over all flesh, that whatsoever thou hast given Him, to them He should give eternal life. And this is life eternal, that they should know thee the only true God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus Christ. The eternal life which He describes as His authority and power to impart are spoken of at length as being possessed here on earth; but He goes on to pray, Father, that which thou hast given me, I will that, where I am, they also may be with me; that they may behold my glory which thou hast given me; for thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world.

When we come to interpret these later claims of divine authority, I shall endeavour to show that, while they go beyond the earlier ones we have been considering, and project themselves into all the future of human life, not only here but hereafter, yet they are all, the earliest and the latest, precisely along the same lines and mean the same thing.

VII

THE BLESSEDNESS OF JESUS

A STUDY of the beatitudes will give us the highest illustration possible of the leading principles of what we have been discussing as the gospel of the common humanity and the earthly life of our Lord. Blessedness is the highest expression as it is the highest reach and attainment of that life. The life of Jesus would not be a gospel to us if it were not a revelation and a promise of human blessedness. We see in Him the meaning, the value, the worth, which not only justifies to us and reconciles us to our life and its conditions as they are, but enables us to find in it the highest satisfaction of which our natures are capable and the highest enjoyment to which our spirits or personalities can attain. We have already seen that while personal pleasure or happiness or even blessedness can never be the motive, it is in fact the measure and the condition, of the highest activity. Mere instinct or mere duty can never lift us to our height. In the first place, perfect functioning or activity is perfect pleasure or happiness or blessedness, as the function is particular, general, or universal, and is lower or higher in the scale. And, secondly, as the perfection of the activity heightens the pleasure, so reflexively the perfection of the pleasure

is necessary to the complete heightening of the function or activity. We can be or do perfectly only that which we supremely love, and which therefore it is our supreme pleasure, happiness or blessedness, as the case may be, to be or to do. Blessedness, therefore, let us repeat, is at once the measure and the condition of the perfect life. Aristotle states the principle somewhat as follows: Pleasure, he says, speaking of even the lower true pleasures, completes a function in two senses. In the first place, it is its completion; like the bloom on the peach or the cheek, it is the final touch which marks the acme of the act or activity. In the second place, it causes its completion, by infusing into the act or activity that without which it cannot complete itself. When, therefore, our Lord comes to speak of blessedness, He is describing His own life, and the life that should be ours, in its very fulness and completeness.

The first question is as to the fact, actual or possible, in human life as it is, of such a blessedness. Our Lord's testimony is to the fact of its actuality, and therefore of its possibility. And let us pause to observe that it is testimony on His part. It is not the immediate revelation of omniscience, but the witness of human experience. He knew that there is a blessedness in human life, because He had found it and was in possession of it. He spoke in the name and with the authority of it, and He declared it that others might seek and find and have part with Him in it. The beatitudes are the revelation of His own humanly discovered and humanly experienced secret of blessedness. There is not one of the human conditions or causes of

it which He gives that He had not Himself tested and proved to the utmost. There is not one of the ingredients in the cup of it that He had not drunk to the bottom. It is true here as always, that He spake that He Himself knew and testified to that He Himself had experienced. He had known the poverty which is the condition of the kingdom of heaven, the sorrow without which one cannot experience the divine consolations, the meekness through which He was destined to inherit the earth; He had hungered and thirsted for righteousness and been filled; He had known the mercy to others which is the only mercy to ourselves; through the purity of His human heart He had seen God; in His perfect ministry of peace with God and peace among men He had reached the acme of human attainment, and tested what it is not only to be called but to be the Son of God. He had known, too, and experienced the blessedness of, persecution and reproach and false witness and rejection.

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As all the causes and conditions so all the rewards and enjoyments of this blessedness are described by our Lord as to be found within this present life. Blessed not shall be hereafter those of whom He is speaking. For theirs is not shall be — the kingdom of God and its rewards. Even where He speaks in the future, as He continues to do, it is evident that He is speaking of cause and effect here and not hereafter. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. No chastening or affliction is at the moment joyous; it is only afterward that it yieldeth peaceable fruit. But afterward, in time; if we cannot reap it in

time, there is no assurance that we can do so in eternity. St. Paul thanks God that the afflictions of Christ had abounded upon him, not only because thereby he had come to know for himself the comfort that aboundeth through Christ, but because he was thus enabled to comfort others with the comfort wherewith he was himself comforted of God.

Nothing assuredly better than a blessedness that begins in poverty and sorrow, and has its earthly end in persecution, could illustrate the great truth that the issues of the kingdom of God are within ourselves, that it is the energies and activities of our own souls in which the abundance of our life consists, and which therefore control, or determine and constitute, our happiness. It cannot be too often repeated that it is not environment but our own reaction upon environment that blesses or curses us. The same environment is equally calculated to make and to mar opposite responses to it. Identical conditions produce the hero and the coward. The career of Jesus Christ so far as it is a revelation to us from God, or so far as it is a demonstration to us of a fact in itself, reveals and demonstrates to us this truth: that human conditions rightly interpreted and rightly acted upon are the best conditions for the pro

duction of a divine human life and blessedness.

If we wish to go more into the details of the blessedness of Jesus, we must analyze the separate beatitudes, and this we shall proceed to do with at least one or more of them. In the two most definite statements by our Lord of the nature and purpose of His earthly mission, the opening address at Nazareth and the reply