UNIVERSITY OF 
 ILLINOIS LIBRARY 
 
 U.^5^.NA-CHA^'.PA: 
 
THE 
 
 GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE 
 
THE GREAT TEXTS 
 OF THE BIBLE 
 
 EDITED EY THE REV. 
 
 JAMES HASTINGS, D.D. 
 
 EDITOR OF "THE EXPOSITORY TIMES" "THE DICTIONARY OF THE BIBLE" 
 "THE DICTIONARY OF CHRIST AND THE GOSPELS" AND 
 "THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RELIGION AND ETHICS" 
 
 PSALMS XXIV.-GXIX. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SGRIBNER'S SONS 
 EDINBURGH : T. & T. CLARK 
 1914 
 
Printed by 
 
 M0RBI30N & GiBB LIMITED, 
 
 FOE 
 
 T. & T. CLARK, EDINBURGH. 
 
 LONDON : SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT, AND CO. LIMITKDk 
 NBW YORK : CHARLES SCRIBNBR'S SONS 
 
iVl'' 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 TOPICS. 
 
 / PAGE 
 
 The Secret of the Lord 
 
 Waiting Courageously . . . . , , .19 
 
 The Transience of Sorrow . . . . . .37 
 
 Room to Live 51 
 The Beatitude of Forgiveness . . , , .67 
 The Guiding Eye ...... .83 
 
 The Goodness of God ....... 97 
 
 God of Nature and God of Grace .... . 117 
 
 Life and Light ........ 137 
 
 Delighting in the Lord . . . . . .153 
 
 The Crowning of the Year . . . . . .167 
 
 The Burden-Bearing God . . . . . . 179 
 
 A Sun and a Shield ....... 195 
 
 The Home of the Soul ...... 209 
 
 The Right Use of Time ...... 225 
 
 God's Inner Circle . . . . . , . 239 
 
 Strength and Beauty ....... 255 
 
 Light and Gladness . ... ... 269 
 
 All His Benefits ....... 283 
 
 The Father's Pity . . ..... 303 
 
 The Day's Work. ....... 317 
 
 Leanness of Soul ....... 337 
 
 A Volunteer Army . . . . . . .351 
 
 The Brook in the Way ...... 367 
 
 What shall I Render? ...... 383 
 
 The Day which the Lord made ..... 397 
 
 The Clean Path . , , , . , . . 413 
 
 The Wondrous Law ....... 427 
 
 Liberty in God's Law ....... 446 
 
vi 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 TEXTS. 
 
 Psalms. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 XXV. 14 . 3 
 
 XXVII. 14 21 
 
 XXX. 5 39 
 
 XXXI. 8 53 
 
 XXXII. 1, 2 69 
 
 XXXII. 8 . . . . . . . .85 
 
 XXXIV. 8 99 
 
 XXXVI. 5, 6 . .119 
 
 XXXVI. 9 139 
 
 XXXVII. 4 165 
 
 LXV. 11 169 
 
 LXVIII. 19 181 
 
 LXXXIV. 11 197 
 
 . XC. 1 211 
 
 XC. 12 227 
 
 XCI. 1 241 
 
 XCVI. 6 .257 
 
 XCVII. 11 271 
 
 cm. 1-5 . . . . . . . .285 
 
 cm. 13, 14 . . . . . . . 305 
 
 CIV. 23 . .319 
 
 CVL 15 . . 339 
 
 ex. 3 . 353 
 
 ex. 7 369 
 
 CXVI. 12-14 385 
 
 CXVIII. 24 399 
 
 CXIX. 9 415 
 
 CXIX. 18 . .429 
 
 CXIX. 96 . . 447 
 
The Secret of the Lord. 
 
 PS. XXV.-CXIX. — I 
 
/ 
 
 Literature. 
 
 Banks (L. A.), The King's Stewards, 142. 
 Brooks (P.), New Starts in Life, 271. 
 Clow (W. M.), The Secret of the Lord, 1. 
 Cowl (F. B.), Digging Ditches, 79. 
 
 Holland (C), Gleanings from a Ministry of Fifty Years, 150. 
 Johnston (J. B.), The Ministry of Reconciliation, 323. 
 Jowett (J. H.), Brooks by the Traveller's Way, 172. 
 
 Keble (J.), Sermons for the Christian Year : Ascension Day to Trinity 
 
 Sunday, 343. 
 Morrison (G. H.), The Afterglow of God, 366. 
 Potts (A. W.), School Sermons, 78. 
 Selby (T. G.), The Divine Craftsman, 142. 
 Simeon (C), Works, v. 168. 
 Vaughan (C. J.), Memorials of Harrow, 270. 
 Literary Churchman, xxxviii. (1892) 45 (C. W. Whistler). 
 Sunday at Home, 1910, p. 629 (G. H. Morrison). 
 Treasury (New York), xvii. 404 (G, B. F. Hallock). 
 
 3 
 
\ 
 
 The Secret of the Lord. 
 
 The secret of the Lord is with them that fear him ; 
 And he will shew them his covenant.— Ps. xxv. 14. 
 
 When the Hebrew poet spoke of the secret of the Lord he meant 
 the knowledge of the God of Israel, the unseen and eternal Jehovah. 
 When he thought of them that fear Him, he remembered the 
 stalwart saints who shall ever be the heroic leaders of the faith. 
 He recalled Abraham coming out of Ur of the Chaldees with a 
 wisdom and a knowledge that no Babylonian star-gazer ever 
 divined. He thought of Jacob rising from his midnight dream at 
 Bethel, saying in penitence and awe, " Surely the Lord is in this 
 place ; and I knew it not." He saw Moses at the burning bush, 
 putting off the shoes from his feet, for the place whereon he stood 
 was holy ground. He remembered Samuel coming out of the 
 temple in the morning light, having heard the voice of God, with 
 a message he dared not tell to Eli. Each of these had entered 
 into a solemn experience. Each of them had come forth with 
 a secret. A new and deeper understanding of God's ways, and 
 thoughts, and purposes had been given them. He marks the law 
 of their experience. It was the law of fear. They had that fear 
 of God which is an awe and a reverence, a passion of desire to 
 know, and a willingness to submit and to obey. Therefore God 
 made known the secret to them. 
 
