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LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
 
 PRINCETON, N. J. 
 
 Presented by 
 
 Division .liiP C.'T'l O 
 
 Section. 
 
ULTIMATE IDEALS^^,,^,;^ 
 
 BY 
 
 JUL * •; 1920 
 
 Logical st\*#^ 
 
 MARY TAYLOR BLAUVELT 
 
 Author of "The Development of Cabinet Government 
 
 in England," "In Cambridge Backs," 
 
 "Solitude Letters" 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 SHERMAN, FRENCH & COMPANY 
 
 1917 
 
Copyright, 1917 
 Sherjian, French ^ Company 
 
TO 
 
 ALL MY PUPILS 
 
 OLD AND NEW 
 
" It is manifest that nothing can be of any conse- 
 quence to mankind, or to any creature, but happiness." 
 Bishop Butler. 
 
 " Happiness and reality came through Jesus 
 Christ." John 1:17 — translated by Matthew Ar- 
 nold. 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 This little book is the outgrowth of thirteen 
 years of teaching. If it be asked why I have 
 chosen to write upon so trite a subject, I reply 
 that I had taught Bible many years before I had 
 the faintest understanding of what was meant by 
 the expressions, the poor in spirit, the meek, the 
 pure in heart, before I had any comprehension of 
 what it was to inherit the earth, or to see God. 
 Because I think there may be others in like case 
 with myself, I venture to put forth this little book 
 as my attempt to interpret the message of the 
 Divine Teacher in terms of the life of to-day. 
 
 Even in this age of war, unrighteousness and un- 
 happiness, it may not be amiss to consider the 
 ideals of peace, righteousness and happiness, given 
 us by that Prince of Peace, who, we yet believe, 
 would in righteousness make war. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I The Ultimate Ideal 1 
 
 II The Poor in Spirit 12 
 
 III They That Mourn 34> 
 
 IV The Meek 45 
 
 V They That Hunger and Thirst After 
 
 Righteousness 64 
 
 VI The Merciful 80 
 
 VII The Peacemakers 94 
 
 VIII The Pure in Heart 109 
 
I 
 
 THE ULTIMATE IDEAL 
 
 It is very difficult in these days for a thinking 
 person to give any detailed account of what he 
 believes concerning God. And yet I am sure that 
 it is an age in which there are more seekers after 
 God, more seekers after truth than ever before. 
 If there is less readiness to believe what is taught 
 than there used to be, that is because the desire 
 for truth is stronger than it used to be. We 
 realize that it is not sufficient to love the Lord 
 our God with all our heart, (the emotional na- 
 ture), with all our soul, (the {esthetic nature), 
 with all our strength, (the will), but that we must 
 also love Him with all our mind. If the God of 
 our fathers is to be our God, it must not be 
 because we have accepted Him from them, but 
 because we have found Him for ourselves. 
 
 For while it is true that we cannot by search- 
 ing find out God, cannot find out the Almighty 
 unto perfection, it is also true, and we are realiz- 
 ing more and more that it is true, that the whole 
 purpose of our creation is to seek after God, if 
 haply we may feel after Him and find Him. 
 
 And doubtless it was meant that this search 
 1 
 
2 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 after God should go on indefinitely, that the God 
 of one generation should not be the God of the 
 next, that to find Him should be to lose Him. 
 For when the purpose of life is accomplished, 
 Avhen there is nothing more to look forward to, 
 romance ends and life ends. To the race that 
 has fully found its God, further spiritual activ- 
 ity is impossible, it is time for it to become ex- 
 tinct. 
 
 But while there can be no ultimate belief, there 
 are certain ideals which to me, at my present 
 stage of thinking, do seem to be ultimate. These 
 ideals, which, although they do not comprise the 
 whole of life,^ certainly comprise a large part of 
 it, seem to me best expressed by Jesus in the 
 verses knowns as the Beatitudes. From over 
 familiarity these verses have become trite, but 
 lately they have come to me with all the splendor 
 of a new revelation. I see more and more that it 
 was His ability to put such profound truth into a 
 nutshell that made the Carpenter of Nazareth the 
 Son of God, that to Him far more than to Aris- 
 totle belongs the title, " Master of those that 
 know." 
 
 For Jesus did not think. He knew. He was 
 not the thinker. He was the seer. He who sees 
 has no need to think. But to me, as a result of 
 long thinking, has come a little understanding 
 of that which He knew. And because when old 
 things become new, they are surrounded with a 
 1 Notably the aesthetic ideals are omitted. 
 
THE ULTIMATE IDEAL 3 
 
 glory and a tenderness, such as the absolutely 
 new can never have, I have ventured to write on 
 what may seem to be a worn out theme, in the 
 hope that I may make what has become new to 
 me, new to some one else. But chiefly I write, as 
 I tliink every writer does, to clarify my own 
 thought. For it is only after we have expressed 
 a thing clearly that we really understand it. 
 
 Whether the passage commonly known as the 
 Sermon on the Mount was spoken all at one time '^ 
 or not, it certainly is the moral, or rather the 
 spiritual law of the kingdom of God, occupying 
 the same place in the New Testament Kingdom 
 of God, as the law, reputed to have been given 
 from Sinai, occupies in the Old Testament King- 
 dom of God. And if it was not spoken all at one 
 time, the author of the first Gospel has put it 
 together so artistically, that it might have been 
 so spoken. Regarded as a single discourse, it 
 analyzes easily, and Jesus might almost like the 
 modern clergyman, have taken a text. And if He 
 had done so, I think it would have been those 
 words of His to the Samaritan woman, " God is a 
 Spirit, and they who worship Him must worship 
 Him in spirit and in truth." 
 
 Indeed, these words might almost be said to 
 comprise His whole message to man. For it was 
 the mission of Jesus to make a religion, which had 
 become little more than conventional, spiritual.j 
 " Except your righteousness exceed the righteous- 
 ness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye can in no 
 
4 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 wise enter into the kingdom of Heaven ! " How 
 is our righteousness to exceed the righteousness of 
 the scribes and Pharisees? In that it is in spirit 
 and in truth! 
 
 Following out the idea that the whole passage 
 is the spiritual law of the kingdom, the first nine 
 verses, conmionly known as the Beatitudes, may 
 be considered as describing the citizens of the 
 kingdom, their duties and their rights. 
 
 And who are the citizens of the kingdom? 
 Why, the poor in spirit, they that mourn, the 
 meek, they that hunger and thirst after right- 
 eousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the 
 peacemakers. 
 
 And what are their duties as citizens? Why, 
 to be poor in spirit, to learn the lesson that 
 mourning teaches, to hunger and thirst after 
 righteousness, to be merciful, to be pure in heart, 
 to be peacemakers. 
 
 That is, their duty consists not in performing 
 certain actions, but in having a certain spirit. 
 Actions are valuable, only as they tend to pro- 
 duce, or are manifestations of this spirit. For the 
 outward form that the worship of Him who is 
 Spirit takes, does not much matter; the only im- 
 portant thing is that it should be in spirit and 
 in truth. 
 
 And what are the rights of the citizens of the 
 kingdom? They may all be summed up in one, 
 blessedness, happiness. Happy are the poor in 
 spirit, happy are they that mourn, happy are the 
 
THE ULTIMATE IDEAL 6 
 
 meek, happy are they that hunger and thirst 
 after righteousness, happy are the pure in heart, 
 happy are the merciful, happy are the peace- 
 makers. 
 
 And the end of each Beatitude gives us an idea 
 of what Jesus' conception of happiness was. 
 Happiness is to possess the kingdom of Heaven, 
 to be comforted, to inherit the earth, to be filled 
 with righteousness, to see God, to be called the 
 children of God. It is not what happens to us, 
 but what happens in us, that makes us happy. 
 Happiness, like the kingdom of Heaven, is within 
 us. Happiness is the kingdom of Heaven, the 
 Kingdom of Heaven is Happiness. 
 
 For the end of the kingdom, its purpose and its 
 only purpose, is happiness. Jesus knew that it 
 is not only the right, but the duty of every man 
 to pursue happiness. He came to teach us how 
 to pursue it. There is only one ultimate ideal, 
 and that is happiness. Not even righteousness, 
 but happiness. Righteousness is the path, but 
 happiness is the goal. For our goal, the place to 
 which we journey, is His presence; and in that 
 presence is fullness of joy, at His right hand is 
 happiness forevermore. 
 
 For we were created for joy, not for sorrow; 
 if weeping endures for a night, it is only that joy 
 may come in the morning. Only in joy can the 
 soul fulfil itself, fulfil the Creator's thought of it, 
 be worthy of the Creator and of creation. 
 
 In the moments in which we realize our citizen- 
 
6 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 ship, we recognize this. For then we know what 
 happiness is, and we understand that it does not 
 spring from outward things, but from such a 
 conception of life, as leads to a gladsome enlight- 
 ened acceptance of whatever our particular lives 
 may bring, a serene energy in which we rejoice 
 both to do and to be. In such moments we cry, 
 " Thy will be done," not in gloomy submission, 
 but in rapturous adoration, for we have at least 
 had a glimpse of what that good and perfect will 
 of God is. Sacrifice is no longer for us a means 
 of sanctification, for we are already sanctified, 
 have already entered into the inheritance of them 
 that are sanctified. Therefore, for us, there is no 
 more sacrifice. We know that wo can only re- 
 nounce joy for the sake of some higher joy, and 
 that is joy beyond joy. 
 
 So when we fast, we no longer have to be told 
 not to be as the hypocrites are, of a sad counte- 
 nance ; instinctively we anoint our heads, and 
 >vash our faces, that our outer selves may corre- 
 spond to our inner selves, may radiate the joy 
 that has taken possesion of, and fills our inmost 
 souls. Our Father who seeth in secret has al- 
 ready rewarded us. He has given us of His joy, 
 has made us one with Himself. And He has re- 
 warded us openly, for this joy shines out upon all 
 with whom we come into contact, until they too 
 become sharers in it. 
 
 For men help each other by their joy, not by 
 their sorrow. Hence it is that the first duty of 
 
THE ULTIMATE IDEAL 7 
 
 the soul is to be as happy as possible, for thus 
 only can it be complete, thus only can it enter 
 into its inheritance, the kingdom of Heaven. 
 Thus only can it come under the ultimate angel's 
 law, where 
 
 " Law, Life, Joy, Impulse, are one thing ! " 
 
 " I am come that they might have life, and 
 that they might have it more abundantly ! " And 
 of what does life consist save of constant rejoic- 
 ing of soul, that rapture from which springs life, 
 and ever more life? For that wonderful trinity, 
 love, joy and life, which are not three but one, 
 can continue to exist only as they find expression, 
 and they find expression only in creation. Joy 
 and only joy is creative, for while it is true that 
 great suffering generally precedes creation (trav- 
 ail always means pain), not until sorrow has been 
 tutned into joy, does it become creative. Or 
 rather the creative process always turns sorrow 
 into joy, without joy has nothing ever been cre- 
 ated. 
 
 The prophets of India knew that when they 
 wrote, " From joy does spring all this creation, 
 by joy is it maintained, toward joy does it pro- 
 gress, and into joy does it enter." And again, 
 " Creation is the form that His joy doth take." 
 And the prophets of Israel knew it when they 
 sang, " Be glad in the Lord, and rejoice oh, ye 
 righteous; shout for joy all ye that are upright 
 in heart," " Oh, Eternal, happy is the man that 
 
8 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 putteth His trust in Thee," for " All Thy ways 
 are pleasantness and all Thy paths are peace ! " 
 
 But in Jesus' day, as Matthew Arnold points 
 out, Israel had somehow lost the peace, the joy 
 of which her prophets had written so much ; there- 
 fore it was the mission of Him whom we call the 
 INIan of Sorrows, and acquainted with grief, to 
 restore it unto them. " These things have I 
 spoken unto you, that my joy may be in you, and 
 that your joy may be full." 
 
 But why had Israel lost her joy, why had her 
 teachers become whited scpulchers, mere recepta- 
 cles for dead men's bones? Because their right- 
 eousness had ceased to be creative, and had be- 
 come formal and traditional. Because they them- 
 selves had ceased to be real ! Jesus came to do 
 away with formalism, to make men real, for thus 
 only could they be happy ! Happiness and real- 
 ity came through Jesus Christ. 
 
 " Sir," said the Samaritan woman, " I perceive 
 that thou art a prophet," and then she began to 
 ask him the most important question that she 
 could think of to ask a prophet, " Our fathers 
 worshipped in this mountain, and ye say that in 
 Jerusalem is the place where men ought to wor- 
 ship ! " It is as though we to-da^^, brought face 
 to face with a prophet of God, could think of 
 nothing more important to ask about than the 
 cut of a surplice ! 
 
 True, this was an ignorant woman, and a 
 Samaritan, but in spiritual conceptions the 
 
THE ULTIMATE IDEAL 9 
 
 scribes and the Pharisees had not advanced much 
 beyond her; their spiritual life, too, consisted 
 mainly of outward observances. And no outward 
 observances, even of things which God had really 
 commanded, or which the experience of the ages 
 had taught were God's laws, could bring peace 
 and joy ; much less such fantastic devices as they 
 had invented for themselves. The heart was 
 wrong. " The things which come from within a 
 man's heart, they it is which defile the man." The 
 keeping of the commandments, the keeping of a 
 man's whole soul, through which he enters into 
 life, could not consist in outward observances ! 
 God is a Spirit, and we come into His presence, 
 the presence in which is always fullness of joy, 
 only as we worship Him in spirit and in truth ! 
 
 For thus only can we be real, thus only can we 
 fulfil ourselves, thus only can we enter into the 
 joy of our Lord! For Jesus' joy consisted in the 
 fact that He was real, that in Him was no sham 
 whatsoever. He was Himself, He fulfilled Him- 
 self. Outwardly and inwardly He was Himself, 
 He was what God meant Him to be. His peace. 
 His joy, consisted in the fact that He had at- 
 tained the hardest thing of all to obtain, perfect 
 truth, perfect sincerity, perfect self-knowledge, 
 perfect self-fulfilment. He was real ; happiness 
 and reality came through Jesus Christ. 
 
 But we are not happy, because we are not real, 
 because we are not ourselves ! From babyhood 
 there has been so much formalism, so much con- 
 
10 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 vcntionality in our words, in our actions, in what 
 we have been pleased to call our thoughts, that 
 M'c have lost ourselves, and cannot find ourselves. 
 Indeed if we should meet our true selves, we would 
 perhaps hardly know them. 
 
 " For we have been on many thousand lines, 
 And we have shown, on each, spirit and power; 
 But hardly have we, for one little hour. 
 Been on our own lines, have we been ourselves." 
 
 But if we would be happy, if we would have 
 the joy of Jesus fulfilled in ourselves, we must 
 know ourselves and be ourselves, we must come 
 to ourselves, we must be our real selves, as He was 
 His real self. We must die to our apparent 
 selves, we must live to our real selves. 
 
 And the inner and the outer self must be per- 
 fectly harmonious ; the outer self must be a per- 
 fect expression of the inner self, and the inner 
 self must be worthy of perfect expression, thus 
 only can we be at peace with ourselves. 
 
 For we should never be satisfied with ourselves 
 until we do what is right, not because it is our 
 duty, but because we want to do it, because we 
 enjoy doing it. So long as we act from a sense 
 of duty, so long as sacrifice is conscious, the joy 
 that springs from right action is partly self- 
 conceit, and therefore vicious. But to him whose 
 heart is right, all sense of duty vanishes, for him 
 duty has ceased to exist, he simply enjoys himself, 
 his joy is full^ he is made perfect in joy. For 
 
THE ULTIMATE IDEAL 11 
 
 what is happiness save perfect expression of a self 
 worth expressing? The man who has attained 
 to this is at one with himself, the higher self hav- 
 ing completely triumphed over the lower, at one 
 with the Father, whose ideal for him, he has ful- 
 filled. 
 
 This is the ultimate ideal, all other ideals are 
 but the path that leads to it. It may be that 
 we shall never wholly reach it. As Schlegel says 
 of Plato's Republic, it is an archetype laid up in 
 Heaven for the instruction of the philosopher, but 
 it is at least to be " asymptotically approached." 
 That is, as the curve constantly approaches its 
 asymptote, although it never reaches it until it 
 gets out of space into infinity, so we should ap- 
 proach our asymptote, reality and the happiness 
 that comes with it, although we may never reach 
 it until we get out of Time into Eternity. 
 
II 
 
 THE POOR IN SPIRIT 
 
 Nothing is more curious than the way in which 
 we repeat certain phrases from earliest childhood, 
 without the faintest understanding of them, and 
 furthermore without the faintest suspicion that 
 we do not understand. Such was my experience 
 with the expression " the poor in spirit." I did 
 not know what it meant, nor had I the slightest 
 idea that I did not know, until in my senior year 
 in college, a professor of philosophy startled me 
 by asking me to define it. For the first time 
 I realized that this was something that I had 
 never thought about, and, furthermore, that 
 it was something that it would be well to think 
 about. 
 
 On the spur of the moment, I decided that the 
 words were a curious roundabout way of saying 
 " the humble " ; that just as the poor in material 
 things are those who feel their need of material 
 things, and desire them intensely, so the poor in 
 spirit are those who feel their need of spiritual 
 things, and desire them intensely. This made the 
 blessing promised, the kingdom of Heaven, not 
 only very appropriate, but even a matter of 
 
 12 
 
THE POOR IN SPIRIT 13 
 
 course. For it is impossible to desire spiritual 
 blessings intensely, and not obtain them; if we 
 really want the Kingdom of Heaven above all 
 things else, we shall certainly have it. " If with 
 all your hearts ye seek Me, ye shall surely find 
 Me." 
 
