuses. It is a false humility which leads us to take the lower room, that we may shirk our duties and avoid taking a lead when we are called upon to do so. It was not true humility that led the idle servant to bury his talent in the ground. Whatever name it may assume, it is conceit and pride that in the heart believes itself fitted for higher things, and is discontented with its part on the world’s stage. It is pride that wishes to be ministered unto, and is too conceited to minister. There is no true humility in pretending to be worse than we are, in underrating the gifts that God has given us, in declining to take the part for which we are fitted.

Do you want a cure for that false humility, that mock modesty which says, “I am not worthy,” and trumpets its denial till all the world knows that an honour has been offered; which, while it says with the lips, “It is too great for me,” feels all the time in the heart that self-consciousness of merit which betrays itself in the affected walk and the showy humility? Would you be free from this folly? Feel that God is all; that whether He makes you great, or leaves you unknown, it is best for you, because it is His work. 2 [Note: Stopford A. Brooke.]

III

The Benediction

1. The bulk of the remaining Beatitudes point onward to a future; this deals with the present; not “theirs shall be,” but “theirs is the kingdom.” It is an all-comprehensive promise, holding the succeeding ones within itself, for they are but diverse aspects—modified according to the necessities which they supply—of that one encyclopædia of blessings, the possession of the Kingdom of Heaven.

The Kingdom of Heaven—what is it here? Surely we shall read the words aright if we think of them as conveying the promise of a present dominion of no ordinary kind; an inward power that comes here and now, and finds its exercise in ways all unknown to the possessor, that blesses those whom it has never seen and cheers those who have felt only its shadow; an inward un-self-conscious, often unrealized, power that flows out and is conveyed in a word or a look, or even by something more subtle still. So does Christian influence work among men. The poor in spirit make men believe that Christ is God, because they show the Divine beneath the human.

Often, as formerly with Jesus, a look, a word sufficed Francis to attach to himself men who would follow him until their death. It is impossible, alas! to analyze the best of this eloquence, all made of love, intimate apprehension, and fire. The written word can no more give an idea of it than it can give us an idea of a sonata of Beethoven or a painting by Rembrandt. We are often amazed, on reading the memoirs of those who have been great conquerors of souls, to find ourselves remaining cold, finding in them all no trace of animation or originality. It is because we have only a lifeless relic in the hand; the soul is gone. It is the white wafer of the sacrament, but how shall that rouse in us the emotions of the beloved disciple lying on the Lord’s breast on the night of the Last Supper? 1 [Note: Paul Sabatier, Life of St. Francis of Assisi, 131.]

2. The Kingdom of Heaven belongs to those who feel their own unworthiness and utter need, and who seek in Christ the sufficiency they do not find in themselves. They have already entered into their heritage because they have learnt their true position in it—fit to rule because they have learnt to serve, fit to influence because they have felt the Divine spark kindling them. They may not be called to high office; their place in the world may be a very lowly one, but their rule is more of a fact now than if they had the mastery of many legions. For there is no influence so certain, so strong, so compelling, as that which is founded upon the assured sense of the Divine indwelling, and the Divine co-operation; if a man has that sense he must become poor in spirit, emptied of mere conceit and shallow pride, because he has seen what real greatness is.

The clearest and most significant of all the relationships of this grace of humility is that which connects it with greatness. Humility and greatness always walk together. I do not think that Ruskin ever spoke a truer word than when he said, “I believe the first test of a truly great man is his humility.” That truth shines with lustre upon every page of our human record. There is nothing more beautiful in the whole of the human story than the humility of the greatest men. The mind of the seer is not so far from the heart of the little child as we sometimes imagine. Most of the great scientific discoveries have been achieved through the spirit of humility. Men have been willing to be led to great discoveries through observation of the simplest things—an apple falling from the tree or steam coming through a kettle’s spout. The willingness to learn has opened the doors to the most fruitful discoveries. An over-assertive knowledge is always the cloak of ignorance. And as with knowledge, so with everything else. Power always veils itself. It does not seek to produce an impression. It does not need to do that. It walks in the paths of the humble. There are many people in the world who will not stoop to menial tasks. In their blindness they imagine humble duties to be a sign of lowly station or inferior nature. If they but knew, there is no sign of inferiority so patent as that which cannot stoop in lowliness or work in secret. There is a beautiful and significant sentence in St. John’s record of the ministry of our Lord which illustrates this association between greatness and humility. This is how it reads: “Jesus knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he was come from God, and went to God; he riseth from supper, and laid aside his garments; and took a towel, and girded himself … and began to wash the disciples’ feet.” The moment when He was most conscious of greatness was the time when He performed the most menial duty. And that association is always true in humble life. Greatness is never ashamed to be found in lowly guise. The surest sign of a high nature is that it can stoop without apologizing for itself. 1 [Note: Sidney M. Berry, Graces of the Christian Character, 78.]

3. We can understand the happiness of this attitude. The man is absorbed in the work—the God-given work—before him. He has no leisure to pause and ask what the world thinks of him. There is a real work to do, and he is alive to its importance and to the necessity of turning his whole energy into it. The work has to be done; the trust must be discharged; the criticisms of the world, whether favourable or unfavourable, are of little moment. Egotism has so small a place in his spirit that he is neither uplifted nor depressed by the words of men’s lips. His soul is set on other things. He seeks the Kingdom of God, and no kingdom of self—and it is in the emancipation of self from self that he finds that Divine Kingdom. He loses himself to find himself. This is the note that seals the possession of the Kingdom of Heaven. In fact, this is the keynote of all our Lord’s teaching. It is the note of His own life. It is expressly what He says of Himself: “Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.” It is what He teaches by His example. For He ever watched the Father’s hand. He spoke the Father’s words, He did the Father’s works, and all He thought, felt, and did was done in obedience to the Father. He emptied Himself. At every fresh departure in His work He spent the night in prayer and fellowship with the Father, and whenever He needed wisdom and power for His life-work He sought these from the Father. Thus in virtue of His poverty of spirit He was in possession of the Kingdom.

I cannot tell you how great a point our Blessed Father made of self-abandonment, i.e., self-surrender into the hands of God. In one place he speaks of it as: “The cream of charity, the odour of humility, the flower of patience, and the fruit of perseverance. Great,” he says, “is this virtue, and worthy of being practised by the best-beloved children of God.” And again, “Our Lord loves with a most tender love those who are so happy as to abandon themselves wholly to His fatherly care, letting themselves be governed by His divine Providence without any idle speculations as to whether the workings of this Providence will be useful to them to their profit, or painful to their loss, and this because they are well assured that nothing can be sent, nothing permitted by this paternal and most loving Heart, which will not be a source of good and profit to them. All that is required is that they should place all their confidence in Him, and say from their heart, ‘Into thy hands I commend my spirit,’ my soul, my body, and all that I have, to do with them as it shall please Thee.” 1 [Note: J. P. Camus, The Spirit of St. Francis De Sales, 278.]

Christ showed that sacrifice, self-surrender, death, is the beginning and the course and the aim and the essential principle of the higher life. To find life in our own way, to wish to save it, to seek to gain it, to love it, is, He proclaims, to miss it altogether.… The law of sacrifice is based on essential moral relations, justified by the facts of common experience, welcomed by the universal conscience.… Sacrifice alone is fruitful.… The essence of sin is selfishness in respect of men, and self-assertion in respect of God, the unloving claim of independence, the arrogant isolation of our interests.… That which we use for ourselves perishes ignobly: that which He uses for us but not on us proves the beginning of a fuller joy. Isolation is the spring of death; life is revealed through sacrifice.… Vicarious toil, pain, suffering, is the very warp of life. When the Divine light falls upon it, it becomes transformed into sacrifice.… Not one tear, one pang, one look of tender compassion, one cry of pitying anguish, one strain of labouring arm, offered in the strength of God for the love of man, has been in vain. They have entered into the great life with a power to purify, and cheer, and nerve, measured not by the standard of our judgment but by the completeness of the sacrifice which they represent. 2 [Note: Bishop Westcott, The Victory of the Cross, 22.]

The First Beatitude

Literature

Ainsworth (P. C.), The Blessed Life, 61.

Brett (J.), The Blessed Life, 7.

Callan (H.), Heart Cures, 18, 27.

Carpenter (W. B.), The Great Charter of Christ, 77.

Charles (Mrs. R.), The Beatitudes, 21.

Deshon (G.), Sermons for the Ecclesiastical Year, 484.

Dudden (F. H.), Christ and Christ’s Religion, 47.

Dykes (J. O.), The Manifesto of the King, 25.

Eyton (R.), The Beatitudes, 14.

Fletcher (A. E.), The Sermon on the Mount and Practical Politics, 1.

Fox (W. J.), Collected Works, iii. 210.

Gore (C.), The Sermon on the Mount, 23.

Hambleton (J.), The Beatitudes, 32.

Ingram (A. F. W.), Secrets of Strength, 14.

Iverach (J.), The Other Side of Greatness, 1.

Jones (J. D.), The Way into the Kingdom, 23.

Laverack (F. J.), These Sayings of Mine, 19.

Leckie (J.), Life and Religion, 209.

Maclaren (A.), The Beatitudes, 1.

Meyer (F. B.), Blessed are Ye, 22.

Miller (J. R.), The Master’s Blesseds, 23.

Moberley (G.), Sermons on the Beatitudes, 1.

Monsell (J. S. B.), The Beatitudes, 1.

Pearson (A.), Christus Magister, 51.

Potts (A. W.), School Sermons, 64.

Ridgeway (C. J.), The Mountain of Blessedness, 12.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, lv. (1909), No. 3156.

Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), New Ser., xxi. (1882), No. 1197.

Wilmot-Buxton (H. J.), Day by Day Duty, 172.

Woods (H. G.), At the Temple Church, 185.

Cambridge Review, ii. Supplement Nos. 145, 161 (W. Sanday).

