THOSE WHO HUNGER AND THIRST AFTER RIGHTEOUSNESS.

THE FOURTH BEATITUDE.

“Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.” — St. Matt. v. 6.

A remarkable hymn, which once attained a great popularity, has in it the lines —

"Doing is a deadly thing.

Doing ends in death.”

That hymn is suggestive of the famous comment of a Scotsman upon the Sermon on the Mount, that he did not think highly of the Sermon on the Mount; "there was too much morality in it.”

A singular illustration of the same frame of mind was seen some years ago, when an edition of the New Testament Scriptures was published which was known as the Marked New Testament. One or more red lines were drawn under every text which the editors thought of special importance. No mark at all appeared under the Beatitudes.

So far has one phase of Christian opinion passed from the characteristic teaching of Jesus Himself; so sadly has it lost His most characteristic note.

Contrast those rhymes about "deadly doing" with the words of our Master. "Every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man which built his house upon the sand.” No condemnation of "deadly doing,” is there. Indeed, it is impossible to go, with a mind unprejudiced and cleared from the accretions of a later theology, to the actual teaching of Jesus Himself without feeling that a passionate love of righteousness is through it. Morality, in its widest sense, is the very air it breathes. The Hebrew conscience has been called the "keenest religious instrument of the ancient world.” A famous writer found in the word "righteousness" a summary of the whole Old Testament message. Jesus came not to destroy, but to fulfil that message. The very heart of His teaching is in the saying of St. John: "He that doeth not righteousness is not of God.”

When, therefore, we hear Him offer a blessing upon those who "hunger and thirst after righteousness,” we may be certain that there is no suggestion in His words of the doctrine called “imputed righteousness,” or of any such doctrine which has come in after years to be prominent in Christian teaching. The Beatitude is a plain unequivocal blessing t upon those who do well — who try to live cleanly and be just to God and man.

There is, however, a note of passion in the words which removes them from the sphere of what in Scotland used to be called the “cold moralities.” “Hunger” and "thirst" are primitive, fundamental appetites which every one understands. But middleclass people hardly understand them in their intensity of meaning. The men with the famished eyes who look in through the windows of bakers’ shops and gloat greedily upon a plenty which they cannot share — they know the meaning of "hunger" and "thirst" as ordinary people hardly guess it. There is some suggestion of their eager desire in the "hunger and thirst after righteousness" over which the Beatitude is uttered.

A modern writer on religious subjects put this well when he said that “no love is pure which is not passionate, no virtue is safe which is not enthusiastic.” It is such a love, such a virtue, which Jesus inculcates upon men.

Think of righteousness as He defines it, as He exemplified it on earth, as He personifies it still, and everywhere it has the power deeply to stir the heart. He defines Righteousness as an enthusiastic love of God and man — to love God with all our being, and our neighbour as ourselves. He exemplified righteousness in His own life as (i) a keen sympathy with the poor and sorrowful; (2) an antipathy just as keen to all Pharisaic superiority and unreality; (3) a lowly estimate of one’s own need of honour and pleasure; and (4) a heroic devotion to duty beyond even what is normally expected of a man, so that an answer can be given to the question. What do ye more? But stirring as it is to the imagination to recall the figure of the righteous Lord and His consecrated life on earth, we have an inspiration that is loftier still in the contemplation of righteousness for ever personified in Him. As Dean Church finely said: "The Gospel calls us to the study of a living person and the following of a living mind.” When, therefore, we hear the blessing upon those who "hunger and thirst after righteousness,” it is no slavish adherence to the letter of a law, no cold morality which is enjoined. It is a burning attachment to the Fairest and the Holiest — a reverent remembrance of His beautiful life on earth, and an adoring worship of Him now glorified and crowned.

If any one ask why should we desire such a Righteousness, we do not argue over the matter. It is as natural that we should seek Christ as it is for "hunger" and "thirst" to desire to be satisfied, as natural as it is for the mind to think and the heart to feel. That is the charm of this Beatitude, and indeed of all of the Beatitudes, that they do not require to be argued for and defended. Once they were spoken, they became the indisputable and inalienable possession of the race.

Three aspects of the Beatitude, however, remain which demand some fuller treatment

I. First there is our Lord’s teaching regarding the hopefulness of the human struggle. "Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.” It has been the despair of the best men that their progress in the moral life has seemed so slow, and the goal so inaccessible. "Thy righteousness,” said the Psalmist, "is like the great mountains.” It is serene and most beautiful; but it is far away. It discourages and appals as much as it fascinates. Many have thought of Jesus so — disconcerted and abashed in His presence rather than allured to follow in His steps. The ideal will always have in it some such aspect of awe. But it is the teaching of Jesus that every one who really wishes to be good will be good; those who seek the supreme righteousness and whose souls are athirst for God, will be satisfied with the object of their desire.

It is the law of this world that environment answers to need. The eye seeks light and finds it; the body seeks food and finds it; so will the hungry soul be satisfied.

Here once more we have the experience of multitudes to say Amen to the teaching of our Master. It may be that there never were so many people at any time as there are at our time who have found the supreme satisfaction of the soul just through this avenue of the appetite for Righteousness^ Our Lord said that His spirit would convict men “of sin and righteousness and judgment” At other periods of the world’s history, the sense of sin and, it may be, the fear of judgment, have brought men to themselves and to Christ Through these gateways they have reached the Highest. But the sense of sin is less acute at our age, and certainly the fear of judgment is a less formative emotion; fewer people find the conviction of their personal sinfulness or the dread of eternal suffering to be a road to the Saviour’s heart. But there never was so humane a spirit in any community. There never was a greater longing for the abolition of old tyrannies and the establishment of justice between man and man. Never did the general heart respond more readily to the claim of unselfish and generous ideals. Never in all the ages were more men led to the Lord Jesus, just because they were convicted of "Righteousness,” and saw in Him the realisation of every dream of justice and compassion which they had cherished. Because they "hunger and thirst after righteousness,” they are "filled with all the fulness of God.”