 ^ Thompson dwells on St. Paul's unspoken message, which, 
 designated by the name of wisdom, he withheld from many of the 
 Corinthians because they were not fit to hear it. He communi- 
 cated it to the sjnritual not to the animal man. Origen says that 
 that which St. Paul would have called wisdom is found in the 
 " Canticle of Canticles." Thompson dwells further on the hidden 
 meanings of the Pentateuch, believing that there was "an inex- 
 haustible treasure of divine wisdom concealed under the letter of 
 Holy Writ." Thompson saw wise men whispering, and guessed 
 that there were secrets ; their presence discovered, they were open 
 
 3 
 
4 
 
 THE SECRET OF THE LORD 
 
 secrets for such as he. " You have but to direct my sight, and 
 the intentness of my gaze will discover the rest." ^ 
 
 ^ There were three courts in the Temple at Jerusalem. There 
 was the outer court, where even the Gentiles who cared nothing 
 for the God of Israel or the faith of the Hebrew people might 
 freely come. There was the holy place with its sacred things, 
 where only the Hebrew worshipper might walk. There was the 
 most holy place, over which the veil of the Temple hung, and into 
 whose unseen and unknown seclusion the high priest entered once 
 every year, alone. There are these three courts in the life of a 
 Christian man. There is the outer court, where a man who is 
 living his life in the world must keep company with all who enter 
 its circle. He must rub shoulders with the crowd, although he 
 never forgets that they cannot enter into his secret. There is the 
 holy place, where fellow-believers may pass, and speech and 
 thought of the things of God have a gracious liberty. But there 
 is the most holy place, and what passes there between God and 
 the soul is to be kept with a guarded reticence until there is need 
 for its being told.^ 
 
 ^ When the ancient Jew approached his sanctuary, he found 
 an outer court of the Temple full of activity with the coming and 
 going of those who touched the whole natural life and the daily 
 sacrifice on the altar. But behind lay the still silent room where 
 the golden lamp burned and the bread of life was resting on the 
 golden table. And behind again the silence of the Holy of Holies 
 where man and God merge in union. Even so it is not the great 
 activity, touching national issues — it is not even the sacrificial life 
 of Dr. Baton that has most attracted me and, I believe, others. 
 But here was a priest of the Most High God, in the sanctuary of 
 whose heart the light burned and the bread of life was broken. 
 And with reverent awe we knew that behind lay communion with 
 the Inspirer and Hearer of Prayer. So that out of him from the 
 Divine source flow " rivers of living water." Thus heaven touched 
 earth through our intercourse, and the passion for service of his 
 soul entered ours.^ 
 
 The secret of the Lord, as the Psalmist conceives it, may be 
 held to include (1) Knowledge; (2) Character; (3) Happiness. 
 Knowledge is the secret of the Teacher, Character is the secret of 
 the Friend, Happiness is the secret of the Lover. 
 
 1 E. Meynell, The Life of Francis Thom2)son (1913), 223. 
 
 2 W. M. Clow, The Secret of the Lord, 247. 
 ' J. Marchant, J. B. Faton, 311. 
 
PSALM XXV. 14 
 
 5 
 
 I. 
 
 Knowledge. 
 
 1. Every teacher has his secret. He scans his scholars, eager 
 to find a receptive mind to whom he can reveal it. When the 
 responsive glance, the significant word, or the searching question 
 reveals the student's promise, the teacher has an exquisite joy in 
 revealing his secret. 
 
 H The great painters of the Middle Ages took pupils into their 
 studios. To every aspirant they gave honest attention. When 
 one came who was swift to understand his master's conceptions, 
 eager to imitate his strength of line and purity of colour, humbly 
 and patiently reverent in his zeal, the secret was disclosed. In 
 our own day Edward Burne Jones became a disciple of Dante 
 Gabriel Eossetti. He spent still and strenuous hoars in copying 
 his master's works, studying their distinction, and aspiring after 
 their spirit. With a trembling heart young Burne Jones took his 
 drawings to Eossetti to receive his judgment upon them. The 
 honest painter looked at them in silence, and with a word of 
 emotion he said, " You have nothing more to learn from me." He 
 had entered into the master's secret. But mark the law. It is 
 not to the carping critic, the scorning and cynical scholar, the 
 contemptuous idler, that the secret is revealed. The secret is 
 "with them that fear."i 
 
 God keeps His holy mysteries 
 
 Just on the outside of man's dream. ... 
 
 Yet, touching so, they draw above 
 
 Our common thoughts to Heaven's unknown; 
 
 Our daily joy and pain advance 
 
 To a divine significance.^ 
 
 2. There is a mystery in every Christian life. When the 
 words are said in our hearing, " The secret of the Lord is with 
 them that fear him," they seem to give a momentary glimpse of 
 the truth. There is a secret in such lives, and that secret is God's. 
 He has to do with them. There is a communication between 
 their souls and Him. He has told them a secret, and they keep it. 
 
 1 W. M. Clow, The Secret of the Lord, 4. 
 ' E. B. Browning. 
 
6 
 
 THE SECRET OF THE LORD 
 
 Others may see that they have a secret ; but intermeddle with 
 it they cannot. There is only one way to attain it — by going 
 through the same process as these have gone through. We may 
 not at present think it worth our while to do so, or we may have 
 an undefined dread of the supposed difficulty and irksomeness of 
 that process : but at least let us lay it up well in our hearts that 
 there is such a process, and such an end ; that the Christian s life 
 is a reality, whether we ever attain that life or not ; a mystery, 
 whether we be ever initiated into that mystery or not; let us 
 accept and reverence the mspired declaration that " the secret of 
 the Lord is with them that fear him." 
 
 ^ The more of a man a man is, the more secret is the secret 
 of his life, and the more plain and frank are its external workings. 
 A small and shallow man tries to throw a mystery about the mere 
 methods of his life, he tries to make his ways of living seem 
 obscure. Where he goes, how he makes his fortune, whom he 
 talks with, what his words mean, who his friends are — he is very 
 mysterious about all these, and all because the secret of his life 
 is really weak, because he is conscious that there is no really 
 strong purpose of living which he himself understands. It is a 
 shallow pool which muddies its surface to make itself look deep. 
 But a greater man will be perfectly frank and unmysterious about 
 these little things. Anybody may know what he does and where 
 he goes. His acts will be transparent, his words will be in- 
 telligible. Yet all the while every one who looks at him will see 
 that there is something behind all, which escapes the closest 
 observation. The very clearness of the surface will show how 
 deep the water is, how far away the bottom lies. There is hardly 
 a better way to tell a great man from a little one.^ 
 
 ^ He always lived with his blinds up, and you saw all 
 the workings of his mind. 'Had he not been steeped in the 
 spirit of love he could never have survived the self-exposure 
 which was a habit with him. But his very caprices were always 
 unselfish, and he could afford to let his friends look him through 
 and through.2 
 
 As in some cavern dark and deep. 
 