 But this makes the first beautitude diff^er little 
 in meaning from the fourth, " Blessed are they 
 that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for 
 they shall be filled." I remember, too, that St. 
 Luke represents Jesus as saying, " Blessed are the 
 poor." Does not St. Matthew give us simply 
 another and more complete version of this, a 
 more understanding version? Should not this 
 beatitude be interpreted " Blessed are they who, 
 whether they possess or do not possess worldly 
 wealth, are at least in spirit poor; they who, if 
 riches increase, set not their hearts upon them; 
 they who, if riches decrease, set not their hearts 
 upon them. For their object is to lay up treas- 
 ure not on earth, but in Heaven. And so their 
 reward is that upon which they have set their 
 hearts, the Kingdom of Heaven. For what is the 
 kingdom of Heaven? "The kingdom of Heaven 
 is not meat and drink," not the meat and drink, 
 upon which they have not set their hearts, " but 
 righteousness, peace, joy in the Holy Spirit," the 
 things upon which they have set their hearts. 
 The kingdom of Heaven is within us, and that is 
 the reason that they who have set their hearts 
 upon outward things are not able to find it. 
 
14 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 Some time ago I heard a man condemn this as 
 a soft and sentimental age, an age that was too 
 lenient to the sinner, and had too little considera- 
 tion for the respectable member of society. I 
 could not help thinking that if this were indeed 
 true, it might mean that we are beginning to un- 
 derstand the mind of Christ, to have that mind 
 witliin us which was also in Him. For Jesus seems 
 to have had nothing but compassion for the obvi- 
 ous sins, that bring their own punishment with 
 them, the outcast was alwa^'s His friend. Was it 
 not that He felt that such sins had their place 
 in the Divine plan for human development.'' For 
 upon the one hand, they teach men their insuffi- 
 ciency and weakness, and thus throw them back 
 upon God, while on the other hand, they teach 
 them to make allowance for their neighbor, to 
 forgive and to love. 
 
 For what is human development, human per- 
 fection, save getting closer to God, getting closer 
 to man, understanding God better, understanding 
 man better, lo^^ng God better, loving man better.'' 
 For such development it may be that such sin is 
 necessary ; it is possible that we can no more be 
 made perfect without sin, than we can be made 
 perfect without suffering. Is it because of this 
 that there is more joy in the presence of the an- 
 gels of God over one sinner that repenteth, than 
 over ninety and nine just persons that need no re- 
 pentance.'' It is gentleness that makes us great, 
 and after all does not gentleness imply a certain 
 
THE POOR IN SPIRIT 15 
 
 weakness, at least sufficient weakness to under- 
 stand the weak? 
 
 On the other hand, the vices of the mind, the 
 respectable sins, avarice and hypocrisy, which in 
 this life ordinarily bring not punishment but pros- 
 perity, are as much worse than the vices of the 
 body as the mind is above the body, for they are 
 the sins which in their very nature tend to sepa- 
 rate us from God and man. Ye cannot serve God 
 and mammon, ye cannot love God and mammon, 
 ye cannot serve man and mammon, ye cannot love 
 man and mammon. 
 
 For the excessive love of money not only ex- 
 tinguishes all divine ideals within a man, it also 
 dulls all human interests. To the mere money- 
 maker, men become nothing but raw material, out 
 of which he can make more money. And when he 
 has made his money, he frequently does not know 
 how to use it so as to enrich even his own nature, 
 or give charm to his life. His pleasures, if he 
 has any apart from money-making, are often 
 costly but not ennobling, his home expensive but 
 not refined, while his family are often averse to 
 effort, living only for excitement, and helpless 
 without it. If he is hospitable, his hospitality 
 often springs more from love of ostentation, than 
 from love of his friend, and enriches neither him 
 that gives nor him that takes. There is no po- 
 etry in his life, for poetry is in its essence the 
 discerning of beauty. And there is no room in 
 the heart of the mere money maker for the 
 
16 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 strange jiiul wistful longing which beautiful things 
 arouse, for the raj)turous emotion evoked by 
 lK>auty. 
 
 To such a man there are no moods of soul- 
 delight, for there is no soul to be delighted. For 
 what is the soul save the power to see the beauty 
 in things, the power to see it where it is obvious, 
 and the power to see it where it is not always 
 obvious, in all the lives al>out us? "What shall 
 it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose 
 his own soul? " In the multitude of his posses- 
 sions, he has lost the power to become a son of 
 God. 
 
 Even if he be the possessor of beautiful things, 
 it is often not the sense of their beauty that 
 thrills him, but the fact of his possession. He 
 may enjoy his own Ix^autiful gardens, but not 
 those of his neighbors, still less the public parks, 
 or the wild beauty of Nature. For a thing must 
 be his exclusively, before he can enjoy it, and 
 thus his possessions form a high wall about him, 
 cutting him off not only from his fellows, but 
 from all other beautiful things. Thus in order 
 that he may possess a few things, he has given up 
 everything. He lives, or rather is buried alive, 
 in the little world of his own possessions, while 
 the poor in spirit may claim the whole world that 
 God has made as his own. Nay, he may live not 
 only in this world, but in a thousand worlds, for 
 all things are his, not only the things that he pos- 
 sesses, but also the things that he enjoys, not 
 
THE POOR IN SPIRIT 17 
 
 only the things that he experiences, but even the 
 things that he imagines. 
 
 I was once present at a party, which a friend 
 of mine gave to some pauper blind children. One 
 little lad, greatly excited, wanted to feel of every- 
 thing in the room, and to know to whom each 
 belonged. When in answer to his questions I 
 
 said, " It belongs to Mrs. W , everything here 
 
 belongs to Mrs. W ," he put his hand on my 
 
 cheek, and with a beatific smile exclaimed, " Oh, 
 no ! you made a mistake ! it is all mine for today ! " 
 That is the way it is with the poor in spirit: 
 everything that he can enjoy is his for today, and 
 which is ours for today is ours forever. 
 
 " What entered into thee, 
 That was, is, and shall be ! " 
 
 " How hardly shall they that trust in riches 
 enter into the kingdom of God ! " For the king- 
 dom of God is the kingdom of love, the kingdom 
 of understanding, the kingdom of the ideal, the 
 kingdom of the beautiful ! And into that king- 
 dom none but the poor in spirit may enter. 
 
 But we must remember that it is the poor in 
 spirit that are blessed, and these are not neces- 
 sarily the poor in this world's goods. There is 
 no blessing in either riches or poverty, considered 
 by themselves, nor is there necessarily any curse 
 in either. There are times when having seen the 
 vulgar materialism, the disgusting animalism, of 
 
18 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 certain rich people, we have a tendency to idealize 
 the poor. But a closer view shows us that there 
 is often quite as much materialism in the life of 
 the poor, as in that of the rich. Poverty, like 
 sorrow, is frequently a blessing, because it brings 
 men nearer to each other, helps them to recog- 
 nize each other's human hearts. Poverty, too, 
 sometimes demands and cries out for faith in God. 
 Those in comfortable circumstances were not 
 eager to come to the marriage of the king's son ; 
 they had too many interests of their own. The 
 blind, the poor, the halt and the maimed, having 
 no such interests, were glad to come. In Tol- 
 stoi's " War and Peace," it was not until Peter, 
 the richest man in Russia, had been taken prisoner 
 and deprived of everything, that he could look 
 upon the woods and the fields, and beyond to the 
 limitless horizon, and exclaim, " All that is mine ! 
 All that is in me ! and that is what they think they 
 have taken prisoner ! " 
 
 Yet it is doubtful whether Peter would have felt 
 this, if he had always been poor. We know that, 
 for the very poor, life is often reduced to, " What 
 shall we eat, and what shall we drink, and where- 
 withal shall we be clothed? " and that this strug- 
 gle, so far from throwing the soul back upon God 
 and the neighbor, frequently leaves no room in 
 the life for either God or the neighbor, no power 
 to appreciate the beauty of either earth, or sea 
 or sky. Is it not the ultimate tragedy of the 
 slums, that, under slum conditions, one can 
 
THE POOR IN SPIRIT 19 
 
 scarcely, from birth to death, think of anything 
 but the body? Existence becomes merely animal, 
 men work in order to get food to keep the body 
 alive, in order to do more work, to get more food, 
 to keep the body alive, and so on in an endless 
 chain. 
 
 Nor, and perhaps this is the greatest curse of 
 all, is there any pleasure in the work, for it is of 
 too monotonous a nature ; it affords no oppor- 
 tunity for either self-expression or self-develop- 
 ment. Consequently there is no self to be ex- 
 pressed, no self to be developed; man ceases to be 
 man, and becomes a mere animal. The only 
 pleasures that can be enjoyed are physical pleas- 
 ures, and of the physical pleasures those that are 
 most degrading are often most enjoyed. Some 
 time ago I saw a letter from an educated man who 
 had gone to work as a common laborer, in order 
 that he might study the conditions, under wliich 
 so many of his fellows had to live. He boarded 
 in a house with other laborers, and he testified 
 that ninety per cent of his house-mates got drunk 
 once a week, and that as they sat at table it was 
 unusual for five minutes to pass without an ob- 
 scene jest. 
 
 And then there is a certain grace, finish, polish 
 and pervasive charm, which people cannot easily 
 acquire, except by a certain amount of leisure 
 from drudgery and scrambling cares. We may 
 say that this is not essential, and perhaps does 
 not even matter very much, but in our inmost 
 
20 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 hearts we know that it does matter; that it is 
 this beauty of perception and proportion that 
 attracts us, as nothing else does. The other day 
 I read a story, in which the wife of the principal 
 character experiences the shock of discovering 
 that her husband had made money by questionable 
 means. When she reproaches him with it, he re- 
 plies, " You know very well that you would not 
 have looked at me if I had always been poor. I 
 grant that you can get along without the things 
 that money buys, but you wanted the kind of man 
 that it takes a certain amount of money to make." 
 
 Yes, it may be a sad truth, but it is a truth. 
 Most of us, if we are high-minded, can get along 
 without the things that money buys, but we de- 
 mand as our friends the kind of men and women 
 that it usually takes a certain amount of money 
 to make. Of course we have all known simple 
 country people who, by their natural kindliness 
 and sympathy on the one hand, and acute ob- 
 servation on the other, have won their way to 
 our hearts. We have felt that this natural essen- 
 tial culture was much better than any acquired 
 culture. But the one does not necessarily exclude 
 the other, and there is no denying the fact that 
 the acquired culture greatly enhances the value 
 of the natural culture, that the educated man, 
 who works out far-reaching problems, is of more 
 worth to the world, than the mere hewer of wood 
 and drawer of water. 
 
 Moreover it is just the temperament that, under 
 
THE POOR IN SPIRIT 21 
 
 favorable circumstances, might have been artistic 
 and contributed something of permanent beauty 
 to the world, that is most likely to break down 
 under monotonous toil in an uncongenial environ- 
 ment. It is a mistake to comfort ourselves with 
 the thought that real genius will always conquer 
 circumstances ; it will not. No doubt there have 
 been many mute, inglorious Miltons. Many a 
 struggling genius has prayed Sidney Lanier's 
 prayer, " Only bread, dear Lord, not my Avill, but 
 Thy decree, and then leisure to write my poems," 
 and the prayer has not been answered, the world 
 has been deprived of the poems. 
 
 I know of no sadder passage in all literature 
 than one to be found in Zangwill's story, " The 
 Master." The hero, the son of a poor, ignorant 
 family, has become a world-renowned painter, and 
 has fallen in love with a beautiful woman, made 
 more beautiful by all that money can buy. And 
 then " the thought of his mother came up from 
 dim recesses of memory, and he was jealous of 
 Eleanor for her sake, jealous of her beauty, her 
 breeding, her wealth; jealous of all that made her 
 different from his mother, of all that made her 
 life fuller, freer, higher, richer, — of all, in fine, 
 that made him love her." For it had suddenly 
 dawned upon him that, after all, his wretched 
 mother had the same temperament that Eleanor 
 had, only circumstances had brought out all that 
 was lovely in Eleanor, all that was unlovely in 
 his mother. 
 
22 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 And then in these days most men and women 
 have to depend, not only upon their own labor 
 for their daily bread, but upon another man's 
 will for a chance to labor, and doubtless this often 
 means great curtailment of freedom of thought 
 and speech, and of the development that comes 
 with such freedom. " The only time a fellow like 
 me can have an opinion," a laboring man was 
 heard to remark, " is when he is in bed." The 
 other day I heard of the principal of a school of 
 whom it was said, " She would have had the high- 
 est possible ideals if only she had had a proper 
 financial backing." It is to be feared that there 
 are many people similarly placed. 
 
 When we consider all these things, we come to 
 see, that so far from exalting poverty, it is right 
 that the great end of civilization for this genera- 
 tion should be, as it is coming more and more to 
 be, to abolish poverty, to do away not only with 
 debasing and degrading conditions, but also to 
 set men free from hopeless drudgery, to provide 
 a certain amount of leisure and beauty for all, 
 together with the training that is necessary for 
 a proper appreciation of leisure and beauty. It 
 is right that he who will not labor should not 
 eat, but it is a disgrace to our civilization that 
 he who is willing to labor should not have the 
 chance to do so, and that he who does labor should 
 often have the chance to eat so little. Such a 
 man is entitled not only to corn and house room, 
 but to what Emerson calls Athenian corn, and 
 
THE POOR IN SPIRIT 23 
 
 Roman house room, and we who do have these 
 things should never be quite happy in our posses- 
 sion of them, until all can share them with us. 
 
 But if neither wealth nor poverty in itself 
 brings salvation, neither is there any salvation 
 in middle-classness. I used to think the prayer of 
 Agur, " Give me neither poverty nor riches," quite 
 ideal, and for myself it is still what I want. But 
 as a matter of fact when one lives in a community 
 composed entirely of middle-class people, one finds 
 their lives no more ideal than those of the very 
 poor, or those of the very rich. I will grant that, 
 as a class, there is probably a higher average of 
 respectability among them, than is to be found 
 among either the rich or the poor. They have 
 less tendency to physical vice, but I am inclined 
 to think that, except as the middle class includes 
 professional people, there is less aspiration, less 
 lifting up of the heart among them, than there is 
 among either rich or poor. 
 
 For the God of the middle-class is too often 
 respectability, and having attained that, there is 
 no more to be desired. They have fewer vices 
 than either the rich or the poor, but on the other 
 hand, there is frequently a smugness and self-satis- 
 faction among them, due to the fact that their 
 virtue is chiefly negative. And with this smugness 
 there is often associated a certain pretentiousness 
 and artificiality. It seems as though they had 
 lost the naturalness and simplicity of the lower 
 classes, without gaining the naturalness and sim- 
 
24. ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 plicity of the upper classes. Since such people 
 have so little in the way of positive virtue, it 
 would be almost a relief to find more positive vice 
 among them. " I would that thou wert cold or 
 hot." One is never enthusiastic about them, never 
 animated with a desire to be like them, for they 
 are not themselves enthusiastic, and their virtue, 
 Avhile it may be orderly, is not beautiful, and their 
 culture, like their goodness, is secondhand and 
 conventional, and therefore uninspiring. 
 
 The difficulty with them is that they lack ambi- 
 tion; instead of struggling after more victory, 
 they are content to sit down and enjoy the petty 
 victories of the past. They are not " pressing 
 forward to the things that are before," for they 
 seem to interpret St. Paul's words " I have learned 
 in whatsoever state I am therewith to be con- 
 tent," as applying not only to the material state, 
 but also to the intellectual and spiritual state. 
 And they are content with their present stage not 
 only as a stage, but as an end, and to be content 
 Avith anything as an end is death. They are what 
 a friend of mine called " too damned happy." 
 And the adjective was perfectly correct, for he 
 who is absolutely content with himself and his 
 surroundings is damned, damned or condemned 
 not to grow. 
 
 For human nature inspires only as it aspires, 
 turning its back upon every success attained, to 
 pursue another higher and better still. When the 
 crown falls upon one victory, it should only en- 
 
THE POOR IN SPIRIT 25 
 
 couz'age us for the harder tug still to come. We 
 gain one height, only that we may obtain a better 
 view of the height that lies above it, and of the 
 path by which we may ascend to it. 
 
 After all, does not the very expression " a dead 
 level " imply that any level is deadening? Vari- 
 ety is the spice of life, and I believe that for life 
 to be sufficiently interesting we need this variety, 
 not only in temperament, character and abilities, 
 but also in material possessions. Even in Wil- 
 liam Morris' ideal commonwealth, where every- 
 body could have everything that he wanted, some 
 people lived in big houses, and some people lived 
 in little houses, because they preferred them. I 
 prefer the little house for myself because it best 
 expresses me, but I enjoy visiting in the big houses 
 of some of my friends. And within certain limits 
 the stately homes of England and America have 
 their place,^ are a real addition to the spiritual 
 life of the nation, especially when, as is more and 
 more becoming the case, they are more or less 
 open to the public. There is room for the beauty 
 of Nature which is, or should be, free to all, but 
 there is also room for the beauty of Art, which 
 is sometimes very expensive. 
 
 1 Of course I do not mean in any sense to indorse what 
 Ruskin describes as " that curious laying out of ground, 
 that beautiful arrangement of dwelling-house for man and 
 beast, by which we have grouse and blackcock, so many 
 brace to the acre, and men and women — so many brace 
 to the garret." 
 
26 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 Wliat then should be our attitude toward 
 wealth? The incdijeval saints seem to have taken 
 the same position toward material possessions, 
 that they took toward the human body ; they 
 regarded both as impure and unholy things, and 
 thought it the duty of the Christian to despise 
 them. Rut the body is not an impure and unholy 
 thing, it is the temple of the living God, and 
 neither is wealth in itself an unholy thing. It is 
 true that temptations come to us from the world 
 and from the flesh as well as from the devil, but 
 the world and the flesh are not in themselves the 
 devil, and to think of them as such is simply to 
 blaspheme against the God who made them, as 
 the highest manifestation of Himself. 
 
