themselves, never dream of avenging themselves, or of returning aught
but good for evil. They do not imagine it their business to take care of
themselves. The meek man may indeed take much thought, but it will not
be for himself. He never builds an exclusive wall, shuts any honest
neighbour out. He will not always serve the wish, but always the good of
his neighbour. His service must be true service. Self shall be no umpire
in affair of his. Man's consciousness of himself is but a shadow: the
meek man's self always vanishes in the light of a real presence. His
nature lies open to the Father of men, and to every good impulse is as
it were empty. No bristling importance, no vain attendance of fancied
rights and wrongs, guards his door, or crowds the passages of his house;
they are for the angels to come and go. Abandoned thus to the truth, as
the sparks from the gleaming river dip into the flowers of Dante's
unperfected vision, so the many souls of the visible world, lights from
the father of lights, enter his heart freely; and by them he inherits
the earth he was created to inherit--possesses it as his father made him
capable of possessing, and the earth of being possessed. Because the man
is meek, his eye is single; he sees things as God sees them, as he would
have his child see them: to confront creation with pure eyes is to
possess it.

How little is the man able to make his own, who would ravish all! The
man who, by the exclusion of others from the space he calls his, would
grasp any portion of the earth as his own, befools himself in the
attempt. The very bread he has swallowed cannot so in any real sense be
his. There does not exist such a power of possessing as he would
arrogate. There is not such a sense of having as that of which he has
conceived the shadow in his degenerate and lapsing imagination. The real
owner of his demesne is that pedlar passing his gate, into a divine
soul receiving the sweetnesses which not all the greed of the so-counted