Meekness makes all of nature ours
Only the meek can truly enjoy the gifts of God.
Only the meek can truly enjoy the gifts of God.
Editor’s Notes
In this part, Fr Coleridge tells us…
How meekness frees the soul to enjoy God’s gifts with gratitude and peace.
That pride, passion, and ambition blind men to immaterial goods
Why only the meek truly inherit the earth – by using creation as children of God.
He shows us that meekness is not weakness, but the disposition which enables man to understand, possess, and rejoice in all that God has given.
For more information on this mini-series, see Part I.
The Meek possessing the Land
The Preaching of the Beatitudes
Chapter XIII
St. Matt. v. 4; Story of the Gospels, § 31
Burns and Oates, London, 1876.
Meekness mini-series contents:
Meekness and intellectual enjoyment
Men of strong passions, untamed ambition, reckless lust, who indulge their natural greed for power or pleasure, or who strain themselves in the continual pursuit of wealth or the honour of this world, may be rich in lands and possessions, and have all the means of temporal enjoyment at their command and yet after all they do not enjoy life or their own possessions.
They can no more enter into their inheritance in all these matters, than an idiot can inherit intellectual treasures of literature or art which his fathers have accumulated for him, and this, not for lack of the act of possession, but for lack of the faculty of possessing anything in a rational manner. The defect in the idiot is the absence of intelligence; the defect in the men who are the slaves of passion or ambition or avarice or the disquiet of worldly cares or the restlessness of an evil conscience, is the lack of meekness of mind and heart.
To those who have this meekness, the whole world is a possession and a home, they enjoy even the riches and treasures of others, whatever has delight and joy and profit to give yields them to the meek, and they inherit it as the children of Him Who gave the earth to man, not by the law of human inheritance which allots what is called property in this world, but by the right of the Creator of all things, Who has made all things to be used, and given to men of humble hearts the title and the power to use them.
God’s Providence and gifts
Again, a great part of the natural inheritance which is intended for God’s children in this world is the teaching concerning Himself which is contained in the course of history, His providence in the government of mankind, of the Church, of single souls, which, to those whose eyes are enlightened by Him is full of sweetness and beauty and tenderness, as well as of justice and holiness. But for the understanding of all this, meekness is necessary; for ‘He will guide the mild in judgment, and He will teach the meek His ways’.1
The reverent faith which recognizes Him as the Ruler of all things in His providence, which sees His hand in all that comes about, adores His judgments and waits patiently on His will, is rewarded by the gifts of intelligence and wisdom, while the contrary spirit of pride and self-will and independence grovels in darkness, and in its ignorance is tempted to find fault with and rebel against what it cannot understand.
Thus meekness is necessary in order to use the gifts of God, natural as well as spiritual, aright, to understand them and see His action in them and take home the lessons and instructions they are meant to convey.
The same may be said even of their enjoyment. For they are not truly gifts to, nor are they truly enjoyed, by those who use them as their own or as the instruments of pride or of sin, and so, though in this sense they may occupy the land, they do not possess it or inherit it. To the meek they are the works of God, the gifts of their Father, all that is good and beautiful and profitable in them is a quality which reflects Him in His beauty and goodness, and the quiet, tranquil thankfulness of a childlike spirit enables them to use them as they are meant to be used, and to recognise and rejoice in their loveliness with a simple depth of discernment and intensity of delight which can have no place in the soul disturbed by passion.
It may be said that even the common beauties of nature are sealed books to the proud and passionate, because they require in those who are to enjoy them something in harmony with their own peace and obedience and dependence on their Creator and Lord, Whose ineffable repose and beauty and might they reflect in their several degrees.
Thus it is that the gentle heart inherits all that is soothing and elevating in what human genius has produced, such as the restful music of poetry or art, in which the soul pours out her longings for higher and nobler things than she as yet possesses. The contact of nature, even in her simpler scenes, and of whatever bears on it the stamp of natural piety in human works, has a soothing influence for them, of which sensuality, dissipation, frivolity, or the sterner tempests of ambition, envy, or hatred, deprive the souls in which they reign.
Three meanings of the land
These are considerations, then, which suggest that, when we enlarge our ideas of what our Lord may have meant by the earth or land which the meek are to inherit, we may find that there is no difficulty in understanding the words in their plain literal sense.
And it is only an extension of the same interpretation to understand that our Lord means to teach us that meekness is the condition on which alone any gifts of God to man can be truly enjoyed and used as they ought to be by His children, that it is the key which unlocks His treasures, which opens the secrets of Scripture or of doctrine to the student, secures the guidance of the Holy Spirit to those who have to rule or teach, and enables men to profit by all holy inspirations and means of grace of whatever kind that are provided for them in the Church.
It is in an especial manner true that meekness is necessary for the discernment of the manifold action of God upon the soul, for He speaks ordinarily when there is calm and peace, and in the same way the soul that would converse with God in prayer must be quiet and docile. And this is the account to be given of the inability of many Christians to pray and meditate: there is some inordinate passion in the soul which has not been conquered, some end of self-love which has not been abandoned, and there is in consequence an absence of that docility and tranquillity which prayer requires.
If, then, we consider that in the ‘inheritance of the earth’ may be included the intelligent and profitable use of all that God has given to His children as their possession in this life, whether spiritual, moral, intellectual, or material, ‘whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report,’2 it may be said that meekness is the one disposition and virtue which enables man to use and enjoy and possess all these things according to the intention of his Creator.
Meekness mini-series contents:
From:
The Preaching of the Beatitudes
Further Reading:
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Psalm xxiv. 9
Philipp. iv. 8.