Jesus never gave any sign of admiring that intelligence which is solely the intelligence of abstraction and the memory for phrases. Purely systematic philosophers, and metaphysical sophists, gropers in nature, devourers of books, would never have found grace in His eyes. But intelligence, the power of understanding the signs of the future and the meaning of symbols—enlightened and prophetic intelligence, the loving mastery of the truth—was a gift in His eyes also, and many times He grieved that His listeners and His disciples showed so little of it. For Him supreme intelligence consisted in realizing that the intelligence alone is not enough, that all the soul must be changed to obtain happiness, since happiness is not an absurd dream but eternally possible and within reach. But he fully understood that intelligence ought to aid us in this total transmutation. He could not therefore call to the fullness of the Kingdom of God the dull and the imbecile. Poor in spirit are those who are fully and painfully aware of their own spiritual poverty, of the faultiness of their own souls, of the smallness of the good that is in us all, of the moral indigence of most men. Only the poor who realize that they are really poor suffer from their poverty, and because they suffer from it try to escape from it. Very different these from men apparently rich, from those blind arrogant self-satisfied people who believe themselves fulfilled and perfected, in good standing with God and man, who feel no eagerness to climb upward because they delude themselves with thinking they are already on high, who will never enrich themselves because they do not realize their own fathomless poverty. Those therefore who confess themselves poor and undergo suffering to acquire that veritable wealth named perfection, will become holy as God is holy, and theirs shall be the Kingdom of Heaven; those complacent people on the other hand who drape themselves in self-satisfaction, taking no heed of the foulness accumulated and hidden under their vainglory, will not enter into the Kingdom. BLESSED ARE THE MEEK: FOR THEY SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH