I. "Blessed are the meek." The word "meek" hardly expresses the quality which is meant in the original. It is too passive a word; it does not sufficiently represent the actual character which is intended. In the French translation it is, "Bienheureux sont les debonnaires;"that is, "Happy are the gracious, graceful Christian characters who by their courtesy win all hearts around them, and smooth all the rough places of the world." Perhaps "Blessed are the gentle" would best express it.
II. The next quality which our Saviour blesses is thus expressed: "They who hunger and thirst after righteousness." He does not say those who have attained righteousness, but those who have a hungering and craving after that which they, perhaps, have not reached; and, perhaps, which they never, in this life, may fully attain to; but which to seek after is the truest ambition of the children of God. When we look out into the world, when we see how much there is of falsehood and injustice and oppression all around, there is one consoling thought, and that is to see some who are filled with earnest desire to make things better than they are. There is a representation in the Catacombs, on Christian tombs, and as the first sign of Christian life, of a stag drinking eagerly at the silver stream. This is the true likeness of hungering and thirsting after righteousness. When we toil towards the close of our earthly course, or in any especial period of it; when we feel stifled by the sultry and suffocating sense of the hardness and selfishness of the world about us; when our breath is, as it were, choked by the dust and trifles and forms and fashions of the world's vast machinery, we may still join the cry, "I thirst, for the refreshing sight of any pure, upright, generous spirit; I thirst, for the day when I may drink freely of God's boundless charity; I thirst, for the day when I shall hear the sound of abundance of rain, and a higher heaven than that which now encloses us round." Happy are they who, when they see generous deeds and hear of generous characters higher than their own, long to be like them. It is our business to keep up the chase; not to cease our efforts to quench this thirst; never to be weary in well-doing; and to believe that in this hunger and thirst is the spring of true religion.
A. P. Stanley, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xx., p. 8.