ruth. 'Shall not God avenge his own
elect,' he says, 'which cry day and night unto him?' Now what can God's
elect have to keep on crying for, night and day, but righteousness? He
allows that God seems to put off answering them, but assures us he will
answer them speedily. Even now he must be busy answering their prayers;
increasing hunger is the best possible indication that he is doing so.
For some divine reason it is well they should not yet know in themselves
that he is answering their prayers; but the day must come when we shall
be righteous even as he is righteous; when no word of his will miss
being understood because of our lack of righteousness; when no
unrighteousness shall hide from our eyes the face of the Father.

These two promises, of seeing God, and being filled with righteousness,
have place between the individual man and his father in heaven directly;
the promise I now come to, has place between a man and his God as the
God of other men also, as the father of the whole family in heaven and
earth: 'Blessed are the peace-makers, for they shall be called the
children of God.'

Those that are on their way to see God, those who are growing pure in
heart through hunger and thirst after righteousness, are indeed the
children of God; but specially the Lord calls those his children who, on
their way home, are peace-makers in the travelling company; for, surely,
those in any family are specially the children, who make peace with and
among the rest. The true idea of the universe is the whole family in
heaven and earth. All the children in this part of it, the earth, at
least, are not good children; but however far, therefore, the earth is
from being a true portion of a real family, the life-germ at the root of
the world, that by and for which it exists, is its relation to God the
father of men. For the development of this germ in the consciousness of
the children, the church--whose idea is the purer family within the more
mixed, ever growing as leaven within the meal by absorption, but which
itself is, alas! not easily distinguishable from the world it would
change--is one of the passing means. For the same purpose, the whole
divine family is made up of numberless human families, that in these,
men may learn and begin to love one another. God, then, would make of
the world a true, divine family. Now the primary necessity to the very
existence of a family is peace. Many a human family is no family, and
the world i