 No, a man's life consisteth not in the abundance 
 of things that he possesseth, any more than a 
 man's life consisteth in bodily strength. A man's 
 life consisteth in the full and free exercise of 
 his faculties. But for the full and free exer- 
 cise of the faculties a certain amount of physical 
 strength, and generally a certain amount of 
 worldly wealth is necessary, and he who fails to 
 do what he can to obtain both the health and the 
 possessions, necessary to the full exercise of his 
 God-given powers, is not only not praiseworthy, 
 but even criminal. 
 
 It is true that some of the loveliest and most 
 useful persons that the world has ever seen have 
 been among those who, having found it impossible 
 to obtain physical health, have accepted that fact, 
 
THE POOR IN SPIRIT 27 
 
 and have found even better self-expression in sick- 
 ness than in health. And so the absolutely love- 
 liest and most useful persons that the world has 
 ever known have been those who, like Jesus and 
 St. Francis, have recognized that their own 
 peculiar genius could find its best expression in 
 poverty, and so have deliberately chosen it. And 
 not very far below this class have been some who, 
 having found poverty inevitable, have accepted 
 it cheerfully. 
 
 But when the physical or material state in which 
 we happen to be seems to us to be such as to 
 interfere with our best development, our best ex- 
 pression, our best service, we should not be con- 
 tent to remain in it, if it is possible to change it. 
 Of course if we cannot change it, then we must 
 believe that the development and service that seem 
 to us to be best, are not really best and be satis- 
 fied " not to serve God more, which meaneth other- 
 wise, than as God please." 
 
 And just as there are times in our lives when 
 we may have to concentrate our energies upon 
 obtaining physical health, so there are times in 
 our lives when some of us may have to concentrate 
 our energies upon obtaining material wealth ; only 
 both should be regarded as means, and not ends. 
 We sometimes hear a mother say " I am much 
 more interested just now in my child's physical 
 development than I am in his intellectual prog- 
 ress." And she may be quite right in feeling as 
 she does. Dollars are more important than pen- 
 
28 TTT.TIMATE IDEALS 
 
 nios, yet there is truth in the saying " Take care 
 of the pennies, and the dolhirs will take care of 
 themselves." So the intellectual and the spiritual 
 are more important than the physical and ma- 
 terial, hut it is sometimes true of some people that 
 if they can be made to take care of the physical 
 and material, the intellectual and spiritual will 
 take care of themselves. 
 
 No, a man's life consistcth not in the abundance 
 of the things that lie possesseth. But while life 
 is not made up of things, life does use things ; 
 and it is not right wholly to ignore this fact. 
 Wealth ministers directly to the body, but the 
 body, rightly used, ministers to the spirit, and it 
 is right for us to want and to try to get as much 
 wealth as is necessary, to make our particular 
 boiiies minister, in the best way, to our particular 
 spirits. If the bread that we eat, the pleasures 
 that we enjoy, become not only animal strength 
 and animal spirit, but courage, endurance, 
 thought, imagination and love, then we have a 
 right to just as much bread, to just as much 
 pleasure as can be so transnuited. Whatever we 
 can honestly have that helps us, comforts us, en- 
 ables us to do our work better, enables us to love 
 more, we have a right to have. 
 
 I once heard a man ask William Morris whether 
 he honestly thought that a chimney-sweep should 
 l)c paid as much as a university professor. Mor- 
 ris replied, somewhat sarcastically, " If in order 
 to do his work properly, the professor needs to 
 
THE POOR IN SrililT 29 
 
 eat more than the cliimney-sweep, then he should 
 Ik? ])aid more." If by eatin/:^ he meant, as Mr. 
 Tuliiver would say, " not exactly eating, but all 
 that that signifies," the answer was a correct one. 
 We are taught to pray " Give us this day our 
 daily bread," and it is right that we should 
 have our daily bread, and enjoy it. " Man does 
 not live by bread alone," but man cannot live 
 without bread ; so it is right that he should both 
 pray for it and work for it. Only the mind and 
 heart should \hi set chiefly on work and love, not 
 on bread. 
 
 It is sometimes assumed that Jesus meant that 
 all men should be poor, but a close reading of the 
 Gospel story does not lead to this conclusion. He 
 Himself was not an ascetic. He came eating and 
 drinking, and they said " Behold a gluttonous 
 man, and a wine-bibber, a friend of })ublicans and 
 sinners." He j)rayed not that His disciples 
 should be taken out of the world, but that they 
 should be ke|)t from the evil that is in the world. 
 For, as Phillips Brooks has so well put it. He 
 did not believe that i)erfection could be realized 
 by " cutting off everything which by completing 
 life should confuse it ; " it is not so easy and 
 simple as that. He had friends among both the 
 rich and the poor, for He was a partisan of 
 neither wealtli nor poverty. Neither was good 
 nor bad in itself, either was good as it made the 
 man good, bad as it made the man bad. 
 
 If He chose the life of a poor man for Himself, 
 
30 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 it was because His own particular nature, His own 
 particular genius found its best expression in 
 poverty. Other men's natures, other men's 
 geniuses, might find their best expression in wealth, 
 and He had no quarrel with them. It is true that, 
 when He sent His disciples out to teach and to 
 preach. He told them that they were not to take 
 two coats, but that was because unnecessary lug- 
 gage would impede them in their mission, not be- 
 cause there is anything wrong in having two coats. 
 That is the test whether wealth is right for us, 
 will it help us or hinder us in our mission? We 
 are put here to work out our own salvation, but 
 what is salvation for you is not necessarily salva- 
 tion for me, and therefore the ways by which you 
 find salvation may differ, and rightly differ, from 
 the ways by which I find it. 
 
 It is sometimes said that Jesus taught that we 
 should sell all that we have and give to the poor, 
 but that also is not true. He told one young 
 man to do that, but that, I think, was because for 
 that particular young man. He had a plan of life 
 with which wealth would have interfered. Jesus 
 " beholding him, loved him," and wanted him for 
 an apostle, and in the apostle's life great pos- 
 sessions would not help, but liinder. It seems to 
 me that it is probable that all through his min- 
 istry, Jesus felt the need of one apostle with a 
 little broader culture than the others, to do the 
 work which St. Paul was afterwards called upon 
 to do. When He saw this man He was drawn 
 
THE POOR IN SPIRIT 31 
 
 toward him ; he felt that he was perhaps the man 
 whom He was seeking, and so He offered him the 
 greatest opportunity which was ever offered to 
 any man since the world began, an opportunity 
 perhaps to fill the places of St. Paul and St. John 
 combined, and the young man refused, because he 
 had great possessions. For if possessions some- 
 times help us to self-realization, they are just as 
 likely to prevent self-realization, and this is the 
 saddest instance on record of their having done so. 
 
 What then is the conclusion of the whole mat- 
 ter.'' " A man's life consisteth not in the abund- 
 ance of the things that he possesseth." No. A 
 man's life consisteth in the full and free exercise 
 of his faculties. It is right that we should have 
 food and drink, but we are here to satisfy needs 
 that are more to us than food and drink, we are 
 here to find ourselves, to find our own souls, the 
 soul that is greater than what we have, than what 
 we do, or even than what we think. And that is 
 another way of saying that we are here to find 
 God in our souls, to glorify the God who is within 
 us, and to prepare to enjoy Him forever. It is 
 right and even our duty to do what we can to 
 provide the worldly goods that are necessary for 
 that full and free exercise of our faculties, which 
 is essential if we would find ourselves, and having 
 done that, to think no more about material things. 
 
 Some men, and these are often of the highest 
 type, have faculties for whose development very 
 little, in the way of worldly possessions, is needed. 
 
32 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 Others liave faculties for whose proper develop- 
 ment more is required. Some authors have writ- 
 ten better when surrounded by beautiful things, 
 others have preferred to write in perfectly bare 
 rooms ; that is, some have found beautiful sur- 
 roundings an inspiration, others have found them 
 a distraction. It is our right to labor for what- 
 ever we find inspiring, our duty to banish from 
 our lives whatever proves distracting. 
 
 But not only is it right that every man should 
 labor for whatever wealth is necessary for the 
 exercise of his faculties, but there are those whose 
 faculties are such, that it is impossible to exercise 
 them fully and freely without getting rich, and 
 even perhaps very rich. If such men realize the 
 immorality of seeking to acquire wealth by win- 
 ning it from others, rather than by earning it by 
 service to their fellowmen, if by enriching them- 
 selves they enrich others also, then they may be 
 among the most useful members of society. 
 
 Great captains of industry are as necessary as 
 great rulers, but they are no more entitled to all 
 the profits of the industry which they control, than 
 rulers are to all the wealth of the nation which 
 they rule. But if the object of their lives is to 
 make gold and silver as common stones, not in 
 their own palaces, but in Jeiiisalem, if incidentally 
 the precious metals abound in their own palaces 
 also, there is no fault to be found with them. 
 
 It is even right that they should enjoy the sen- 
 sation of making money. Every one enjoys the 
 
THE POOR IN SPIRIT 33 
 
 sensation of exercising liis faculties successfully. 
 But the business man, the chief object of whose life 
 is money, is on a par with the clergyman, the chief 
 object of whose life is popularity. To a certain 
 extent the clergyman has a right to enjoy his 
 popularity, but only as it comes as a by-product 
 of service. So the business man has a right to 
 enjoy getting rich, but only when it comes as a 
 by-product of service. And when wealth has not 
 been created by its owner but inherited, then the 
 responsibility is even greater. Such a man is in 
 the position of a servant who has been .paid in 
 advance, therefore failure on his part to serve is 
 especially disgraceful. And whatever we have, no 
 matter how obtained, is ours, not to keep, but to 
 share. Even the child that we create is not our 
 own, it must be given to the world. 
 
Ill 
 
 THEY THAT MOURN 
 
 " Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall 
 be comforted ! " Yes, happy are they that mourn, 
 for true happiness, the goal of life, can never be 
 reached except through mourning. No one who 
 has really mourned and been comforted ever 
 doubts this. He knows that now for the first time, 
 he is truly happy; what he called happiness before 
 was merely light -heartedness. " Life," my old 
 Oxford teacher, York Powell used to say, " would 
 be a poor, tliin thing without sorrow." 
 
 " Man is bom to trouble, as the sparks fly up- 
 ward." Suffering is our birthright as human be- 
 ings, and I believe that there is no one who would 
 willingly give up this birthright, for it is only 
 through suffering that we become great, enter into 
 fellowship with man and God, and so go on unto 
 perfection. Was not Jesus the perfect man, that 
 is, the man whose fellowship with man and God 
 was perfect, because He was the Man of Sorrows 
 and acquainted with grief? Therefore, we do well 
 to pray with St. Paul that we may know the fel- 
 lowship of His suffering. To suffering are we 
 called, and we none of us want to miss our calling. 
 
 34 
 
THEY THAT MOURN 35 
 
 Even little children feel the need of sorrow in 
 life, for have you never noticed how many of them 
 love sad stories? Is not this because even they 
 have it dimly in mind that life is not complete 
 without suffering? So until sorrow has come to 
 them in life they must have it in books. For how- 
 ever much we may dread the sad experiences of 
 life, we none of us want to miss the blessing prom- 
 ised to those who mourn. And we all bear testi- 
 mony to the fact that there can be no real joy 
 without suffering, for when we ourselves are in 
 sorrow and want comfort, we never turn to those 
 who are happy as we once were happy, but only 
 to those who have had great sorrow, and whose 
 sorrow has been turned into joy, has shed such 
 light upon their souls that they are able to shed 
 light upon other souls. 
 
 " How sad," we sometimes say, " to see the lines 
 of suffering come upon a young face ! " Yes, but 
 how much sadder it is when these lines never come ! 
 " Shall our pity," says Maeterlinck, " go forth to 
 him who at times will weep on the shore of an 
 infinite sea, or to the other who smiles all his life 
 without cause alone in his little room? " Yes, 
 it is better to weep on the Mount of Transfigura- 
 tion in the company of apostles and prophets, in 
 the company of Emanuel Himself, than to smile 
 alone in the valley. 
 
 " The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away, 
 blessed be the name of the Lord ! " That is the 
 comfort, still to be able to say " Blessed be the 
 
36 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 name of the Lord " ; to realize that what we loved 
 has been taken from us only because something 
 better was in store for us, that our angels have 
 left us only that archangels may come. To have 
 proved, too, the strength of our own souls, for 
 now that we know that the soul is strong enough 
 to bear and to bless, we can face the future without 
 fear. Yes, it pays even to have had to cry out, 
 " My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me ! " 
 just to prove that it is not true, that our God 
 has not forsaken us. For it is only as we have 
 uttered that cry, that we know certainly that it 
 is not true, that our God can never forsake us. 
 Having descended into hell, and found that He is 
 there, we know that He is everywhere. 
 
 " These things," so the King James' version 
 makes Jesus say, " are the beginning of sorrow." 
 The Revised Version reads, " These things are the 
 beginning of travail." And can there be any sat- 
 isfying explanation of sorrow save that it is the 
 birth-pangs of the spiritual life ; what possible 
 justification of pain can there be save that from 
 it new life is born? But it rests with us to deter- 
 mine whether the new life shall be born, whether 
 our sorrow shall remain sorrow, whether it shall 
 become nothing but pettiness and littleness, sepa- 
 rating us from man and God, or whether it shall 
 be transformed into the joy from whence new 
 life is born, fuller life for ourselves and for all 
 those about us. 
 
 And when we have succeeded in transforming our 
 
THEY THAT MOURN St 
 
 sorrow into joy, then we see how perfectly fitted 
 our particular burden was to the back. When 
 affliction first comes to us, we are tempted to cry 
 out, " Is there any sorrow like unto my sorrow? " 
 But when it is over we say, " I am glad that I 
 had my own cross, my own burden to bear, and not 
 somebody else's. Only my own cross could have 
 strengthened me for my own life." So we thank 
 God for the sorrow and for the joy that has come 
 with it. And having borne so much in the past, 
 we know that Ave shall be able to bear whatever 
 may come to us in the future. 
 
 Mourn for what.'' Mourn for anything in such 
 a way that it throws us upon the power which 
 makes for righteousness and happiness, the Power 
 which in one sense is not ourselves, and in another 
 sense is our highest, truest self ; the Power in whom 
 we live and move and have our being. And mourn 
 for anything in such a way as throws us more 
 upon each other, or makes us understand each 
 other better. For what is the blessing that comes 
 to those who mourn.'' Simply, that through suf- 
 fering, rightly accepted, we enter into closer rela- 
 tions with man and God ; that is after we have 
 suffered awhile, we are made perfect, stablished, 
 strengthened, settled. 
 
 For again we must remind ourselves that the 
 perfect man is he whose relations with God and 
 man are perfect, he who loves the Lord his God 
 with all his heart, with all his soul, with all his 
 mind, with all his strength, and his neighbor as 
 
38 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 himself. Love and love only is the fulfillment of 
 the law. But we only love as we understand, and 
 we only come to a full understanding as wc suffer. 
 The Everlasting Arms are always underneath, but 
 we do not always appreciate that fact until sorrow 
 presses us down into the underneath. Then the 
 comfort is that we enter into fellowship with the 
 Comforter, understand the heart of God. 
 
 But not only is there very little fellowship with 
 God without suffering, there is also very little real 
 fellowship with man. It is in times of suffering 
 that we " cry unto our fellow, and our fellow hears 
 and comes, and we mourn together under the sun, 
 until again we laugh together, and are but half 
 sorry between us." ^ And when, as often hap- 
 pens, he who hath no fellow in times of sorrow 
 gains a fellow, surely his mourning has brought 
 him the richest blessing that can come to any one. 
 No wonder that his sorrow soon becomes but a 
 story of sorrow, a story with the happiest of end- 
 ings. For " it is fellowship that is Heaven, the 
 lack of fellowship that is Hell, fellowship that is 
 life, the lack of fellowship that is death." And it 
 is not only the particular precious fellowship that 
 often comes to us in time of mourning, it is also 
 that through mourning we enter into fellowship, 
 because we enter into understanding, with all who 
 mourn, that is with everybody. 
 
 In " Ferishtah's Fancies," Browning has put this 
 
 1 William Morris' " Vision of John Ball." 
 
THEY THAT MOURN 39 
 
 all in a nutshell. Of the wise Dervish the question 
 is asked: 
 
 " Wherefore should any evil hap to man, 
 From ache of flesh to agony of soul. 
 Since God's all-mercy mates all-potency ? " 
 
 In reply to which Ferishtah asks 
 
 " What were the bond 'twixt man and man, dost 
 
 judge, 
 Pain once abolished ? " 
 
 He then proceeds to ask the inquirer what he 
 thinks of the reigning Shah. To which the reply 
 is that he finds nothing to admire in him, he is 
 Shah only in virtue of the fact that he happened 
 to be the eldest son of the last Shah. And al- 
 though Ferishtah calls his attention to various 
 things in the Shah that he might admire, all fail 
 to move him until he tells him that he is wasting 
 away with internal ulcer. Then the scorner be- 
 comes all sympathy, is eager to suggest remedies. 
 From which change in attitude Ferishtah draws 
 the conclusion 
 
 " Put pain from out the world, what room were left 
 
 For thanks to God, for love to man.'' 
 
 /Thanks to God, 
 
 And love to man, from man to take these away. 
 And what is man worth ? " 
 
 Since there is no growth save growth in under- 
 standing, growth in love, growth in understanding 
 
40 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 and loving God, growth in understanding and lov- 
 ing nian, and since full growth and understanding 
 can come only through suffering, it seems to me 
 wrong, nothing short of blasphemy against the 
 Holy Ghost, the Spirit of God Avithin us, to say, 
 as I have known people to say, " I will steel myself 
 against suffering, I will not allow myself to suffer, 
 I will not allow myself to feel except as I absolutely 
 have to." There are even those who go so far as 
 to refuse to bestow their affection upon people 
 whom they would really like to love, because they 
 arc afraid of the suffering that it might involve. 
 To the extent that one is able to carry out such a 
 resolution, one has cut one's self off from fellowship 
 with man and with God. That is one has failed 
 to fulfil the purpose for which one was created. 
 For we were meant to live and to taste the fulness 
 of life ! 
 
