sponsibility and trudges along under it. Jesus says that if a
man wants to follow him, he must first of all take up his own burden
like a man. He sees, for instance, a young man to-day beset by his own
problems and difficulties,--his poverty, his temper, his sin, his
timidity, his enemies; and Jesus says to him: "That is your cross, your
own cross. Now, do not shirk it, or dodge it, or lie down on it, or
turn from it to my cross. First of all, take up your own; let it lie
on your shoulder; and then stand up under it like a man and come to me;
and as you thus come, not limply and feebly, but with the step--even
let it be the staggering step--of a man who is honestly bearing his own
load, you will find that your way opens into strength and peace. The
yoke you have to carry will grow easier for you to carry, and the
burden which you do not desire to shirk will be made light."

{58}

XXII

THE POOR IN SPIRIT

_Matthew_ v. 3.

Whom does Jesus call the blessed people? First of all, he says, they
are the "poor in spirit." And who are the poor in spirit? It
sometimes seems as if Christians thought that to be poor in spirit one
must be poor-spirited--a limp and spiritless creature, without dash, or
vigor, or force. But the poor in spirit are not the poor-spirited.
They are simply the teachable, the receptive, the people who want help
and are conscious of need. They do not think they "know it all;" they
appreciate their own insufficiency. They are open-minded and
impressionable. Now Jesus says that the first approach to his
blessedness is in this teachable spirit. The hardest people for him to
reach were always the self-sufficient people. The Pharisees thought
they did not need anything, and so they could not get anything. As any
one thinks, then, of his own greatest blessings, the first of them must
be {59} this,--that somehow he has been made open-minded to the good.
It may be that the conceit has been, as we say, knocked out of him, and
that he has been "taken down." Well! it is better to be taken down
than to be still up or "uppish." It is better to have the
self-complacency knocked out of you than to have it left in. Humility,
as Henry Drummond once said, even when it happens through humiliation,
is a blessing. Not to the Pharisee with his "I am not as other men
are," but to the publican crying "God be merciful to me, a sinner,"
comes the promise of the beatitude. The first condition of receiv