ekness.

Further, in a word, I would note here another thing, and that is--what a
sad, stern, true view of the condition of men in the world results from
noticing that the only three qualities in regard to our relation to them
which Christ sets in this sevenfold tiara of diamonds are meekness in
the face of hatred and injustice; mercifulness in the face of weakness
and wickedness; peacemaking in the face of hostility and wrangling. What
a world in which we have to live, where the crowning graces are those
which presuppose such vices as do these! Ah! dear friends, 'as sheep in
the midst of wolves' is true to-day. And the one conquering power is
patient gentleness, which recompenses all evil with good, and is the
sole means of transforming and thus overcoming it.

People talk a great deal, and a good deal of it very insincerely, about
their admiration for these precepts gathered together in this chapter.
If they would try to live them for a fortnight, they would perhaps pause
a little longer than some of them do before they said, as do people that
detest the theology of the New Testament, 'The Sermon on the Mount is
_my_ religion.' Is it? It does not look very like it. At all events, if
it is, it is a religion behind which practice most wofully limps.

II. Let me ask you to look at what I have already in part referred
to--the place in this series which Mercifulness holds.

Now, of course, I know, and nothing that I say now is to be taken for a
moment as questioning or underestimating it, that, altogether apart from
religion, there is interwoven into the structure of human nature that
sentiment of mercifulness which our Lord here crowns with His
benediction. But it is not that natural, instinctive sentiment--which is
partially unreliable, and has little power apart from the reinforcement
of higher thoughts to carry itself consistently through life--that our
Lord is here speaking about; but it is a mercifulness which is more than
an instinct, more than a sentiment, more than the natural answer of the
human heart to the sight of compassion and distress, which is, in fact,
the product of all that has preceded it in this linked chain of
characteristics and their blessings.

And so I ask you to recall these. 'Poor in spirit,' 'mourning,' 'meek,'
'hungering and thirsting after righteousness'--these are the springs
that feed the flow of this river; and if it be not fed from them, but
from the surface-waters of human sentiment