tell you where to begin. If you reply, 'My conscience says nothing
definite'; I answer, 'You are but playing with your conscience.
Determine, and it will speak.'

If you care to see God, be pure. If you will not be pure, you will grow
more and more impure; and instead of seeing God, will at length find
yourself face to face with a vast inane--a vast inane, yet filled full
of one inhabitant, that devouring monster, your own false self. If for
this neither do you care, I tell you there is a Power that will not have
it so; a Love that will make you care by the consequences of not caring.

You who seek purity, and would have your fellow-men also seek it, spend
not your labour on the stony ground of their intellect, endeavouring to
explain what purity is; give their imagination the one pure man; call up
their conscience to witness against their own deeds; urge upon them the
grand resolve to be pure. With the first endeavour of a soul toward her,
Purity will begin to draw nigh, calling for admittance; and never will a
man have to pause in the divine toil, asking what next is required of
him; the demands of the indwelling Purity will ever be in front of his
slow-labouring obedience.

If one should say, 'Alas, I am shut out from this blessing! I am not
pure in heart: never shall I see God!' here is another word from the
same eternal heart to comfort him, making his grief its own consolation.
For this man also there is blessing with the messenger of the Father.
Unhappy men were we, if God were the God of the perfected only, and not
of the growing, the becoming! 'Blessed are they,' says the Lord,
concerning the not yet pure, 'which do hunger and thirst after
righteousness, for they shall be filled.' Filled with righteousness,
they are pure; pure, they shall see God.

Long ere the Lord appeared, ever since man was on the earth, nay,
surely, from the very beginning, was his spirit at work in it for
righteousness; in the fullness of time he came in his own human person,
to fulfil all righteousness. He came to his own of the same mind with
himself, who hungered and thirsted after righteousness. They should be
fulfilled of righteousness!

To hunger and thirst after anything, implies a sore personal need, a
strong desire, a passion for that thing. Those that hunger and thirst
after righteousness, seek with their whole nature the design of that
nature. Nothing less will give them satisfaction; that alone will set
them at ease. The