 My soul within me here lies low, 
 Where, veiled, she dreams in wondrous sleep 
 
 Of things I may not know. 
 
 J Phillips Brooks, New Starts in Life, 272. 
 
 2 Love and Life : The Story of J. Denholm Brash (1913), 163. 
 
PSALM XXV. 14 
 
 7 
 
 And if perchance she wake awhile, 
 I probe her radiant eyes in vain : 
 
 She turns from me with misty smile 
 And, sighing, sleeps again.^ 
 
 3. God may be expected to keep some things hidden. In the 
 most intimate and sacred of our friendships it is not for us to say 
 what secrets shall be made known to us, and what secrets shall be 
 guarded from our cognizance. A government reserves to itself 
 the right of saying what information may be imparted to its 
 friends, and what, for sufficient reasons, shall be kept back. A 
 general on the battle-field, whilst putting safe and suitable 
 selections of news at the service of authorized war correspondents, 
 cannot allow them unlimited access to his plans. It is necessary 
 to respect official reserve. And is not the temper which accepts 
 such conditions binding on a true servant of God ? Let God 
 Himself choose the things He sees fit to make known to us. If 
 we live in reverent and believing fellowship He will treat us as 
 confidants, and our knowledge of His methods and purposes will 
 surpass that of the world ; but at the same time we need to be 
 told once and again that He cannot admit us to equality with 
 Himself by making known the veiled things we petulantly 
 demand. It ought to satisfy us if His heart trusts us, and 
 He comes to us in forms of revelation withheld from the world. 
 He who is thus initiated into His deep counsels and led to 
 know His will makes few mistakes in his prayers, and the faith 
 he cherishes does not suffer the bitterness of disappointment or 
 betrayal. 
 
 ^ I have heard Sir Clifford Allbutt and Signor agree that the 
 necessity or, perhaps better, the love of the mysterious, was an 
 essential and valuable part of the human mind ; far from being 
 all disadvantageous or an impediment to progress, it had been in 
 the main a stimulus towards something transcending man's best 
 efforts. Signor said: " It is in fact the poetic element; and what 
 in the superstitious mind is mere dread, in Browning and 
 Tennyson is aspiration. You cannot take away the mysterious 
 from man, he cannot do without it." ^ 
 
 •J One of the most beautiful of the Bishop's sonnets 
 
 ^ Laurence Alma Tadema. 
 
 2 M. S. Watts, George Frederic Watts, ii. 177. 
 
8 THE SECRET OF THE LORD 
 
 was composed at Trondhjem on August 12, 1888. It rung 
 thus : — 
 
 And was it there — the splendour I behold? 
 This great fjord with its silver grace outspread 
 And thousand-creeked and thousand-islanded ? 
 Those far-off hills, grape-purple, fold on fold? 
 For yesterday, when all day long there rolled 
 The blinding drift, methinks, had some one said 
 " The scene is fair," I scarce had credited ; 
 Yet fairer 'tis than any tongue hath told. 
 And it was there ! Ah, yes ! And on my way 
 More bravely I will go, though storm-clouds lour 
 And all my sky be only cold and grey; 
 For I have learnt the teaching of this hour: 
 And when God's breath blows all these mists afar, 
 I know that I shall see the things that are.^ 
 
 4. Knowledge comes by obedience. It would be hopeless to 
 try to tell the secret, even for the sake of inducing others to 
 treasure it for themselves. The fact is that the secret might be 
 told, and told in the best of words, without its ceasing to be a 
 secret to those who heard. Words are necessary in religious as 
 in other matters; but there is no fear of their telling anything 
 which ought not to be told : first, because the secret is designed 
 for all, and revealed to all who will listen to it ; and next, because 
 it lies deeper far than the understanding, and never becomes the 
 possession of any man till he takes it into his heart. For the 
 obedience by which comes knowledge is the obedience of the 
 heart. Obedience to law, and acts of worship arising out of fear 
 of penalty, are merely hiding from God among the trees of the 
 garden. Even obedience from duty can never be a satisfactory or 
 final state ; it is merely educational, to make manifest defect of 
 life. " I was alive without the law once ; but when the command- 
 ment came, sin revived and I died." When the glory of the Lord 
 has filled all the courts of His temple, man's outward nature 
 becomes reconstituted, not after the law of a carnal command- 
 ment, but after the power of an endless or indissoluble life. The 
 tree of knowledge becomes one with the tree of life which is in 
 the midst of the city, and on both sides of the river of life, 
 proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb. 
 
 ^ F. D. How, Bishop Walsham How, 399. 
 
PSALM XXV. 14 
 
 9 
 
 ^ I have known more than one Highland saint who never 
 had any intellectual training. They had had little schooling, they 
 never were at college, and their libraries were of the scantiest 
 kind. Yet in every true sense of the word they were men of 
 culture ; their language was choice and their thoughts large and 
 just; and they had singular power in complicated questions of 
 seizing on the things that really mattered. What was the secret 
 of that mental clarity ? — " If any man willeth to do his will." To 
 God they had prayed — in Christ's name they had wrestled — they 
 had clung to the right and beaten down the wrong ; until at last 
 that life of deep obedience — that faithfulness to God in what was 
 least — all unexpectedly had reached their intellect, and made it 
 a sphere of mastery and joy.^ 
 
 Just to ask Him what to do 
 
 All the day, 
 And to make you quick and true 
 
 To obey. 
 Just to know the needed grace 
 
 He bestoweth, 
 Every bar of time and place 
 
 Overfloweth. 
 Just to take thy orders straight 
 
 From the Master's own command. 
 Blessed day ! when thus we wait 
 Always at our Sovereign's hand.^ 
 
 5. Obedience is rendered easy by sympathy and an open mind. 
 The man who is full of himself, bent on his own will, seeking his 
 own ends, is not in a frame of mind to have the secret of the Lord 
 revealed to him : probably he does not want it, or wish to have it 
 revealed to him. It is a check upon him. He does not want the 
 key to the Kingdom of Heaven, because he has no wish whatever 
 to enter into it. To enter into the Kingdom of God is to do the 
 will of God, and to try to love it, and the will of God is human 
 duty — what is due from us to God as poor, weak, ignorant 
 creatures at the best; coming we know not whence, going we 
 know not whither ; seeing but a little way into things ; living by 
 faith, by trust in the power over us, trust in the good about us, 
 trust in the good in other people ; and what is due from us to 
 
 * G. H. Morrison, The Wings of the Morning, 19. 
 2 F. R. Havergal. 
 
lo THE SECRET OF THE LORD 
 
 others, for we are related to each other as brethren, because we 
 are all related to God as the Father over all. 
 
