THE MEEK.

THE THIRD BEATITUDE.

“Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.” — St. Matt. v. 5.

No virtue is more easily counterfeited than meekness. But most assuredly the blessing which belongs to the real virtue is not promised to the counterfeit.

I. Men may be meek for gain. A prudent regard for self-interest will check the expression of their own opinion and repress the outburst of their temper. And they will be meek because they must. It would not pay a shopman, harassed as he often is by unreasonable customers, to betray his annoyance or his amusement. So must a subordinate often accept without a murmur the petty irritation of his superior, finding relief for his feelings, perhaps, in passing on the unpleasantness to some one who in turn is subordinate to him. People have often to learn the truth of that saying of Queen Elizabeth to one of her courtiers who had been goaded into an ill-tempered retort. “Ah, Sir Philip,” "anger often makes men witty; but it always keeps them poor.” The meekness of manner which is trained by such self-interest is a poor enough imitation of the Christian grace which our Master declared to be blessed.

II. But it is better than another counterfeit which passes for meekness — the placidity of temper whose mother is disdain. There are some composed, unruffled natures whose only motive for self-restraint is that they do not think it worth while to show any feeling. A genuine contempt for the judgment of their neighbours is the secret of their calm. This looks like meekness: but it is a devilish pride. It may be boldly said, that it is a mark of a good man that one can make him angry. He is caring so much about things, and minding so much about his fellow-creatures, that he is easily stirred to indignation. So far from that being a fault, it is the sign of an ingenuous and wholesome nature. It is infinitely more respectful to a man that his acquaintance should be angry with him than that he should fancy him beneath even that tribute of his attention. A meekness whose source is in disdain can bring no blessing with it.

III. Nor is a third kind of meekness of moral worth — that which is a mere dulness and torpidness of good nature — the fat serenity of a sluggish soul. There is no great merit in commanding one’s temper if one have no temper to command.

Such counterfeits of the grace of meekness, ingenious and sustained though they be, will not for long deceive the observant. They have none of the impressiveness and charm of the virtue which Jesus blessed. Perhaps there is no quality of character more charming and more impressive.

The Prophet Isaiah reached a high level of inspiration when he described the Servant of the Lord in terms of this grace of meekness. "Behold My Servant, whom I uphold; Mine elect, in whom My soul delighteth: I have put My Spirit upon Him; He shall bring forth judgment to the Gentiles. He shall not cry, nor lift up, nor cause His voice to be heard in the street. A bruised reed shall He not break, and the smoking flax shall He not quench: He shall bring forth judgment unto truth.” It is no wonder that the instinct of Christendom has seen that description fulfilled in “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild” — in the forbearing Lord "who when He was reviled, reviled not again; when He suffered, He threatened not.” Just by such meekness Jesus has won the heart of the world.

There had been another in the history of Israel before Him who was known for his meekness also — Moses, the man of God. Take the Old Testament, and ask whose figure is the most dominant and majestic in it. The answer will be — It was the man of whom it is recorded that he was “meek above all the men which were upon the face of the earth.” Like the greater Prophet, who was to come after him, Moses commands admiration because he was not aggressive and self-assertive, and (as we say in modern adjectives, unpleasant but often appropriate) he was not “pushing” and “loud” and “self-advertising.” He also “did not strive nor cry, nor let his voice be heard in the street.” The meekness of the man was his charm.

Take such a test for the people we know. Think of those who are always, as they say, “standing up for their rights” and refusing, as they express it, to be “put upon" — the people who are always looking out for slights and "determined to stand no nonsense" from any one — there is hardly a poorer spectacle in the world; and they are nearly always unsuccessful, losing the respect which they are so aggressively eager to gain. Contrast them with the meek whom we know — the gentlefolk at heart, whatever their birth may have been — who are not worrying about their dignity, and are too modest about their own powers to think that they have a claim to much distinction — the people who do not even like to speak too loudly in any company because it draws attention to themselves, and who would hate to obtrude themselves or make a show — the gentle, sensitive, shrinking souls, refined in thought and manner and speech, in whose very presence all violence is abashed and all self-seeking looks mean. Can we make such a contrast without understanding to the full what our Lord meant by the Beatitude, "Blessed are the meek"?

At our time when loudness and aggressiveness often seem the synonym of "modernness,” and when indeed the nervous strain at which people live makes self-command more difficult and impatience a commoner fault than it used to be, it is good to hear and to give heed to that blessing upon the meek. All that is best in us leaps up to recognise its truth.

