freely; and by them he inherits
the earth he was created to inherit--possesses it as his father made him
capable of possessing, and the earth of being possessed. Because the man
is meek, his eye is single; he sees things as God sees them, as he would
have his child see them: to confront creation with pure eyes is to
possess it.

How little is the man able to make his own, who would ravish all! The
man who, by the exclusion of others from the space he calls his, would
grasp any portion of the earth as his own, befools himself in the
attempt. The very bread he has swallowed cannot so in any real sense be
his. There does not exist such a power of possessing as he would
arrogate. There is not such a sense of having as that of which he has
conceived the shadow in his degenerate and lapsing imagination. The real
owner of his demesne is that pedlar passing his gate, into a divine
soul receiving the sweetnesses which not all the greed of the so-counted
possessor can keep within his walls: they overflow the cup-lip of the
coping, to give themselves to the footfarer. The motions aerial, the
sounds, the odours of those imprisoned spaces, are the earnest of a
possession for which is ever growing his power of possessing. In no wise
will such inheritance interfere with the claim of the man who calls them
his. Each possessor has them his, as much as each in his own way is
capable of possessing them. For possession is determined by the kind and
the scope of the power of possessing; and the earth has a fourth
dimension of which the mere owner of its soil knows nothing.

The child of the maker is naturally the inheritor. But if the child try
to possess as a house the thing his father made an organ, will he
succeed in so possessing it? Or if he do nestle in a corner of its case,
will he oust thereby the Lord of its multiplex harmony, sitting regnant
on the seat of sway, and drawing with 'volant touch' from the house of
the child the liege homage of its rendered wealth? To the poverty of
such a child are all those left, who think to have and to hold after the
corrupt fancies of a greedy self.

We cannot see the world as God means it, save in proportion as our souls
are meek. In meekness only are we its inheritors. Meekness alone makes
the spiritual retina pure to receive God's things as they are, mingling
with them neither imperfection nor impurity of its own. A thing so
beheld that it conveys to me the divine thought issuing in its for