 Among the folk songs which Carmen Sylva has 
 collected in " The Bard of the Dimbo Vitza," there 
 is one entitled " The Draught of Tears," the story 
 of the man who, having swallowed his own tears, 
 has no longer any feeling left for anything or 
 anybody. 
 
 " For he doth thirst no more, 
 
 Therefore for other's thirst he has no pity. 
 
 He lets the rain lie heavy on his cloak, 
 
 And blesses not the rain; 
 
 Sees the brooks flow, and blesses not the brooks. 
 
 He gazes on the well's cool deepSj 
 
 Nor blesses its cool deeps. 
 
THEY THAT MOURN 41 
 
 For this is he who drank of his own tears, 
 
 His thirst is qenched forever; 
 
 He let them trickle down into his glass. 
 
 Let the sun glitter on them, and the moon 
 
 Mirror herself therein. 
 
 And sun and moon both said, " What crystal water ! " 
 
 Then did he put it to his lips and drink ! 
 
 And his lips spake, " What fiery, burning water ! " 
 
 This is the man who drank of his own tears." 
 
 Is it possible to imagine a life a more hopeless 
 failure than this.'' It is true that sometimes the 
 strength of the will, perverted though it be, of the 
 man who has drunk of his own tears, his power 
 to accomplish his purpose, calls forth a certain 
 sort of admiration, but how inaccessible he is ! He 
 is generally a correct man, at least he is free from 
 physical vice. He is frequently, in a worldly way, 
 a successful man ; indeed his motive in not allowing 
 himself to feel has often been the fear that too 
 great feeling would interfere with his efficiency, his 
 success in life. But is there any real success in 
 life apart from loving and making one's self loved.? 
 And is not the merely being accessible to all more, 
 infinitely more, than worldly success, or even than 
 doing tangible things for other people.'' 
 
 I do not mean of course that one should waste 
 one's self in diffuse, meaningless sociability, or in 
 ineffectual, fruitless feeling; but I do mean that 
 somehow each of us should make it clear that for 
 us to live is to love. The expression that love 
 takes will, of course, differ with different people, 
 
42 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 and we must be careful not to condemn any one 
 merely because he follows not with us, but in some 
 way every one should make it clear that for him. 
 the object of life is love, and the expression of 
 love. 
 
 " For life, with all it yields of joy and woe, 
 And hope and fear, believe the aged friend. 
 Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love. 
 How love might be, hath been indeed and is." 
 
 To refuse the joy and the pain, the hope and 
 the fear, is to refuse the chance of the prize, that 
 is, to refuse our chance of love, our chance of life, 
 for love is life. 
 
 And yet, on the other hand, we must not give 
 ourselves up to the luxury of enjoying sorrow, we 
 must not enshrine ourselves in it, we must not make 
 it an object of morbid self-gratification. It is cer- 
 tainly one of the good signs of the present century 
 that people, especially women, no longer feel that 
 it is a fine and noble thing to cherish grief, that 
 INIaggie Tulliver's Aunt Pullet has gone out of 
 fashion. The objection to such sentimental 
 mourning is not only that it is weakening to our- 
 selves, and depressing to others, unfitting both the 
 mourners, and those with whom they come in con- 
 tact, for doing their best work in the world, but 
 also that it is false. God is a Spirit, and they 
 who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and 
 in truth. The whole life should be a worship of 
 God, mourning quite as much as anything else. 
 
THEY THAT MOURN 43 
 
 But nothing which is not in spirit and in truth 
 can be worship. Nothing can be worship that 
 leads to nothing, that does not bear fruit. 
 
 Should we mourn for sin? When I ask the 
 girls in my Bible classes what they should mourn 
 for, they usually put sin first, but I suspect that 
 that is because they think it the correct thing to 
 say. We certainly do not mourn for sin as our 
 fathers did, we no longer have the strong sense of 
 sin that they had. Is this a loss? Frankly, I 
 think it a great gain. There are just two temp- 
 tations which seem to me to be the most dangerous 
 to which we are ever subjected: First, the temp- 
 tation to be so well satisfied with ourselves, that 
 we have no disposition to improve; and second, 
 the disposition to be so ill satisfied with ourselves, 
 that we lack the strength and the courage to 
 improve. 
 
 I remember that when I was a little girl my 
 father had occasion to correct me for something. 
 Because I was inclined to take any reproof that 
 came from him overmuch to heart, he was very 
 timid about it. So he took me upon his lap and 
 began, oh ! so tenderly ! " My little girl," and 
 when I asked what the trouble was, he said, " I 
 would rather that you had not done so and so." 
 Wlien I said that I was sorry, he replied, " I 
 don't want you to be sorry, I only want you 
 not to do it again." That is the kind of father 
 God is. He does not want us to be sorry. He 
 only wants us not to do it again. 
 
44 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 For sin, like disease, is to be dwelt upon, only 
 long enough to understand it, and get rid of it. 
 We must understand it, not only that we may 
 get rid of it in ourselves and others, but also that 
 through this understanding we may come into 
 closer fellowship, not only with God who forgives 
 sin, but also with man who sins. For it is 
 through understanding our own sin that we come 
 to understand the sin of others, and so enter into 
 fellowship with our fellow sinners, and with God 
 who understands and forgives us all. That is 
 God's purpose for us in all the mourning that He 
 sends to us, deeper fellowship. And we can only 
 miss this purpose as we let mourning over dis- 
 appointment make us bitter, or mourning over 
 sin make us weak. 
 
IV 
 
 THE MEEK 
 
 " Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit 
 the earth ! " 
 
 Here is another example of the fact that be- 
 cause we have always been familiar with the 
 Beatitudes, we take them as a matter of course, 
 almost as axiomatic, and yet when we stop to 
 think about them, we realize that they are not 
 at all self-evident. Indeed most of them, if we 
 should hear them for the first time, would be ex- 
 tremely surprising and puzzling, and perhaps 
 none of them would seem more of an enigma than 
 this one. For myself, I had said this Beatitude 
 thoughtlessly for years, and when I first really 
 did give it a little superficial thought, I found it 
 unworthy, and even provoking, " the least of all 
 the Beatitudes, and not meet to be called a Beati- 
 tude." 
 
 In the first place, in the face of Jesus' constant 
 teaching about riches, the blessing promised, to 
 inherit the earth, seemed a rather doubtful good, 
 and at least altogether out of keeping with the 
 other blessings promised. Everywhere else the 
 blessing was spiritual, here it was material. 
 
 4ff 
 
46 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 Moreover in actual life, this blessing, such as it 
 is, does not seem to be realized. Everywhere we 
 see that if inheriting the earth means getting rich, 
 it is the pushing, aggressive man who does it, not 
 the meek, patient man. 
 
 And if the reward is a doubtful blessing, so the 
 quality to be rewarded seemed to me rather a 
 questionable virtue. When I ask my girls what 
 meekness is, they sometimes say mean-spiritedness. 
 And I do think that it is something like this that 
 we commonly have in mind when we use the word, 
 and we none of us really believe that mean-spirit- 
 edness is a virtue. Indeed meekness, as we com- 
 monly understand it, instead of arousing our ad- 
 miration, generally throws us into a more or less 
 violent state of irritation. We associate it with 
 the worm that never turns, or with the ass who 
 is too stupid and phlegmatic to resent the most 
 unjust treatment, and we do not admire either 
 animal. 
 
 Indeed, when I heard of a drunken brute, who 
 gave as his reason for beating his wife, that he 
 was tired of seeing her around looking so meek, 
 I confess to feeling some sympathy with him. 
 Workers among the poor tell us that it is the 
 meek, patient wife, whose sole object seems to be 
 to please her husband, who is most often abused. 
 One man is reported to have said, " No, I don't 
 never strike my missis. You see she would strike 
 back, and though I could easily get the best of 
 her, I don't like no rumpus like that.'* And I 
 
THE MEEK 47 
 
 know of a district nurse who, bearing this in mind, 
 advises the women in her district never to take a 
 blow, without in some way getting even with their 
 husbands. The results of acting upon this advice 
 appear generally to be excellent, blows soon cease. 
 
 And when we got higher up in the social scale, 
 we do not find the member of the family who 
 has no life of her own, who is at every one's beck 
 and call, the one who is most loved or admired. 
 Too often the tendency is to take advantage of 
 such people, and then, instead of thanking them, 
 to snub them. We are so sure of their attentions 
 that we are not at all grateful for them ; whatever 
 they do, we expect more. 
 
 And then although we may like the thing that 
 they do, the manner in which they do it is often 
 offensive, for their very anxiety to please makes 
 them shy, clumsy and awkward. It seems as 
 though their very desire for love makes it impos- 
 sible for them to win it. Moreover, they appear 
 never to expect to win it. They seem to feel 
 that they do not deserve it. We prefer that they 
 should be a little less humble, a little less conscious 
 that love is not for them, and then perhaps they 
 would obtain it. And all the time they irritate 
 us the more, because they are so good and so 
 self-sacrificing, that they put us in the wrong. 
 There seems to be no excuse for not liking them, 
 but we cannot. Sometimes, like the drunken hus- 
 band, we get tired of seeing them around looking 
 so meek, and we speak to them with a severity 
 
48 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 that we know they have not deserved. They take 
 it with an air of meek resignation, as though they 
 were conscious of having merited it, or at least 
 as though it was what they expected. We would 
 prefer that they should get angry with us, and 
 give us the rebuke that we know that we ought to 
 have. 
 
 But are we altogether wrong in feeling as we 
 do about these so-called meek people.'* I think 
 that a careful analysis of the case will show that 
 we are not. In the first place, while such people 
 submit to everybody, do things for everybody, 
 they do not appear to actively enjoy doing any- 
 thing; they are utterly lacking in enthusiasm. 
 Their attitude is simply that of submitting to 
 what is put upon them ; they do what they do 
 either from a mistaken idea of duty, or else be- 
 cause they crave a love, that because of their 
 lack of personality, they can never win. We only 
 love one who is somebody, no one loves a nobody. 
 
 That is the great trouble with them, they are 
 nobodies, they are absolutely lacking in the initia- 
 tive which is the first essential of personality. 
 They have no scheme of life at all, no definite 
 things that they want to do, no definite path on 
 which they wish to advance, no definite self which 
 they wish to develop. Of course there is such a 
 thing as having too unyielding a scheme of life, 
 but perhaps it is no worse to think too much 
 about the self than it is to have no self to think 
 
THE MEEK 49 
 
 about, no worse to be selfish than it is to have no 
 self to be selfish. 
 
 And after all society is not so much in danger 
 from the really bad people, as it is from the weak, 
 vague, drifting people, who having no initiative, 
 no minds of their own, are open to suggestions 
 of all kinds. If there is danger of thinking of 
 ourselves more higlily than we ought to think, 
 there is at least an equal danger of thinking of 
 ourselves more lowly than we ought to think. It 
 has been well said that one cannot argue on one's 
 knees, therefore that it is right that he who is 
 on his knees to everybody should be respected by 
 nobody. Indeed, we are coming more and more 
 to see that if meek resignation means stupid or 
 thoughtless resignation, it is a thing not to be 
 admired, but to be condemned. We must accept 
 even the laws of God, not as the servant who 
 knoweth not what his Lord doeth, but as the 
 friend, who knows something, and who is trying 
 to know more. We must dare to search and 
 question. 
 
 But if meek people of this type have any object 
 in life at all, it is simply to please, or, worse still, 
 just not to offend. And generally speaking the 
 inoffensive person is the most offensive person of 
 all. It may be all very well for the dog to live 
 simply to please his master, for we do not expect 
 him to have a scheme of life of his own. It may 
 be quite right for the dog to live chiefly to gratify 
 
60 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 his master's whims, but we think it no more right 
 for the man to live wholly to gratify another's 
 whims, than it would be to live wholly for the 
 gratification of his own whims. If one is self- 
 sacrificing it should be for a real purpose. We 
 should love our neighbor as ourselves ; but we 
 should love ourselves wisely, and so we should love 
 our neighbor wisely. 
 
 Just as we are to love the Lord our God with 
 all our minds, so in our love for ourselves and our 
 neighbor, the mind should have its part. The 
 command " Whatsoever ye would that men should 
 do to you, do ye even so to them," is to be inter- 
 preted not what ye would when ye are whimsical, 
 but what ye would, when 3^e use your best judg- 
 ment. In what we do for our neighbor, we are 
 under the same obligation to use our judgment 
 as we are in what we do for ourselves. Only very 
 young children like people who live solely to please 
 them. And there are even children who, having 
 attained their personality at an early age, despise 
 such people. The truth is we feel that one who 
 lives simply to gratify our whims, not only has 
 no personality of his own, but has a very low 
 estimate of our personality. For if we are really 
 developed people, we do not consider it a matter 
 of importance that our whims should be gratified, 
 and we are offended with any one who supposes 
 that we do. 
 
 And the sympathy of these people is often quite 
 as bungling as their efforts to please. For hav- 
 
THE MEEK 51 
 
 ing no personality of their own, they have no 
 understanding of the personality of another, they 
 sympathize with one person in exactly the same 
 way that they sympathize with another. Here 
 the dog has a great advantage over them, for he 
 at least does not make the mistake of thinking 
 that we are sad when we are not. He simply 
 feels that we are sad or glad, and sympathizes 
 with our moods, without asking what has pro- 
 duced them ; and then he cannot talk and say 
 stupid things. The undeveloped person argues 
 that what would make him sad, would make any 
 one else sad, and so, having had what should make 
 us sad, we must be sad. We, on the contrary, 
 are perhaps not sad at all, or if we are, and do 
 want sympathy, it must be expressed in the way 
 in which our personality demands. We are not 
 children, we sorrow not as the child sorrows, and 
 it is not the child's or even the dog's sympathy 
 that we want from the grown person. 
 
 Yes, there is beauty in the giving of one's self, 
 and it is only as we give ourselves that we can 
 ever fully become ourselves, we must go out of 
 ourselves to find ourselves. But before we can 
 give, we must have something to give, we must in 
 some manner at least become ourselves before we 
 can give ourselves. We cannot fulfill our duty 
 to others, except as we have first fulfilled our 
 duty to ourselves, have done our utmost to make 
 ourselves as worth while as possible. 
 
 " Among the many beautiful things that turn 
 
62 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 through mistaken use to utter evil," says Ruskin, 
 " I am not sure but that the thoughtlessly meek 
 and self-sacrificing spirit of good men must be 
 named as the fatallest." For when we starve our 
 own souls in order to give to other souls, we 
 often find not only that there is not enough for 
 them and for us, but even that there is absolutely 
 nothing for either of us. So the wise virgins were 
 not selfish, but wise, when they refused to give 
 their oil to the foolish virgins. It is possible for 
 us to use our lamps to lighten the pathway of 
 others, but to try to give them of our oil is simply 
 to squander it. Too many mothers have not 
 given themselves so much as wasted themselves, 
 ministering to their children ; for children want 
 not so much what their mothers can do for them, 
 they want their mother. Love should go out of 
 itself to find itself, not to lose itself. 
 
 The truth is that the present generation has 
 put a bad meaning into the word meek, just as it 
 has put a bad meaning into the word pious. True 
 meekness, the meekness that Jesus commends, is 
 the exact opposite of the stupid aimlessness that 
 now passes, or fails to pass, under that name. 
 So far from the meek man being the man who 
 has no aim in life, he is rather the man who is 
 all aim, the man whose mind is so set upon his 
 aim that he entirely forgets himself, forgets to 
 be exalted and forgets to be abased ; he has 
 neither false conceit, nor false modesty. 
 
 And what is the aim-f* Tagore, who has cast 
 
THE MEEK 63 
 
 more illumination upon this subject than any one 
 else has done, has well expressed it when he says: 
 " The aim of the teachers of India was the realiza- 
 tion of the soul, or in other words, gaining the 
 world in perfect truth. When Jesus said, 
 " Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the 
 earth " he meant this. He proclaimed the truth, 
 that when man gets rid of his pride of self, then 
 he comes into his true inheritance. No more has 
 he to fight his way into his position in the world! 
 it is secure to him everywhere by the immortal 
 right of his soul. Pride of self interferes with the 
 proper function of the soul, which is to realize 
 itself by perfecting its union with the world and 
 the world's God." 
 
 No, meekness is not the aimlessness that submits 
 blindly to circumstances, to what we falsely call 
 destiny ! It is rather the wisdom that controls 
 circumstances, that controls destiny. At its low- 
 est it is almost synonymous with self-control, or, 
 as Henry Ward Beecher puts it, it is " the best 
 side of a man under provocation, maintaining 
 itself in the best mood, and thus controlling all 
 men.'* At its highest it is the complete absorp- 
 tion of the soul in high aims, that makes conscious 
 self-control unnecessary ; there seems to be no 
 self to control, the man has lost himself in his 
 aim, which is only another way of saying that he 
 has lost himself in his God. 
 
 One of our great men has recently made the 
 statement that we despise a nation, as we despise 
 
54 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 an individual, who does not resent an insult. But 
 do we despise the individual who does not resent 
 an insult? I grant that there is a tendency to 
 despise the man who is cowed by an insult; he 
 gets on our nerves. But what about the man who 
 is so occupied in what he is doing, that he simply 
 does not know that he has been insulted? 
 
 Some time ago I heard of a man who was serv- 
 ing on an important commission. In expressing 
 his opinion on the subject under debate he said 
 something that so infuriated another member of 
 the commission, that he struck him in the face 
 with a roll of paper that he happened to have in 
 his hand. But the speaker was so occupied in 
 what he was sa3'ing that he did not even notice it, 
 he just finished what he had to say. He could 
 hardly be said to exercise self-control, for he 
 scarcely knew that he had been struck. And he 
 carried his point, for when he had finished, the 
 whole commission, even the man that had struck 
 him, acknowledged that he was right. 
 
