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inconsistent with Christian motives will rob a Christian of Christian
privileges. The hand on his brother's throat destroys the servant's own
forgiveness. He cannot be at once a rapacious creditor and a discharged
bankrupt.

VI. If detached from its connection, there is little blessedness in the
next Beatitude. What is the use of telling us how happy purity of heart
will make us? It only provokes the despairing question, 'And how am I to
be pure?' But when we set this word in its place here, it does bring
hope. For it teaches that purity is the result of all that has gone
before, and comes from that purifying which is the sure answer of God to
our poverty, mourning, and longing. Such purity is plainly progressive,
and as it increases, so does the vision of God grow. The more the
glasses of the telescope are cleansed, the brighter does the great star
shine to the gazer. 'No man hath seen God,' nor can see Him, either
amid the mists of earth or in the cloudless sky of heaven, if by seeing
we mean perceiving by sense, or full, direct comprehension by spirit.
But seeing Him is possible even now, if by it we understand the
knowledge of His character, the assurance of His presence, the sense of
communion with Him. Our earthly consciousness of God may become so
clear, direct, real, and certain, that it deserves the name of vision.
Such blessed intuition of Him is the prerogative of those whose hearts
Christ has cleansed, and whose inward eye is therefore able to behold
God, because it is like Him. 'Unless the eye were sunlike, how could it
see the sun?' We can blind ourselves to Him, by wallowing in filth.
Impurity unfits for seeing purity. Swedenborg profoundly said that the
wicked see only blackness where the sun is.

Like all these Beatitudes, this has a double fulfilment, as the kingdom
has two stages of here and hereafter. Purity of heart is the condition
of the vision of God in heaven. Without holiness, 'no man shall see the
Lord.' The sight makes us pure, and purity makes us see. Thus heaven
will be a state of ever-increasing, reciprocally acting sight and
holiness. Like Him because we see Him, we shall see Him more because we
have assimilated what we see, as the sunshine opens the petals, and
tints the flower with its own colours the more deeply, the wider it
opens.

VII. Once more we have the alternation of a grace exercised to men. If
we give due weight to the order of these Beatitudes, we shall feel that
Chris