The reward which is promised in the Beatitude presents at first sight a greater difficulty: "Blessed are the meek; for they shall inherit the earth.” Had it been heaven that was promised to the meek — that gracious world where the unselfish and holy have their home — then indeed the offer would seem assured of fulfilment. But it seems, at first, a paradox that the meek should find the rewards of earth. Such, however, was the promise of the Master, renewing an old declaration of the 37th Psalm which it is impossible to sublimate into any merely spiritual recompense. And is it, as a matter of fact, away from experience that in the long run, even in this world, it is not the "pushers" and the noisy who succeed? Violence has its day, but it is not always a long day. In those conversations in which Napoleon is recorded to have taken part during his banishment, there is one often-quoted saying of his: "Alexander and Caesar and I founded great empires: but the empires perished because they were founded on force. Jesus Christ alone founded an empire upon love, and to this day thousands will die for Him.” Whether Napoleon used those words or not, the sentiment in them is true. Examples of its truth are written large on the history of mankind. Think, for example, of South Africa. The story of our relations with that land is not on the whole a Ill-editable story. But there are aspects of it on which one can reflect with pride. Contrast, let us say, Cecil Rhodes with David Livingstone — the one a type of aggressive and self-confident vigour, the other an unwearied and unselfish worker for knowledge and freedom, and for Jesus Christ. When all for which the Rand millionaires stood has perished, and is remembered only as an ugly blot on the fair name of England, Livingstone’s services to mankind will be a cherished and inalienable possession of our history. The meek will have inherited the earth.

The promise is not always fulfilled at once: it is an heir and not a possessor who is spoken of: an assured kingdom in the future, though it may be after many days. Yet the experience of men has been that the quiet and the thoughtful and the dutiful, in time came to their own.

Moreover, the real inheritance of the earth is very different from what hard men, in their eager ambition, suppose it to be. The conquerors can get the outside trappings of earthly possession; but what do they really gain even of the world they seek? While they are absorbed in their battles and their law-making, the homes and the hearts of the people are utterly outside their power. In a sermon to children, the late Dean Stanley of Westminster told of a grave-stone in the Abbey on which is written only these words: “Jane Lister, dear child, died October 7, 1688.” Just at that date the public mind in England was filled with the rumour of revolution and of the coming of William and Mary to the English throne: but there in London, at the heart of the kingdom, two parents were thinking only of the blank in their home and the sorrow in their souls. In the last resort it is always so; kings and parliaments and rulers hardly touch at all the deepest elements of the life of the people. A man may seem to have inherited the earth when he has gained nothing more than some new anxieties and burdens to fill his days with pain.

"Dost thou wish to possess the earth?" asked St. Augustine once: "Beware, lest the earth possess thee.” But the meek enter into a fuller inheritance of the earth, even the treasures of its honour and its love.

If a meek man, therefore, be ineffectual, it is not on account of his meekness, but on account of his weakness. A man like the patriarch Isaac, for example, lost much by undue concession in his old age: but he had made mark enough at his time by wise conciliation, and had settled terms of friendship and peace with his neighbours which no mere aggressiveness would have secured. For the Church of Christ, and for every Christian man and woman, it is a useful teaching yet, that the way to influence, permanent because worthy, is through the same channel of quiet persuasion and humble merit and the steady insistence of love.

They are advising other methods for the Church. Nothing pleases some of her critics in the unostentatious and old-fashioned ways. They will have advertisement and noise, and the methods of the theatre or the political platform. Such methods seem to succeed for a little, and crowds follow each new charlatan. But the demand for novelty and excitement exhausts itself, and heresy of doctrine or scandal of morals is the end of each new vagary of those who “lift up their voice in the street.” The quiet, self-restrained ways of the Church are best. They are the most likely to secure a lasting success. Big things do not need to be shouted about. Life and death and destiny are persistent themes; and people feel that they approach them best, quietly, solemnly, without newspaper controversy and platform declamation. Therefore the future is with the Catholic Church — not, of course, only the Roman Catholic Church, but the Church of history and tradition — which seeks out the old ways and walks therein. “The meek shall' inherit the earth.”

As a new type of character is being evolved in an age of competition and advertisement, it is worth while remembering also that the promise to the meek is not revoked in the twentieth century. David Hume once said: "Nothing carries a man through the world like a true, genuine, natural impudence"; and sometimes one is tempted to believe that Hume was right. In business and the professions and public life, there are successful men who seem to have no other qualification than that which is colloquially called “push.” But is there more than a superficial truth in such a reflection? Whatever apparent success is found by such men, must it not be qualified and rendered nugatory to them by their association with the cultivated, the powerful in intelligence, and the refined in nature? Does it not become apparent to them (for they are not lacking in ability) that, after a little, they will be forgotten, and be as if they had never been, while ideals foreign to them are stamping their mark on society, and principles they could not grasp are changing the face of the world? What sort of an inheritance of the earth is that which must be loathed even while it is possessed, and is seen (if those men have eyes at all) to be but the possession of a day?

On the other hand, the meek — the holy and humble men of heart — find themselves at one with the eternal things, and in the fellowship of the saints, and in the brotherhood of Christ, and though they are not thinking of reward nor seeking it, for them the reward is sure — because natural, inevitable — the future must be with them, for they only are allied with the things that last