 ^ " See how that noble fellow Collingwood leads the fleet into 
 action ! " exclaimed Nelson at the battle of Trafalgar, as he looked 
 on the ship of his second bearing down upon the French line under 
 a press of sail. " Ah ! what would Nelson give to be here ! " 
 exclaimed Admiral Collingwood at the same moment. It seemed 
 as if the two heroic men were animated by one spirit ; as if by 
 completeness of sympathy they knew each other's thoughts. 
 And have we not all seen something like this in our own ex- 
 perience ? Have we not known persons so congenial in thought 
 and feeling that scenes in nature lighted up their faces with the 
 same delight, or cast over them the shadows of thoughtfulness and 
 awe ; sights of distress and tales of sorrow drew forth from them 
 kindred tears of compassion ; a noble poem or an eloquent oration 
 awakened in their bosoms the same pure and generous emotions ? 
 And such, too, is the power of sympathy between man and God. 
 Just as a man tells his secret only to his friends, knowing that it 
 would often be unsafe, and at other times impossible, to tell it to 
 others ; and just as they, knowing his great aim and motive, can 
 make more of a nod or look or word than others can of a lengthened 
 statement ; so God reveals, as He did to Abraham His friend in 
 the matter of Sodom's destruction, the depth of His mind and will 
 to them who fear Him, and who by fearing Him have been made 
 like Him ; and they, loving in general as God loves, and hating in 
 general as God hates, enter as others cannot into the meaning and 
 spirit of God's declarations.^ 
 
 II. 
 
 Character. 
 
 1. God unveils His character by entering into friendly relations 
 with man. It is always a sign of deepening friendship when 
 people begin to open their inner rooms to us. To be made the 
 depositary of a rare secret is to be sealed as a friend. When any 
 one tells us a secret joy, it is a mark of intimacy ; when any one 
 unveils to us a secret grief, it is a proof of the closest fellowship. 
 When we are taken from the suburbs of a man's being to the 
 centre, it is a proof of an enriching communion. " No longer do 
 I call you servants ; but I have called you friends ; for all things 
 
 ^ J. B. Johnston, The Ministry of Reconciliation , 335. 
 
PSALM XXV. 14 
 
 II 
 
 that I heard from my Father I have made known unto you." 
 Is there not something tenderly suggestive in the word which 
 tells us that " when they were alone, he expounded unto them " ? 
 When He had His familiar friends to Himself, He told them His 
 secrets and showed them His covenant. 
 
 Are these the tracks of some unearthly Friend, 
 His foot-prints, and his vesture-skirts of light, 
 Who, as I talk with men, conforms aright 
 Their sympathetic words, or deeds that blend 
 With my hid thought; — or stoops him to attend 
 My doubtful-pleading grief; — or blunts the might 
 Of ill I see not ; — or in dreams of night 
 Figures the scope, in which what is will end? 
 Were I Christ's own, then fitly might I call 
 That vision real ; for to the thoughtful mind 
 That walks with Him, He half unveils His face; 
 But when on earth-stain'd souls such tokens fall. 
 These dare not claim as theirs what there they find. 
 Yet, not all hopeless, eye His boundless grace.^ 
 
 2. Fellowship with God is the secret of the highest character 
 in man. If a man admires, reveres and attaches himself to any 
 one, he is naturally led to imitate him ; and the tendency of all 
 worship is to make a man like his God. The deities of heathen- 
 dom are the product of the vain imaginations, unholy passions 
 and guilty fears of their votaries, and the contemplation of them 
 continues to quicken the foul source whence they have issued. 
 The sins as well as the sorrows of those who follow after other gods 
 are multiplied. And the worshippers of the true God are, in 
 accordance with this principle of our nature, brought to godliness, 
 induced and taught to love and hate, to approve and condemn, 
 according to the perfect model. In every one that fears God, 
 there is a real and growing assimilation. 
 
 ^ Some words of Kingsley's written in 1872, in which he 
 defines a " noble fear " as one of the elements of that lofty and 
 spiritual love which ruled his own daily life, may explain why he 
 speaks of entering the married state with " solemn awe and self- 
 humiliation," and why he looked upon such married Love as the 
 noblest education a man's character can have : " Can there be 
 true love without wholesome fear ? And does not the old Eliza- 
 
 * J. H. Newman. 
 
12 THE SECRET OF THE LORD 
 
 bethan ' My dear dread ' express the noblest voluntary relation in 
 which two human souls can stand to each other ? Perfect love 
 casteth out fear. Yes ; but where is love perfect among imperfect 
 beings, save a mother's for her child ? For all the rest, it is 
 through fear that love is made perfect; fear which bridles and 
 guides the lover with awe — even though misplaced — of the beloved 
 one's perfections; with dread — never misplaced — of the beloved 
 one's contempt. And therefore it is that souls who have the germ 
 of nobleness within, are drawn to souls more noble than them- 
 selves, just because, neediug guidance, they cling to one before 
 whom they dare not say, or do, or even think an ignoble thing. 
 And if these higher souls are — as they usually are — not merely 
 formidable, but tender likewise, and true, then the influence which 
 they may gain is unbounded — both to themselves, and to those 
 that worship them." ^ 
 
 3. To enjoy this fellowship we must "fear" the Lord. In 
 order to read any one's secret we must respect him. You cannot 
 show the real secret of your life, the spring and power of your 
 living, to any man who does not respect you. Not merely you 
 will not, but you cannot. Is it not so ? A man comes with 
 impertinent curiosity and looks in at your door, and you shut it 
 in his face indignantly. A friend comes strolling by and gazes in 
 with easy carelessness, not making much of what you may be 
 doing, not thinking it of much importance, and before him you 
 cover up instinctively the work which was serious to you, and 
 make believe that you were only playing games. So it is when 
 men try to get hold of the secret of your life. No friendship, no 
 kindliness, can make you show it to them unless they evidently 
 really feel as you feel, that it is a serious and sacred thing. There 
 must be something like reverence or awe about the way that they 
 approach you. It is the way in which children shut themselves 
 up before their elders because they know their elders have no 
 such sense as they have of the importance of their childish 
 thoughts and feelings. 
 
 ^1 You must believe that there is something deep in nature or 
 you will find nothing there. You must have an awe of the 
 mystery and sacredness in your fellow-man, or his mystery and 
 sacredness will escape you. And this sense of mystery and 
 sacredness is what we gather into that word "fear." It is the 
 
 ^ Charles KingsUy, i. 154. 
 
