Section LXXVIII. The Inner Revelation and the Conscience. (Concl'd) · SECTION CXXXVI.

(2) The perfection of feeling, as a moral fruit, is the feeling of pure pleasure in the divine, and of unmitigated repugnance to the ungodly, and, as based on faith, the feeling of pure joy which springs from the consciousness of the morally-wrought harmony of one’s own existence with God and with the universe. As relating to existence other than that of the moral subject, this perfection is perfect love as a power grown essential and inherent in the personality; in relation to the moral subject himself it is the perfect bliss of the child of God, the repose of the soul in God.

So long as the feeling of self is not yet reduced to full harmony with the love of God (§ 92), so long also is feeling, as relating to the godly and the ungodly, not pure and not decided. As the ear must first be made skillful by attentiveness and practice in order to be able readily to distinguish beautiful from discordant notes, so also must feeling, first be made sensitive by moral exercise in order to be able, at every moment, unhesitatingly to love and to hate at once in the right manner. Such decisiveness, such purity of feeling, constitutes an essential part of the perfection of the life in God, that is, of blessedness; blessed are they who are pure of heart; blessed they who find no occasion of offense in Christ and in the ways of God [Matt. xi, 6.] Mere joy is not yet blessedness; the merely natural pleasure in existence, even were it of a Paradisaical character, is not enough to satisfy the spiritual nature of man; only that which is morally wrought, or at least morally appropriated, renders blessed. Even a normal child rejoices more in its own playful creating than in mere eating and drinking. The nine Beatitudes of Christ [Matt. v] relate, all of them, to the moral, and not one of them to a mere state of enjoyment. All blessedness, however, is love, and true love is blessedness; but only morally attained love is true love; even love to God becomes truly blissful only when it is the expression of already-attained God-Sonship. The moral man feels blissful when he views the harmony of being not as simply immediately existing and as merely contemplated by himself, but as in moral freedom recognized, willed, and realized by himself,—namely, in so far as, on the one hand, those features in the objective world which are originally as yet exterior and uncongenial to man are overcome, and the dominion of man over nature realized, and in so far as, on the other, a spiritually moral world is brought into being with which the individual knows himself in moral harmony; but the consciousness of this double harmony produces loving blessedness only when it rests on the consciousness of a morally virtualized filial relation to God. True blessedness exists only in union with God; peace of soul only in the eternal.

That such blessedness is not simply an inheritance in the future but the destination even of the present life, is implied in the moral idea itself, as well as in the thought of the divine love. God has not appointed us unto wrath, but to obtain blessedness [1 Thess. v, 9]; “but whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed” [James i, 25]; though this thought may hold good on the part of one by , only under certain limitations, yet it is unconditionally valid of man per se and as unfallen; with him moral activity is per se blessedness, and there is no blessedness without moral activity. “Blessed are they that hear the word of God and keep it” [Luke xi, 28],—keep it not merely in memory but in their heart, in love and in volition; “blessed are they that do his commandments” [Rev. xxii, 14].