II. The second aspect of the Beatitude which demands our notice is its recognition of the place of aspiration in character. The road to character is generally described as through act and custom and habit But there is more in life than act and custom and habit. There are efforts, deep desires, and high ambitions, aspirations, impulses, Teachings forth of the nature which have never perhaps crystallised into acts, but which are most meaningful in the making of a man. It is after all a ** hunger" and "thirst" which are blessed, and not an attainment, an achievement, a possession. If a true judgment on human life is to be passed, it must be by one who knows not only what we have done, but what we have honestly tried to do. There is many a glorious failure which has left a more permanent mark for good upon the soul than a hundred easily won successes. So the brightest charm of this Beatitude is not its promise of the perfect attainment of Heaven, where they serve in righteousness without a flaw, but its blessing upon the toilsome way along which, with many a stumbling step, we press forward towards the goal.

"Not on the vulgar mass

     Called ‘work,’ must sentence pass.

Things done, that took the eye and had the price;

     O’er which, from level stand,

     The low world laid its hand,

Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice:

 

"But all, the world’s coarse thumb

     And finger failed to plumb,

So passed in making up the main account;

     All instincts immature,

     All purposes unsure,

That weighed not as his ‘work,' yet swelled the man’s amount:

 

"Thoughts hardly to be packed

     Into a narrow act.

Fancies that broke through language and escaped;

     All I could never be,

     All, men ignored in me,

This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.”

The great thing in this life is not having, but wanting: turning from all earthly havings to thirst for the unattained. Life’s possibilities lie infinitely beyond life’s realisations. Having is a limited thing which in possessing we transcend. A deep, persuasive sense of lack touches the infinite; every true thirst of the being resolving itself into a thirst for God.”

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness.

III. But perhaps our third reflection is of most practical value. How is such a hunger and thirst after righteousness to be stimulated? How in the multitude of desires, rational and irrational, by which the will is swayed, are those better impulses to be cultivated and given sway? We desire much, fiercely and persistently. Base appetites usurp large rooms of the heart. Ambitions for honour without desert, and reward without the duty that has earned it, and popularity without the service to our brethren which is its one worthy excuse— such desires move restlessly through our minds. How shall we learn to hunger more for righteousness than for ought else? There is a sermon on this theme by a divine eminent in his day. Dr Leckie of Ibrox; and he had no better suggestion to offer than that we should read much of good biography. "Lives of great men" are indeed good reading — far better than fiction, just because they have that singular charm of the authentic about which Carlyle used to speak so much, and which most of us have ourselves experienced. A good biography of a really good man must stir a generous admiration, must excite at least some desire to emulate the hero’s virtue and services. Therefore there is no better reading for the young, whose minds are formed so much by examples, and who assimilate a precept for life so much more easily and permanently when it is presented in concrete form. There is no need to detract from Dr. Leckie’s praise of a good biography as a stimulus to the hunger for righteousness. No one could read of Wilberforce, or Shaftesbury, or Livingstone without being, at least for the time, on a loftier plane of being.

But the shallower thought of his sermon may be set beside a strangely impressive discourse by one of the great preachers of the world. Horace Bushnell has a sermon which bears the title, "Christ regenerates even the desires.” He dealt with the incident when the Sons of Zebedee came to Jesus and asked Him to give them whatever they wished. Bushnell showed the folly of their random request and the strange psychological problems which open before the mind which would seriously consider the worth of human desires. And then he proceeded to show how James and John, the inconsiderate and reckless, were yet so moved in after days by their fellowship with Christ, that even their desires were transfigured and regenerated. The whole secret of the government of the nature is disclosed by one of them — St John — when he says: "Whatsoever we ask we receive of Him, because we keep His commandments, and do those things which are pleasing in His sight.” "He was in God’s order, and now all his desires went to their mark.”

The habit of prayer, the new love of the Lord which so adjusts the nature that all the gusty inclinations of the soul are laid at rest; above all, the companionship with Christ which moulds our minds to His and makes us insensibly take His type — these methods, and the discipline of Providence, are the ways in which the desires, which are at the back of consciousness and outside the reasoned government of the will, can be conformed to the highest, and men may learn to "hunger and thirst after righteousness.”

But of them all there is none so effectual as the love of Christ, which thinks of Him as the friend and companion of the soul, and desires to be with Him as an exile pines for home. There is a letter by David Gray, the Scottish poet, which is among the saddest things in literature. Gray was a lad of promise and of a fine nature. He yearned for a life of letters, and nothing would serve him but to leave his home near Glasgow and adventure upon the great world of London, there to make his fame. He fell into a consumption: he was poor and dying; and this is what he wrote to his parents: —

“Torquay, Jan. 6, 1861.

“Dear Parents, — I am coming home — homesick. I cannot stay from home any longer. What’s the good of me being so far from home and sick and ill? O God, I wish I were home, never to leave it more. Tell everybody that I am coming back — no better, worse, worse. What’s about climate, about frost or snow or cold weather, when one’s at home? I wish I had never left it. I have no money; and I want to get home, home, home. What shall I do, O God? Father, I shall steal to you again, because I did not use you rightly. Will you forgive me? Do I ask that?... I have come through things that would make your heart ache for me — things that I shall never tell to anybody but you, and you shall keep them secret as the grave. Get my own little room ready — quick, quick: have it all tidy and clean and cosy against my homecoming. I wish to die there, and nobody shall nurse me except my own dear mother, ever, ever again. O home, home, home I"

Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after Righteousness, which is Christ, in such a way as that: for they shall be filled.