Christian World Pulpit, xv. 49 (W. Hubbard); xix. 401 (G. G. Bradley); xxxviii. 3 (W. J. Woods); lvi. 379 (J. Stalker).

Church of England Pulpit, lxii. 101 (C. G. Lang).

Preacher’s Magazine, xxiv. 423 (E. G. Loosley).

Verse 8

The Pure in Heart

Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.— Matthew 5:8.

If there be in the bright constellation of the Beatitudes one particular star, it is this text. If in blessedness there be a crown of blessedness, it is here. If there be a character that in its very quintessence is spiritual, it is this. And if there be a delight above all conceivable delights, it is that which is promised in these well-known words. So lofty a verse is this, that it is one of the texts which the preacher trembles to take, and yet is continually impelled to take, that at least he may teach himself if he cannot teach other people, and that preacher and congregation together may do a little towards climbing up to summits which seem like the far-off Alpine heights.

Oh, snow so pure, Oh, peak so high,

I shall not reach you till I die.

Yet lofty and remote as they seem, these words are in truth among the most hopeful and radiant that ever came even from Christ’s lips. For they offer the realization of an apparently impossible character. They promise the possession of an apparently impossible vision. They soothe fears, and tell us that the sight from which, were it possible, we should sometimes shrink, is the source of our purest gladness.

I

The Vision

“They shall see God”; what do these words mean? In their widest and fullest significance they must remain to us an eternal mystery. They express the object around which all the hopes and fears of the best men of the human race have always gathered, and around which they are gathering still. To see God has been the ultimate aim of all philosophy; it is the ultimate hope of all science, and it will ever remain the ultimate desire of all nations.

In all the nobler religions which the world has seen, we can trace an endeavour to rise to a vision of God. The Brahmin on the burning plains of the East gave up all the present charm of life, and, renouncing ease and love, passed his years in silent thought, hoping to be absorbed into the Eternal. The Greek philosopher spoke of passions that clogged the soul’s wings, and desires that darkened its piercing eye, and he strove to purge his spirit from them by philosophy, that he might free its pinions and quicken its sight for beholding the Infinite. And in this light we can understand how the monks in the Middle Ages became so marvellously earnest. These men felt a Presence around their path which at one time appeared to reveal itself like a dream of splendour, and at another swept like a vision of terror across the shuddering heart; and to behold Him they crushed their longings for fellowship, steeled their hearts to the calls of affection, and alone, in dens and deserts, hoped, by mortifying the body, to see God in the soul. In a word, the dream which has haunted the earnest of our world, has ever been this—to be blessed, man must know the Eternal. Christ proclaims that dream to be a fact—they are blessed who see God. 1 [Note: E. L. Hull, Sermons, i. 155.]

1. To see God is to stand on the highest point of created being. Not until we see God—no partial and passing embodiment of Him, but the abiding Presence—do we stand upon our own mountain-top, the height of the existence which God has given us, and up to which He is leading us. That there we should stand is the end of our creation. This truth is at the heart of everything, means all kinds of completions, may be uttered in many ways; but language will never compass it, for form will never contain it. Nor shall we ever see, that is, know, God perfectly. We shall indeed never absolutely know man or woman or child; but we may know God as we never can know human being, as we never can know ourselves. We not only may, but we must, so know Him, and it can never be until we are pure in heart.

Religion largely lies in the consciousness of our true relation to Him who made us; and the yearning for the realization of this consciousness found constant expression in Tennyson’s works and conversation. Perhaps its clearest expression is to be found in his instructions to his son: “Remember, I want ‘Crossing the Bar’ to be always at the end of all my works.”

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

When I have crossed the Bar.

When in answer to the question, What was his deepest desire of all? he said, “A clearer vision of God,” it exactly expressed the continued strivings of his spirit for more light upon every possible question, which so constantly appear in his poems. 1 [Note: Tennyson and His Friends, 305.]

Is not the Vision He? tho’ He be not that which He seems?

Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?

Earth, these solid stars, this weight of body and limb,

Are they not sign and symbol of thy division from Him?

Dark is the world to thee: thyself art the reason why;

For is He not all but that which has power to feel “I am I”?

Glory about thee, without thee; and thou fulfillest thy doom,

Making Him broken gleams, and a stifled splendour and gloom.

And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see;

But if we could see and hear, this Vision—were it not ?Hebrews 2 [Note: Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism.]

2. To see God is to be admitted into His immediate presence and friendship. In the court language of ancient Oriental despotisms, where the Sovereign was revered as if he were the vicegerent of Heaven, to “see the king’s face” stood for the highest felicity of the most favoured subjects. It was the petition of the disgraced prince Absalom, after he had for two full years resided in the capital without being received at his father’s palace: “Now therefore let me see the king’s face; and if there be iniquity in me, let him kill me!” “Happy are these thy servants,” said the African queen to Solomon; happy in this, that they “stand continually before thee.” So the seven chief princes of the Medo-Persian Empire who sat first in the kingdom of Ahasuerus were they “which saw the king’s face.” The same magnificent phraseology passed from the court to the temple. In the Hebrew State, Jehovah was the national Sovereign; and the reigning king was, in no flattering hyperbole, but in constitutional law, His elected vicegerent. The temple was His palace, the most holy place His chamber of presence and of audience; and the one thing desired by His devout and favoured servants was to behold His beauty; their prayer, that His face would shine on them; their hope, to see His face in righteousness, and one day to be satisfied with His likeness.

In prayer there would sometimes come upon me such a sense of the Presence of God that I seemed to be all engulfed in God. I think the learned call this mystical experience; at any rate, it so suspends the ordinary operations of the soul that she seems to be wholly taken out of herself. This tenderness, this sweetness, this regale is nothing else but the Presence of God in the praying soul. God places the soul in His immediate Presence, and in an instant bestows Himself upon the soul in a way she could never of herself attain to. He manifests something of His greatness to the soul at such times: something of His beauty, something of His special and particular grace. And the soul enjoys God without dialectically understanding just how she so enjoys Him. She burns with love without knowing what she has done to deserve or to prepare herself for such a rapture. It is the gift of God, and He gives His gifts to whomsoever and whensoever He will. 1 [Note: Saint Teresa.]

3. The theophany, or visible discovery of the Divine Being, which was given to the best period of Hebrew history, was a prefigure of the Incarnation—the chief theophany of all time—in which, through a human character and life, there has been discovered to us all the ethical beauty and splendour of the Godhead. To “see God” must now for ever mean nothing else than this: to see His “truth and grace” mirrored in the face of that Man, who alone of all men on earth “is of God, and hath seen the Father.”

We are in the world to see God. That is the final spiritual purpose of life. Across the cradle of the babe and the playtime of the girls and boys this purpose ever falls. It can be forgotten and frustrated, but as life’s highest possibility and truest destiny it is always with us. It follows the prodigal in his wandering, the fool in his folly, the strong man in his wilfulness. It is all-inclusive. It waits men in the quiet places of thought, and in the clangour of the world’s work. The student, the book-writer, the weaver at his loom, the buyer and seller, the woman mid her household cares—the vision is close to them all. It is before us in the sunlight and the green earth, it is about us in all the grace and trust and intimacy of home life. In youth and age, in gladness and in grieving, the vision waits. And most of all the vision draws near to us in the life of Him who said, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” 1 [Note: P. C. Ainsworth, The Blessed Life, 132.]

Through all the complexities of Christ’s mind and mission, how essentially single His spirit and simple His method—rare as morning air, limpid as spring water, clear as a running brook, ever standing in the truth, utterly veracious and sublimely superior to worldly policy! Is not this, indeed, the meaning of that choice beatitude—among those beatitudes with their sevenfold colours like a rainbow round the throne of Christ—“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God”? Not the “immaculate”—it would be superfluous to say, “Blessed are the holy”—but rather those of pure intent and single spirit, free from duplicities in their motives. “Blessed” in that trueness of spirit which gives vision, that honest and unadulterated child-heart which enables us to see our Father-God and the Good everywhere. 2 [Note: R. E. Welsh, Man to Man, 90.]

If clearer vision Thou impart,

Grateful and glad my soul shall be;

But yet to have a purer heart

Is more to me.

Yea, only as the heart is clean

May larger vision yet be mine,

For mirrored in its depths are seen

The things divine. 3 [Note: Walter C. Smith, Poetical Works, 478.]

II

The Condition of the Vision

There are three distinct kinds of sight. There is, first of all, physical sight, which depends chiefly on bodily organs, and which merely enables us to distinguish material objects from one another. Then, secondly, there is mental sight—the sight of the scientist and the poet. This faculty helps men to discover analogies and resemblances and connexions between dissimilar and distant things; and hence it gives rise to the metaphors and similes of poetry, and leads to the discovery of the laws of nature. It was the faculty of mental vision, for example, that led to the establishment of the widest scientific generalization, by suggesting to Newton that perhaps the earth might exercise the same influence of attraction upon the moon as it did upon a falling apple. Then, thirdly, there is spiritual sight, which belongs to the man of faith and pure heart. Spiritual vision enables men to see Him who is invisible.

I care not whether God’s self-revelation in the conscience be called an immediate vision of God in the experiences of conscience, or whether it be taken as an inference drawn from the data they supply. It is the truth contained in them; with one man it may be only implicitly felt in their solemn and mystic character; with another, explicitly and immediately seen emerging from them as they come, and making him the Seer of God rather than the reasoner about Him. In any case, the constitution of our moral nature is unintelligible, except as living in response to an objective Perfection pervading the universe with Holy Law. 1 [Note: James Martineau, A Study of Religion, ii. 28.]

