lessed are
they who hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be
filled. Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed
are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. Blessed are the peace-
makers: for they shall be called the children of God. Blessed are they
which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for their's is the kingdom
of heaven. Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you,
and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.
Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven."

This is what they are like; and what we, I fear, too many of us, are not
like. But in proportion as we grow like them, by the grace of God, just
so far shall we enter into the communion of saints, and understand the
bliss of that everlasting All Saints' Day which St John saw in heaven.

And what do they do, those blessed beings? Whatever else they do, or do
not do, this we are told they do--they worship. They satisfy, it would
seem, in perfection, that mysterious instinct of devotion--that inborn
craving to look upward and adore, which, let false philosophy say what it
will, proves the most benighted idolater to be a man, and not a brute--a
spirit, and not a merely natural thing.

They have worshipped, and so are blest. They have hungered and thirsted
after righteousness, and now they are filled. They have longed for,
toiled for, it may be died for, the true, the beautiful, and the good;
and now they can gaze upward at the perfect reality of that which they
saw on earth, only as in a glass darkly, dimly, and afar; and can
contemplate the utterly free, the utterly beautiful, and the utterly good
in the character of God and the face of Jesus Christ. They entered while
on earth into the mystery and the glory of self-sacrifice; and now they
find their bliss in gazing on the one perfect and eternal sacrifice, and
rejoicing in the thought that it is the cause and ground of the whole
universe, even the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world.

I say not that all things are clear to them. How can they be to any
finite and created being? They, and indeed angels and archangels, must
walk for ever by faith, and not by sight. But if there be mysteries in
the universe still hidden from them, they know who has opened the sealed
book of God's secret counsels, even the Lamb who is the Lion, and the
Lion who is the La