chief good.  If the aims which usually engross us are really the true aims of life, then there is no meaning in this saying of our Lord, for then it had been better not to sorrow at all than to sorrow and be comforted.  But if the true purpose for which we are all gifted with this solemn gift of life is that we may become ‘imitators of God as dear children,’ then there are few things for which men should be more thankful than the sacred sorrow, than which there are few instruments more powerful for creating the type of character which we are set here to make our own.  All lofty, dignified, serious thinkers and poets (who for the most of men are the best teachers) had spoken this same thought as well as Christ.  But He speaks it with a difference all His own, which deepens incalculably its solemnity, and sets the truth of the otherwise sentimental saying, which flies often in the face of human nature, upon immovable foundations.

Let me ask you, then, to look with me, in the simplest possible way, at the two thoughts of our text, as to who are the mourners that are ‘blessed,’ and as to what is the consolation that they receive.

I. The mourners who are blessed.

‘Blessed are they that mourn.’  Ah! that is not a universal bliss.  All mourners are not blessed.  It would be good news, indeed, to a world so full of miseries that men sometimes think it were better not to be, and holding so many wrecked and broken hearts, if every sorrow had its benediction.  But just as we saw in the preceding discourse that the poverty which Christ pronounced blessed is not mere straitness of circumstances, or lack of material wealth, so here the sorrow, round the head of which He casts this halo of glory, is not that which springs from the mere alteration of external circumstances, or from any natural causes.  The influence of the first saying runs through all the Beatitudes, and since it is ‘the poor in spirit’ who are there pronounced happy, so here we must go far deeper than mere outward condition, in order to find the ground of the benediction pronounced.  Let us be sure, to begin with, of this, that no condition, be it of wealth or woe, is absolutely and necessarily good, but that the seat of all true blessedness lies within, in the disposition which rightly meets the conditions which God sends.

So I would say, first, that the mourners whom Christ pronounces ‘blessed’ are those who are ‘poor in spirit.’  The mourning is the emotion which follows upon that poverty.  The one is the recognition of the true estimate of our own characters and failings; the other is the feeling that follows upon that recognition.  The one is the prophet’s clear-sighted ‘I am a man of unclean lips’; the other is the same prophet’s contemporaneous wail, ‘Woe is me, for I am undone!’

And surely, brethren, if you and I have ever had anything like a glimpse of what we really are, and have brought ourselves into the light of God’s face, and have pondered upon our characters and our doings in that—­not ‘fierce’ but all-searching, ‘light’ that flashes from Him, there can be no attitude, no disposition, more becoming the best, the purest, the noblest of us, than that ‘Woe is me, for I am undone!’