1. God cannot be seen by the eye of sense. Of course, we know that; we admit it at once; and yet men have an idea that God was nearer to the patriarchs, and the people in the early days who, in a vision or in some way or other—we hardly know how—did see God; and though they do not know what heaven is, they think that somehow or other, by and by, in another state, they will see and consciously have a sensible vision. It cannot be. “Eye hath not seen,” and eye can never see. And God is not seen by reason. Doubtless if reason were freed from all clogs and hindrances and drawbacks, if it worked with perfect clearness and completeness, we might reason about God; but even so we should conclude and argue and infer; we should not see. Nor by imagination. Imagination may do a great deal, but the danger with regard to it is that we deceive ourselves, that we worship our own fancies, and that the image below us is one which we see in a mirror, and which we ourselves have, so to speak, created. And God cannot be seen by means of traditional knowledge, though that is very good. One hopes that religious knowledge will continually be handed on from parents to children, and that the children are being taught in all that is good, and that they learn that God is infinite and eternal and omniscient; and well indeed that so they should learn. But they do not see Him by that process. And faith—faith can do a great deal. It has a marvellous power of transporting us beyond ourselves, and beyond the world of the seen and tangible; but faith itself is opposed to sight, and though faith can trust and obey, it cannot see.

You know that your friend is never seen by the eye of the body; you can discern a form, a figure, a countenance, by which you know that he is near; but that is not the friend you love; you discern him spiritually; you understand his inner character; you know his truth, his nobleness, his affection, his charity—all these the eye of sense cannot see. A stranger does not see him thus; he sees only the visible form and feature which imperfectly represent the qualities of mind and heart which you know; but you see in that friend things which were invisible to the other. It is in this sense—in understanding the truth and goodness, in feeling the pity and charity, in holding communion with the loving spirit of the Father—that Christ speaks of seeing God. 1 [Note: E. L. Hull, Sermons, i. 159.]

Science is teaching us now that at each end of the spectrum, beyond the red rays and the violet rays, there are rays of light which our eyes cannot perceive. We know perfectly well that there are notes of music too acute or too grave for our ears to apprehend them. Do they not exist, then, though the ear cannot hear them? And so in religious matters, even though we are regular worshippers in the Lord’s house, and profess to know a great deal about Christianity, we may be as blind men walking in a gallery of pictures or—I will not say as deaf men, but—as a large number of those who go to a Beethoven concert. 2 [Note: W. T. Davison.]

2. The vision of God is possible only to the pure in heart. The word “pure” as ordinarily used, in Hebrew, in Greek, and in English, means “without alloy,” “clean,” “clear,” “simple,” “single.” It is applied, in the Bible, to virgin gold, to a clean table or candlestick, to flawless glass, to unmixed oil, and to water that is only water. It does not necessarily involve a moral element. It never stands for absolute sinlessness of being. Hence it is to be taken, in the Sermon on the Mount as well as elsewhere, when connected with “heart,” or “mind,” as meaning “single,” “simple,” “unmixed.” The “pure in heart” are those whose minds, or very selves, are single, simple, undivided and unalloyed in one aim and purpose.

Single-mindedness, or simple-mindedness, is a characteristic of childhood. A child is all attent to one thing at a time, looking at that one thing with single eye and simpleness of mind; while double-mindedness, or divided thinking, is the peril of the full-grown person. How many things a keen-eyed child will see in an everyday walk that are unnoticed by the father whom he accompanies! The father has too many things in his mind, or on his mind, to observe that which, for the moment, is the all in all to the single-eyed and simple-minded—or, as the Bible would call it, the pure-hearted—child. Therefore it is that our Lord said to His maturer disciples: “Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall in no wise enter therein” ( Luke 18:17). The pure in heart are the child-minded. They shall see God, because when they are looking for Him they are not looking for anything else. Their eyes are single, their minds are undivided, and their whole being goes out towards the object of their search. They seek for God, and they find Him when they search for Him with all their mind.

He returned to the Abbey, and preached his sermon on the words, “Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.” The short, simple discourse contained the last words that he spoke in Westminster Abbey. By one of those strange coincidences that seem more than chance, the subject of his sermon was the blessedness of purity of heart and life, which those who knew him best considered to be the distinguishing quality of his character and career. “The words,” he said, “may bear a twofold meaning—pure, disinterested love of truth, and pure and clean aversion to everything that defiles.” He goes on to give three examples of the blessedness of purity in men whose hearts and writings were pure, and who not only abstained from anything which could defile the soul, but fixed their eyes intently on those simple affections and those great natural objects of beauty which most surely guard the mind from corrupting influences. “And what,” he asks in the words which conclude his last sermon, “is the reason that our Saviour gives for this blessedness of the pure in heart? It is that they shall see God. What is the meaning of this connexion? It is because, of all the obstacles which can intervene between us and an insight into the invisible and the Divine, nothing presents so coarse and thick a veil as the indulgence of the impure passions which lower our nature, and because nothing can so clear up our better thoughts, and nothing leaves our minds so open to receive the impression of what is good and high, as the single eye and pure conscience, which we may not, perhaps, be able to reach, but which is an indispensable condition of having the doors of our mind kept open and the channel of communication kept free between us and the Supreme and Eternal Fountain of all purity and of all goodness.” 1 [Note: R. E. Prothero, Life of Dean Stanley, ii. 567.]

I hardly know whether Dean Stanley’s last words will make an adequate impression upon the public. The Dean had begun on Saturday afternoons a course of sermons on the Beatitudes. In great weakness he finished the fourth sermon a little more than a week before his death, and for his text on that occasion he took two of the benedictions together, “Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.” He illustrated his discourse from conspicuous monuments in the Abbey, taking sometimes one instance, and sometimes another, but I think that the Dean himself was the best instance of these two benedictions, for he was a merciful man, and as pure in heart as a little child. In some aspects of his character he was more like a little child than a full-grown man who had lived sixty-five years in the midst of this wicked world. In many aspects of its wickedness the world had never tainted his pure soul. 2 [Note: Bishop Fraser’s Lancashire Life, 257.]

3. It is not enongh to be clean outside. In our Lord’s days much attention was paid by religious people to external purity. They had many ceremonies of washing. They washed nearly everything they used—not to make it clean, but to make it holy. They were quick to condemn any one who failed to observe all the rules for outward cleansing. Yet Jesus reproved them for their insincerity, for while they made clean the outside of the cup and the platter, within they were full of extortion and excess. He said they were like whited sepulchres, which appeared beautiful without, but within were full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. It is not enough to have a fair exterior; the heart must be pure. It is in the heart that God would live. The heart, too, is the centre of the life. If the heart be not holy, the life cannot be holy.

“Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.” There is no fault in our Authorized Version in this passage, but the words “pure in heart” should be rendered in modern English, “clear in their affections.” These are the truly simple, who read Dante’s Ben del Intelletto—the vision of the Godhead. To be truly pure in heart is to search for one’s main duty and to set oneself to do it, subordinating to this life-task all other desires and all distractions of a more or less material kind. 1 [Note: H. B. Garrod, Dante, Goethe’s Faust, and Other Lectures, 376.]

Bernard made signal to me with a smile

To look above; but of myself had I

Anticipated his desire the while;

For now my vision, clearer than before,

Within that Beam of perfect Purity

And perfect Truth was entering more and more.

From this time forward that which filled my sight

Became too lofty for our mortal strains;

And memory fails to take so vast a flight. 2 [Note: Dante, Paradiso, xxxiii. 49–57 (trans. by Wright).]

In the Middle Ages, and sometimes since, men who desired earnestly to see the vision of God strove to attain it by asceticism—that is, by a sort of forced, mechanical purity. The mechanism, we believe, failed, for it was not appointed of God, but was a clumsy contrivance of men. Yet the attempt showed a recognition, however perverse, of the truth which Christ puts here so beautifully and simply. The same truth inspired the chivalrous legend of the Holy Grail. Many brave and worthy knights addressed themselves to the quest of the Sangreal, yearning to see the vision of the chalice that brimmed red with the very blood of God Incarnate, and to win the mysterious blessings which that vision brought. But to none was it given to accomplish the quest save to the pure in heart. The knight who could sing,

My strength is as the strength of ten,

Because my heart is pure—

he it was who was sanctified and consoled by the mystic vision

A gentle sound, an awful light!

Three angels bear the Holy Grail:

With folded feet, in stoles of white,

On sleeping wings they sail.

Ah, blessed vision! blood of God!

My spirit beats her mortal bars,

As down dark tides the glory slides,

And star-like mingles with the stars.

Sir Galahad no longer rides in harness on quests of knight-errantry; he labours without fame in the byways of life. But he is still consoled by the reward of purity, and endures as seeing Him who is invisible. 1 [Note: C. A. Vince.]

4. There is no true purity apart from the absolute enthronement of God in the affections. It is not the absence of unholy affections, it is the presence of a holy and surpassing earnest love, that makes us really pure. Man is not made by negatives. It is not what the heart loves not, but what it loves, that makes the man: “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” The soul is so supremely an altar that it must worship something in its inmost shrine; and unless it worship God there, it cannot be pure.

Jesus saw God reflected in His own soul. His own pure soul was a mirror in which spiritual imageship to the Heavenly Father was perfectly revealed. For us His thoughts were God’s thoughts. His love was God’s love. His will was God’s will. So perfectly at one with the holy Father was His pure heart that, when He looked into the depths of His own being, He had His profoundest revelations of the moral nature of His Father. There was no blur upon His soul. The cloudless likeness of the Heavenly Father was there. Alas, that upon our hearts the breath of sin has condensed itself so that we see in ourselves only a foggy image of God!

The truth in God’s breast

Lies trace upon trace on ours imprest:

Tho’ He is so bright, and we are so dim,

We were made in His image to witness Him.

The heart where “Christ dwells” is, so far as His residence there is unhindered and entire, the purified heart. Let Him be welcomed not into its vestibule only but into its interior chambers, and the Presence will itself be purity. Before Him so coming, so abiding, the strife of passion cannot but subside. Flowing out from His intimate converse there, the very love of God will mix itself with the motives and the movements of the will. The heart thus made the chamber of His life will by a sure law reflect His character; nay, it will find itself shaped and dilated by His heart, not from its exterior or circumference, but from its centre. 1 [Note: H. C. G. Moule, Faith, 156.]

