Matthew 5:4 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

Blessed are they that mourn— "Either for their own sins, or for other men's, and who are steadily and habitually serious; they shall be comforted, most solidly and deeply in this world, and eternally in heaven. What they now sow in tears, they shall reap in joy." See 1 Corinthians 5:2 and Bengelius. Possibly our Saviour might refer still farther in this blessing to the mourning rightly improved on account of afflictions; and in this light nothing can be more true than the present aphorism; because, if any thing under the grace of God brings a man to holiness, it is affliction; the natural tendency thereof being to give him a feeling of the vanity of the world, and consequently to convince him how necessary it is that he should seek his happiness in things more solid and durable. Affliction awakens serious thoughts in the mind, composes it into a grave and settled frame, very different from the levity which prosperity inspires; gives it a fellow-feeling of the sorrows of others, and makes it, when accompanied by the operation of the Divine Spirit, sensible of the evil of departing from God, the source and centre of its joy. See Macknight.