PSALM XXV. 14 
 
 13 
 
 feeling with which you step across the threshold of a great deserted 
 temple or into some vast dark mysterious cavern. It is not terror. 
 That would make one turn and run away. Terror is a blinding 
 and deafening emotion. Terror shuts up the apprehension. You 
 do not get at the secret of anything which frightens you, but fear, 
 as we use the word now, is quite a different emotion. It is a large, 
 deep sense of the majesty and importance of anything, a reverence 
 and respect for it. Without that no man can understand another. 
 And so " the secret of a man is with them that fear him." ^ 
 
 ^ We have listened to some sweet melody, and we cannot 
 escape from its gracious thraldom. It pervades the entire day. 
 It interweaves itself with all our changing affairs. We hear it in 
 our work and in our leisure ; when we retire to rest and when we 
 awake. It haunts us. The analogy may help us to some appre- 
 hension of what is meant by the fear of God. The man who fears 
 God is haunted by God's presence. God is an abiding conscious- 
 ness. God is "continually before him." Everything is seen in 
 relationship to God. The Divine presence pervades the mind and 
 shapes and colours the judgment. Here are two descriptions from 
 the Word of God, in the contrast of which the meaning will be 
 made quite clear. " God is not in all his thoughts." The Eternal 
 does not haunt his mind. Everything is secularized, and nothing 
 is referred to the arbitrament of the Divine Will. He is not God- 
 possessed. " Pray without ceasing." Here is the contrasted mind, 
 from which the sense of God is never absent. Like an air of 
 penetrating music the Divine presence pervades the exercise of 
 all his powers. He is God-haunted, and in the consciousness of 
 that presence he lives and moves and has his being. He fears 
 God.2 
 
 III. 
 
 Happiness. 
 
 1. The secret of happiness is love. The people of God love 
 Him, and He loves them; their habitual feeling is that their 
 affection and gratitude bear no proportion to the greatness of His 
 claims. Like the penitent disciple who had had much forgiven, 
 they can solemnly appeal to His omniscience and say, "Lord, 
 thou knowest all things ; thou knowest that I love thee." And 
 He loves them with a love which has a height and depth, and 
 
 ^ Phillips Brooks, New Starts in Life, 275. 
 
 * J. H. Jowett, Brooks by th» Traveller's Way, 173. 
 
14 THE SFXRET OF THE LORD 
 
 length and breadth passing knowledge — a love which has thrown 
 open to them the book of Nature that their eyes might be filled 
 with its beauty and their souls with its truth — a love which sings 
 sweet songs in the carol of the bird, in the murmur of the brook, 
 in the whispering of the breeze, and in the joyous music of the 
 domestic hearth — a love which covers the earth with golden grain, 
 and casts abundance into the lap of life — a love which has toiled, 
 and bled, and died that the soul of man might be taken from the 
 spoiler who has held it under his cruel and polluting sway, and 
 be brought under the dominion of its rightful Lord and made 
 fully happy, and that for ever, in His fellowship. 
 
 ^ He looked out on the world through the eyes of Love, and 
 that is why it was to him ever beautiful in its infinite variety, 
 and in its amazing friendliness. He lived to be seventy-one as 
 the world counts years, but even then he was Youth and Joy — in 
 the best sense of the word he refused to grow up.^ 
 
 ^ Though Mr. Paynter was a deeply spiritual man, there was 
 nothing in his life or speech to suggest gloom ; certainly there 
 was not in his looks. Many a laugh have we had together, over 
 some amusing incident or story, in the lighter interludes of life ; 
 and though he himself rarely told a story, yet sometimes he would 
 make a " dry " remark, which showed that the sense of humour 
 was not absent. He was a happy man — happy in all the domes- 
 ticities of his home and family life — happy among his flowers — 
 happy in his work — happy always in doing good to others, and all 
 because he was happy in God, and had learned what St. Paul 
 meant when he said, " All things are yours." ^ 
 
 Just to recollect His love, 
 
 Always true; 
 Always shining from above, 
 
 Always new. 
 Just to recognize its light 
 
 All-enfolding ; 
 Just to claim its present might, 
 
 All-upholding. 
 Just to know it as thine own, 
 
 That no power can take away. 
 Is not this enough alone 
 
 For the gladness of the day ? ^ 
 
 * Love and Life : The Story of J. Denholm Brash (1913), 8. 
 
 2 S. M. Nugent, Life Radiant : Memorials of the Rev. F. Paynter, 228. 
 
 3 F. R. Havergal. 
 
PSALM XXV. 14 
 
 15 
 
 2. We learn the secret of happiness as we try to express our 
 love in noble character and unselfish conduct. Men are so con- 
 stituted that obedience is its own reward. There is no delight so 
 deep and true as the delight of doing the will of Him whom we 
 love. There is no blessedness like that of the increasing com- 
 munion with God and of the clearer perception of His will and 
 mind which follow obedience as surely as the shadow follows the 
 sunshine. There is no blessedness like the glow of approving 
 conscience, the reflection of the smile on Christ's face. 
 
 To have the heart in close communion with the very Fountain 
 of all good, and the will in harmony with the will of the best 
 Beloved ; to hear the Voice that is dearest of all ever saying, 
 " This is the way, walk ye in it " ; to feel " a spirit in my feet " 
 impelling me upon that road ; to know that all my petty deeds 
 are made great, and my stained offerings hallowed by the altar on 
 which they are honoured to lie ; and to be conscious of fellowship 
 with the Friend of my soul increased by obedience — this is to 
 taste the keenest joy and good of life, and he who is thus 
 " blessed in his deed " need never fear that that blessedness will 
 be taken away, or sorrow though other joys be few and griefs be 
 many. 
 
 ^ To Florence Nightingale, communion with the Unseen 
 meant something deeper, richer, fuller, more positive than the fear 
 of God. The fear of God is the beginning, but not the end, of 
 wisdom, for perfect love casteth out fear. It was for the love of 
 God as an active principle in her mind, constraining all her deeds, 
 that she strove.^ 
 
 ^ The income from his books and other sources, which might 
 have been spent in a life of luxury and selfishness, he distributed 
 lavishly where he saw it was needed, and in order to do this he 
 always lived in the most simple way. To make others happy was 
 the Golden Kule of his life. On August 31 he wrote, in a letter 
 to a friend, Miss Mary Brown : " And now what am I to tell you 
 about myself ? To say I am quite well ' goes without saying ' 
 with me. In fact, my life is so strangely free from all trial and 
 trouble that I cannot doubt my own happiness is one of the 
 talents entrusted to me to 'occupy' with, till the Master shall 
 return, by doing something to make other lives happy.'' 2 
 
 ^ Sir Edward Cook, The Life of Florence Nightingale, i. 50. 
 