Mark Rutherford says, “The love of the beautiful is itself moral. What we love in it is virtue. A perfect form or a delicate colour is the expression of something which is destroyed in us by subjugation to the baser desires or meanness; and he who has been unjust to man or woman misses the true interpretation of a cloud or a falling wave.” In the light of this beatitude I think he is right. Sin does not cheat a man out of the fragrance of a rose, but it cheats him out of that sweeter soul-fragrance of Divine love that is folded in every petal. Sin does not veil from our eyes the fashion of things seen, but it obscures their eternal and spirit-satisfying meaning. The impure shall see all—except God. That is to say, they shall see nothing as it is. For the pure-hearted all the mystery of the waking earth tells something of the soul’s immortal story. Through the avenues of sight the pure heart goes on and finds insight. Through all that the ear can hear and the hand can touch, it passes into that real world that is so near to us all, if we but knew it, where failing voices utter unfailing messages and where beneath the ephemeral the soul finds the eternal. 2 [Note: P. C. Ainsworth, The Blessed Life, 137.]

5. The vision of the pure in heart is its own exceeding blessedness. Holiness has in itself the elements of happiness. It frees us from a thousand sources of pain, the inward strife of the heart with itself, the condemning voice of conscience, the fret and worry of anxious worldly care, the bitterness of passion, anger, envy, jealousy, discontent, and a thousand thorns that spring in the soil of the natural heart—these roots are all removed and the “peace of God, which passeth all understanding,” keeps the heart and mind, and makes life a heaven below.

Horace Bushnell gives his own experience in these words: “Clear of all the vices, having a naturally active-minded, inquiring habit, never meaning to get away from the truth, one has yet relapsed into such doubt as to find that he has nearly lost the conviction of God, and cannot, if he would, say with emphasis that God exists. Such a one pacing in his chamber, comes some day suddenly upon the question—Is there then no truth that I do believe? Yes, there is one; there is a distinction of right and wrong, that I never doubted, and can see not how I can. Nay, I am even quite sure of this. Then forthwith starts up the question—Have I ever taken the principle of right for my law? Have I ever thrown my life out on it, to become all that it requires of me? No matter what becomes of my difficulties, if I cannot take a first principle so inevitably true and live in it. Here, then, will I begin, If there is a God, as I rather hope than dimly believe there is, then He is a right God. If I have lost Him in wrong, perhaps I shall find Him in right. Will He not help me, or, perchance, even be discovered to me? Then he prays to the dim God so dimly felt. It is an awfully dark prayer in the first look of it; but it is the truest and best that he can; the better and more true that he puts no orthodox colours on it; and the prayer and the vow are so profoundly meant that his soul is borne up with God’s help, as it were by some unseen chariot, and permitted to see the opening of heaven. He rises, and it is as if he had gotten wings. The whole sky is luminous about him. It is the morning of a new eternity. After this all troublesome doubt of God’s reality is gone. A being so profoundly felt must inevitably be.” 1 [Note: C. H. Parkhurst, The Blind Man’s Creed, 215.]

The Pure in Heart

Literature

Ainsworth (P. C.), The Blessed Life, 131.

Barrett (G. S.), Musings for Quiet Hours, 110.

Dykes (J. O.), The Manifesto of the King, 119.

Gore (C.), The Sermon on the Mount, 40.

Houchin (J. W.), The Vision of God, 1.

Hull (E. L.), Sermons, i. 154.

Huntington (F. D.), Christ in the Christian Year: Advent to Trinity, 219.

Jones (J. S.), The Invisible Things, 34.

Kennett (R. H.), In Our Tongues, 51.

Lightfoot (J. B.), Cambridge Sermons, 34.

Lockyer (T. F.), The Inspirations of the Christian Life, 144.

Maclaren (A.), The Beatitudes, 53.

Meyer (H. H.), in Drew Sermons on the Golden Texts for 1910, 19.

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Momerie (A. W.), The Origin of Evil, 283.

Neale (J. M.), Sermons for Children, 105.

Parkhurst (C. H.), The Blind Man’s Creed, 205.

Peabody (F. G.), Mornings in the College Chapel, i. 69.

Smith (W. C.), Sermons, 50.

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Verse 13

The Salt of the Earth

Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out and trodden under foot of men.— Matthew 5:13.

The exact position of these words in the Sermon on the Mount must be carefully remembered. They follow immediately after the Beatitudes—those sayings in which Christ had described the various qualities of character essential to the citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven, that is, for one who would obey the rule which He had come on earth to establish and extend. A citizen of that Kingdom, Christ had just taught His hearers, must be humble-minded: he must grieve over the sin and the various evils which exist in the world; he must be gentle; he must desire righteousness above all things; he must be merciful; he must be pure-minded in the fullest sense of the words; he must do all in his power to promote peace; and he must be prepared to suffer in order that righteousness may be promoted and extended. A character which fulfils these conditions, that is, a character of which these virtues are the factors, is the character desired by Christ, and such a character is His own.

Immediately after this description has been given, as soon as ever this ideal has been set us as the standard, Christ addresses the words of the text to those who were following Him and learning from Him. To them He looked to cultivate this character. And for a moment He thinks of them, not as they actually were, but as He would have them be. For a moment He treats them as if His ideal for them were already realized in them; He does not say ye shall be, but ye are the salt of the earth. The spirit of all the united qualities commended in the Beatitudes is the salt of the life of the world. All of them—meekness and humility and purity and the rest—run up into two: the spirit of love and the spirit of righteousness. These, then, embodied in human life, are the salt of the earth, the salt of Churches and nations, of all forms of human activity, of thought, of imagination, of business, of the daily life of men. These keep humanity fresh and living, preserve it from corruption, and add to it the savour which secures to men their true and enduring enjoyment of life. But chiefly, in Christ’s present idea, they were the freshening, purifying, preserving element in His Kingdom.

I

The Salt and its Savour

“Ye are the salt of the earth.”

1. Salt is one of those superfluities which the great French wit defined as “things that are very necessary.” From the very beginning of human history men have set a high value upon it and sought for it in caves and by the seashore. The nation that had a good supply of it was counted rich. A bag of salt, among the barbarous tribes, was worth more than a man. The Jews prized it especially because they lived in a warm climate where food was difficult to keep, and because their religion laid particular emphasis on cleanliness, and because salt was largely used in their sacrifices.

Both in Hebrew and in Roman bywords, salt is praised as a necessity of human life. Homer calls it “divine,” and Plato speaks of it as a “substance dear to the gods.” It is an indispensable element in the food both of men and of animals. It is so cheap and plentiful with us that we can hardly realize that there are places where there is what is known as salt starvation, which is in its way even more painful than hunger or thirst. A missionary tells us that in Africa he has known natives who have travelled fifty or sixty miles in search of salt. Their hot African blood, lacking the purifying and health-giving salt, has broken out in painful ulcers which drain the life and energy; and when the mission-house has been reached they have begged in piteous tones, not for money or bread, but for salt. 1 [Note: J. G. Mantle, God’s To-Morrow, 22.]

Chloride of sodium (common salt) is fortunately one of the most widely distributed, as well as one of the most useful and absolutely necessary, of nature’s gifts; and it is a matter of much comfort to know that this mineral exists in such enormous quantities that it can never be exhausted. “Had not,” says Dr. Buckland, “the beneficent providence of the Creator laid up these stores of salt within the bowels of the earth, the distance of inland countries from the sea would have rendered this article of prime and daily necessity unattainable to a large proportion of mankind; but under the existing dispensation, the presence of mineral salt, in strata which are dispersed generally over the interior of our continents and larger islands, is a source of health and daily enjoyment to the inhabitants of almost every region.” Even supposing that the whole of the mines, brine pits, and springs become exhausted, we can fall back on the sea, whose supply is as boundless as its restless self; and there is as little fear of its exhaustion as there is of the failure of the sun’s heat. 1 [Note: W. Coles-Finch, Water: its Origin and Use, 167.]

2. From one point of view it was an immense compliment for the disciples to be spoken of as salt. Their Master showed great confidence in them. He set a high value upon them. The historian Livy could find nothing better to express his admiration for the people of ancient Greece than this very phrase. He called them sal gentium, “the salt of the nations.” But our Lord was not simply paying compliments. He was giving a clear and powerful call to duty. His thought was not that His disciples should congratulate themselves on being better than any other men. He wished them to ask themselves whether they actually had in them the purpose and the power to make other men better. Did they intend to exercise a purifying, seasoning, saving influence in the world? Salt exists solely to purify, not itself, but that which needs its services. The usefulness of the Church as a separated society lies wholly in the very world from which it has been so carefully separated. It exists to redeem that world from itself. Out of love for that world it is sent by the same impulse of the Father as sent to it His only-begotten Son; and the damning error of the Pharisee is that he arrests this Divine intention in mid career, arrests it at the point where it has reached him, arrests it for his own honour and his own benefit, refusing to let it pass through him to its work on others.

(1) Salt is most largely used as an antiseptic, for allaying corruption, and for stopping the effects of climate upon animal matter; it is a preservative of sweetness and purity in that with which it is associated. So the presence of Christ’s Church in the world, of a Christian man or woman in the smaller world of his or her own circle in society, is to be preservative: to allay corruption, to maintain life, to ward off decay and death, to uphold a standard of right, without which the world would be a far worse place than it is.

“Ye”—Christians, ye that are lowly, serious, and meek; ye that hunger after righteousness, that love God and man, that do good to all, and therefore suffer evil—“ye are the salt of the earth.” It is your very nature to season whatever is round about you. It is the nature of the Divine savour which is in you to spread to whatsoever you touch; to diffuse itself, on every side, to all those among whom you are. This is the great reason why the providence of God has so mingled you together with other men, that whatever grace you have received of God may through you be communicated to others; that every holy temper and word and work of yours may have an influence on them also. By this means a check will, in some measure, be given to the corruption which is in the world; and a small part, at least, saved from the general infection, and rendered holy and pure before God. 1 [Note: John Wesley.]

