THE MOURNERS.

THE SECOND BEATITUDE.

“Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.” — St. Matt. v. 4

An eminent teacher has said: "It will ever be a question whether men abuse more their sorrows or their joys; but no earnest soul can doubt which of these abuses is the more fatal. To sin in the one case is to yield to a temptation: to sin in the other is to resist a divine grace. Sorrow is God’s last message to man. It is God speaking in emphasis. He who abuses it shows that he can shut his ears when God speaks loudest.” There are few people who can read such words without some measure of self-reproach. A man who has gone through great trouble said to the present writer that “he knew that he was a better man before it. It had done him no good.” If we are entirely honest with ourselves we shall probably all admit that we have lost much through our sorrows — lost a certain buoyancy and elasticity of life which will not come back again, and an interest in the world and in our kind which was one of our happiest possessions.

If indeed our sorrow has been that which St Paul described as the “sorrow of the world,” it has injured us still more deeply. If we have met it heartlessly, trying only to divert our minds from it by amusement or self-indulgence or the quips of a cynical humour, then it has only hardened and soured our nature. That sorrow of the world worketh death.

But even at the best, even when it was godly sorrow, many will admit that it has chilled them. So far from the conventional phrases about “refiner’s fire” being completely true, the furnace of affliction has not left our nature pure gold. If some dross has gone, some cinders and some smoke of the fire are clinging to us.

There is no matter in which absolute truthfulness, both with ourselves and towards those whom we would fain help in their time of trouble, is more necessary than in the matter of consolation, and especially in the use of the comforts of religion. A false note jars and hurts like a blow. Therefore, even when we hear our Lord say, “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted,” we remember that He did not say that such comfort makes up for everything, and that there is no blessing also for the unharassed life. Blessed are they who know the joy of the Lord.

This needs to be said by way of caution. Every one cannot reflect on a past sorrow as Cardinal Newman did —

“I would not miss one sigh or tear,

     Heart-pang or throbbing brow;

Sweet was the agony severe,

     And sweet its memory now.”

Yet that would be a strange soul who could not understand the Lord’s Beatitude on mourning, and who met it with no acquiescence and belief. However little satisfied we are with the gait in which we passed through the Dark Valley, at least we have brought three things out of it

I. The first is a kindlier view of our fellows. One uses homely words, and says, * I never knew people were so good before.’ That is about comparative strangers. Then there were the hearts nearer our own, about whom we felt that they were really suffering with us in our trouble, giving virtue out of themselves that somehow they might relieve and strengthen us. Thus even in our bitterest hours we felt that the cords of love were being more tightly drawn.

"Mortal, if thou art beloved,

Life's offences are removed.

All the fateful things that checked thee,

Hearten, hallow, and protect thee.

What is sorrow? Comfort's prime;

Love's choice Indian Summer time.

Sickness! thou wilt pray it worse,

For so blessed kindly nurse.

And for Death! when thou art dying,

'Twill be Love beside thee lying."

There can be no doubt at all that it is in the Dark Valley of mourning, and not on the happy plains of life, that the best sides of human nature are revealed, and we learn also to believe in that Divine Love which came to its climax of tenderness on a Cross. Therefore, "Blessed are they that mourn.”

II. A second gain that comes from sorrow is an added sense of the seriousness of life. We may not think ourselves better men or women after it, but certainly we are more thoughtful. Sorrow may not do everything; but it sobers the judgment, and makes us see ourselves and the world with clearer eyes. These were true words which George Eliot wrote of one of her characters: “Adam Bede had not outlived his sorrow — had not felt it slip from him as a temporary burden, and leave him the same man again. Do any of us? God forbid. It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it, if we could return to the same blind loves, the same self-confident blame, the same light thoughts of human suffering, the same frivolous gossip over blighted human lives, the same feeble sense of the unknown towards which we have sent forth irrepressible cries in our loneliness.” Some such blessing of seriousness must ever be brought by mourning. A common word we use has a wonderful suggestion of this in it. We talk of a "heavy sorrow" — never of a heavy joy. Joy is light and bubbles up. But sorrow sounds the deeps. It takes a man to the bed - rock of experience. Because it is always good to be in contact with reality, there is a blessedness in mourning which hardly comes in happier days.

Think, for example, how it makes a man know the worth of his religion — sometimes with appalling distress when he discovers that familiar and accepted phrases have no potency to cheer; and sometimes with a sweet wonder that he had never understood before the graciousness of the promises of God. If, while the sun shone, the profoundest things of life had thus been unseen and unrealised, like the stars at noonday, was it not a blessing when, with the thick darkness, "Hesperus and the host of heaven came, and lo, creation widened to our view"?

