have had in their lonely college chambers.

But I

should be sorry to rest the case on any such selfish grounds. It is in another way that I believe you will do yourselves good by opening your hearts to this appeal. In your younger days you experienced all the tender kindnesses of family life. Later you will probably know family life again happier then because giving more than receiving. But in early manhood the temptation to selfishness is strongest. Then a man stands most alone, and is apt to think it his sole duty to push himself on in the world. Thankfully then accept the opportunity of counteracting this tendency by showing sympathy with the needy. and the suffering; so that however small your means of helping them may be, you may still be entitled one day to receive from our Lord the acknowledgment, "I was sick and ye visited me."

VI

HUNGER AND THIRST AFTER

RIGHTEOUSNESS.

"Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled."-MATTHEW v. 6.

WHAT is meant by hunger and thirst for food and drink? Does it mean this, that your understandings have been convinced that if you neglect to take nourishment you will lose your strength; that you will be unable to perform the duties of your daily life; and that if your neglect continue long you will die? Does it mean, in short, that you choose to take nourishment because of the good consequences that you are persuaded will follow from your doing so? or rather does it not mean that you feel a craving for the food itself without any thought of future consequences, and that it is immediate pain to you to be deprived of it?

Imagine that it were possible for you to travel to some other planet, and that you there heard a

preacher delivering an eloquent sermon on the duty of taking food and drink; that he showed by solid arguments how the tissues of the body are wasted in all the processes of life, and how it is absolutely necessary that this waste should be repaired by nourishment in order that the work of life should be carried on. If you heard such an argument, the more elaborate and conclusive and thoroughly satisfying it was, the more would the conclusion force itself on you, the people for whom all this reasoning is necessary can have no idea what hunger and thirst are.

It is a striking characteristic of our Lord's teaching that He puts forward righteousness not so much as a thing, the absence of which will entail certain dangerous consequences, as rather a thing necessary to satisfy the cravings of the soul. He makes a capacity to feel such cravings the essential evidence of the soul's life and health. It is sufficient to compare the beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount with the beatitudes of the Pentateuch. The reward promised to obedience in the Book of Deuteronomy is "Blessed shalt thou be in the city, and blessed shalt thou be in the field. Blessed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy ground, and the fruit of thy cattle, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep. Blessed shall be thy basket and thy store. Blessed shalt thou

be when thou comest in, and blessed shalt thou be when thou goest out. . . . The Lord shall command the blessing upon thee in thy store-houses, and in all that thou settest thine hand unto; and He shall bless thee in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee." And in fuller detail are enumerated the penalties which would follow on disobedience. All through, righteousness is commended as a thing desirable, not so much for its own sake as in order to gain the external prosperity and escape the plagues which God has instituted as the sanctions for His commands. And in modern preaching this Old Testament method is very commonly adopted. It is true that under our dispensation we are not able, as Moses was, to promise that temporal prosperity and adversity shall correspond to men's deserts; but we have a clearer view than Moses of the rewards and punishments of another life. And so the Christian preacher has been able to draw more glorious pictures of the happiness that will crown obedience than that given in Deuteronomy xxvii., and more terrible pictures of the misery of God's enemies than that given in the xxviii. And consequently if one of us had to express in his own words the idea of the text in the form in which he has received it, it would be apt to run"Blessed are ye who hunger and thirst for salvation, for ye shall obtain it."

It is quite a different key which is struck in our Lord's beatitudes-"Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God." Thus, then, though it is perfectly true that the righteousness spoken of in the text is, according to the rule of God's government of the world, rewarded, and its absence punished, yet the prudential seeking after righteousness in order to gain these rewards or escape those punishments is no more hunger and thirst for righteousness than a sick man's taking food for which he does not care, but which is prescribed as necessary to keep him alive, can be called hunger. The blessedness spoken of in the text is that of those who feel in their souls a real craving for righteousness. The reward offered is nothing external, it is simply that that craving shall be satisfied.

The illustration I have just glanced at shows clearly enough that a capacity to feel such cravings is in itself blessedness. It occurs to us from time

to time to see realised Job's description of the sick man chastened with pain upon his bed, so that his life abhorreth bread, and his soul dainty In vain his attendants strive with delicacies

meat.