(2) To put our Lord’s comparison in its full relief, however, we must add the sacrificial use of salt in Hebrew worship as well as in the rites of heathen antiquity. No offering of cakes or vegetable produce was laid on Jehovah’s altar saltless; perhaps this seasoning was added even to animal sacrifices; certainly it entered into the composition of the sacred incense. With all this in their minds, Jesus’ audience could understand Him to mean no less than this, that His disciples were to act on society (Jewish society, of course, in the first place) as a moral preservative, keeping it from total decay, and fitting it to be an oblation, not distasteful, but acceptable, to Jehovah. The thought was far from a new one to the Hebrew mind. Remembering how the world before the flood perished because “all flesh had corrupted his way,” except one salt particle too minute to preserve the mass; how ten men like Lot would have saved the cities of the lower Jordan; how it marked the extreme ripeness to destruction of the Israel of Ezekiel’s day, that even these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job, had they been in it, could have delivered “neither son nor daughter”; no Jew could miss the point of our Lord’s words to His Twelve around Him, “Ye are the salt of the land.” When He spoke, the corruption of His nation was extreme, as His own sermons show us; and effete Judaism was fast ripening for its fall.

(3) Salt gives relish to what would otherwise be tasteless or unpleasant; and Christ’s people are, if we may so speak, the relishing element in the world, which prevents it from being loathsome altogether to the Lord. So Lot was in the cities of the plain the one savour which made them even so long endurable. There was not much salt in Lot; but there was a little, there was a righteous soul that at least vexed itself because of the unrighteousness around it, if it did not do very much to arrest that unrighteousness. And because of Lot, God almost spared the place, would have spared it had there been only a few more like him, or had he been just a little truer than he was. Even so Christians are to be as salt to the earth, which, without them, would be in a manner loathsome, being so possessed with mean and base and ignoble souls.

A king asked his three daughters how much they loved him. Two of them replied that they loved him better than all the gold and silver in the world. The youngest one said she loved him better than salt. The king was not pleased with her answer, as he thought salt was not very palatable. But the cook, overhearing the remark, put no salt in anything for breakfast next morning, and the meal was so insipid that the king could not enjoy it. He then saw the force of his daughter’s remark. She loved him so well that nothing was good without him. 1 [Note: A. C. Dixon, Through Night to Morning, 197.]

(4) Salt does its work silently, inconspicuously, gradually. “Ye are the light of the world,” says Christ in the next verse. Light is far-reaching and brilliant, flashing that it may be seen. That is one side of Christian work, the side that most of us like best, the conspicuous kind of it. But there is a very much humbler, and a very much more useful, kind of work that we have all to do. We shall never be the “light of the world,” except on condition of being “the salt of the earth.” We have to play the humble, inconspicuous, silent part of checking corruption by a pure example before we can aspire to play the other part of raying out light into the darkness, and so drawing men to Christ Himself.

I was once travelling in an Oriental country, where life was squalid, women despised, and houses built of mud; and of a sudden, I came upon a village where all seemed changed. The houses had gardens before them and curtains in their windows; the children did not beg of the passer-by, but called out a friendly greeting. What had happened? I was fifty miles from a Christian mission-station, and this mission had been there for precisely fifty years. Slowly and patiently the influence had radiated at the rate of a mile a year, so that one could now for a space of fifty miles across that barren land perceive the salt of the Christian spirit, and could see the light of the Christian life shining as from a lighthouse fifty miles away. That was the work to which Jesus summoned the world,—not an ostentatious or revolutionary or dramatic work, but the work of the salt and of the light. The saying of Jesus is not for the self-satisfied or conspicuous, but for the discouraged and obscure. A man says to himself: “I cannot be a leader, a hero, or a scholar, but I can at least do the work of the salt and keep the life that is near to me from spoiling; I can at least do the work of the light so that the way of life shall not be wholly dark.” Then, as he gives himself to this self-effacing service, he hears the great word: “He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it,” and answers gladly: “So then death worketh in us, but life in you.” 1 [Note: F. G. Peabody, Mornings in the College Chapel, ii. 53.]

II

The Salt without the Savour.

“If the salt have lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted?”

1. Salt may lose its seasoning power. In Christ’s era salt frequently reached the consumer in a very imperfect state, being largely mixed with earth. The salt which has lost its savour is simply the earthy residuum of such impure salt after the sodium chloride has been washed out. Blocks of salt were quarried on the shores of the Dead Sea and brought to Jerusalem, and a store of this rock-salt was kept by the Levites in the Temple to be used in the sacrifices. It was very impure—usually containing a large mixture of sand—and in moist weather the saline ingredient deliquesced and, trickling away, left the porous lump in its original shape, but all its substance, all its “savour” gone. For food it was no longer fit seasoning. Cast on the altar it would no longer decrepitate and sparkle, and in flowers of flaming violet adorn and consume the offering. Even the farmer did not care to get it. The gritty, gravelly mass was good for nothing—only fit to be pounded and sprinkled on the slippery pavement, and trodden under the feet of men.

I have often seen just such salt, and the identical disposition of it that our Lord has mentioned. A merchant of Sidon having farmed of the Government the revenue from the importation of salt, brought over an immense quantity from the marshes of Cyprus—enough, in fact, to supply the whole province for at least twenty years. This he had transferred to the mountains, to cheat the Government out of some small percentage. Sixty-five houses in Jûne—Lady Stanhope’s village—were rented and filled with salt. These houses have merely earthen floors, and the salt next the ground in a few years entirely spoiled. I saw large quantities of it literally thrown into the street, to be trodden under foot of men and beasts. It was “good for nothing.” Similar magazines are common in Palestine, and have been from remote ages; and the sweeping out of the spoiled salt and casting it into the street are actions familiar to all men. Maundrell, who visited the lake at Jebbûl, tells us that he found salt there which had entirely “lost its savour,” and the same abounds among the debris at Usdum, and in other localities of rock-salt at the south end of the Dead Sea. Indeed, it is a well-known fact that the salt of this country, when in contact with the ground, or exposed to rain and sun, does become insipid, and useless. From the manner in which it is gathered, much earth and other impurities are necessarily collected with it. Not a little of it is so impure that it cannot be used at all; and such salt soon effloresces and turns to dust—not to fruitful soil, however. It is not only good for nothing itself, but it actually destroys all fertility wherever it is thrown; and this is the reason why it is cast into the street. There is a sort of verbal verisimilitude in the manner in which our Lord alludes to the act—“it is cast out” and “trodden under foot”; so troublesome is this corrupted salt, that it is carefully swept up, carried forth, and thrown into the street. There is no place about the house, yard, or garden where it can be tolerated. No man will allow it to be thrown on to his field, and the only place for it is the street; and there it is cast, to be trodden under foot of men. 1 [Note: W. M. Thomson, The Land and the Book, chap. xxvi.]

2. What is a saltless Christian? A saltless Christian is one who has gone back to the earthly, the worldly, the carnal. The heavenly element is no longer in the ascendant; the salt has lost its savour.

(1) One sign of deterioration is to be found in a lowered and attenuated ideal. Christ has little by little become almost a personal stranger. We do not seek His company, watch His eye, listen for His voice. The thought of Him does not send a thrill of joy into the heart. We have not renounced Him or consciously taken another Lord in His place. But we have lagged so far behind in the journey that He is quite out of our sight and reach. We can no more honestly say, as once we could say with a kind of rapture, “He is chief among ten thousand, and altogether lovely.” It is the inevitable result from this changed relationship to Christ that the cross has dropped from our back (we did not feel it drop, nor do we miss it now that it is gone); there is nothing in our lives, or activities, or general profession, that is irksome or troublesome, compelling sacrifice, and earning joy. The world is apparently neither worse nor better for us. Really it is worse. The candlestick is still in its place, the candle is still feebly burning, but in a moment it may go out, and then where shall we be?

If you take a red-hot ball out of a furnace and lay it down upon a frosty moor, two processes will go on—the ball will lose heat and the surrounding atmosphere will gain it. There are two ways by which you equalize the temperature of a hotter and a colder body; the one is by the hot one getting cold, and the other is by the cold one getting hot. If you are not heating the world, the world is freezing you. Every man influences all men round him, and receives influences from them; and if there be not more exports than imports, if there be not more influences and mightier influences raying out from him than are coming into him, he is a poor creature, and at the mercy of circumstances. “Men must either be hammers or anvil”;—must either give blows or receive them. I am afraid that a great many of us who call ourselves Christians get a great deal more harm from the world than we ever dream of doing good to it. Remember this, you are “the salt of the earth,” and if you do not salt the world, the world will rot you. 1 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

(2) Another sign of deterioration is a growing indifference to all great enterprise for Christ. Few things are more exhilarating, more invigorating, more uplifting, more solemnizing, than a mighty gathering of Christian people, met, let us say, for a great missionary anniversary, to hear the glad tidings of the progress of the Redeemer’s kingdom, and to return to their homes, stirred, joyful, thankful. The man whose heart is cold to all this, sceptical about it, indifferent to it, and who yet looks back on days when every word spoken, every blow struck, every triumph won for Jesus, was a joy which few things else equalled, has good reason for asking himself what has happened to him to make the growth of the Kingdom of Christ so small and dull and unattractive and commonplace a thing. The change is assuredly not in the purpose of Jesus, or in the value of the soul, or in the duty of the Church, which is His Body.

If, as can be reasonably argued, the historian may trace an increasing deterioration in the moral worth of Alexander Borgia from the period when the influence of Cesare at the Vatican replaced that of Juan, the fact has its obvious explanation. Rodrigo Borgia was a man of extraordinary vitality, with unusual reserves of power for his years. His energies had found their chief outlet in keen interest in the functions of his office as he understood them. His sensual indulgences, however disreputable, were never the first preoccupation of his nature; they were rather the surplusage of a virile temperament to which such interests as art, letters, or building made no serious appeal. In any position but that of the Vicar of Christ his excesses would have passed unremarked. If they weakened, as they undoubtedly did, his spiritual authority, they had hitherto scarcely detracted from the respect due to his political capacity. But in proportion as he surrendered his initiative in affairs and shared the control of policy, of finance, and of ecclesiastical administration with Cesare, the less worthy elements of his nature asserted themselves more forcibly. It was inevitable that in such a man abdication of responsibility should have this result, till in the end Alexander became a thoroughly evil man; evil, in that under guise of natural affection, in reality through cowardice, he allowed his authority, both spiritual and political, to be shamelessly exploited. Thus knowingly and without resistance Rodrigo Borgia steadily yielded to the worst impulses of his nature. 1 [Note: W. H. Woodward, Cesare Borgia, 136.]