 * S, D, Collingwood, The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll, 325, 
 
i6 THE SECRET OF THE LORD 
 
 3. And thus we are brought round again to knowledge. 
 For the final verdict upon the realities of religion rests not 
 with the highest intellect, but with the purest heart. Humboldt 
 tells that the Arab guide employed in one of his desert journeys 
 had such a keen and highly trained power of vision that he could 
 see the moons of Jupiter without a telescope, and that he gave 
 the date when one of those moons was eclipsed, a date afterwards 
 verified by the traveller on his return to Europe. The watch- 
 maker, the line-engraver, the microscopist, who for years have 
 been poring over minute objects a few inches from the face, could 
 not emulate the feat of the Arab whose eye had been trained for 
 a lifetime by use in the desert, and might potsibly doubt the fact. 
 In that respect the man of science himself, with his wide know- 
 ledge, exact observation, many accomplishments, was inferior to 
 his unlettered guide. A devout soul seeks wistfully after God, 
 accustoms its faculties to discern and interpret His signs, and 
 acquires a vision penetrative beyond that of his neighbour. 
 
 •[J In one of his saddest poems — in the series entitled " Men and 
 Women " — Browning tells the story of Andrea del Sarto, who was 
 called the faultless painter of Florence. In his youth he had 
 loved and married a woman of rare and radiant beauty. He 
 rendered to her an almost worshipping homage. He longed to 
 lift her to the high plane of thought and desire and holy ambition 
 on which he moved. But she was a shallow, thin-natured, mean- 
 souled woman. She was the woman who smeared with a careless 
 fling of her skirt the picture he had painted in hours of spiritual 
 ecstasy. She was the woman who craved him for his hard-earned 
 money that she might spend it at the gaming-table with her 
 dissolute companions. Browning sets down the tragedy of their 
 years with his usual unerring insight. It was not that she dis- 
 appointed him, robbed his hand of its power, dulled his mind, 
 shadowed his heart, and, as he foresaw, would sully his fame. It 
 was this more piteous thing, that he could not disclose himself to 
 her. She was not able to see and to understand him at his 
 highest and noblest. She never discerned the moral majesty of 
 his mind or the spiritual hunger of his heart. The poet sets the 
 sorrow of it all in a sigh, which is the climax of his story. 
 But had you — oh, with the same perfect brow, 
 And perfect eyes, and more than perfect mouth. 
 And the low voice my soul hears, as a bird 
 The fowler's pipe, and follows to the snare — 
 Had you, with these the same, but brought a mind ! 
 
PSALM XXV. 14 
 
 Lover he was, with the lover's secret, but she brought no mind, 
 and the lover's secret she never knew. For the lover's secret is 
 only with them that fear.^ 
 
 4. The nearer we live to Christ, the further shall we see into 
 the Unseen and discern the secret of God. The vision of the 
 godly man, like that of the prophet at Bethel, pierces into the 
 unseen, and he is sensible of things to which others are blind. If 
 he cannot envisage horses and chariots of fire, the vindicating 
 ministries of the covenant, he can read the terms of the covenant 
 in letters clear as the stars, and these revelations are enough, and 
 assure as perfectly as glimpses of the hosts God leads. Doubts 
 and misgivings are dispelled by spiritual insight. In the things 
 which, to a worldly mind, suggest the anger of Heaven, he is made 
 to see occasions which discipline the character into higher fitness 
 for receiving the awaiting blessings of an immutable covenant. 
 
 1[ For many years a lady made her livelihood by taking 
 Greenwich time round to the jewellers' shops in the small towns 
 to the west of London. She was the daughter of a watchmaker, 
 and possessed an excellent chronometer which had been be- 
 queathed by her father. When necessary, the authorities of the 
 Observatory kindly regulated it. Every Friday she went to 
 Greenwich, got the standard time, and carried it to her clients, 
 who paid a small fee for the service rendered. She belonged to 
 the old dispensation, and may stand for one of its types. Many 
 provincial towns, and even private firms of watchmakers, are now 
 in direct electric connexion with Greenwich, and get the standard 
 time every day. ... In the United States of America, every post 
 office is linked with the Observatory at Washington. Under the 
 earlier Covenant, men who wished to learn of the things of God 
 had to avail themselves of the ministries of the prophets, or sit at 
 the feet of scholars, whose office it was to interpret the books of 
 the law. But under the New Covenant the regenerate soul is 
 brought into direct contact with God, and acquires Divine wisdom, 
 not by listening to a neighbour, but by heeding swift inward 
 impressions wrought by the wonderful Spirit of God.^ 
 
 Love touch'd my eyes — these eyes which once were blind, 
 And, lo ! a glorious world reveal'd to view, 
 
 A world I ne'er had dream'd so fair to find. 
 I sang for gladness — all things were made new. 
 
 1 W. M. Clow, The Secret of the Lcyrd, 10. 
 « T. G. Selby, The Divine Craftsman, 175. 
 PS. XXV.-CXIX. — 2 
 
i8 THE SECRET OF THE LORD 
 
 'Twas Love unstopp'd my ears, and every sound 
 
 Borne through the silence seem'd a psalm of praise: 
 
 Bird-song, child-laughter — yet o'er all I found 
 Thy voice the music of my happy days. 
 
 Love chang'd life's draught and made the water wine, 
 And through my languid senses seem'd to flow 
 
 Some pow'r enkindled by the fire divine, 
 Some inspiration I can ne'er forego. 
 
 Love rais'd the dead to life — and never more 
 Can many waters quench th' eternal flame. 
 
 Love open'd wide the everlasting door, 
 And bade us enter, called by His name.^ 
 
 ^ Una, In Life's Garden^ 6. 
 
Waiting Courageously. 
 
 «9 
 
/ 
 
 Literature. 
 
 Bright (W.), Morality in Doctrine^ 115. 
 
 Craig (R.), Bock Plants with Gospel Roots, 27. 
 
 Dyke (H. van), Manhood, Faith and Courage, 53. 
 
 Jowett (J. H.), From Strength to Strength, 65. 
 
 Maclaren (A.), Creed and Conduct, 15. 
 
 Newman (J. H.), Sermons on Subjects of the Day, 47. 
 
 Spurgeon (C. H.), Morning by Morning, 243. 
 
