With a beautiful unconsciousness of any merit, the people
who have lived lovingly plead ignorance of their own lovely acts and
tempers; but they have been witnessed by the hierarchies of heaven, the
morning stars have sung of them, they have made glad the heart of God;
and the reward of these humble servitors of love now is that having
added to the joy of God, henceforth they shall share that joy forever.
Never was there vision at once so exquisite and so surprising. It is
like a child's dream of heaven and judgment, so untouched is it by the
conventions of the world, so innocent, so daring, so tenderly imagined,
and so impossibly probable. Alas, that most of us are too wise to
understand it, and too worldly to receive it. Yet in nothing that
Jesus uttered is there clearer evidence of deliberation. And it is of
a piece with all He taught; so much so indeed that without it, His
teaching would be incomplete.
Truly, we may say, the Heaven of Jesus is a strangely ordered Kingdom;
for in it beggars are comforted for apparently no other reason than
that they need comfort; the doers of forgotten kindnesses are crowned
with sudden splendours of divine approval while the lords of genius and
the makers of empire are forgotten; and the very anthems of the blessed
are hushed into silent wondering and joy when solitary penitents turn
homewards from the roads of sin! But it is not stranger than that
kingdom in which Jesus lived habitually, the kingdom He created round
Him in His earthly life.
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