Page:The way of Martha and the way of Mary (1915).djvu/303

Rh it to be so. In the Russian translation it runs, "Blessed are those who are beggars in spirit." Russia sees blessedness in the state of beggars, in the state of those who have nothing; a beggar in Russian is one who has no earthly possessions. The beggar is a national institution. No one purely Russian in temperament wants to get rid of the beggar—the man who has nothing. Even Gorky calls the beggar the bell of the Lord, the reminder to man that he can have no true possessions here in the world.

The second beatitude, "Blessed are they that mourn," we also took to mean more to the East than to the West. The East feels the blessing of mourning, the West the blessing of being comforted.

The third beatitude, "Blessed are the meek," meant more to the West we concluded. We in England and America look forward to what Tennyson calls "the reign of the meek upon earth." We remember the promise that the lion shall lie down with the lamb. One of the most popular of Western pictures is that of the child carrying a palm-branch, "A little child shall lead them." The East, however, feels that the lions will always be lions, that "the world" will remain "the world" without much change, full of the faithless, the cruel, the predatory, mingled with the faithful, the gentle, the self-abnegatory.

The fourth beatitude, "Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled," seemed to me to be also a purely Western one. America and the West have taken it specially to themselves. It has been the watchword of the Puritans. But my friend Vera astonished me by reading it, "Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after truth, for they shall be filled," and on looking at the Russian translation I found indeed that the word was pravda and the popular sense was nearer "truth" than "righteousness." That difference means a great deal to a national outlook.