THE MERCIFUL.

THE FIFTH BEATITUDE.

"Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.” — St. Matt. v. 7.

"Blessed,” “Blessed,” “Blessed" — the iteration of the gracious word as the Beatitudes go on is significant of much. When, at the close of His earthly life, Jesus passed into the Unseen, it was "while He blessed His disciples that He was parted from them.” A chain of blessing bound together the beginning and the end of His ministry. It was all a positive Gospel which He taught. Not fear nor self-interest was the motive which He stirred. He appealed with the winsomeness and the joy of goodness.

Those who have once heard the Commination Service which is used in the Church of England on Ash Wednesday, the first day in Lent, are not likely to wish ever to hear it again. The minister is directed to read the words, "Cursed is the man that maketh any carved or molten image, to worship it.” "And the people shall answer and say, Amen.” Then the minister goes on: "Cursed is he that curseth his father and mother,” and the response is made, "Amen.” Eight other curses follow, and an address of terrifying severity. One feels in a different world from that hillside where a benignant and beautiful Being smiled upon the kind souls that loved Him and were His friends, and in the glorious sunshine of an Eastern day told them of the inner joy of goodness: "Blessed,” "Blessed,” "Blessed.”

The Beatitudes, and not the Commination Service, contain the characteristic note of the Christian Gospel. The stern sanctions of the law indeed remain, and the awful facts of life in which sin and punishment are inextricably bound together. But the inspiration of character is no longer in the recital of things forbidden: it is in an ideal that is positive, spiritual, unworldly, and most fair.

It is this sense of being at the heart of Christianity when we read the Beatitudes which has made them fill so large a place in the minds both of friends and of foes of our faith. It is a curious fact that two writers who have been among the most influential forces in literature during the past generation, Tolstoi and Nietzsche, have each directed a keen interest upon the Beatitudes, Nietzsche in a bitter and mocking hatred, Tolstoi in a subservience of reverent obedience almost slavish in its literalness. There could not be a better illustration of the feeling, which we all experience in some degree, that here, in this part of our Lord’s teaching, we are dealing with the crucial questions: we are touching the live heart of the Gospel of Christ.

It may be that the blessing on the merciful is of all the Beatitudes the most characteristic, the most suggestive of the original elements of the new religion. It concentrates on itself the attention of friend and foe of the faith. When people speak familiarly of "a Christian spirit,” they nearly always mean a merciful and forgiving spirit. When a great writer like the author of Ecce Homo turned to a study of the Christian Gospel, he found in this subject of Mercy the theme of almost half his book. The attraction of the Christian ideal to myriads of men — and its repulsion for some others — just lies in this, that we name our Master the Man of Mercy.

The misunderstanding of this Beatitude both by friend and foe would, however, have been to some degree removed had there been a proper insistence on the fact that every side of human excellence is not suggested by the blessing on the merciful.

Probably our Lord thought it unnecessary to utter a Beatitude on common Honesty. That, and the great virtues which the moralists describe as the Cardinal Virtues — Justice, Prudence, Temperance, Fortitude — are assumed to be the furniture of a good man’s mind. Much of the current criticism of the Christian ideal would have been seen to be unnecessary had it been taken for granted that Jesus was dealing with reasonable men, and expecting their common sense to supply the scaffolding of His ideals. This very grace of mercifulness were worthless if it were a mere thoughtless and unregulated emotion. Long before the day of our Lord, the Psalmist had shown how in a complete character "mercy and truth are met together, righteousness and peace have kissed each other.”

It may be difficult to draw the boundary between the sphere of mercy and of truth, and to show what a man’s course should be who wants to be kind, but is trying also to be just. Most human graces are not like a rectangular State of the American Union, whose frontier is drawn in straight lines. They are rather like the counties of old England, where the boundaries follow, here the bendings of a river, and there the margin of a lake. Definitions are usually difficult where the line of duty is concerned. But Mercy and Truth meet each other easily enough in life when the practical reason is unhampered by casuistry and a wise benevolence has its way.

Truth, of course, saves Mercy from being a maudlin sentiment like that which snuffles in a theatre over make-believe sorrow, but is unrelated to the exigencies of life.

But the office of Truth is not to be a mere check upon Mercy. “Why do you hate that man?" said one to Charles Lamb; "you do not even know him.” "Of course I do not know him,” answered Lamb; "for if I knew him I probably should not hate him.” It is so that a better understanding of a human life, with its difficulties and manifold disadvantages, often takes the bitterness out of the judgment we might pronounce. There is no happier proof of this than in the feet that mercy is a grace which grows with growing years. The young are often hard. Having seen little of life and its trials, they pronounce swift censures on the failures. But as we get older we are more considerate. Mercy and Truth meet together.

Here is the explanation also of those unrelenting judgments which even the kindest are apt to pass on some offences. Sir John Seeley quotes a modern novelist as saying, "There are some wrongs that no one ought to forgive, and I shall be a villain on the day I shake that man’s hand.” Though the words seem cruel and unchristian, there is a feeling not dissimilar which many of us cherish. Not to speak of those nearer to us, there is a feeling that Sir Walter Scott’s Varney and Dalgarno, or Thackeray’s Marquis of Steyne, or Shakespeare’s Iago, ought not to be forgiven — at least that we could not bring ourselves to forgive them. Is not the whole secret in this, that their characters being what they were, we could not believe in their being really penitent and asking forgiveness? If only we could be assured of that — if, that is, we could really get at the truth about them, would resentment continue unabated? Would a Christian heart forget the lesson of seventy times seven?

The main consideration to keep in our minds is, that the mercy of which Jesus spoke is no mere pity or sympathy divorced from intellectual judgment and deprived of moral weight. It proceeds upon the use of the minds God has given us. "Mercy and truth are met together.”

