ime looked for a Messiah to set their
nation free, and make it rich and strong; the oppressed of our time
believe in money, knowledge, and the will of a people which needs but
power to be in its turn the oppressor. The first words of the Lord on
this occasion were:--'Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the
kingdom of heaven,'

It is not the proud, it is not the greedy of distinction, it is not
those who gather and hoard, not those who lay down the law to their
neighbours, not those that condescend, any more than those that shrug
the shoulder and shoot out the lip, that have any share in the kingdom
of the Father. That kingdom has no relation with or resemblance to the
kingdoms of this world, deals with no one thing that distinguishes their
rulers, except to repudiate it. The Son of God will favour no smallest
ambition, be it in the heart of him who leans on his bosom. The kingdom
of God, the refuge of the oppressed, the golden age of the new world,
the real Utopia, the newest yet oldest Atlantis, the home of the
children, will not open its gates to the most miserable who would rise
above his equal in misery, who looks down on any one more miserable than
himself. It is the home of perfect brotherhood. The poor, the beggars in
spirit, the humble men of heart, the unambitious, the unselfish; those
who never despise men, and never seek their praises; the lowly, who see
nothing to admire in themselves, therefore cannot seek to be admired of
others; the men who give themselves away--these are the freemen of the
kingdom, these are the citizens of the new Jerusalem. The men who are
aware of their own essential poverty; not the men who are poor in
friends, poor in influence, poor in acquirements, poor in money, but
those who are poor in spirit, who _feel themselves poor creatures_; who
know nothing to be pleased with themselves for, and desire nothing to
make them think well of themselves; who know that they need much to make
their life worth living, to make their existence a good thing, to make
them fit to live; these humble ones are the poor whom the Lord calls
blessed. When a man says, I am low and worthless, then the gate of the
kingdom begins to open to him, for there enter the true, and this man
has begun to know the truth concerning himself. Whatever such a man has
attained to, he straightway forgets; it is part of him and behind him;
his business is with what he has not, with the things that lie above and
befor