3. When the salt has lost its savour it is good for nothing. There are some things, the chemist tells us, which, when they have lost their own peculiar form and utility, are still of some good, for they can be put to other and baser uses. But to what use can a dead Church be put? You may try to galvanize it into newness of life by artificial means, but, after all, it is nothing more than a corpse. All that can be truly said of such an attempt is that it was an interesting experiment. A mere profession of religion is either an embarrassment or, what is worse, a fatal delusion. This old world of ours has undergone many material changes during its existence, yet it has grown more and more beautiful, in spite of them, as the forces of evolution have unfolded themselves. But there is one change it could hardly survive as the habitation of man, and that is the lost consciousness of the presence and power of God with the people, or the loss of the sweetness and beauty of the Redeemer of men as revealed in the lives of those faithful souls who sincerely love Him. For the Church which has lost its savour there will come a day when men, overwhelmed by their disappointment, and maddened by their sense of its lost savour, will tear it to pieces, just as the enraged mob in Paris is said to have torn the fillet from Reason’s brow and trampled it under their feet.

If the salt should lose its savour, if the regenerative force should die out of the Church—if there were a Church into which the spirit of the world had passed, a Church which had become assimilated by the world, a Church which had somehow learnt to speak the world’s language and to justify the world’s morality, and to echo the world’s phrases, a Church which are and drank at the world’s table without the world becoming aware of any protest, or any discomfort, or any fear, a Church which, instead of awakening consciences, sent them to sleep, instead of exposing the world’s plagues flattered them into excusing or forgetting them: in the name of God what use, or place, has such a Church on the face of the earth? Such a Church has falsified the first law of its existence. It has killed out the very conscience which it was created to sustain. It has destroyed the very power of remedy from sin which it alone held in charge. It has poisoned the wells of human hope. “If the very salt have lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out and trodden under foot of men.”

The really amazing thing is that such immense numbers of people have accepted Christianity in the world, and profess themselves Christians without the slightest doubt of their sincerity, who never regard the Christian principles at all. The chief aim, it would seem, of the Church has been not to preserve the original revelation, but to accommodate it to human instincts and desires. It seems to me to resemble the very quaint and simple old Breton legend, which relates how the Saviour sent the Apostles out to sell stale fish as fresh; and when they returned unsuccessful, He was angry with them, and said, “How shall I make you into fishers of men, if you cannot even persuade simple people to buy stale fish for fresh?” That is a very trenchant little allegory of ecclesiastical methods! And perhaps it is even so that it has come to pass that Christianity is in a sense a failure, or rather an unfulfilled hope, because it has made terms with the world, has become pompous and respectable and mundane and influential and combative, and has deliberately exalted civic duty above love. 1 [Note: A. C. Benson, Joyous Gard, 197.]

Glanced over some lectures of Mr. Gore’s on “The Mission of the Church.” He tells a story of St. Thomas Aquinas which is new to me. The Pope said to him, as the bags full of the money of the faithful, who had crowded to the Jubilee, were carried past: “Peter could not say now, ‘Silver and gold have I none.’ ” “No,” was the reply, “neither could he say, ‘Arise, and walk!’ ” 2 [Note: Sir M. E. Grant Duff, Notes from a Diary, 1892–1895, i. 138.]

The Salt of the Earth

Literature

Austin (A. B.), Linked Lives, 221.

Brooke (S. A.), Short Sermons, 22.

Chadwick (W. E.), Christ and Everyday Life, 134.

Church (R. W.), Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford, 110.

Cope (F. L.), A North Country Preacher, 161.

Dixon (A. C.), Through Night to Morning, 194.

Dyke (H. van), The Open Door, 63.

Fürst (A.), Christ the Way, 31.

Gough (E. J.), The Religion of the Son of Man, 57.

Hamer (D. J.), Salt and Light, 3.

Hamilton (J.), Works, vi. 212.

King (T. S.), Christianity and Humanity, 267.

Lyttelton (E.), The Sermon on the Mount, 113.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions: St. Matthew i.–viii., 178.

Mantle (J. G.), God’s To-Morrow, 19.

Meyer (F. B.), The Directory of the Devout Life, 33.

Miller (J.), Sermons Literary and Scientific, ii. 369.

Peabody (F. G.), Mornings in the College Chapel, ii. 52.

Smith (N.), Members One of Another, 153.

Smith (W. C.), The Sermon on the Mount, 37.

Symonds (A. R.), Fifty Sermons, 352.

Tait (A.), The Charter of Christianity, 97.

Thorold (A. W.), Questions of Faith and Duty, 179.

Trench (R. C.), Westminster and Other Sermons, 281.

Whately (R.), Sermons, 251.

Christian World Pulpit, xl. 360 (A. Melville); lviii. 183 (H. S. Holland); lxx. 49 (A. Clayton); lxxvi. 75 (W. Glover); lxxxii. 282 (N. Marshall).

Verse 17

A Conservative Reformer

Think not that I came to destroy the law or the prophets: I came not to destroy, but to fulfil.— Matthew 5:17.

Christ, the new Prophet and Teacher, has gone up upon the Mount and is about to speak to the people. He is sitting down to preach. The villages will be empty soon, for the news has gone abroad and great excitement has seized the people. What new thing will He tell them? What daring message is this Revolutionary about to give them? They throng the slopes; they hang upon His words; there is the silence of a great expectation upon the multitude. And Christ begins to preach. What is His subject? What is He saying?

Not a syllable about what they called religion, law, and Sabbath, and temple worship, and fasts; simply the Beatitudes, the inner virtues of the heart, the duty to show light. He moves the conscience of the people by bringing them straight into the presence of their Father. He recalls them to the consciousness of God, whom they are forgetting. His words move them as nothing had ever moved them before. They feel for an instant the pressure and the nearness of God Himself. At such a moment, in presence of a higher religion, what to them were law, and ceremonial, and priest? The murmur goes round that old things have passed away; it is a new world; away with remnants of exploded superstition and bygone forms of worship! It is to meet this inarticulate thought that Christ stops and says, “Think not that I came to destroy the law or the prophets: I came not to destroy, but to fulfil.” There is to be entire continuity with the past.

With absolute decisiveness He states the purpose of His coming. He knows the meaning of His own work, which so few of us do, and it is safe to take His own account of what He intends, as we so seldom do. His opening declaration is singularly composed of blended humility and majesty. Its humility lies in His placing Himself, as it were, in line with previous messengers, and representing Himself as carrying on the sequence of Divine revelation. It would not have been humble for anybody but Him to say that, but it was so for Him. Its majesty lies in His claim to “fulfil” all former utterances from God.

My love of, and trust in, our Lord, after I had seen Him in a vision, began to grow, for my converse with Him was so continual. I saw that, though He was God, He was man also; that He is not surprised at the frailties of men, that He understands our miserable nature, liable to fall continually, because of the first sin, for the reparation of which He had come. I could speak to Him as to a friend, though He is my Lord.… O my Lord! O my King! who can describe Thy Majesty? It is impossible not to see that Thou art Thyself the great Ruler of all, that the beholding of Thy Majesty fills men with awe. But I am filled with greater awe, O my Lord, when I consider Thy humility, and the love Thou hast for such as I am. We can converse and speak with Thee about everything whenever we will; and when we lose our first fear and awe at the vision of Thy Majesty, we have a greater dread of offending Thee,—not arising out of the fear of punishment, O my Lord, for that is as nothing in comparison with the loss of Thee! 1 [Note: The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus (trans. by D. Lewis), 367.]

I

Christ the Revolutionary

After the multitude had heard those wonderful teachings contained in the Beatitudes, most of which were new and startling, one might well suppose that the question uppermost in every heart would be, Are those laws and institutions which have lasted for two thousand years now to undergo complete change—are they to be superseded by those precepts which we have now just heard propounded by this Great Teacher, who seems to be the Founder of an entirely new law; for what Jewish Rabbi ever gave utterance to such precepts as the proclaiming of blessedness to the poor in spirit, the meek, the humble, the mourning, the persecuted? In the text the Saviour corrects this view.

1. “Think not,” He says, “that I came to destroy.” It is noticeable at once that Christ uses a word for “destroy” which seems to be merely an echo of some confused popular sayings about the Messiah. It is indeed not easy to state clearly what is meant by destroying a law or a set of laws, still less easy to say what would be the meaning of “destroying the prophets.” Laws may no doubt be repealed, but it is not conceivable that any clearheaded man anticipated that the Messiah would repeal the Ten Commandments, or was going to forbid the Old Testament to be read. Strictly speaking, this is the only rational sense which attaches itself to the words. It is probable that Christ was here merely putting on one side a rough popular description of the rôle which He was supposed to be going to play.

It is not obvious at first sight what Christ means by “fulfilling the law.” He does not mean taking the written law as it stands, and literally obeying it. That is what He condemns, not as wrong, but as wholly inadequate. He means rather, starting with it as it stands, and bringing it on to completeness; working out the spirit of it; getting at the comprehensive principles which underlie the narrowness of that letter. These the Messiah sets forth as the essence of the revelation made by God through the Law and the Prophets. Through them He has revealed His will, and it is impossible that His Son should attempt to pull down or undo this revelation of the Father’s will, or that His will, in the smallest particular, should fail of fulfilment. It is not the Law or the Prophets that Jesus proposes to abolish, but the traditional misinterpretations of these authorities. To destroy these misinterpretations is to open the way for the fulfilment of the Law and the Prophets; and He thus substituted free development of spiritual character for servile obedience to oppressive rules. 1 [Note: A. Plummer.]