 He carried his point ! Herein is the clue to the 
 meaning of the expression " to inherit the earth." 
 For what is an heir? Is he not the man who is 
 entitled to a certain inheritance, a certain place 
 in the world? and he comes into his inheritance 
 when he takes that place, accomplishes the thing 
 that God meant him to do, fulfils God's ideal for 
 him. Thus it is that the heir of God comes into 
 liis father's house, into his home. 
 
 My old Wellesley teacher, Miss Morgan, used 
 
THE MEEK 56 
 
 to define home as the place where we can be our 
 best. And when we stop to think of it, this is not 
 really an unusual sense of the word, it is what we 
 all mean when we use the expression " at home." 
 We feel at home with a person, or in a place, 
 when we are at our ease with that person, or in 
 that place, and so able to be and to do our best. 
 In that sense are we not all here in the world to 
 find our home, in order that we may find our- 
 selves? In the beginning God made a world for 
 each separate man. He puts us here in order 
 that each might find his own world, his own in- 
 heritance, his own home. And it is only the meek 
 who can fully find his home, and he will never fail 
 to do so. For home, like the kingdom of heaven, 
 is within us. 
 
 To go back to Henry Ward Beecher's defini- 
 tion, " Meekness is the best side of a man under 
 provocation, maintaining himself in the best 
 mood and thus controlling all men," the meek man 
 controls all men, as the man whom I have cited 
 did, because he makes them see that he is right, 
 and thus he controls them not only outwardly, but 
 inwardly. It is sometimes possible to control men 
 outwardly by making them afraid of us, but in 
 that case we have not controlled them, we have 
 only controlled their actions. Indeed, he who 
 obeys because he does not dare to disobey is al- 
 ways in silent inward rebellion — in fact, any 
 conscious obedience is, in a sense, rebellious. In 
 order to really control others, we must first con- 
 
56 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 trol ourselves, hence real meekness differs little 
 from wise self-control. 
 
 But the man who is meek in the perverted sense 
 in which the word was used at the beginning of 
 this paper never controls any one, not even him- 
 self, for he has no self to control. He has not 
 controlled himself, but has repressed himself, until 
 there is no self left, either to control or to re- 
 press. Self-control differs from self-repression, 
 in that it is used only as a means toward an end. 
 Self-control means simply the subduing or the 
 keeping within proper proportions of such in- 
 stincts, or impulses, as there is a definite reason 
 for subduing or guiding, but self-repression means 
 an instinctive, perhaps an inherited, subduing of 
 instincts and impulses, merely for the sake of sub- 
 duing them, and that is nothing less than the re- 
 pression or annihilation of life itself. The self 
 has not been controlled, it has been destroyed, 
 for when life ceases to be eager, spontaneous and 
 enthusiastic, it ceases to be life at all. 
 
 The truly meek are never the victims of their 
 temperaments, but on the other hand they never 
 seek to destroy their temperaments, for to de- 
 stroy the temperament is to destroy the personal- 
 ity. They never subdue themselves, they only 
 subdue that which keeps them from being them- 
 selves. They do not blindly submit to circum- 
 stances, for there is a definite goal which they 
 are striving to reach. From this goal they are 
 turned by no obstacle which it is possible to over- 
 
THE MEEK 57 
 
 come, but when the obstacles are really insur- 
 mountable, they waste no strength bubbling in im- 
 potent fury. And thus they reach their goal, for 
 he that ruleth his own spirit is greater than he 
 that taketh a city, and he generally takes the 
 city! 
 
 For true meekness will always in the deepest 
 sense control destiny, and it always knows that it 
 will. Therefore, the truly meek man may be de- 
 fined as the man who sees the proportions of 
 things ; the man who has set his feet firm on some 
 portion of eternal truth, and then is infinitely 
 patient with people who are too stupid, or even 
 too wicked, to perceive it, for he is sure that the 
 truth will in the end prevail ; the truth that he 
 sees in so far as it is the real truth, but in any 
 case, the real truth. 
 
 And he works for the truth that he sees so long 
 as he so sees it, but keeps his eyes open for an 
 ever-widening vision. His attitude is " Whatever 
 is, is best, when I have done my best." He is not 
 discouraged even when he has not done his best. 
 For then his attitude is " Whatever is, even when 
 it is the result of my not having done my best, is 
 the best that I can have now, and therefore it is 
 to be made the best of. Instead of giving up the 
 struggle, or wasting time in repining, let me now 
 do the best that I can with what is left." Per- 
 haps, too, in a larger sense, in the great working 
 out of things, it may even turn out to be the abso- 
 lute best. For even our sins can be made a means 
 
68 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 of strengthening our inner lives. They too can 
 shed a light upon our souls, can be made the step- 
 ping stones on which we rise to higher things. 
 
 Even when we have done our best, there will be, 
 of course, circumstances which we cannot control, 
 calamities that we cannot avert. The farmer 
 cannot control the weather, but that does not pre- 
 vent him from working as hard as he can to con- 
 trol such forces of nature as it is possible to bend 
 to his purposes. So the truly meek man uses all 
 the means at his disposal to avert tragedy, but 
 when in spite of everything it comes, he accepts 
 it with equanimity, not in the spirit of resignation, 
 but of co-operation. For it is not resignation 
 that gladdens and uplifts us, it is co-operation. 
 
 We pray, " Thy will be done," but we should 
 pray gladly, not sorrowfully, and M'e should not 
 only pray for it, we should work for it. " For 
 this is the will of God, even your sanctification." 
 But we are to work out our own sanctification, 
 the will of God should not be something to which 
 we sorrowfully submit, but something for which 
 we gladly work. And therefore our business is to 
 find out what it is, and work for it. " Hence- 
 forth I call you not servants, but friends, for the 
 servant knoweth not what his lord doeth," but it 
 is the friend's business to read the mind of his 
 friend. So the business of life is to read the mind 
 of God in such a way as to become the friend of 
 God, to find out what the good and perfect will of 
 God is, and to do it. 
 
THE MEEK 59 
 
 And when we find that we have made mis- 
 takes, so far from being discouraged, we should 
 rejoice that we have acquired the wisdom to per- 
 ceive our errors. For if what seemed right to us 
 yesterday seems wrong today, it is because we 
 have passed on to a higher plane, have come to 
 know God better. For what is God, or God's will, 
 to any one of us, save our own highest ideal of 
 righteousness? And we are to rise to higher 
 tilings, not only on stepping stones of our dead 
 selves, but on stepping stones of our dead ideals. 
 
 Nothing in the character of Goethe is more in- 
 spiring, than the joy with wliich he welcomed the 
 experiences, which contributed to unlearning what 
 was false, as well as the experiences which con- 
 tributed to learning what was true. For nothing 
 was so joyous to him as to feel himself grow, and 
 he grew by unlearning as well as by learning. 
 Therefore it was an object with him, while pre- 
 serving his identity, to be constantly putting his 
 old self behind him. " The Regeneration," he 
 writes from Italy, " which is changing me within 
 and without, continues to work. The more I am 
 obliged to renounce my former self, the more de- 
 lighted I am." 
 
 " The soul that is meekly honest ! " I came 
 across that expression the other day. What does 
 this mean save the soul that is honestly seeking 
 the truth, instead of opposing his own will to it.^* 
 who is willing to give up even his conception of 
 truth for what proves to be the real truth, the 
 
60 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 soul that docs not resent or resist the truth, the 
 soul that receives sorrow and disappointment 
 meekly, so that it becomes to it sweetness and not 
 bitterness, a source of strength rather than a 
 source of weakness. 
 
 We attain this poise, this self-possession, this 
 equanimity, this meekness, as we have perfect con- 
 fidence that if we honestly strive to do our part, 
 what ever has been, is, and will be, is right. No 
 mistake, no calamity is then irreparable; we can 
 always convert it into something that is not a 
 mistake, something that is not calamity. For the 
 Father hath put all things into our hands, all 
 things that we ought to have, and we come from 
 God, and go to God. 
 
 So much for the attitude of the meek toward 
 external people, toward external things. What 
 about their attitude toward themselves? Well, 
 they do not think of themselves more highly than 
 the}'^ ought to think, but, on the other hand, they 
 do not think of themselves more lowly than they 
 ought to think. Indeed, their charm consists in 
 the fact that they do not seem to think of them- 
 selves at all. They have neither the self-appre- 
 ciation, nor the self-depreciation, both of which 
 spring from thinking too much about ourselves, 
 and both of which prevent people from entering 
 into easy relations with their fellows. Being 
 neither shy nor self-assertive, they are at ease in 
 any company. They can take either a high place 
 or a low place without self-consciousness, think- 
 
THE MEEK 61 
 
 ing none the better of themselves because it is 
 high, and none the less of themselves because it is 
 low. The important thing is not that it should 
 be a high place or a low place, but that it should 
 be their place, the place which they can fill. They 
 know that to belittle themselves is just as snobbish 
 as to exalt themselves, that it is just as bad to be 
 conscious that the place that they can fill is a 
 small one, as it is to be conscious that it is a 
 great one. 
 
 For whatever talents we may possess are gifts, 
 and there is no occasion to be exalted if they have 
 been bestowed, or to be humiliated if they have 
 been withlield. And when we cannot do great 
 things ourselves, we should be just as glad to see 
 others do them, for in the life of the world, the 
 important thing is not that we should do great 
 things, but that great things should be done. 
 And in our own lives the important thing is that 
 we should be and do what we can, be that little 
 or great. We are to run with patience the race 
 that is set before us, but that race is not one in 
 which the object is to get ahead of others, but one 
 in which the object is to reach the goal, a goal 
 which we can all reach, for, for each of us the 
 goal is simply his best. And my attaining my 
 best self docs not interfere with your attaining 
 your best self. 
 
 However, this does not mean that each of us 
 is to be content with the place in which he may 
 at any particular time find himself, if that place 
 
62 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 does not happen to be the one in which he can be 
 his best. We are not to choose the principal 
 place at the feast, but there is a difference be- 
 tween wanting the principal place at the feast, a 
 mere honor, and wanting' an opportunity for 
 fuller development and wider service, more and 
 better work. It used to be said that Abraham 
 Lincoln never sought an office, but I am glad that 
 the facts correct that popular superstition. 
 When the elder Pitt said to the Duke of Devon- 
 shire, " My lord, I know that I can save this 
 country, and that no one else can," if he hon- 
 estly believed what he said, he was not only justi- 
 fied in seeking office, but he would have been crim- 
 inal if he had not sought it. For it is right to 
 strive even for a high place, if one honestly wants 
 it, not for the prestige that it brings, but for 
 the work, the service that it makes possible. 
 
 Yes, there are those for whom it is right at 
 times to seek high office, but it must be sought in 
 the spirit of him who said, " Brethren, I count 
 not myself to have apprehended, but I follow 
 after, if by any means I may apprehend that for 
 which I have been apprehended of Christ Jesus." 
 Or in the spirit of Him who cried, " O Jerusalem, 
 Jerusalem, thou that killcst the prophets, and 
 stonest them that are sent unto thee, how often 
 would I have gathered thy children, as a hen 
 gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye 
 would not." If that be egotism or self-seeking, 
 make the most of it. 
 
THE MEEK 63 
 
 WAITING 
 
 Serene, I fold my liands and wait 
 Nor care for wind, or tide, or sea; 
 
 I rave no more 'gainst time or fate. 
 For lo ! my own shall come to me. 
 
 I stay my haste, I make delays, 
 For what avails this eager pace? 
 
 I stand amid the eternal ways, 
 
 And what is mine sliall know my face. 
 
 Asleep, awake, by night or day. 
 
 The friends I seek are seeking me; 
 
 No wind can drive my bark away. 
 Nor change the tide of destiny. 
 
 What matter if I stand alone.'' 
 
 I wait with joy the coming years; 
 
 My heart shall reap where it hath sown, 
 And garner up its fruit of tears. 
 
 The waters know their own and draw 
 
 The brook that springs in yonder height; 
 
 So flows the good with equal law 
 Unto the soul of pure delight. 
 
 The stars come nightly to the sky. 
 
 The tidal wave into the sea; 
 Nor time nor space, nor deep, nor high 
 
 Can keep my own away from me. 
 
 John Burroughs. 
 
THEY THAT HUNGER AND THIRST 
 AFTER RIGHTEOUSNESS 
 
 " Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after 
 righteousness, for they shall be filled." With 
 what will they be filled? Why, with righteous- 
 ness, the thing after which they hunger and 
 thirst ! Goodness itself is the assured and only 
 reward of goodness. Heaven and Hell, consid- 
 ered as reward and punishment, are immoral in- 
 ventions. 
 
 Why is it that we ever do wrong.? In the last 
 
 analysis, is it not because we really do not wish 
 
 to do right.'' Yet we often hear people say very 
 
 earnestly, " I do want to do right, but it just 
 
 seems as though I couldn't." " They tell us that 
 
 we can always do right if we try hard enough," 
 
 Mr. Barrie writes. " So I suppose that Tommy 
 
 didn't try hard enough, but only God knows how 
 
 hard he did try." And as we look into our own 
 
 hearts, we must admit that there is such a thing 
 
 as doing wrong when in a sense we would like to 
 
 do right, but that is because while, up to a certain 
 
 point, we do want to do right, we want to do 
 
 wrong more. For, in the last analysis, we always 
 
 64 
 
THEY THAT HUNGER 65 
 
 do the thing that we want most to do. So that 
 if we really want to do right more than we want 
 to do anything else, we will do it. 
 
 That is, if we truly hunger and thirst after 
 righteousness, as the starving man hungers after 
 bread, and as the thirsty man thirsts after water, 
 we will surely have it. But we must remember 
 that, compared with his desire for food, the hun- 
 gry man desires nothing else; compared with his 
 desire for drink, the thirsty man has no other de- 
 sire. And the spiritual hunger and thirst must 
 be just as intense as the physical hunger and 
 thirst. Then, and then only, is it certain of 
 gratification. " If with all your hearts ye seek 
 Me, ye shall surely find Me." 
 
 For while alas ! it is possible to hunger after 
 food and drink, and not be filled, it is not possible 
 to hunger and thirst after righteousness, and not 
 be filled. And just as food and drink keep the 
 body alive, so righteousness keeps the soul alive. 
 For the soul is that part of us which aspires after, 
 and unites us with the Infinite and Eternal, and 
 only through righteousness is that aspiration 
 kept alive, that union maintained. Thus right- 
 eousness is the food of the soul, without which the 
 soul cannot live. 
 
 And yet there is a difficulty. I remember poor 
 George III., who did seem to want to do right, 
 and to make others do right, (the latter of course 
 was his weakness), and yet managed to do more 
 harm than his two predecessors put together, 
 
66 ULTIIMATE IDEALS 
 
 neitlicr of whom cared about doing right. Must 
 wc conclude, then, that while he who hungers and 
 thirsts after righteousness, will surely be filled 
 with it, in so far as he understands what it is, 
 there can yet be no assurance that his under- 
 standing will be guided aright? 
 
 The truth seems to be that it is quite as much 
 our duty to find out what righteousness is, as it is 
 to do it after we have found out. That is, the 
 honest effort to find out what righteousness is, is 
 a part of righteousness, perhaps the most impor- 
 tant part, certainly the most difficult part. It is 
 quite as much our duty to serve the Lord our 
 God with all our minds, as it is to serve Him with 
 all our strength. Serving Him with all the mind 
 means self-development; serving Him with all the 
 strength means self-control. On the whole the 
 former is more important than the latter, for 
 while self-control is only a means, self-develop- 
 ment is an end, the end for which w^e were created. 
 God created us that we should fulfil ourselves, not 
 that we should restrain ourselves. As the sin 
 against the Spirit is to doubt the Spirit, so the 
 sin against life is to deny life. Restraint can 
 only be tolerated as a tempoi-ary, partial means 
 toward fulfillment. But when perfect fulfillment 
 is reached, that which is perfect is come, " law, 
 life, joy, impulse are one thing." 
 
 We sometimes Avish that there were a Voice 
 from Heaven to tell us just what the right thing 
 was. We would be willing to do it if only we 
 
THEY THAT HUNGER 67 
 
 knew what it was ! But if such a Voice could 
 come, we would be deprived of the opportunity to 
 serve the Lord our God with all our minds, that 
 is, of our chance of self-development, our chance 
 of becoming ourselves, which is only another way 
 of saying our chance of becoming one with the 
 Father. The child does not become one with his 
 father through obeying commands that he does 
 not understand, but by understanding his father's 
 nature, and his father's wishes so well, that com- 
 mands are unnecessary. So it is only as we are 
 able to find out the will of God without being told, 
 that we can really become one with Him, think His 
 thoughts, understand His nature, hear His voice, 
 not as something outside of us, but as something 
 within us. " This is life eternal, to know Thee, 
 the only true God." But we can never know Him 
 through just being told about Him, He must 
 speak within us. 
 
 " Blessed art thou, Simon bar-Jonah, for flesh 
 and blood hath not revealed it unto Thee, but my 
 Father which is in Heaven." And the Father 
 spoke not to Him, but within Him. When the 
 union of two spirits is complete, there is no need 
 of speaking to each other. " In that day ye shall 
 ask me nothing," and I will tell you nothing. 
 There is no need of asking or telling, for I am 
 you and you are I, we are made perfect in one. 
 In so far as I understand my friend, I am one 
 with my friend. In so far as I understand God, 
 I am one with God. 
 
68 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 It is this sense of oneness with the Father that 
 distinguishes Jesus from all the prophets that 
 came before Him. The Old Testament prophets 
 thought of Jehovah as something outside of them- 
 selves, guiding and directing them. Jesus, on the 
 other hand, thought of the Father as one with 
 Himself, " I and the Father are one." He had 
 no need of any one to testify to Him of man, for 
 He Himself knew what was in man. And so He 
 had no need of any one to testify to Him of God, 
 for He Himself knew what was in God. God was 
 in Him, and He was in God. And His prayer for 
 His disciples was that they should be united with, 
 identified with the Father, even as He was. " No 
 man knoweth the Father, save the Son." That 
 is, to know God, we must become sons of God. 
 Only by the God within us can we know the God 
 above us. 
 
