s merciful: we must be merciful. There is no blessedness
except in being such as God; it would be altogether unmerciful to leave
us unmerciful. The reward of the merciful is, that by their mercy they
are rendered capable of receiving the mercy of God--yea, God himself,
who is Mercy.

That men may be drawn to taste and see and understand, the Lord
associates reward with righteousness. The Lord would have men love
righteousness, but how are they to love it without being acquainted with
it? How are they to go on loving it without a growing knowledge of it?
To draw them toward it that they may begin to know it, and to encourage
them when assailed by the disappointments that accompany endeavour, he
tells them simply a truth concerning it--that in the doing of it, there
is great reward. Let no one start with dismay at the idea of a reward of
righteousness, saying virtue is its own reward. Is not virtue then a
reward? Is any other imaginable reward worth mentioning beside it? True,
the man may, after this mode or that, mistake the reward promised; not
the less must he have it, or perish. Who will count himself deceived by
overfulfilment? Would a parent be deceiving his child in saying, 'My
boy, you will have a great reward if you learn Greek,' foreseeing his
son's delight in Homer and Plato--now but a valueless waste in his eyes?
When his reward comes, will the youth feel aggrieved that it is Greek,
and not bank-notes?

The nature indeed of the Lord's promised rewards is hardly to be
mistaken; yet the foolish remarks one sometimes hears, make me wish to
point out that neither is the Lord proclaiming an ethical system, nor
does he make the blunder of representing as righteousness the doing of a
good thing because of some advantage to be thereby gained. When he
promises, he only states some fact that will encourage his
disciples--that is, all who learn of him--to meet the difficulties in
the way of doing right and so learning righteousness, his object being
to make men righteous, not to teach them philosophy. I doubt if those
who would, on the ground of mentioned reward, set aside the teaching of
the Lord, are as anxious to be righteous as they are to prove him
unrighteous. If they were, they would, I think, take more care to
represent him truly; they would make farther search into the thing, nor
be willing that he whom the world confesses its best man, and whom they
themselves, perhaps, confess their superior in conduct, shoul