can never make up to him for what he has lost. The Mount on which Jesus sat the day of the sermon was certainly not so high as that from which Satan had shown Him the Kingdoms of the earth. From it you could see only the plain, calm under the loving sunset light; on one side the silver-green oval of the lake, and on the other the long crest of Carmel where Elijah overcame the scullions of Baal. But from this humble mount which only the hyperbole of the chroniclers called mountain, from this little rocky hill scarcely rising above the level earth, Jesus disclosed that Kingdom which has no confines or boundaries, and wrote not on tablets of stone like Jehovah, but on flesh-and-blood hearts, the song of the new man, the hymn of glorification. “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace!” Isaiah was never more a prophet than at the moment when these words poured from his soul. BLESSED ARE THE POOR Jesus sat on a little hill in the midst of the first apostles surrounded by hundreds of eyes that were watching His eyes; and some one asked Him to whom would be allotted this Kingdom of Heaven, of which He so often spoke. Jesus answered with the nine beatitudes. The beatitudes, so often spelled out even nowadays by people who have lost their meaning, are almost always misunderstood, mutilated, deformed, cheapened, distorted. And yet they epitomize the first day of Christ’s teaching, that glorious day! “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Luke leaves out the words “in spirit,” seeming to mean the “poor” and nothing else; and many people after him (some modern and malicious) have understood him to mean the simple-minded, the silly. They see in the words only a choice between the bankrupt and the imbecile. When He spoke, Jesus was not thinking either of the first or the second. Jesus had no friendship for the rich and detested with all His soul the greedy desire for riches, the greatest obstacle to the true enrichment of the soul; Jesus was friendly to the poor and comforted them because they had less comfort than other people; He kept them near Him because of their greater need to be fed by loving words. But He was not so foolish as to think that to be poor, materially poor in the worldly sense of the word, is a sufficient title to enjoy the Kingdom, without any other qualifications.