But while this national reference may be the one originally meant, the splendid vagueness of the metaphor forbids us to be content with it, or with any solitary application. For the two clauses are as the eyes of the All-Pitiful Father, that rest wherever on this broad earth there is any life, though it be so low as to be conscious only through pain or doubt; they are as the healing palms of Jesus stretched over the multitudes to bless and gather to Himself the weary and the poor in spirit. We contrast our miserable ruin of character, our feeble sparks of desire after holiness, with the life, which Christ demands and has promised, and in despair we tell ourselves, this can never become that. But it is precisely this that Christ has come to lift to that. The first chapter of the Sermon on the Mount closes with the awful command, _Be ye perfect, as your Father in Heaven is perfect_; but we work our way back through the chapter, and we come to this, _Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled_; and to this, _Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven._ Such is Christ's treatment of the bruised reed and the smoking flax. Let us not despair. There is only one kind of men, for whom it has no gospel,--the dead and they who are steeped in worldliness, who have forgotten what the pain of a sore conscience is, and are strangers to humility and aspiration. But for all who know their life, were it only through their pain or their doubt, were it only in the despair of what they feel to be a last struggle with temptation, were it only in contrition for their sin or in shame for their uselessness, this text has hope. _Reed that is broken he breaketh not off, wick that is fading he doth not quench._