Newport weekly independent., 1903-01-16
TIE HUNGRY SOUL.
1t Travels the Road of the Blessed
 in Christ's Kingdom.
And Has the Comfort of tho Promise c That M Shall He FiIIed-Ser- mon by the "Highway and
 Byway" Preacher.
ICopyright, 1908, by A N. Kellogg News
 paper Co.,

Chicago, January Il, 1903.
 Text: Blessed are they which do hun ger and thirst after ghteousness, for they shall be filed" Matt. 5:6
 The hungry soul is one of the char acters met with in the Kingdom of Jesus Christ. And because it is hun gry soul it is plainly and self-evident- ly a live soul, a healthy soul and d growing soul. A dead body never yet hungered and thirsted, and dead soul is as insensible to desire for the righteousness of God as is the dead body to the tempting viands placed at it's side. Jesus declares: Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filed" For thirty years the Son of Gcd had walked the pathway of the blessed. In Him was found the per feet expression of David's outpoured heart: "Oh, how love I Thy law trighteousness) it is my meditation all the day" In the humble home at Nazareth during his boyhood as He learned at His parents knees; in the first journey to Jerusalem at the age of twelve, when He sought out the rabbis in the temple and questioned them eagerly out of the law and the prophets; during the long years of waiting in the rude carpenter shop at Nazareth, while He wrought with His hands for His daily bread, oh, how His soul hungered and thirstcd for the righteousness of God! He learned to know that blessed indeed was he who hungered and thirsted for righteousness, and the fullness Of God was His portion as day by day His soul sat at His Fathers table and ate and drank of the spiritual bounties so lavishly set before Him. And then in the fullness of Gods time He came to set up His King dom, and in the Sermon on the Mount we have, not the Magma Charta of the human race, as it has been false fy called, but the recasting of the in flexible law of Gods righteousness as the declaration of principles of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ. The Mag na Charta of the human race rang forth in Christ's words from the cross: "It is finished" as He, the Righteous One, bore the sins of the world, and wrought for mankind q mighty deliverance from sin and death, but in the Sermon on the Mount we have the perfect righteous ness of God made manifest in new form, and perfectly lived out in the life of Jesus. Jesus was a practi- cal theologian and step by step dur ing the actual experiences of every day life He had come to know that the poor in spirit, the mourner, the meek, the hungry soul the merciful. the pure-hearted, the peacemaker, were all blessed, and that every prom ise given to them by God was as certain of fulfillment as His coming had been the fulfllment of prophecy.
 The clear understanding of this shuts every door of human possibil- ity of realizing the lofty heights of this towering mountain of Gods righteousness; but, blessed be God. it opens the "Via Christi" along which the soul may walk and real ize all the righteousness and fullness of Christ Jesus. Man may not look through the natural lenses of the human heart upon the rare and priceless gems studding this Sermon on the Mount and appropriate them to his use. God must fit glasses to the eyes of his soul before he can see clearly the beauty of these jew els and understand their true setting Belshazzar, king of Babylon, appro- priated the holy vessels taken from the temple at Jerusalem to his own use. and the finger of God traced His indelible judgment upon the walls of his palace and the prophet Daniel read: "Thou art weighed in the bal. ances and found wanting" And it is ever thus. If the natural man ap. propriates the holy things of God, he does so to his own destruction. As Peter puts it: "They that are un- learned and unstable wrest tic Scriptures unto their own dc struction." And every verse, and every line, and every word, in the Sermon on the Mount bears it's over whelming indictment of the natural man: Thou art weighed in the bal snces and found wanting" But the soul which has been quickened int 2 life by the touch of Him Who has sealed it's every glistening height and has measured its length and breadth of possibilities may follow over the pathway marked out by Jesus pa tient, bleeding feet. and rejoice that he can sit in the School of Heaven and learn the Divine secrets of the King dom of God.
 And so our text is not for the dead soul of the natural man, but is a message to the quickened soul of the regenerate man, and blessed is he when he hungers and thirsts after righteousness, for he shall be filled.
 There are just two kinds of souls dead souls and live souls; the sou