2. To destroy—that is the creed of the revolutionary. In the French Revolution, Robespierre and his confederates went so far as to obliterate the septennial division of time, insisting that the week should consist of ten rather than seven days. New names were affixed to the days, to the streets, and to the officials of the State. But it was not thus that Christ inaugurated His work. He answered the thoughts of His age, saying, “Think not that I came to destroy.” Every “jot and tittle” of the ancient code was dear to Him. Jesus was no iconoclast.

3. For there is nothing to be gained by destruction. There are men who think that the best means of heralding the new dawn is to fling a bomb into a crowd of harmless people. There are those who believe, with Bakunin, that the only way to regenerate society is to wipe it out by utter destruction, on the supposition that a new and better order will surely be evolved out of chaos. It never has been so, and it never can be so. Such methods can only delay the advance of progress. You can, indeed, cast out devils by Beelzebub. You cannot keep them out; only angels can do that. “His kingdom shall not stand”; for by fulfilment, not by destruction, the old passes into the new.

Carlyle could not reverence Voltaire, but he could not hate him. How could he hate a man who had fought manfully against injustice in high places, and had himself many a time in private done kind and generous actions? To Carlyle, Voltaire was no apostle charged with any divine message of positive truth. Even in his crusade against what he believed to be false, Voltaire was not animated with a high and noble indignation. He was simply an instrument of destruction, enjoying his work with the pleasure of some mocking imp, yet preparing the way for the tremendous conflagration which was impending. In the earlier part of his career Carlyle sympathized with and expected more from the distinctive functions of revolution than he was able to do after longer experience. “I thought,” he once said to me, “that it was the abolition of rubbish. I find it has been only the kindling of a dunghill. The dry straw on the outside burns off; but the huge damp rotting mass remains where it was.” 1 [Note: J. A. Froude, Thomas Carlyle, 1795–1835, ii. 54.]

“Think not (comp. Matthew 3:9, Matthew 10:34) that I came to destroy the law or the prophets.” Such an expression implies that Christ knew that there was danger of the Jews thinking so, and possibly that some had actually said this of Him. The Pharisees would be sure to say it. He disregarded the oral tradition, which they held to be equal in authority to the written Law; and He interpreted the written Law according to its spirit, and not, as they did, according to the rigid letter. Above all, He spoke as if He Himself were an authority, independent of the Law. Even some of His own followers may have been perplexed, and have thought that He proposed to supersede the Law. They might suppose “that it was the purpose of His mission simply to break down restraints, to lift from men’s shoulders the duties which they felt as burdens. The law was full of commandments; the Prophets were full of rebukes and warnings. Might not the mild new Rabbi be welcomed as one come to break down the Law and the Prophets, and so lead the way to less exacting ways of life? This is the delusion which our Lord set Himself to crush. The gospel of the Kingdom was not a gospel of indulgence” (Hort, Judaistic Christianity, 15). He was not a fanatical revolutionary, but a Divine Restorer and Reformer. 1 [Note: A. Plummer.]

II

Christ the Conserver

If Christ is not to destroy the law and the prophets, what then is He to do with this old faith of the Jews? How is He to treat this partial, this imperfect, faith which is already on the ground? He may do either of two things. He may destroy or He may preserve. With the most deliberate wisdom He chooses one method and rejects the other. To the conservative, Christ comes with reassurance.

1. Nothing of the old that is valuable or strong shall be lost. Examine the new, and we shall find the old at the heart of it. Study the channel where the new current is running and we shall find the water of the old channel there. That is a very suggestive fact; it appears everywhere. Study the real forward movement of thought and we shall find it true. There will always be petty disturbances, offshoots here and there which have no reference to the real advance of thought; they may cut loose from the old truth, but they are short-lived and passing. In the main movements, down the main stream, the old is never lost.

An American missionary in Japan, Dr. S. L. Gulick, writes thus: “The Christian preacher should constantly take the ground that every good teaching in the native faith is a gift of God the Father of all men, and is a preparation for the coming of His fuller revelation in Jesus Christ. We should show our real and deep respect for the ‘heathen’ religions; we should take off our hats at their shrines, as we expect them to do in our churches. We should ever insist that Christianity does not come to destroy anything that is good or true in the native faiths, but rather to stimulate, to strengthen, and fulfil it—to give it life and real energy. The trouble with the native religions is not that they possess no truth, but that the truth they have is so mixed up with folly and superstition that it is lost; it has no power—no life-giving energy.” 1 [Note: World Missionary Conference, 1910: Report of Commission IV., 95.]

2. Nothing is to be remitted—no rule of purity, no necessity of righteousness. How can it be, when we are brought, by entering this Kingdom, nearer to God, who must be of purer eyes than to behold iniquity? No slackening of the spiritual code is possible, is conceivable. To suppose this is to mistake all the meaning of mercy, all the purpose of pardon. Let no one make such a disastrous blunder. “Think not that I came to destroy the law or the prophets: I came not to destroy, but to fulfil.”

“Think not that I will dispense with any of the rules of morality, prescribed by Moses, and explained by the prophets,” is Blair’s rendering of this verse. “I came not to destroy, but to fulfil” (both the law and the prophets): “To fulfil,” that is, to render full obedience to those great commandments (see Matthew 5:19) which it is the pre-eminent aim of the Scriptures to inculcate and enforce. Jesus came to render this full obedience in His own person, and also to secure that it should be rendered increasingly, and ever increasingly, in the persons of His disciples, the subjects of His Kingdom. It is this latter idea that was prominently in His mind on the present occasion, as is evident from the 19th and 20th verses. He came, not to introduce licence and licentiousness into His Kingdom, but to establish holiness. Some expositors suppose that the word “fulfil” means to supplement or perfect; and they imagine that Christ is here referring to His legislative authority. But such an interpretation of the term is at variance with Matthew 5:18-19, and with its use in kindred passages, such as Romans 13:8, Galatians 5:14. Theophylact, among other interpretations, says that Christ fulfilled the law as a painter fills up the sketch of his picture. But it is a different “full-filling” that is referred to. When commandments are addressed to us, they present, as it were, empty vessels of duty, which our obedience is to “fill full.” 2 [Note: J. Morison.]

3. The Old Testament is not as it were the scaffolding necessary for the erection of the Christian Church, needing to be taken down in order that the full symmetry and beauty of the building may be seen, and only to be had recourse to from time to time when repairs are needed. It is an integral part of the structure. Ye are “built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the chief corner stone.” How could it be otherwise? we ask with reverence. It was God who spoke “through the prophets,” it is God who speaks “in a Son.” Every Divine word must be of eternal import. God’s truth does not vary; there is no mutability of purpose in the eternal present of the Divine mind.

The Old Testament leads us up to Christ, and Christ takes it and puts it back into our hands as a completed whole. He bids us study it as “fulfilled in him,” and “put ourselves to school with every part of it.” The old lesson-book is not to be thrown away or kept as an archæological curiosity; it is to be re-studied in this fresh light of further knowledge.

The πλήρωσις of the law and the prophets is their fulfilment by the re-establishment of their absolute meaning, so that now nothing more is wanting to what they ought to be in accordance with the Divine ideas which lie at the foundation of their commands. It is the perfect development of their ideal reality out of the positive form, in which the same is historically apprehended and limited.… Luther well says: “Christ is speaking of the fulfilment, and so deals with doctrines, in like manner as He calls ‘ destroying’ a not acting with works against the law, but a breaking off from the law with the doctrine.” The fulfilling is “showing the right kernel and understanding, that they may learn what the law is and desires to have.” The Apostle Paul worked quite in the sense of our passage; his writings are full of the fulfilment of the law in the sense in which Christ means it; and his doctrine of its abrogation refers only to its validity for justification to the exclusion of faith. Paul did not advance beyond this declaration, but he applied his right understanding boldly and freely, and in so doing the breaking up of the old form by the new spirit could not but necessarily begin, as Jesus Himself clearly recognized (cf. Matthew 9:16; John 4:21; John 4:23 f.) and set forth to those who believed in His own person and His completed righteousness. But even in this self-representation of Christ the new principle is not severed from the Old Testament piety, but is the highest fulfilment of the latter, its anti-typical consummation, its realized ideal. Christianity itself is in so far a law. 1 [Note: H. A. W. Meyer.]

III

Christ the Fulfiller

Continuity with the old is part of Christ’s teaching. He came to conserve. But He came to do more than that—infinitely more than that. He came also to fulfil. “To fulfil.” Do we not often limit the idea of “fulfilment” to what are called the typical and prophetic parts of the Old Testament, and regard the fulfilment as just the counterpart of the type or prediction, as the reality of which only the reflection had hitherto been visible? But “fulfilment” is far more than this. It is the completion of what was before imperfect; it is the realization of what was shadowy; it is the development of what was rudimentary; it is the union and reconciliation of what was isolated and disconnected; it is the full growth from the antecedent germ.

1. Christ fulfilled the law.—The law (νόμος ) is not to be restricted here to the Decalogue; it is to be taken in its more extended signification as denoting the entire law. The moral law was an expression of the mind of God, of God’s moral nature—a revelation, or rather expansion, of the law of nature which He originally wrote in the heart of man. Sin blinded men to such an extent that it was necessary to have the law promulgated; hence God wrote it on two tables of stone. And it stood as a public warning against sin, and as a standard of moral duty. It disclosed wants that it was incapable of satisfying, it aggravated the evil it could not heal; and, compelling men to see their own weakness, it taught them to look forward to One who would be capable of fulfilling all its demands. This is the “fulfilling” of which Christ speaks, the completion of that which for two thousand years had been imperfect and ineffectual. “Christ fulfilled the law and the prophets,” says Bishop Wordsworth, “by obedience, by accomplishment of types, ceremonies, rites, and prophecies, and by explaining, spiritualizing, elevating, enlarging, and perfecting the moral law, by writing it on the heart, and by giving grace to obey it, as well as an example of obedience by taking away its curse; and by the doctrine of free justification by faith in Himself, which the law prefigured and anticipated, but could not give.”

