Brethren, we so often feel hopeless about getting over our faults. Let us hunger and thirst after righteousness, and we shall be filled. As our Lord saw of the travail of His soul and was satisfied, so, depend upon it, shall we. If you only seriously want to be good, your progress may be slow, but at the last you will be good. Christ is pledged to satisfy, if only you will go on wanting. There is not in the pursuit of goodness any failure except in ceasing to hunger and thirst――that is, in ceasing to want, to pray, to try. Do you want righteousness seriously, deliberately? Then you can have it, and not for yourself only, but for the world. “Till righteousness turn again unto judgement, all such as are true in heart shall follow it.” It is pledged to us. The day will come when the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of righteousness and meekness and truth, shall be an established and a visible fact. Blessed are they that here and now hunger and thirst after righteousness in themselves and in the world: for they shall be filled. V “Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.” Of course wherever human misery is, there is also human pity. But, apart from Christ, it was not thought of as a motive force, to be used in redeeming others’ lives and in enriching our own. The Buddha, indeed, one of the purest and noblest men who have ever lived, was first awakened from the dream of luxury, in which he had been brought up, by the threefold spectacle of human misery――decrepitude, disease and death. And once awakened, he made his “great renunciation”: he abandoned his royal state: after much searching, he discovered for himself, as he thought, the way of emancipation from life and, being filled with compassion, taught it to others. But he believed life to be radically an evil. He could imagine no redemption _of_ life but only escape _from_ it. The philosopher Aristotle, who examined and catalogued human qualities, could not have failed to come across the fact of pity. But he seems even to have regarded it as a troublesome emotion――a disturbing force which had better be got rid of in practical concerns. The Greek tragedy, which by its marvellous presentations of the weakness of man was calculated to evoke the sentiment of pity in great intensity, he regarded as a vent or outlet for the emotion which in this way could be purged off and leave the Greek citizen in untroubled serenity in face of actual life. It is to be feared that we very often use the drama and literature in this way. We let our emotion of pity be stirred by the pictures of human misfortune presented to us, and we find a luxury in the indulgence of the emotion. But it is a luxury, and nothing more. It leads to no effective action for the removing of the misery which we deplore. This is pagan. For the disciple of Christ pity is a motive to vigorous action. God in Christ declares His “power most chiefly in showing mercy and pity.” Powerful