To every soul dissatisfied with itself, comes this word, at once rousing
and consoling, from the Power that lives and makes him live--that in his
hungering and thirsting he is blessed, for he shall be filled. His
hungering and thirsting is the divine pledge of the divine meal. The
more he hungers and thirsts the more blessed is he; the more room is
there in him to receive that which God is yet more eager to give than
he to have. It is the miserable emptiness that makes a man hunger and
thirst; and, as the body, so the soul hungers after what belongs to its
nature. A man hungers and thirsts after righteousness because his nature
needs it--needs it because it was made for it; his soul desires its own.
His nature is good, and desires more good. Therefore, that he is empty
of good, needs discourage no one; for what is emptiness but room to be
filled? Emptiness is need of good; the emptiness that desires good, is
itself good. Even if the hunger after righteousness should in part
spring from a desire after self-respect, it is not therefore _all_
false. A man could not even be ashamed of himself, without some 'feeling
sense' of the beauty of rightness. By divine degrees the man will at
length grow sick of himself, and desire righteousness with a pure
hunger--just as a man longs to eat that which is good, nor thinks of the
strength it will restore.

To be filled with righteousness, will be to forget even righteousness
itself in the bliss of being righteous, that is, a child of God. The
thought of righteousness will vanish in the fact of righteousness. When
a creature is just what he is meant to be, what only he is fit to be;
when, therefore, he is truly himself, he never thinks what he is. He
_is_ that thing; why think about it? It is no longer outside of him that
he should contemplate or desire it.

God made man, and woke in him the hunger for righteousness; the Lord