 To the superficial reader, it may be rather 
 shocking to find Oscar Wilde writing, " I don't 
 care whether I am a better man or not, provided 
 only I am a deeper man." But what is it to be 
 a deeper man? Is it not to understand man bet- 
 ter, and to understand God better .-^ And can one 
 be a deeper man without being a better man.'' 
 We are told that David was a man after God's 
 own heart. What can this mean save that he was 
 a deep man, a man who had learned to understand 
 man, a man who had learned to understand God.'' 
 And he had learned this largely through his mis- 
 takes. 
 
THEY THAT HUNGER 69 
 
 Oscar Wilde tells us that morality had no in- 
 terest for him. After all, there is a sense in 
 which it had no interest for Jesus, the morality 
 that consists in outward forms. For forms teach 
 nothing, it is only inner experiences that teach. 
 " It is the Spirit that quickeneth, the letter profit- 
 eth nothing." 
 
 The truth is that the Divine government is not, 
 as frequently represented, an absolute monarchy, 
 or a benevolent despotism; it is a democracy. 
 And the superiority of democracy to paternalism 
 does not consist in the fact that the laws are bet- 
 ter, they frequently are not. Indeed, if we con- 
 sider any one generation, it is often possible to 
 find that hotter things are done, better conditions 
 created, under paternalism than under democracy. 
 The advantage which a successful democracy has 
 over a successful despotism is, not that it makes 
 better laws, or even better outward actions, but 
 that it makes better developed people. For 
 through making their laws, that is through for- 
 mulating their ideals, the people make themselves. 
 So God allows us to make our own laws, that is 
 to find out His laws, for ourselves, even at the 
 risk of making great mistakes. For the object of 
 the Divine government is not to make laws, but 
 to make men. And our failures, quite as much as 
 our successes, help us to be men. 
 
 When I was a young girl I had to make an 
 important decision. After I had made it, I had 
 reason to think that my father disapproved of it, 
 
70 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 but when I questioned him on the subject, he re- 
 plied, *' Well, it is better that you should decide 
 for yourself, than that I should decide for you. 
 Even if you are making a mistake, it is better 
 that you should make a mistake for yourself, than 
 that I should make it for you.'* Yes, the mis- 
 takes which we make for ourselves, especially 
 when we have honestly tried to find the right 
 course, are developing, while the mistakes which 
 others make for us, are too often only embitter- 
 ing. But not only are the honest mistakes which 
 we make for ourselves more developing than the 
 mistakes which others make for us, but they often 
 bring us nearer to God, than even the wise deci- 
 sions made for us by others. 
 
 For we are here, not even to find righteousness, 
 we are here to find ourselves. We find ourselves 
 through finding righteousness, but only through 
 finding it ourselves, not through having it found 
 for us. Indeed, in the last analysis, unrighteous- 
 ness would seem to be nothing save unwillingness 
 to think, wilful inability to think straight, a re- 
 fusal to use our reason, in reliance upon the 
 Power that has given us that reason. 
 
 But while democracy is the highest ideal of 
 government, it is of course an adventure, and a 
 dangerous adventure. Yet, dangerous as it is, it 
 is nothing like so dangerous as the adoption of a 
 rule-of-thumb morality, adopting it not only for 
 one's self, but attempting to force it upon others. 
 That is not only the most dangerous, but the most 
 
THEY THAT HUNGER 71 
 
 sinful thing that it is possible to do. For it is 
 both to lose one's own soul, through stifling all 
 chance for its development, and to endanger the 
 souls of others. " Quench not the Spirit," the 
 principle of growth within you. And the Puri- 
 tan is in fully as much danger of quenching the 
 Spirit as is the libertine. 
 
 Much has been written about the dangers aris- 
 ing from an excessive or perverted emotional na- 
 ture. But what about the danger of an excessive 
 or perverted will.-^ the will that, as in the case 
 of poor George III., is used to close both the mind 
 and the heart, to stifle the voice within us that is 
 trying to say, " Speak, Lord, for thy servant 
 heareth." 
 
 The truth is that we are too apt to mistake 
 hungering and thirsting after our own way, try- 
 ing to impose our own will upon others, for hun- 
 gering and thirsting after righteousness. What 
 passes for a strong will is often mere obstinacy, 
 wilfulness rather than will. And wilfulness diff'ers 
 from will, in that there is no mind behind it, it is 
 will that is not able to justify itself. 
 
 In one of his books, Professor Sumner of Yale 
 carries his well-known delight of putting truth in 
 the form of paradox, to the extent of asserting 
 that, of all dangerous citizens, quite the most dan- 
 gerous is the man of principle. Now there is 
 nothing of which we are prouder than of having 
 principles, and of sticking to them through thick 
 and thin, regardless of consequences. Professor 
 
72 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 Sumner, however, contended that these so-called 
 principles are dangerous, because too often they 
 degenerate into iron rules of conduct, that take 
 no account of changing conditions, because based 
 on the idea that right and wrong are absolute, 
 not relative. 
 
 For there is only one righteousness which is 
 absolute, and that is of the spirit, and not of the 
 letter; it consists in loving the Lord our God with 
 all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind, 
 and with all our strength, and our neighbor as 
 ourselves. Perfect love for God, perfect love for 
 the neighbor, perfect, that is enlightened love for 
 the self, is the only real righteousness, the only 
 righteousness that does not deprive us of the indi- 
 viduality and the sympathy that we were put here 
 to develop. Any righteousness that is developed 
 at the expense of initiative and tenderness is sheer 
 loss. 
 
 The form of expression that the love that is 
 righteousness should take, is left to our God- 
 given reason to determine. Certainly it does not 
 express itself by blindly follow^ing a line of con- 
 duct fixed years ago, before the conditions of the 
 present age could possibly be knoAvn. For not 
 only is true love never blind, it never sees with 
 other people's eyes. 
 
 No! God does not supply us with rules of 
 righteousness. He is a source of righteousness. 
 Like the lute-player in the " Bard of the Dimbo- 
 Vitza." 
 
THEY THAT HUNGER 73 
 
 "If thou art thirsty He will ne'er 
 Give thee a drink, but show thee where 
 His well doth stand." 
 
 Moreover, conventional righteousness cannot be 
 the real righteousness, for if it were, it could be 
 fully attained, and growth would stop. The soul 
 would have no chance to build more lofty cham- 
 bers as the old decay. We are to be filled with 
 righteousness, but that means that we are to be 
 filled now, up to the limits of our present capacity, 
 filled and satisfied for now, but not filled or sat- 
 isfied for all time. For to be filled permanently, 
 to have satisfied one's desire for all time, to have 
 attained one's final end, is not Heaven, but Hell. 
 In his " Child of the Dawn," Mr. Benson makes 
 Hell the land of satisfied desire. And the land of 
 permanently satisfied desire, even when that desire 
 is for righteousness, is indeed Hell. " Wherefore, 
 that that which is should be perfect is not allot- 
 ted, for if it is lacking in naught, then it is lack- 
 ing in all things." 
 
 Nevertheless, " Ye shall be perfect, even as 
 your Father which is in Heaven is perfect." But 
 our Father in Heaven is for each of us his own 
 highest ideal, and the highest ideal of today is sup- 
 planted by the still higher ideal of tomorrow. 
 The music that one loves the best is that which 
 speaks to the soul of something far off and un- 
 attainable. And to each poet the song that he 
 never wrote is the dearest song. 
 
 But while we are not to accept conventional 
 
74 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 standards because they are conventional, neither 
 are we to reject them on that account. I once 
 knew two little girls whose mother had set them 
 on a long summer afternoon to do some examples 
 in division of fractions. The younger child set to 
 work at once, and finislied them before the other, 
 who was fretting away nervously, had even made 
 a beginning. The child whose task was com- 
 pleted exclaimed impatiently, " Mildred, why 
 don't you hurry up and do your examples, so that 
 you can come out and play?" "Because," was 
 the reply, " I don't understand them." " Why," 
 retorted the other, " it is perfectly simple. Just 
 turn the divisors upside down, and multiply nu- 
 merators and denominators together." " Oh, I 
 know that," answered the first, " and could have 
 done it as quickly as you did, but I didn't under- 
 stand why that is dividing, and I won't do one 
 thing until I understand why." " Oh," said the 
 little sister, " it is dividing because the book says 
 so, and because mother says so." " Helen 
 Brown," was the indignant and superior reply, 
 " if you are going to believe everything just be- 
 cause books say so, and mother says so, I pity 
 you." 
 
 And, indeed, there was ground for pity. Nev- 
 ertheless the little sister might have retorted with 
 equal force, " Mildred Brown, if you are going to 
 disbelieve everything just because books say so, 
 and because mother says so, I pity you." 
 
 For the experience of the ages is not to be de- 
 
THEY THAT HUNGER 75 
 
 spised; it must count for something, must indeed 
 count for a great deal. Every student of history 
 or of sociology knows that there is or was a real 
 reason behind almost every convention, that to 
 obey conventions is often simply to let the great 
 social conscience make short-cut decisions for us. 
 So we are neither to accept nor to reject con- 
 ventions simply because they are conventions, we 
 are to prove all things, to hold fast that which is 
 good. It is possible that in our search after 
 righteousness, we may, as Mr. Chesterton says, 
 sail all around the globe only to find England 
 again, but the England that we have discovered 
 for ourselves is different from the England that 
 we have accepted from others. Accepted plati- 
 tudes are deadening, realized platitudes are life- 
 giving. 
 
 " Think not that I am come to destroy the law 
 and the prophets. I am come not to destroy, but 
 to fulfil ! " Nevertheless, " except your righteous- 
 ness exceed the righteousness of the scribes and 
 Pharisees," the people who appear to care most 
 about the law and the prophets, " ye shall in no 
 wise enter into the kingdom of Heaven ! " But 
 how is our righteousness to exceed the righteous- 
 ness of the scribes and Pharisees.'' By its inward- 
 ness ! Instead of paying so much attention to the 
 outward actions, attend first to the inner thought 
 and emotions. " God is a Spirit, and they who 
 worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in 
 truth ! " " My son, give me thy heart." 
 
76 ULTIIMATE IDEALS 
 
 It is also to be noticed that the righteousness 
 after wliich we hunger and thirst cannot be nega- 
 tive righteousness. For we cannot hunger and 
 thirst after a negative good. We do not hunger 
 and thirst not to have ])oison, we hunger and 
 thirst to have food and drink. And just as it is 
 impossible to hunger and thirst after negative 
 righteousness, so it is ini])ossible to be filled with 
 it. Negations are not filling. Our religion must 
 be an inspiring, not a repressive force. We do 
 want to get rid of vice, but only as a means 
 toward an end, that is, that the room which it 
 occupies may be filled with virtue. For when the 
 unclean spirit had gone out of the man, it was 
 only that it might take to it seven other spirits 
 worse than himself, and return again to the house 
 that it found swept, garnished and empty. 
 
 So we must take care not to free ourselves from 
 the vices of the body only to make room for the 
 much more contemptible vices of the mind: pride, 
 contempt, avarice and hypocrisy. For we may 
 be sure that any righteousness that does not in- 
 crease our love for our fellowmen is not righteous- 
 ness, and will land us not in Heaven, but in Hell. 
 From its etjnnology Hell is simply that which 
 separates us, to be helled is to be shut off from. 
 And he who has built a wall around himself so as 
 to separate himself from his fellowmen is in hell, 
 even though the Avail be a wall of righteousness. 
 There can be no loving the Lord our God with all 
 our heart that does not include the love of the 
 
THEY THAT HUNGER 77 
 
 neighbor. To love God in such a way as sepa- 
 rates us from, makes us despise the neighbor, is 
 really not to love, but to hate God. 
 
 And of course to hunger and thirst after right- 
 eousness is not to abstain from evil, because one is 
 afraid of its consequences. If I abstain from 
 being a drunkard, it should not be chiefly because 
 I am afraid of the havoc of body and mind which 
 drunkenness produces, the loss of social consid- 
 eration and so forth, but because I am eagerly 
 desirous of some positive development, some active 
 service with which drunkenness would interfere. 
 We cast sin away, not so much because we see the 
 ugliness of sin, as because we see the beauty of 
 holiness. Virtue must not be confounded with 
 respectability. 
 
 Neither is it possible to take any credit to our- 
 selves when we practice the negative virtues for 
 the sake of getting on, rather than for the sake of 
 rendering efficient service. We cannot serve God 
 and mammon ; neither can we make our service of 
 God a means of serving mammon. 
 
 Moreover, no one who truly hungers and thirsts 
 after righteousness can ever be made sour and sad 
 by attaining it. Food makes the hungry man 
 glad, water rejoices the heart of the thirsty man. 
 So there is no one who really hungers and thirsts 
 after righteousness, who does not shout for joy 
 when he obtains it. The sanction of righteous- 
 ness is happiness. For righteousness is the food 
 of the soul, not its medicine. Moreover when we 
 
78 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 really hunger and thirst after righteousness, all 
 sense of duty vanishes. He who hungers and 
 thirsts after righteousness no more does right 
 from a sense of duty, than he who hungers and 
 thirsts after food and drink eats and drinks from 
 a sense of duty. 
 
 And true righteousness does not deprive us of 
 an interest in life, for true righteousness, true 
 saintliness, unites us with, rather than separates 
 us from, our fellows. 
 
 " Love not the world, neither the things that 
 are in the world ! " Yet " God so loved the 
 world." And I think that He loved not only the 
 people that are in the world, but all the beautiful 
 things that arc in the world, whether they are 
 man-made or God-made. " My country right or 
 wrong ; if right, to keep it right ; if wrong, to 
 make it right." So we may also say, " This 
 world of God's, right or wrong; if right, to keep 
 it right ; if wrong, to set it right." 
 
 What is the conclusion of the whole matter.'' 
 It is this : If we really and truly try with all our 
 hearts to find out what the good and perfect will 
 of God is, we are sure to find out as much as God 
 means us to find out for the present. " If with all 
 your hearts ye seek Me, ye shall surely find Me." 
 
 If we hunger and thirst after righteousness, we 
 are sure to be filled with what for us is righteous- 
 ness, even though that righteousness be relative, 
 and not absolute. For to live up to our own 
 judgment and our own principles, having done all 
 
THEY THAT HUNGER 79 
 
 that we could to make that judgment and those 
 principles high, is subjective, if not objective 
 righteousness. And if, when we have really used 
 the best judgment that has been given to us, we 
 still make mistakes, we must conclude that God 
 means us to make mistakes, that He means to use 
 even our mistakes to work out some higher pur- 
 pose, some higher righteousness. So even in our 
 mistakes, we have attained the righteousness that, 
 at this stage. He meant us to attain. When 
 Browning's Pope, exercising his best judgment, 
 condemns Guido, he says 
 
 " If some acuter wit, fresh-probing, sound 
 His multifarious mass of words and deeds 
 Deeper, and reach through guilt to innocence, 
 I shall face Guide's soul, nor blench a jot. 
 
 " God, who set me to judge thee, meted out 
 So much of judging faculty, no more! 
 Ask Him if I was slack in use thereof ! " 
 
 For the error that is not our fault we are not 
 responsible. God means us sometimes to find our 
 way through error to truth. The truth that can 
 be seen at once is generally superficial truth, or 
 at best, objective truth, not subjective truth. 
 For it is something outside, and not inside of us. 
 Truth, to be truth for us, must, like the kingdom 
 of heaven be within us. " If with all your hearts 
 ye seek Me, ye shall surely find Me," and when that 
 which is perfect is come, we shall find that even 
 the mistakes were steps on the way to finding Him. 
 
VI 
 THE MERCIFUL 
 
 Who is the merciful person? Is he the person 
 who denies sin? If so, man's mercy must be very 
 different from God's mercy, for God never denies 
 sin. God recognizes, more than man does, the ex- 
 ceeding sinfulness of sin. No, the merciful man 
 is he who, like God, does not deny sin, but who, 
 also like God, understands it, understands sin and 
 understands the sinner. I sometimes think that 
 God can hardly be said to forgive us at all. He 
 just understands us. And when we really under- 
 stand, there is no room for forgiveness ; love, sym- 
 pathy and help take its place. 
 
 That is why we are never ashamed to confess 
 our sins to God, for God is not only the spirit 
 of love, but also the spirit of wisdom and under- 
 standing, the spirit of love because He is the 
 spirit of wisdom and understanding. We do not 
 love because we do not understand, or it may be 
 we do not understand because we do not love. 
 But God is the Spirit that understands all, not 
 only what we do and say, but also the inmost 
 thoughts of our hearts, just what the temptation 
 to which we have succumbed was to us, all our 
 
 80 
 
THE MERCIFUL 81 
 
 inherited tendencies, all the temptations that come 
 to us from environment. He knows too the lim- 
 ited vision that has been granted to each of us, 
 knows therefore that of all sinners it might be 
 said, as Jesus said of those who did Him to death, 
 " They know not what they do." 
 
 He understands too that while it is possible 
 that in the best action of the best man, there is a 
 seed of evil which, if allowed to develop, would be 
 sufficient to damn, it is certain that in the worst 
 actions of the worst man, there is a seed of good 
 which, if allowed to develop, would be sufficient to 
 save. And He has no need to judge after the 
 sight of His eyes, or to reprove after the hearing 
 of His ears, for He is able to see more than eyes 
 can see, to hear more than ears can hear. He 
 needeth not that any one should testify to Him 
 of man, for He Himself knows what is in Man. 
 