 „ „ Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxiii. (1877), No. 1371. 
 
 Steel (T. H.), Sermons in Harrow Chapel, 315. 
 Vauglian (J.), Sermons in Christ Church, Brighton, 2nd Ser., 51. 
 Wynne (G. R.), In Quietness and Confidence, 50. 
 
 Christian World Pulpit, xliv. 321 (C. S. Home) ; liii. 136 (H. Black) ; Ivii. 
 
 27 (J. G. Rogers) ; Iviii. 401 (J. H. Jowett). 
 Church of England Magazine, xxxiv. 168 (R. W. Dale). 
 Church of England Pulpit, Ix. 286 (C. Wordswortli). 
 Churchman's Pulpit : Sermons to the Young, xvi. 406 (R. G. Scans). 
 Twentieth Century Pastor, xxx. 20 (A. B. Macaulay). 
 
Waiting Courageously. 
 
 Wait on the Lord : 
 
 Be strong, and let thine heart take courage; 
 Yea, wait thou on the Lord. — Ps. xxvii. 14. 
 
 This is the concluding verse of a psalm which glows with lofty 
 faith, and yet is clouded by a sense of depression. The magnificent 
 opening, with its fulness of glad, exuberant energy, its high-hearted 
 disclaimer of all fear in view of a host of enemies, and its fervid 
 avowal of one supreme desire — to dwell in the Lord's house and 
 to gaze upon His beauty — is followed up by entreaties which 
 represent a change of mood. It is one of those transitions so 
 common in the Psalter, which make it so truly human a book. 
 Acting on the invitation, " Seek ye my face," the Psalmist begs 
 his Lord not to cast him away, not to forsake him ; he describes 
 himself as an orphan whom God will adopt, and he glances 
 tremblingly at a contingency which would surely have over- 
 whelmed him — 
 
 What if no faith were mine, to see 
 Thy love in realms where life shall be ? 
 
 But the psalm goes back to the major key at last, and in the 
 closing verse prayer passes into self-encouragement. The heart 
 that spoke to God now speaks to itself. Faith exhorts sense and 
 soul to " wait on Jehovah." The self -communing of the Psalmist, 
 beginning with exultant confidence and merging into prayer thrilled 
 with consciousness of need and of weakness, closes with bracing 
 him up to courage, which is not presumption, because it is the 
 fruit of waiting on the Lord. He who thus keeps his heart in touch 
 with God will be able to obey the ancient command, which had 
 rung so long before in the ears of Joshua and is never out of date, 
 " Be strong and of a good courage " ; and none but those who wait 
 on the Lord will be at once conscious of weakness and filled with 
 strength, aware of the foes and bold to meet them. 
 
 ai 
 
22 WAITING COURAGEOUSLY 
 
 I. 
 
 Watting. 
 
 The word " walk " describes almost the whole of Christian life, 
 and so does this word " wait " ; for, rightly understood, waiting is 
 active as well as passive, energetic as well as patient, and to wait 
 upon the Lord necessitates as much courage as warring and 
 fighting with enemies. It may seem an easy thing to wait, but 
 it is one of the postures which a Christian soldier learns only 
 with years of teaching. Marching and quick-marching are much 
 easier to God's warriors than standing still. There are hours of 
 perplexity when the most willing spirit, anxiously desirous to 
 serve the Lord, knows not what part to take. Then what shall 
 it do ? Vex itself by despair ? Fly back in cowardice, turn to 
 the right hand in fear, or rush forward in presumption ? No, but 
 simply wait. 
 
 ^ The English Prayer-Book version of the Psalms gives a 
 quaint but beautiful rendering of the phrase " Wait on the Lord." 
 It runs, " 0 tarry thou the Lord's leisure." This rendering brings 
 out the exact meaning of the word " wait," which we have inter- 
 larded and lost sight of by making it mean such things — and 
 legitimately enough — as prayer. It just means " wait." Wait 
 for Him as you would wait at the trysting-place for a friend 
 who does not come. Wait for Him, and wait, and wait until He 
 does come.^ 
 
 When He appoints to meet thee, go thou forth. 
 
 It matters not 
 If south or north. 
 
 Bleak waste or sunny plot. 
 Nor think, if haply He thou seek'st be late, 
 
 He does thee wrong; 
 To stile or gate 
 
 Lean thou thy head, and long! 
 It may be that to spy thee He is mounting 
 
 Upon a tower. 
 Or in thy counting 
 
 Thou hast mista'en the hour. 
 
 » Hugh Black. 
 
PSALM XXVII. 14 
 
 23 
 
 But, if He come not, neither do thou go 
 
 Till Vesper chime ; 
 Belike thou then shalt know 
 
 He hath been with thee all the time.^ 
 
 1. Let us wait with faith. It is faith that secures the Divine 
 blessing — persistent, expectant faith. He cannot be said to wait 
 upon God who disbelieves that God will come to his aid, or who 
 doubts whether He will. Loitering about to see if anything will 
 turn up is not the same thing, by any means, as waiting for a 
 particular person to appear, or a particular event to happen. 
 Faith and expectation characterize the latter condition as distinct 
 from the former. And these qualities belong to the very nature of 
 the exercise of " waiting on God." The more unwavering a man's 
 faith is, in fact, and the higher he stretches on tiptoe of expecta- 
 tion, the more accurately may he be described as a man waiting 
 on God. " My soul," cries the Psalmist, " waiteth for the Lord 
 more than they that watch for the morning." How eager he 
 represents himself to be by that figure of the anxious watchers 
 scanning the eastern skies for signs of daybreak ! And how con- 
 fident, too ! For more surely than the sun shall climb up over 
 the horizon and dispel the shadows of night, his God, he believes, 
 shall cause His face to shine upon him. His God and our God — 
 it is not to immensity or infinity, or some dimly comprehended 
 and overwhelming attribute, precariously personified, that we 
 look up for help and a response to our supplications. It is to the 
 living, self-revealing God, who hath " of old time spoken unto the 
 fathers in the prophets," and who " hath at the end of these days 
 spoken unto us in his Son." 
 
