665

SERMON XLVI.

ON THE BLESSEDNESS OF THOSE WHO HUNGER AND THIRST AFTER RIGHTEOUSNESS.

MATTHEW v. 6.

Blessed are they who do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.

WERE We to confine our attention merely to the letter of this benediction, it would not be easy for us to resist some cavils, which have been started concerning the supposed inaccuracy of the expression. It might be urged, that the whole course of human experience is opposite to the blessedness here proposed - that hunger and thirst, in a figurative point of view, imply a most eager and earnest desire -that desire always denotes the absence of the good proposed that this absence is invariably the cause of pain-and that the degree of this pain is proportioned to the intrinsic or assumed value of the object and therefore, that as righteousness itself is highly valuable, and appears such to every judicious. and serious man, the situation of him who hungers and thirsts after it, is not only destitute of happiness, but even replete with misery. And can it with truth, or with reverence, be said of the founder

of Christianity, that he assigns contradictory properties to the operations of the human mind- or recommends as a good what must eventually be found an evil?

Yet the force of this objection will be considerably broken, if we observe that our Saviour's words are not to be taken absolutely, but with restrictions. The desire of holiness, merely as such, does not, and cannot be said to confer perfect happiness. For it is in the possession certainly, as in all other cases, that our chief well-being must consist. And who doubts but that those beings, whose intellectual and moral capacities are more enlarged than our own, do, from the attainment of that excellence to which they long aspired, experience a purer and more elevated satisfaction than could here be reached amidst the struggles of temptation, and the mortifications of frequent disappointments?

Indeed the text itself is decisive, that while we hunger and thirst after righteousness, our felicity is in some measure incomplete, for it is said they shall be filled. The plain and obvious meaning of which is, that if men do justly esteem, and sincerely pursue virtue- if, in the prosecution of it, they endure every trial and encounter every danger—if they suffer themselves to be neither drawn aside by pleasure, nor impeded by adversity-then shall their upright intentions, and strenuous endeavours be crowned with an adequate reward at the last. Must we then consider it as and thirst after righteousness? partial, and a comparative good.

an evil to hunger No surely, it is a For compare the

situation of him who fixes his attention on the attainment of the one thing necessary, with that of men who either neglect it totally, or perversely prefer to it the more perishing and frivolous objects of this sublunary world. Would you choose to live in a state of stupid and brutal insensibility to your duty, and the connection in which it stands with your happiness-or would you rather endure that consciousness of your defects and danger, which can alone enable you to supply the one and avert the other? Would you roll down the stream of life unalarmed and unconcerned about your future condition-or would you rather be subject to those salutary fears which religion excites, and by which it enables us to work out our own salvation, though it be sometimes with profound humiliation, and sometimes with trembling solicitude? Or, on the other hand, finding yourself placed in a world, where happiness is not immediately forced upon you-where it is to be gained only by reiterated endeavours-where those endeavours are to be proportioned to the intenseness of our desires, and where our desires may be directed to various ends -what now shall be your aim? Will you pant for honour? Will you toil after wealth? and revel in voluptuousness? Or, suspecting the happiness conferred by them to be fleeting and treacherous, will you bend the whole force of your thoughts to that righteousness, the ardent and unfeigned love of which shall not fail of its recompence?

He that never feels this love will assuredly form a despicable and ignoble character; and though

from the absence of opportunity, or through the langour of his affections, he may never be betrayed into any outrageous crime, yet will he certainly be incapable of that elevated and resolute virtue which Christianity exacts from its followers. They who hunger and thirst after the good things of this life, will often be disappointed; and even where they are most successful, they will not derive any lasting satisfaction-they cannot be secure from loosing tomorrow what to day was obtained, and under their loss they will have no inward reflections to soothe their sorrow, and to reanimate their hopes. But if you fix your hopes and your aims on righteousness, though much anxiety is to be suffered - though much labour is to be exerted-though many delays and miscarriages may be expected, yet we shall in the end receive a sure and permanent and ample recompence.

After this vindication of the blessing proposed in my text, I shall concisely show, first, what is the righteousness here meant; then, what we are to understand by hungering after it. Without perplexing your minds on the wild and confused disputes that have been raised on the subject of justification, which has for its original the same word that is translated "righteousness" in the text, it may suffice to observe, that the word is used sometimes to signify the whole extent of our duty-and sometimes the efficacy of it, when performed diligently, to obtain the favour of God. The difference here is only that which subsists between the means and the end. As all human excellence is in some mea

sure defective—as the best of men are betrayed into sins, and the wisest into errors-as we often neglect what is enjoined, and commit what is forbidden, no man, on the strength of personal merit, is properly and fully justified in the sight of God. On the other hand, if our disobedience be flagrant and habitual, it is vain to claim the promises of the Deity, when we have not performed the conditions. Be not deceived by vain and empty words. Saved you are by grace, that is, by favour. But this salvation depends much upon yourselves—not on a mere profession of faith-not upon the implicit admission of this or that doctrine-not on supernatural, and I will add, most unintelligible and pretended effusions of the spirit, but upon an honest and religious life. When you make God's laws the rule of your actions -when you govern all your turbulent and impure passions-when you attend to your secular interests in subordination to your spiritual, then only are you, in the scriptural sense of the word, righteous; -and though it be true that, in many points we all offend, yet if we be sincere in our wishes and constant in our efforts to deserve the approbation of the Supreme Being, he will not frustrate those wishes, or suffer those efforts to lose their effect. Indeed it is not easy in practice to separate the two meanings of the word righteousness, or justification, so far as they unite our well-being hereafter with our well-doing here.

It is therefore an unsullied and a holy life, of which Heaven is the recompence, that we are to understand by righteousness; and they who would