 It is because we feel that men do not under- 
 stand us that we cry out for a God who does. 
 We are never quite happy in the presence of one 
 who loves us, but from whom we are keeping some- 
 thing back. We feel that his love depends upon 
 our keeping it back. The real friend is the 
 friend who understands us fully, and who loves 
 us just the same. But is there any such friend? 
 Is it not because there is no such friend that we 
 are obliged to believe in God? We read that of 
 old Moses talked face to face with God as a man 
 talketh with his friend. But nowadays I believe 
 we are sometimes tempted to cry out, " Would 
 
82 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 that there were a friend with whom we could talk 
 face to face, as a man talketh with his God ! " 
 
 I have just been reading Mr. H. G. Wells' 
 " Research Magnificent." In it I find a charac- 
 ter, Prothero, who does talk to his friend Benham, 
 as intimately as a man talks to God. But in real 
 life we rarely lay our hearts bare to our friends. 
 There is always something that we keep back. 
 We are afraid either that the friend would be 
 bored, or that he would not understand, and there- 
 fore would be shocked. But whenever we feel 
 that we are really thinking ourselves or anything 
 else down to the bottom, we have a feeling that we 
 are talking to God, the great Spirit of the Uni- 
 verse, who includes all, and therefore understands 
 and loves all. 
 
 " Sir," said the Samaritan woman, " I perceive 
 that thou art a prophet." And when Jesus pro- 
 ceeds to show her that He knows all about her sin- 
 ful and sorrowful past, she does not seem to be at 
 all ashamed, for in the presence of the true 
 prophet, we may be sorry, but we are not 
 ashamed. " Come see a man who told me all 
 things that ever I did. Is not this the Christ.'* " 
 What would the Christ, the Messiah, be to each 
 of us, save a man who could tell us, and to whom 
 we could tell, all things that ever we did, and not 
 be ashamed? 
 
 So I could fancy no praise that would seem 
 quite so great to me, as for one to say to me, tliat 
 he would never be ashamed to tell me anything. 
 
THE MERCIFUL 83 
 
 For it would mean that I was becoming like God, 
 in that I was able to see beneath the surface, 
 that I was developing the spiritual eye, the spir- 
 itual ear, to serve as interpreter of impressions 
 made upon the physical eye, the physical ear. I 
 have a friend who, when she is summing up the 
 character of another, feels that she has bestowed 
 her highest praise, when she says " She is not 
 easily shocked." And if the not being easily 
 shocked does not imply an absence of ideals, but 
 rather a knowledge of, an understanding of human 
 nature, an ability to see not only the deed but also 
 the soul of the doer, then surely it is a quality de- 
 serving of praise. God is never shocked, for He 
 understands all. 
 
 I once heard it said of a very sweet young girl, 
 " It is easy for her to be so uniformly sweet, for 
 she has nothing of the reformer in her nature." 
 But that is not the kind of sweetness that we 
 want, not the sweetness that is blind to sin, but 
 the sweetness that sees sin clearly, and stays sweet 
 just the same; the sweetness which understands, 
 and knows that if there be condemnation, it should 
 not be so much for the individual as for the whole 
 order of society, that has made such sin possible. 
 It may be permitted to Pippa to sing " All's right 
 with the world," but Pippa was only a child. 
 Browning, the author of " Fifine," the creator of 
 Guido and his brothers, certainly never meant to 
 teach tliat all was right with the world in the 
 child's sense. Indeed, as we read his poems, there 
 
84 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 are times when we are more inclined to say, " All's 
 wrong with the world. Who will show us any 
 good?" But it is true that deep beneath the 
 wrong, Browning did find all right with the world. 
 As a friend of mine said of a popular play, " Its 
 lesson seems to be that while at present all is 
 wrong with the world, there is beneath all that 
 is wrong something that is right, and that will in 
 the end make everything right." That is life's 
 lesson. 
 
 " He that is spiritual judgeth all things," but 
 " Judge not according to appearances, but judge 
 righteous judgment." The mercy of the man who 
 is ignorant of sin, or who wilfully denies its exist- 
 ence, is not real mercy. It is only because Brown- 
 ing, like his own David, had gone the whole round 
 of creation, that his final judgment of human 
 nature is worth anything. That judgment is to 
 be found in the last lines which came from his pen, 
 in which he describes himself as 
 
 " One who never turned his back, but marched breast 
 forward, 
 Never doubted clouds would break. 
 Never dreamed though right were worsted, wrong 
 
 would triumph. 
 Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, 
 Sleep to wake." 
 
 We are sometimes told that we must not be 
 too critical. I am inclined to think that it is 
 impossible to be too critical, if only we can be 
 critical in the right spirit. The criticism or 
 
THE MERCIFUL 85 
 
 analysis of others can never hurt the soul that is 
 conscious of its own weakness. For it is not criti- 
 cism, but complacency that is the enemy of spir- 
 itual growth. We must not indulge in it, not so 
 much because it hurts others, as because it hurts 
 ourselves. It did not hurt the publican that the 
 Pharisee prayed within himself, " Lord, I thank 
 thee that I am not as other men are, unjust, adul- 
 terers, extortioners, or even as this publican," but 
 it did hurt the Pharisee. 
 
 There are only two sins that Jesus condemned 
 unsparingly, hypocrisy and avarice. And the 
 hypocrisy which he condemned did not consist in 
 pretending to others that one was better than one 
 was. It was the much more hopeless sin of be- 
 lieving one's self that one was better than one 
 was. And the sinner was almost always a correct 
 person, a devotee of formal righteousness. 
 
 Of course the difficulty here, as elsewhere in life, 
 is that if we escape Scylla, we are in danger of 
 falling into Charybdis. Just as it is always 
 harder for the tolerant person to tolerate intoler- 
 ance than to tolerate any other sin, so it is harder 
 for the merciful person to extend mercy to this 
 unmerciful righteousness, this spiritual security, 
 than to any other sin. And are we really called 
 upon to do so? I said the other day that I de- 
 spised a snob, and was told that it was never right 
 to despise any one. And in truth I believe that' 
 it is not in my nature permanently to despise any 
 one. But in setting up standards, in combating 
 
86 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 sins that are not generally recognized as sins, 
 fierce waves of contempt such as swept over Jesus 
 Himself, when He pronounced His woes upon the 
 self-satisfied people of His own day, do seem to 
 me to be justifiable. There is no need to despise 
 the type of person Avho is guilty of physical sin, 
 such sin is clearly recognized as sin. Moreover it 
 brings its own penalty. But it is the mission of 
 this age, as it was the mission of Jesus' own age, 
 to put snobbishness, hard superiority, in its 
 proper place. And its proper place is at the 
 very head of the category of possible sins. 
 
 Yet in judging the modem Pharisee, we must 
 remember that even for his sin, society is more to 
 blame than is the individual. For the erring in- 
 dividual has probably been brought up to be a 
 self-righteous snob. Society which, through its 
 bad tenement houses, exposes the poor and the 
 low-born to physical temptations, through its 
 false standards exposes the well-to-do and the 
 well-born to this more subtle temptation. Thus, 
 in the last analysis, even here it is society rather 
 than the individual Avho is to be condemned, the 
 sin rather than the sinner. 
 
 So I think that we can be sure that while, when 
 we really understand, there will still be some sins 
 that we will continue to condemn unsparingly, 
 there will be no sinner whom we shall so condemn. 
 But there can be no real understanding that is of 
 the head alone, the heart must play its part. 
 " The prophets," says Matthew Arnold, " ear- 
 
THE MERCIFUL 87 
 
 nestly reminded their nation of the superiority of 
 justice and judgment to any exterior ceremony 
 like sacrifice. But judgment and justice them- 
 selves, as Israel in general conceived them, have 
 something exterior in them ; now what was wanted 
 was more inwardness, more feeling. This was 
 given by adding mercy and humbleness to judg- 
 ment and justice. Mercy and humbleness are al- 
 ways something inward, they are affections of the 
 heart." In one sense mercy is only justice — 
 that is, it is head justice and heart justice, not 
 just external justice. 
 
 Head justice and heart justice, that is what we 
 want, the seeing eye, the understanding heart, 
 justice that understands, justice that loves, for 
 that is the only justice that is justice! In judg- 
 ing our fellowmen we must not leave our intellects 
 behind us. Justice that is merely of the heart is 
 not justice, but wishy-washy sentimentality. But, 
 on the other hand, justice that is of the head alone 
 is never real justice, for the head alone never 
 understood a single human being, or a single im- 
 portant human interest. We must use both head 
 and heart to evolve our ideals of right and wrong, 
 we must use both head and heart to understand 
 our fellowmen who may sin against these ideals. 
 
 Understanding, of course, does not always mean 
 approving, nor does it necessarily mean that even 
 when people do approve of each other, that they 
 can always work together. An acquaintance of 
 mine told me that when he was traveling in China 
 
88 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 he heard of two missionaries who would have noth- 
 ing to do with each other. His informant seemed 
 to think that this proved conclusively that neither 
 was a real Christian. His own impression was 
 that the two men did not understand each other ; 
 if only they could be brought to do this, he felt 
 that there should be no difficulty about their 
 working together. But when he came to know 
 them, he discovered that tlierc was no lack of un- 
 derstanding, and even of respect, and yet each was 
 convinced that the other's mode of work was 
 wrong, that the other, although a good man, was 
 mistaken. Hence of course there could be no 
 working together. Probably it was even better 
 that they should not meet often, but there was no 
 lack of mercy. 
 
 And then of course sometimes we may recognize 
 the fact that a man's way of working and living 
 is right for him, but it is not our way. Hence 
 although we may approve of him, we cannot work 
 or live together. But the important thing is that 
 a man should cast out devils, not that he should 
 follow with us. 
 
 Yes, when we really understand our fellowmen, 
 it is impossible for us not to be merciful. But 
 how shall we attain unto this understanding.'' We 
 attain unto it in great measure, at least, by under- 
 standing ourselves. Know thyself, not only be- 
 cause in order to develop the best self and to 
 subdue the worst self, it is necessary to know 
 the self, but also because it is through know- 
 
THE MERCIFUL 89 
 
 ing ourselves that we come to know others. 
 
 For every man is included in every other man. 
 Hence the way to understand another is to put 
 ourselves in his place, to look into our own hearts, 
 and to find in them the seed of evil which, under 
 different circumstances, might have developed into 
 the same outward action which we are condemn- 
 ing in another. Yes, and to look back over our 
 own lives, and to see, alas ! that there have been 
 times in which seeds of evil not only might, but did 
 develop into actions quite as bad as those which 
 we are now condemning. And thus seeing clearly 
 the beam in our own eye, we will be able to esti- 
 mate more fairly the mote that is in our brother's 
 eye. And as we know that even with the beam in 
 our own eye, we have never been all bad, so we 
 can be sure that, in spite of the mote that is in his 
 eye, our brother, too, has his good qualities. 
 
 " Know thine own soul," not so much for the 
 sake of knowing thine owti soul, not as an end in 
 itself, but for the sake of realizing the sameness, 
 the unity, the brotherhood of all men. That is 
 the reason that to the Greek the words " Know 
 thyself " comprehended all virtue. For the pur- 
 pose of life is that we may see, that the mind may 
 see, that the heart may see, that both heart and 
 mind may be open to receive light and love. So 
 we must keep the mind and the heart open that we 
 may understand ourselves, that we may under- 
 stand other people. 
 
 What is the great mission of literature save to 
 
90 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 combat prejudice? to broaden and deepen the 
 heart by making it sec what lies beneath the sur- 
 face? But no poet, no novelist ever wrote any- 
 thing worth writing, save as he wrote out of his 
 own heart; hence the necessity of knowing one's 
 own heart. And I think that there is a sense in 
 which the really great novelist loves all his char- 
 acters, and makes us love them all, because he 
 understands them all, and makes us understand 
 them all. To understand is to love, to love is to 
 understand. ]\Ien speak of " the gentle Shake- 
 speare." But why was he the gentle Shake- 
 speare? Because he understood all varieties of 
 the human heart and mind, as no other of the sons 
 of men has understood them, and loved because he 
 understood. This is true greatness. " Thy gen- 
 tleness hath made thee great," but also " Thy 
 greatness hath made thee gentle." 
 
 It follows as a matter of course that the merci- 
 ful are blessed or happy, for the mere being merci- 
 ful makes them happy. " The merciful man doeth 
 good unto his own soul." Nothing makes us so 
 unhappy as harsh and bitter judgments of oth- 
 ers. The bitter person must always be the un- 
 happy person. But the truly merciful man is 
 not only he who has no harshness or bitterness, 
 but he who, through a clear understanding, has 
 come to see that there is no room for, no excuse 
 for harshness or bitterness, for he has come to 
 realize not only that there is always good beneath 
 the evil, but also that even the evil itself is good 
 
THE MERCIFUL 91 
 
 in the making. So even evil only serves to kindle 
 the flame of his love. He cannot help being an 
 optimist, not an unreasoning, but a reasoning op- 
 timist, and the reasoning optimist must always be 
 happy. 
 
 And then, as I have said so many times in the 
 course of this book, the only thing that can bring 
 real, lasting happiness, is the feeling that we are 
 moving onward in the direction of full develop- 
 ment. What is God's mercy to us, save the inner 
 peace that comes to us as we grow into more per- 
 fect harmony with man and God? And what is 
 human perfection save perfect relations with man 
 and God? And we are only merciful in the deep 
 sense of the word as we come into closer, more 
 perfect relations with both man and God, through 
 coming into a fuller understanding of man who 
 sins, and of God who forgives sin, and so forgive 
 as God forgives. We pray " Forgive us our tres- 
 passes as we forgive those who trespass against 
 us." Should we not also pray, " Help us to for- 
 give those who trespass, whether against us or 
 against any one else, even those who trespass 
 against themselves, as Thou forgivest us, because 
 we understand them as Thou understandest 
 us and them "? 
 
 We sometimes say, " I can't care for so and so, 
 because I see through him too well." The real 
 truth is that we do not care for him, because we do 
 not see through him enough. A little insight, like 
 a little knowledge, is a dangerous thing. But 
 
92 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 when we see through people as God sees through 
 them, we will love everybody, even as God loves 
 everybody. The true sage is he who, seeing deep- 
 est, loves most. 
 
 The reward of the merciful is the opening of 
 the eyes, the happiness of seeing that, as the dying 
 Luria says, all men do tend to become good crea- 
 tures, even though it be so slow. As our hearts 
 enlarge to their proper size, we come to see that as 
 in Christ Jesus, there can be neither Jew nor 
 Greek, bond nor free, so in us there can be no 
 such thing. 
 
 And we are to carry mercy so far as to love our 
 enemies. To be able to do that is the greatest 
 reward, the highest happiness of all. For if love 
 is the greatest bliss that the human heart can at- 
 tain unto, surely the greatest bliss of all, the joy 
 that transcends joy, is to carry love so far as to 
 extend it to an enemy. " If ye love them that 
 love you, what thank have ye? " No, the great 
 reward is when we love those that do not love us, 
 and this reward is love itself. 
 
 Is it not significant that hard upon the com- 
 mand to love our enemies, come the words " Be ye 
 therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in 
 Heaven is perfect".-^ But what is it to be made 
 perfect? To be made through and through. 
 And we are made through and through only as we 
 are filled through and through with love. We 
 can only be made perfect, as we are made perfect 
 in one, — that is, as we become one with God, and 
 
THE MERCIFUL 93 
 
 one with our fellowmen. " Love is the fulfillment 
 of the law," and when love extends even to the 
 enemy, then and then only is the law perfectly ful- 
 filled. 
 
 And it makes no difference whether we read this 
 verse as a command, or, as in the Revised Version, 
 as a promise. 
 
VII 
 
 THE PEACEMAKERS 
 
 " Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be 
 called the children of God." 
 
 Who are the peacemakers? Are they just the 
 people who patch up quarrels? If so, not many 
 of us have the opportunity to earn this blessing, 
 for there are few of us to whose lot it ever falls 
 to perform this service. Moreover, when all is 
 said and done, peace is not the absence of quarrel- 
 ing; comparatively few of us quarrel, and yet 
 comparatively few of us have real peace. In the 
 last analysis, peace consists not so much in our 
 relations to each other, as in our relations to our- 
 selves and to God, That is, to the general order 
 of the universe, which is God's expression of Him- 
 self. Peace, like the kingdom of Heaven, is within 
 us ! And peacemakers are not so much those who 
 patch up quarrels, as those who diffuse an atmos- 
 phere of peace, those who like Jesus say, or rather 
 have no need to say, whenever they come into a 
 company, " Peace be unto you," and when they 
 leave, " My peace I leave with you." 
 
 What is this peace? Ruskin, at the beginning 
 
 of his " Pra?terita," says, " For best and truest of 
 
 all blessings, I had been taught the perfect mean- 
 
 94 
 
THE PEACEMAKERS 95 
 
 ing of Peace in thought and word. I never had 
 heard mj father's or my mother's voice once 
 raised in any question with each other ; nor seen 
 an angry or even a slightly hurt or offended 
 glance, in the eye of either. I had never heard 
 a servant scolded ; nor even suddenly, passion- 
 ately, or in any severe manner blamed. I had 
 never seen a moment's trouble or disorder in any 
 household matter, nor anything whatever done in 
 a hurry, or undone in due time. I had no con- 
 ception of such a thing as anxiety. ... I had 
 never done any wrong that I knew of, beyond oc- 
 casionally delaying the commitment to heart of 
 some improving sentence, that I might watch a 
 wasp on the window pane, or a bird in the 
 cherry tree ; and I had never seen any grief." 
 
 Is this peace? Is it not rather the negation 
 of life.'' And negation, resignation, is not peace, 
 He who said, " Peace I leave with you, my peace I 
 give unto you " was also He who said " I am come 
 that they might have life, and that they might 
 have it more abundantly." No, it is not less life, 
 but more life that we want. Peace is not nega- 
 tive. Real peace can nowhere be found save in 
 life, and life means love and suffering. And while 
 it is sometimes important that we should relax 
 emotionally^, it is far more important that we shall 
 have strong emotional natures to relax. 
 
