Before we pass on, let us observe how important it is that there should be at all times those in the Church who are capable, not merely of poverty in spirit, but voluntarily of poverty in fact. Upon all men our Lord enjoins detachment. But upon one young man in particular He enjoined that he should give his possessions away, that he should sell all that he had and give to the poor. So in the Church there have been those who in the religious orders have dedicated themselves in voluntary poverty to the service of God and of man; and the Church has lost incalculably in ages when there have been none such. Like all other institutions, the religious orders have been liable to great abuses: they have been homes very often, not so much of scandalous vices, as of sloth and corporate greed; but we must not give up the ideal because there are abuses. There is the command of the Lord to all to be, like Job, detached; there is the counsel of the Lord to some to be, in fact, voluntarily poor. II “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.” These beatitudes follow one another, as St. Chrysostom says, in a golden chain. Once again our Lord is putting Himself in startling opposition to one of the favourite maxims of the world. The world says “Get as much pleasure as you can out of life; suck it in wherever you can; and hug yourself as close as you can from all that disquiets you or makes you uncomfortable; in a word, get as much pleasure and avoid as much pain as by intelligence and forethought you can possibly do.” In startling opposition to this maxim of the world our Lord puts His maxim “Blessed are they that mourn.” What does that mean? Briefly: there are two chief kinds of mourning into which it is the duty of every true servant of our Lord to enter――the mourning for sin and the mourning for pain. We must mourn for sin, for we are sinners. It is possible to hide the fact from our eyes, to prevent the inconvenient light from coming in upon our consciences, to suppose that things that are widely tolerated must be tolerable, that things that are frequently or habitually done must have something to say for themselves. But the Christian gets into the light; he lets the light of the divine word go down into his heart; he strives to see himself first, in the silence of his own soul, as the Lord sees him. Thus he is brought to repentance, and repentance which is in regard to the future a “change of purpose,” is with respect to the past a true mourning: if not emotional sorrow, still profound and heartfelt regret on account of those things in which we have gone against the will of God: and “blessed are they that mourn.”