Let us look shortly at three main ways in which Christ fulfilled the law.

(1) Christ fulfilled the law by meeting its requirements.—From first to last the life of our Lord was the fulfilment, in spirit and letter, of the ancient ritual. As a son of the law, He obeyed the initial rite of Judaism on the eighth day after birth, and there was no item of the law, even to the dots of the i’s or the crossing of the t’s, which He omitted or slurred. He died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures. What could be only partially true of His Apostle was literally true of the Lord: as touching the righteousness which is of the law, He was found blameless. Our Lord fulfilled the ceremonial law and fulfilled the moral law, since He was Jesus Christ “the Righteous.” He honoured the law by His obedience “even to death,” atoning for its breach and violation by mankind, and giving, through His unknown sufferings an answer to its just dues and demands, such as could not have been afforded though the whole race had been mulcted to the uttermost farthing of penal consequences. His fulfilment, therefore, was not for Himself alone, but as the second Adam, the representative man, and for us all.

(2) Christ fulfilled the law by spiritualizing it.—Were we to enter a room in the early morning where a company were sitting or drowsing, with sickly hue, by the dull glimmer of candles, which never had given a sufficient light, and were now guttering, neglected, and burning down to the socket, we would not think we were destroying the light by flinging open the casement, and letting in the clear sunshine upon them. We would, on the contrary, feel that by this process alone could they get the full light which they needed. Now, much in the same way the Lord Jesus came into the world, and found there, as it were, the old seven-branched candlestick of the tabernacle still burning, though dim and low, for it was not well trimmed in those neglectful years; found there the old law of Moses, moral, ceremonial, and judicial, still recognized, though a good deal obscured by traditions; and what He did was to purify and spiritualize the law. He opened upon it the windows of His spirit, illumining its every part, showing its perfection and comprehensiveness. Other teachers had taken the law, the law as it stood, and had so dealt with it as to present it in all its bareness and outwardness, its narrowness and burdensomeness; Jesus Christ took the same law, the law as it stood, but He so dealt with it as to present it in all its fulness and inwardness, its breadth and goodness.

(3) Christ fulfilled the law by generalizing it.—He broke down all class distinctions in morality. Heathenism divided mankind into two classes, the learned and the ignorant, and between these two it erected a high partition wall. These distinctions, though discountenanced in Jewish law, were admitted in Jewish practice. “This people who knoweth not the law are cursed.” Christ boldly demolished the wall of partition built high and broad between the cultured and the illiterate. He entered the granary of Divine truth, took out the golden grain, and scattered it broadcast on the face of the common earth. The truths of the favoured few He made the common property of the uncultured many. He alone of all His contemporaries or predecessors perceived the intrinsic worth and vast possibilities of the human soul.

Christ also broke down all national distinctions in morality. The intense nationalism of the Jews in the time of the Saviour is proverbial; they surrounded sea and land to make one proselyte. Instead of trying to make Judaism commensurate with the world, they tried to make the world commensurate with Judaism. However, Jewish morality here, as in every other instance, was superior to contemporaneous pagan morality. Notwithstanding its intense nationalism, Judaism always inculcated kindness to strangers. “The stranger within thy gates”—the recurrence of that phrase in the Mosaic ethics lifts them above all other ancient ethics whatever. What Moses only began, Jesus Christ beautifully perfected. He made morality absolutely human. It is no longer Greek under obligation to Greek, but man under obligation to man. What the Greek poet only momentarily conceived, Jesus Christ has converted into a powerful element in modern civilization—“I also am a man, and nothing human is foreign to me.”

Jesus felt Himself called of God to a lot within the chosen people, because He was Himself the culmination of the revelation made to them in the past. As that revelation had been through a special nation, so it had to complete itself there. That He Himself lived within the limits of Judaism was not a confession that He was merely the crown of a national or racial faith, but rather the vindication of the older religion as an inherent part of a world-revelation. It was not the lowering of His message to the particularism of the Jewish religion, but the elevation of the latter into a universal significance first fully revealed in Him. The problem which Jesus had to solve was not the destruction of Judaism, but its consummation, the liberation of its spiritual content from the restrictions of its form. That He should have indicated the supersession of Jewish privilege is not at all unlikely; but manifestly this could not be His usual or characteristic tone, if He were to implant in Jewish minds the germs of His wider faith. He had largely to put Himself in their place, and work through the forms of their thought. Primarily, therefore, His universalism had to be implicit. He did not so much give them new religious terms as fill the old terms with a new meaning and reference. Hence it was only after He had at least partly accomplished this in the case of a chosen circle of followers, and attached them unalterably to Himself, that He spoke openly and frequently of the larger issues of His gospel, and the ingathering of the “nations.” Jesus saw that if He were to conserve the eternal element in the Jewish religion, He must work within its lines. He broke, indeed, with the existing authorities, but only because He maintained that they misrepresented it. The principle on which He acted, as regards both the teaching of His ministry and the subsequent development of His Church, was to sow germinal truths which could come to maturity only through the reaction of individual thought, and the enlarging of experience. Therefore, while He did not leave the disciples wholly without plain announcements of the universality of His mission, He did not so emphasize this as to impair their confidence in the unity and continuity of the old and the new faiths. 1 [Note: D. W. Forrest, The Christ of History and of Experience, 418.]

2. Christ fulfilled the prophets.—We are familiar with the idea of the “fulfilment” of prophecy, though that idea is often unduly limited. Prophecy is not “inverted history”: it was not a reflection beforehand by which men could foreknow what was to come: it was but as the seed out of which plant and flower and fruit were to be developed. Prophecy kept men’s eyes fixed upon the future; it created a sense of need, it stirred deep and earnest longings; it stimulated hope. And then the fulfilment gathered into one unimagined reality all the various lines of thought and longing and hope, in a completeness far transcending all anticipation. The fulfilment could not have been conjectured from the prophecy, but it answers to it, and shows the working of the one Divine purpose, unhasting, unresting, to its final goal of man’s redemption.

The prophets’ great teachings were all centred round the figure of the Deliverer of the future. There were three things concerning the person and work of this Messiah upon which they laid special emphasis.

(1) The Messiah was to be humble in the circumstances of His life.—His birthplace, His lowly outward condition, His having no visible grandeur to attract the world’s eye, had all been noted by the pen of inspiration. If He had been born in any other place than Bethlehem, if He had appeared as a rich Prince instead of being the son of a poor family, there would have been reason to say that the words of Scripture were against Him; for it was prophesied regarding Him, “Thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting.”

Christian religion beginneth not at the highest, as other religions do, but at the lowest. It will have us to climb up by Jacob’s ladder, whereupon God Himself leaneth, whose feet touch the very earth, hard by the head of Jacob. Run straight to the manger, and embrace this Infant, the Virgin’s little babe, in thine arms; and behold Him as He was born, nursed, grew up, was conversant amongst men; teaching; dying; rising again; ascending up above all the heavens, and having power over all things. This sight and contemplation will keep thee in the right way, that thou mayest follow whither Christ hath gone. 1 [Note: Luther, Commentary on the Galatians, 102.]

(2) But the Messiah was to be great in His person.—He was to be of high origin, though He was to take up a lowly position on earth. It was said of Him by one of the prophets, His “goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting.” These words intimated that He who was afterwards to appear in human nature for the deliverance of His people had lived from the beginning, from eternity. The prophet Isaiah had also said with reference to Him, “Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The Mighty God, The Everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.”

The Jews took great offence, we read, because Jesus, being a man, called Himself the Son of God. But did not the Scriptures, which they professed to follow, speak of the Messiah as both God and man? If He had claimed less He would not have been the Deliverer promised to their fathers. And were the actions of Jesus inconsistent with His high claim? When He gave sight to the blind, and hearing to the deaf, and speech to the dumb, and life to the dead by a word, did He not show that He indeed was what the prophet Isaiah had said the Messiah at His coming should be, “The Mighty God”? 1 [Note: G. S. Smith, Victory Over Sin and Death, 21.]

(3) He was also to accomplish a matchless work.—He was to bruise the head of the serpent; or, as this first announcement is explained again and again in the prophecies which follow, and particularly in the prophecies of Daniel, He was “to finish transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness.” He was to take away the sins of men which separated them from God, to put an end to the commission of sin, and to bring in the reign of righteousness for ever. He was in consequence called by the prophets in other places “the Lord our righteousness.” Jesus declared when He was upon the earth that this was to be the great purpose of His mission. “The Son of man,” He said, “came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.” He came to take away all burdens and all troubles by taking away sin, which is the cause of them all. “Come unto me,” He said, “all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” And with reference to all that come unto Him, He says, “I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any pluck them out of my hand.”

In St. Paul, Christ is the Deliverer from sins in the past; He is the Defender against sins in the future. God’s love in Christ is emphatically that which delivers the wretched man, beaten in all his endeavours to free himself from the body of this death of sin: it is that which has done through Christ what the law could not do, enabled the righteousness of the law to be fulfilled in His redeemed. Over St. Paul’s mind there ever seems to be resting the shadow of the memory of the past; he remembers how wrong he once went, what a terrible mistake he made. And he remembers how, not by any reflection, not by any study of his own, but by the direct influence of Christ Himself, he first learned how fearfully wrong he was. Hence throughout his life there is present to him a sense of his own weakness. Yet while these thoughts sometimes come across him, and make him more eagerly watchful over all that he does, nothing can shake his firm persuasion that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Jesus Christ our Lord.” To him Christ is emphatically the power which wipes out the past, and which upholds the soul, the power which alone can preserve us blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, whose strength is made perfect in our weakness, who shall one day “change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself.” 1 [Note: Archbishop Temple.]

A Conservative Reformer

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