 Ruskin tells us that the general tenor of his 
 education was too formal. Was not this peace 
 of his childhood also too formal? He not only 
 
96 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 had no grief, he tells us that at this time he had 
 nothing to love. But how can there be peace 
 without grief and without love? No! if we are 
 to have peace Me must have the full peace, that 
 comes to those who see life steadily, and see it 
 whole, not the empty peace that comes to those 
 who have no sorrows of their own, and whose eyes 
 arc blinded to the world's sorrows. If we are to 
 have freedom from anxiety, it must not be the 
 freedom that those have who have never had any- 
 thing to be anxious about, or that they have 
 who are too stupid to be anxious, but the peace 
 that comes to those who have their share of nat- 
 ural anxieties, and are sufficiently clear-sighted to 
 see through them, to feel the peace that is under- 
 neath them. 
 
 For real peace comes only to one who, like 
 Jesus, has been a man of sorrows, and acquainted 
 with grief. Peace in the midst of agony, the calm 
 wisdom gained by suffering of the Greeks, the 
 crown of thorns transformed into a crown of 
 glory of the Christian, this only is true peace. 
 He only knows peace, who has come out of great 
 tribulation, and has made his will one with the 
 Divine will. Peace can only be obtained as the 
 creature becomes one with the Creator. 
 
 " The rishis," says Tagore, " were they who 
 having reached the supreme God from all sides had 
 found abiding peace, had become united with all, 
 had entered into the life of the universe." In 
 
THE PEACEMAKERS 97 
 
 such union with the Creator man becomes perfect, 
 made perfect through joy, made perfect through 
 suffering. He who has attained this peace is 
 more even than a child of God, he is one with God. 
 " I and the Father are one, we will be one with 
 you, 3'e shall be one with us." The purpose of 
 creation is completed, for what is that purpose 
 save that the creature shall become one with the 
 Creator, thinking His thoughts, understanding 
 His laws, doing His will.'' For such a man suffer- 
 ing has ended, he has passed " under the ultimate 
 angels' law " where 
 
 " Law, Life, Joy, Impulse are one thing." 
 
 But this is a never-ending process, and the 
 strongest argument for Eternity is that it is so 
 short a time to understand the Eternal, to become 
 one with God. 
 
 Those of us who have ever suffered from, or 
 been with one who has suffered from melancholia, 
 and recovered, know what this means. It some- 
 times seems as though nothing could shake them 
 again. For they have been to 'the bottom of all 
 things, into the very depths of hell, and there 
 they have found God, and found themselves. " If 
 I descend into hell, lo, thou art there," and so 
 there is no hell. Hell has become simply the way 
 to heaven, the fiery path by which we ascend into 
 the presence of God. Henceforth although the 
 waves may be mountain high, we know that at the 
 
98 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 bottom there will always be peace. There is no 
 longer any fear of the future, for the soul knows 
 its own strength. 
 
 " The P'uture I may face, now I liave proved the 
 Past." 
 
 Is not this the message of the book of Job, 
 the book which Carlyle has so well called " Every 
 Man's Book ".? Great suffering comes to a right- 
 eous man, and through that suffering his right- 
 eousness, nay more, he himself ceases to be for- 
 mal and becomes real, for through it he obtains 
 a vision of God, the great Reality. His three 
 friends come to him with the sorry comfort that 
 his sufferings are the punishment of his sins, re- 
 pentance is what he needs. Elihu comes nearer 
 the truth when he asserts that suffering is disci- 
 pline, the TTadrjfJLaTa of life are fiadrjixara. But the 
 real solution comes when God Himself answers 
 Job out of the whirlwind, giving no intellectual 
 solution of the problem of suffering, but creating 
 in him such a full sense of His presence, that no 
 further solution is necessary. That is what suf- 
 fering is for, to bring us into the presence of God. 
 Then the heart and mind of man are satisfied. 
 " I have heard of Thee with the hearing of the ear, 
 but now mine e^'^e seeth Thee." 
 
 What is it to see God.'* Is it not to see, realize 
 and be satisfied with the fact that we are at the 
 same time everything and nothing? In ourselves 
 nothing, as a part of God everything! And to 
 
THE PEACEMAKERS 99 
 
 this vision of God we only come through suffer- 
 ing nobly borne. This is affliction's meaning, this 
 is its compensation ! 
 
 But the Vision which is Peace does not come to 
 us through renunciation. Indeed, so long as re- 
 nunciation is conscious, we should be ashamed of 
 it, not proud of it. " In the last analysis," said 
 the most unselfish person that I know, " I always 
 do the things that I like best to do." " Lo, I 
 come to do Thy will, O God," because Thy will is 
 my will. " I do always the things that please 
 Him " because the things that please Him are the 
 things that please Me. " To obey is better than 
 sacrifice," but not much better, because after all 
 obedience has in it something of the nature of 
 sacrifice. Glad co-operation is better than either, 
 " Henceforth I call you not servants, but 
 friends." 
 
 For being one with the Father means not just 
 simply submitting to the will of the Father, but 
 actively doing it up to the best light that we have. 
 We must not be resigned to the will of God, we 
 must actively work for it, we must do our best to 
 bring it about. For we do not want the peace that 
 is a mere mental and moral chloroform, stifling 
 ambition, deadening hope. To abandon interest 
 in life is not peace. Human nature demands inter- 
 est more than it demands anything else, and with- 
 out the thing that we demand most, there can be 
 no peace. The negation of ambition is not peace. 
 
 " I have learned in whatsoever state I am there- 
 
100 ULTIINIATE IDEALS 
 
 with to be content," but content with it as a 
 stage, discontented with it as a finality. For 
 peace can be found only in growth; it lies not in 
 resignation, but in hope. It comes only to those 
 who have a definite plan for their lives, a definite 
 object for which they are working up to the limit 
 of their ability. It lies not in quiescence, but in 
 stinigglc; we find rest only in effort. Bafl^ed in 
 trying to attain one object, we must go on to an- 
 other; when one door is closed to us, we must find 
 another that is open. We " fall to rise, are 
 baffled to fight better, sleep to wake." 
 
 Of course there must be a certain kind not of 
 resignation, but of acceptance. We must accept 
 our own limitations, accept ourselves as we are. 
 We must not say, " If I were different, I could do 
 differently," but we must find out what we are, 
 accept ourselves for what we are. We must ac- 
 cept even the limitations that we have imposed 
 upon ourselves, the limitations of mind and body 
 caused by our mistakes and sins. Instead of 
 wasting our strength in remorse, trying to repair 
 the irreparable, we must accept what is left, do 
 the best that we can with what we still have. Nor 
 must we accept ourselves as less than we are, we 
 must respect ourselves, for in the absence of self- 
 respect there can be no peace. Moreover, he who 
 despises himself soon becomes despicable. 
 
 And we must sometimes accept the hardest 
 thing of all to accept, the misunderstanding of 
 friends. Thus only can we enter into the fellow- 
 
THE PEACEMAKERS 101 
 
 ship of His sufferings. For it was not the ac- 
 cursed death of the cross that made Him the Man 
 of Sorrows, and acquainted with grief. It was 
 the fact that not even His brethren believed on 
 Him, that " He came unto His own, and they that 
 were His own, received Him not." 
 
 And we must, of course, accept sorrow and suf- 
 fering, sorrow and suffering that seem to us un- 
 necessary, not only for ourselves, but for the 
 world. Yet most of this, I think, we are to ac- 
 cept only as a stage, only until we can find out 
 how to avoid it. For instance, it is the conven- 
 tional thing to say that it is God's will when a 
 friend or comrade is stricken by death, and thence 
 to draw comfort. But I cannot be brought to 
 the place where I can believe that it is God's will, 
 that a man or a woman should be cut off in the 
 height of power and service. My comfort is that 
 it is not God's will, and that the time is coming 
 when men shall so discover and live by God's laws 
 that an early death cannot occur, and then, and 
 not now, God's will will be done. 
 
 If we ask why we were not told the laws of God 
 from the beginning, why so many centuries of 
 waste must be lived through in the process of find- 
 ing them out, the answer is that in that case there 
 would be no opportunity to serve God with all the 
 mind; that is, that all opportunity of intellectual 
 and spiritual growth would be denied us. For 
 while obedience may be moral, it is certainly not 
 spiritual. There is no spiritual growth even in 
 
102 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 the acceptance of the experience of others ; it is 
 only as we find out things for ourselves that the 
 spirit grows. Therefore, it is that the work of 
 man's life is quite as much to discover the laws of 
 God, as it is to obey them. God establishes His 
 laws, inviolable and beneficial, gives to man the 
 power to discover them, and then leaves him free 
 even to ignorance and sin and suffering. 
 
 " Henceforth I call you not servants, but 
 friends.'* To serve God with the mind is to be- 
 come the friend of God, for what is the friend 
 save the one who understands us, who enters into 
 our plans and our purposes .'* " Ye are they who 
 have continued with me in my temptations." 
 That is much, but they who are with us in our 
 plans and ambitions, are even more. Men's dear- 
 est friends are commonly their fellow-workers, it 
 is permitted to us to be workers together with 
 God. For God cannot fulfil Himself, cannot 
 carry out His own laws, except as we understand 
 Him. If the greatest suffering of man is to be 
 misunderstood, so to Him also ! Speaking after 
 the manner of men, let us learn His laws, that we 
 may put an end to His suffering ! " The whole 
 creation groaneth and travaileth together in 
 pain " until the creature understands the Creator. 
 Till then, both creature and Creator must suffer. 
 For we are not only here to fill out that which is 
 lacking in the sufferings of Christ, we are here to 
 fill out that which is lacking in the wisdom of God. 
 
 If only we could be sure of the Future ! Then 
 
THE PEACEMAKERS 103 
 
 it seems as though we could bear anything. But 
 we must be content, not resigned, not to know all 
 about the Future now, though always working to 
 find out more. For if we knew all about the life 
 that is to be, the life that now is might be only 
 one of waiting. How much time is wasted in wait- 
 ing for trains, for meals, for mails ! So we might 
 waste the whole life in waiting. And the attitude 
 of waiting is not an attitude of growth. 
 
 For we were made to live mainly in the Present, 
 — not too much in either the past or the future. 
 To live in the past is to stand still or to go back- 
 ward, to live in the future in the sense of merely 
 waiting for the future, is to cut off the possibility 
 of having a future. It is legitimate to live in the 
 past only as its joys and its sorrows, its victories 
 and its defeats, shed light upon the present. The 
 life of yesterday is useful only as it contributes 
 strength, sweetness and light to the life of to-day. 
 And it is legitimate to live in the future only as 
 we are making the future out of the present, not 
 as we are worrying about it, or waiting for it. 
 And just as we make the future of this life out of 
 the present, so it is probable that we make the 
 life that is beyond out of the life that now is. 
 
 " The higher life we cannot miss. 
 By truly, nobly living this." 
 
 I have a dear friend who, in the ninety years 
 that have been allotted her, has done much to 
 make this world a better place in which to live. 
 
104 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 An old gentleman, a contemporary whose life has 
 been spent in fighting the same battles that she 
 has fought, once said to her, " And now my friend 
 and I feel that our work is done, and we have 
 nothing to do but wait for the angels to call us 
 home." To which the old lady replied in a spir- 
 ited way, " You may wait for the angels if you 
 want to, I shall be ready for them when they come, 
 but I have too much to do to wait for them." 
 And for myself, I can only hope that old age will 
 find me so full of interest in life that I shall have 
 no time to wait for the angels. For then as the 
 outward man decays, the inward man will be re- 
 newed day by day. Moreover when the inward 
 man is constantly being renewed, it generally takes 
 the outward man a long time to decay. 
 
 Yes, it is in work that we find life and peace. 
 That is the reason that no honest work is ever a 
 failure. " I have no more made my Book," says 
 Montaigne, " than my Book has made me." That 
 is the chief use of work, not what we accomplish 
 outside of us, but what we accomplish inside of us. 
 The world could get on very well without my w^ork, 
 but I could not get on well without it. 
 
 True, " they also serve who only stand and 
 wait." But only Avhen such standing and waiting 
 is imperative. And when we are actually phys- 
 ically or mentally incapacitated for work, I do not 
 think that the suffering is great. It is only the 
 unnecessary rest that produces restlessness. It is 
 when one feels in one's self the capacity to work, 
 
THE PEACEMAKERS 105 
 
 and yet for some reason, generally some misunder- 
 standing, or some social convention, is cut off from 
 exercising it, that the suffering is greatest of all. 
 
 Think of the maiden aunts of the past genera- 
 tion who sat by the fireside of a sister or a brother ! 
 In many cases no one wanted them to be there, 
 and they did not want to be there, but there was 
 no other place for them to be. Some of these 
 women had been in their youth quite as attractive 
 as their married sisters, quite as able as their suc- 
 cessful brothers, but the chances of life had de- 
 nied them the lot of their sisters, social conven- 
 tions had denied them the career of their brothers. 
 So with no outlet for either emotional nature or 
 ability, they became a burden to themselves and to 
 everybody else. 
 
 This is the greatest suffering that I can con- 
 ceive of. Compared with such women, St. Paul 
 did not know the alphabet of suffering! Well 
 might he speak of his afflictions as light and but 
 for a moment ! For if he was " in prisons more 
 abundantly, and in stripes above measure," he 
 was also in labors more abundantly, in labors 
 above measure! He was working up to the very 
 highest point of his ability, for a cause that he 
 was sure was worth while ! And he had the 
 glorious fellowship of the Apostles ! Therefore, 
 of course, the perils of divers, the perils of rob- 
 bers, the perils from his countrymen, the perils 
 from the Gentiles, were to him as nothing. But 
 the old maid's tragedy, now happily becoming 
 
106 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 a thing of the past, was lack of work, lack of 
 fellowship. Generations of old maids had to groan 
 and travail together in pain, waiting to come into 
 the heritage of this generation. God grant that 
 these sad generations, who in this world had only 
 evil things are now comforted. Yes, there is a 
 sense in which in the next world they should be put 
 even above the best of mothers, for the mothers 
 had some of their good things in this life. 
 
 For in such cases the great comfort that comes 
 to me is in the thought of the justice of God. 
 If God is the Creator, He owes us happiness. 
 False theologies have sometimes told us that He 
 owes us nothing, but the Father owes His child 
 everything. And God is far more responsible for 
 us than the earthly parent is for his child. For 
 the earthly parent is not always responsible for his 
 child's limitations, but in the last analysis the Cre- 
 ator is always responsible for our limitations. To 
 say that God is not bound by His own laws, that 
 what is justice for man is not justice for God, is 
 to me too much like the Greek and Roman ideal 
 which permitted murder and adultery to their 
 gods. Worse, for these sins are in a sense pri- 
 vate crimes, affecting, except by example, only a 
 few individuals. Injustice on the part of a king is 
 worse than private vice. A good man but a bad 
 king does more harm than a bad man but a 
 good king. God must be at least as high as the 
 highest ideals that He has implanted in the best 
 
THE PEACEMAKERS 107 
 
 men. In no civilized country should a king be 
 solutus a legihus. 
 
 The twin sister of work is prayer. Work and 
 prayer are the two angels that comfort us and 
 bring us peace. Why do we pray? Our Father 
 knoweth the things we have need of before we ask 
 Him. We pray then not so much that we may 
 obtain the things for which we pray, as that we 
 may be renewed and strengthened in the inner man, 
 that fellowship with the Infinite may protect us 
 from the agitation and embitterment brought on 
 by contact with the finite. 
 
 When Jesus prayed I do not believe that He 
 was asking for things at all. He was just resting 
 Himself upon His Father's love, feeling that His 
 Father was there. That is what prayer is, feeling 
 our Father's presence, for with His presence comes 
 His peace, the peace of God that passeth all un- 
 derstanding. We are taught to ask for things in 
 early youth, because we are so childish that we 
 cannot approach the Infinite in any other way, but 
 as our spirits develop, a fuller, better communion 
 becomes possible. Then we cease to ask for any- 
 thing except spiritual blessings. Prayer consists 
 in so uniting ourselves with the source of all 
 strength that we become one with the Infinite. 
 
 But not only does this kind of prayer 
 strengthen and steady the inner man, it renews the 
 ideal. For prayer expressed in words is something 
 like saying our lessons. The child says his les- 
 
108 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 sons, not for the teacher's benefit, but that he may 
 clarify his own mind. We do not fully know or 
 understand a thing until we can put it into words. 
 So through prayer we come to know and under- 
 stand our own ideals, clarify and strengthen our 
 own notion of the purpose of our lives, and our de- 
 sire to fulfil it. 
 
VIII 
 THE PURE IN HEART 
 
 " BLESSED ARE THE PURE IN HEART, FOR THEY 
 SHALL SEE GOD ! '* 
 
 Herein is the sum of the whole matter. 
 " Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see 
 God! " Of course the pure in heart shall see God, 
 for who are the pure in heart? The pure in heart 
 are they who do see God, in all the works, and all 
 the laws of Creation, they who see the Creator in 
 everything that He has created, they who never 
 call anything that God has cleansed common or un- 
 clean, they who never make anything that God has 
 cleansed common or unclean. 
 
 It is this ability to he pure in heart, this abUity 
 to see God, that separates man from the lower ani- 
 mals. The horse and the dog see the creation — 
 only man sees the Creator. Man, and man only, 
 has the power to recognize the fact that his body 
 is a temple of the living God, and that his spirit is 
 a breath of the living God. The Spirit beareth 
 witness with our spirit that we are the children of 
 God! Only man is capable of enthusiasm, for 
 only man has been breathed into by the living 
 
 God! 
 
 109 
 
110 ULTIMATE IDEALS 
 
 What is the living God? Here I cannot get be- 
 yond the definition that I learned in my childhood. 
 God is Love, God is Light, God is Spirit, He is the 
 Spirit of Wisdom and Understanding, the Spirit 
 of Counsel and Might, the Spirit of Knowledge, 
 and the Fear of the Lord! And this Spirit the 
 pure in heart always see, for in It tliey live and 
 move and have their Being! 
 

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