III. Those who search their own experience for the meaning of sorrow will not deny a third blessing which it brings. It gives a chance of making something great of life. Most people, with moderate abilities and a restricted career, go through the world with few impulses to spiritual development. Their life is dull, not because it is empty, but because the incidents which people it are so little varied from each other. Few occasions call for the self-denials and heroisms which give their colour to character and fix the levels on which life is to be led. A great sorrow is such an occasion — perhaps the most stimulating which men and women know. Every latent resource is summoned to effectiveness, and commonplace people discover that the inspiration which makes shipwreck or war or pestilence call out the noblest that is in humanity is bearing its romance even to them.

If we could always live at the levels which we gain at such hours of grief, how much larger would be our minds, how much more generous our hopes and aims! A husband and a father said beside the dead body of his child, “We must try to have a more religious home after this.” One realised that sorrow was ( awaking in the man aspirations and affinities ' which might — if the glory did not fade — make him enter upon fields of spiritual experience hitherto untravelled, and embrace for his own a life of piety and benevolence which would be the manifest confirmation of the Beatitude, "Blessed are they that mourn.”

Thus in the revelation which our trouble makes of human brotherliness, in the deepened gravity of thought which it induces, and in its summons to heroism and godliness, the compensations of sorrow may be found, and mourning may truly be called blessed.

But surely the very fact that consolation is promised, and the mourners pronounced blessed because they shall be comforted, is in itself a proof that mourning is not the normal nor the highest condition of the soul. Even now, in this world of pain, surcease of sorrow is promised to all those who love the Lord. “Come unto Me all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” “My peace I give unto you.” “Enter ye into the joy of your Lord.” And, in the world to come, it is the promise of the Blessed Home that there "God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes, and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things have passed away.”

In presence of such invitations and promises — in the light of our knowledge of human character — it is necessary to attempt some reconciliation of the blessing upon the mourners with the description of the highest and the lasting life as a life of joy. Such a reconciliation is found in the career of our Lord Jesus Christ Bishop Gore has finely said: “The character which we find described in the Beatitudes is beyond all question nothing else than our Lord’s own character put into words.... It is a description set side by side with an example.” Now, our Lord is called the "Man of Sorrows,” and we know how truly the world’s sorrow broke His heart Yet He was also a man of joy. The complete fulfilment of duty brought Him delight, the peace of domestic affection charmed Him: He found amid the hills and by the sea "the joy of elevated thoughts.” Which title, the man of sorrows, or the man of joy, bears the truest revelation of His nature? Are not both titles in themselves inadequate to represent a complete ideal? And is not the full truth about Him this — that He knew well that

“Not enjoyment and not sorrow

Is our destined end and way.”

As a man upon a journey, He smiled gladly when the sun shone; and He strode on unmurmuringly when the rain fell: but He was not out to enjoy the weather; He was on an errand; and whatever were the conditions He met, He was master of Himself and of them — not “the man of Pleasure,” not "the man of Pain": but "the man of Power.”

Such a detachment is the secret of a final victory, both over sorrow and over happiness, and of the Beatitude both upon the mourners and upon those who rejoice. Tolstoi has put it well: "A man who lives a Christian life does not ascribe any great meaning to his joys, but looks on them as accidental phenomena which meet him in the path of life. And he does not look upon his sufferings as something that ought not to be. He looks on them as indispensable phenomena of life, like friction at work.” If that be true — and the final pattern of human character be neither crowned with flowers nor draped in black, but a large humane spirit which finds itself at home in every vicissitude — like a good ship making her way homeward-bound through all seas — we need not linger exclusively and overmuch on the Beatitude upon the mourners, as if they alone were blessed. Our wisdom is to extract the lesson from every event and see the Providence of all the discipline of our lives. Though a man should study at a university many years and gain many and high degrees, he would not have found a fuller philosophy of life than that which St. Paul had discovered for himself while he tried to follow his Master: "I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. I know both how to be abased and I know how to abound. Everywhere and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.” That is indeed the true wisdom of a full-orbed life. All else is one-sided.

Once when the celebrated French preacher Massillon was preaching before Louis xiv. he addressed the King directly, as was the unseemly custom of the time, and said, "If the world addressed your majesty from this place, the world would not say, ‘ Blessed are they that mourn,’ but blessed is the prince who has never fought but to conquer, who has filled the universe with his name, who through the whole course of a long and flourishing reign enjoys in splendour all that men admire — extent of conquest, the esteem of enemies, the love of his people, the wisdom of his laws. But, sire, the language of the Gospel is not the language of the world.” Yet if the world had been speaking the truth and not gross flattery in such an address, the world would have been nearer than the preacher to the large sane wisdom of St. Paul and of his Lord, who saw the experiences of life in their due place, in their right proportion, and could find a wholesome happiness in the hour of triumph as well as in the hour of defeat. There is no deprecation of the blessedness of fine achievement in the assurance that failure also, rightly encountered, will yield its blessedness; "Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.”