d villages to hear His words upon the mountainside--was there,
think you, _one satisfied nature_?
"Friends--are _ye_ satisfied?
. . . . .
"Or, does every life come to know, at first or at last, how something--a
hope, or a possibility, or the fulfillment of a purpose--has got
dropped out of it, or has even never entered, so that an emptiness
yawns, craving, therein, forever?
"How many souls hunger till they are past their appetite! Go on--down
through the years--needy and waiting, and never find or grasp that which
a sure instinct tells them they were made for?
"This, this is the poverty of life! These are the poor, to whom God's
Gospel was preached in Christ! And to these denied and waiting ones the
first words of Christ's preaching--as I read them--were spoken in
blessing.
"Because, elsewhere, he blesses the meek; elsewhere and presently, he
tells us how the lowly in spirit shall inherit the earth; so, when I
open to this, his earliest uttered benediction upon our race, I read it
with an interpretation that includes all humanity:
"'Blessed, in spirit, are the poor. Theirs is the kingdom of heaven.'
. . . . .
"What is this Kingdom of Heaven? 'It is within you.' It is that which
you hold, and live in spiritually; the _real_, of which all earthly,
outward being and having are but the show. It is the region wherein
little children 'do always behold the Face of my Father which is in
Heaven.' It is where we are when we shut our eyes and pray in the words
that Christ taught us.
. . . . .
"What matters, then, where your feet stand, or wherewith your hands are
busy? So that it is the spot where God has put you, and the work He has
given you to do? Your real life is within--hid in God with
Christ--ripening, and strengthening, and waiting, as through the long,
geologic ages of night and incompleteness waited the germs of all that
was to unfold into this actual, green, and bounteous earth!
. . . . .
"The narrower your daily round, the wider, maybe, the outreach. Isolated
upon a barren mountain peak, you may take in river and lake--forest,
field, and valley. A hundred gardens and harvests lift their bloom and
fullness to your single eye.
"There is a sunlight that contracts the vision; there is a starlight
that enlarges it to take in infinite space.
"'God sets some souls in s
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