According to our Lord’s teaching in two memorable parables — the Good Samaritan and the Unmerciful Servant — Mercy is manifested either in active benevolence and works of charitable relief, or in a placable, generous, and forgiving temper.

a. In a sorrowful world there is much need for Good Samaritans. The plentiful abuses which disfigure every society, even the most civilised; the cruelty of man to man, and of man to the lower creatures; and those degrading and demoralising conditions which seem to be the inevitable accompaniment of industrial competition, call out for helpers. There are many unselfish souls in every community trying their best to remove or alleviate such evils. On them the blessing of the Lord is pronounced. Every visitor of the sick and the poor, every manager of a hospital, every director of a charity, has a claim to some share in this Beatitude.

Such a merciful spirit is most seen within the Christian Church; but the law of mercy, and the blessing on it, is irrespective of all creeds. "Blessed are the merciful" — whereever they may be.

b. The parable of the Unmerciful Servant — that story of the man who was hard and vindictive towards his inferior at the very time when his heart should have been melted by the recollection of his own forgiveness — has set in a lurid light the sin of an implacable temper. Within the realm of such teaching lies many an instructive word for the conscience of Christian men and women. Many who would not break the more formal commandments are lamentably lacking here.

We find our associates in some enterprise very trying and difficult to do with. If our minds work quickly we are impatient with the low level of ability which is common. In boards and committees and Church courts, and in the intercourse of business, we encounter men and women of irritable tempers and absurd prejudices, people who take offence where no offence is meant, and exaggerate careless words into ridiculous importance. If we have a talent for pungent clevernesses we are tempted to its frequent employment; and our whole critical attitude to life tends to be that of satire. Blessed, indeed, are we if gentler graces save our souls. Let thoughts of home and wife and children be often with us to sweeten things. Let some ministry to the sick and the poor keep sweet the human sympathies. When our frame is the hardest let us try to look at the face of Jesus, such as convention has painted it for us and as we know it must have been. It is told of Charles Dickens — who surely of all English writers has most earned the Beatitude upon the merciful — that he wrote concerning a criticism of his on Tom Hood which had appeared in the Examiner: "The book is rather poor: but I have not said so: for Hood is poor too, and ill besides.” What a new and most tender charm would come both into letters and into life were such a merciful spirit commoner than it is.

"Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy": —

A learned commentator on this promise has warned us to look for no barter in it, as if the Lord had said, "If you treat another man kindly he will be kind to you.” That, he points out, is not the real state of affairs, not what happens in actual life. The most merciful Man the world has known was murdered by an ungrateful race. Yet surely, though such a reward does not always come, there is sufficient experience to warrant the promise even of an outward and a present reward of mercy. A lady in a very prominent place in what is called Society has had a wonderful tolerance extended to her, and an explanation was once given of it. "I have known Mrs K. all my life, and I never heard her say a hard word against any one.” There are surely among the acquaintance of most of us some such men and women who are popular and sought after almost for no other reason than that their thoughts of others are kindly, and bitter criticisms are never on their lips. Merciful, they obtain mercy.

Can we not think of others whose own savage and merciless judgments have made their life a long unhappiness and surrounded them with enemies? Everyone knows the epitaph that is set over the grave of Jonathan Swift in Dublin. “Here lies the body of Jonathan Swift, where his fierce indignation can tear his heart no more.” Those who can recall that morose and savage spirit, that truculent and fierce career, are not willing to banish into another world the reward of a gender virtue, "Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.”

In yet another sense than in the kindly judgment of our contemporaries the merciful obtain mercy every day. They train themselves to generosity by the use of generosity. The act goes before the habit and the frame of mind. By pitying they learn to be pitiful. Serene and happy lives the man who has learned to think well of his friends and of the world he lives in, who is not looking for faults or delighting in the mistakes or offences of his fellows, whose mind instinctively takes a generous and a gende view, and whose heart is for ever overflowing in the little tendernesses which make life gracious and beautiful. The source of happiness to others, that man is happy himself. As Portia said in the famous passage, which every preacher on Mercy must quote, he is "twice blest.” Then, last, when our minds expand beyond the sphere of our earthly striving and see such a man facing the unseen world, where “the works of earth are tried by a juster Judge than here,” we know that he enters the presence of the merciful Father as no alien to His spirit, as no stranger to the courts where pity and love have their home. "Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.” The bond of fellowship, which a life of love has forged, is manifest when the illusions of earth and the misunderstandings of men have disappeared.

At this point a resemblance- between the Beatitudes and the Lord’s Prayer, which often suggests itself to the student, becomes most evident. “Forgive us our debts,” we are taught to pray, "as we forgive our debtors.” Even as early as the time of St. Chrysostom there were men, he tells us, who would not say that prayer in its completeness, and omitted the phrase "as we forgive our debtors.” They dared not ask to be forgiven as they forgave. As a man of hard and unrelenting temper says the familiar words to-day, as with a grudge against some offender in his heart, and a lurking passion for revenge, he asks to be forgiven as he forgives, the dreadful impiety of the petition may well startle his conscience into some self inquiry, and the dread of the punishment he is invoking may well send him to seek reconciliation, and it may be friendship anew.

"Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.” They shall obtain it; but they need to show it no more. It is one of the strangest pictures, and it is almost the saddest picture, of a world of redeemed and sanctified men that one of the gracious virtues of life is needless any longer in that happy land. For sorrow and sin are both done away, all that excites compassion and all that cries for forgiveness and lenient judgment, in the new transfigured world, have disappeared, and Mercy is swallowed up in the great broad river of Love.