 ^ There is a school of philosophy, much current in our day, 
 which tells us that religious truth is relative to the individual ; 
 the way to test a religion is to live it. If the philosophy of the 
 pragmatists be right, then few forms of religious creed can claim 
 better witness to their truth than that wherein Florence Nightin- 
 gale lived and moved and had her being. She had " remodelled 
 her whole religious belief from beginning to end," and had " learnt 
 to know God" in the years immediately preceding her active 
 work in the world. Her belief helped to sustain her natural 
 courage amidst the horrors of Scutari, and the fever and the cold 
 of Balaclava. It inspired the life of arduous labour to which she 
 
 1 T. E. Brown, Old John and Other Poems, 244 
 
WAITING COURAGEOUSLY 
 
 devoted herself on returning from the East. It informed her 
 unceasing efforts for the health of the Army and the people, for 
 the reformation of hospitals, for the creation of an art of nursing. 
 Does some one doubt whether any vital force can have proceeded 
 from a belief in Law as the Thought of God, and suggest that to 
 herself as to others she was offering a stone instead of bread ? It 
 was not so. To her the religion which she found was as the 
 body and blood of the Most High.^ 
 
 ^ In the early spring of 1881 Captain Catherine Booth and 
 her intrepid lieutenants, Florence Soper, Adelaide Cox, and Euth 
 Patrick, began life in Paris. With her own hand Catherine 
 raised the flag at Kue d'Angouleme 66, in Belleville. Here was 
 a hall for six hundred, situated in a court approached by a 
 narrow street. The bulk of the audience that gathered there 
 night after night were of the artisan class. Some were young 
 men of a lower type, and from these came what disturbance there 
 was. The French sense of humour is keen, and there were many 
 lively sallies at the expense of the speakers and singers on the 
 platform. Meetings were held night after night, and for six 
 months the Capitaine was never absent except on Saturdays. 
 Those were days of fight, and she fought, to use her own phrase, 
 like "a tiger. She had to fight first her own heart. She knew 
 her capacity, and God had done great things through her in 
 England. The change from an audience of five thousand spell- 
 bound hearers in the circus of Leeds to a handful of gibing 
 ouvriers in the Belleville quarter of Paris was indeed a clashing 
 antithesis. A fortnight passed without a single penitent, and 
 Catherine was all the time so ill that it was doubtful if she would 
 be able to remain in the field. That fortnight was probably 
 the supreme trial of her faith. The work appeared so hopeless ! 
 There was nothing to see. But for the Capitaine faith meant 
 going on. It meant saying to her heart, " You may suffer, you 
 may bleed, you may break, but you shall go on." She went on, 
 believing, praying, fighting, and at last the tide of battle turned.^ 
 
 2. Let us wait with patience. Patience is just the other side 
 and the practical side of faith. Faith is the breath of life to the 
 religious man. Without faith he cannot live. But there may be, 
 and there often is, a faith which is extremely lacking in patience, 
 a faith which is even impatient, a faith which, in the name of God, 
 almost rebukes God for His leisure with the world, and with the 
 
 ^ Sir Edward Cook, The Life of Florence Nightingale, i. 488. 
 2 J. Strahan, The MaHchale (1913), 51. 
 
PSALM XXVII. 14 
 
 25 
 
 Church, and with ourselves. We know it to be a Christian duty 
 to be patient with our fellow-men ; have we ever thought of the 
 necessity and the duty of being patient with God ? Let us have 
 patience with God. And this patience, about which the Bible is 
 full, is not the sickly, complaining counterfeit of it which we often 
 hear of under the name of patience ; it is the power to suffer, the 
 power to sacrifice, the power to endure, the power to die, and, if 
 need be, sometimes harder as it is, to continue to live for His sake. 
 Let us wait God's time. If there were no other reason why we 
 must wait God's time, this is one, and one all-powerful — because He 
 knows the whole, and because we know only a part. The Psalmist 
 cries out, under protracted and aggravated trials, " Lord, how long ? " 
 but he never complains or murmurs, " Lord, this is too long ! " 
 
 ^ It is worthy of remark that Bishop King's first Charge 
 elicited warm commendation from the prelate who, of all the 
 Bishops at that time on the Bench, possessed the acutest and 
 most vigorous intellect. Bishop Magee, of Peterborough, wrote 
 on November 28, 1886 :— 
 
 "What I write specially to thank you for is simply one 
 sentence in your Charge — a very pregnant one, and to me, I 
 confess, a new one — it is, ' The Soul is impatient of the Mediatorial 
 Kingdom.' This is a thought which runs out very far and very 
 deep under all our Christian life. The ' mpatient,' instead of the 
 * patient, waiting for Christ,' is seen, when we come to think of it, 
 to be the source of no small part of our ecclesiastical and even our 
 personal errors and troubles." ^ 
 
 Say, did impatience first impel 
 
 The heaven-sent bond to break? 
 Or, couldst thou bear its hindrance well, 
 
 Loitering for Jesu's sake ? 
 
 Oh, might we know ! for sore we feel 
 
 The languor of delay, 
 When sickness lets our fainter zeal, 
 
 Or foes block up our way. 
 
 Lord ! who Thy thousand years dost wait 
 
 To work the thousandth part 
 Of Thy vast plan, for us create 
 
 With zeal a patient heart.^ 
 
 * G. W. E. Russell, Edward King, Bisliop of Lincoln, 122. 
 ^ J. H. Newman, Verses on Various Occasions, 
 
26 WAITING COURAGEOUSLY 
 
 3. Let us wait with assurance. According to our English 
 Versions, the 62nd Psalm begins with the words, " Truly my soul 
 waiteth," or " My soul waiteth only upon God." The adverbs do 
 not matfer at present, but the verb does. What the Psalmist 
 actually wrote, as we can see from the word which he used, was, 
 " My soul is silent unto God." The same expression occurs else- 
 where in the Old Testament. It is a very striking one. The 
 condition of silence before God, inward silence, with every fret 
 and murmur and disturbing thought hushed, was recognized as 
 the condition suitable for hearing the still small voice of the 
 Eternal One. Those that achieved it were rewarded. And have 
 we no experiences of our own to corroborate the testimony of 
 these Old Testament writers ? Matthew Arnold tells us that — 
 
 From the soul's subterranean depth upborne 
 As from an infinitely distant land, 
 Come airs and floating echoes and convey 
 A melancholy into all our day. 
 
 But other airs and other echoes as well are upborne from the 
 depths of the soul. There is conveyed into the day of the soul 
 that waits upon God and is silent unto Him a peace and a quiet 
 sense of assurance that passes all understanding. Language 
 cannot describe the source and nature of these inward ministries 
 of strength and consolation, but the soul knows that God has 
 responded to its waiting. 
 
 ^ " Does it hurt you severely ? " one asked of a friend who lay 
 with a broken arm. " Not when I keep still," was the answer. 
 This is the secret of much of the victoriousness we see in rejoicing 
 Christians. They conquer the pain and the bitterness by keeping 
 still. They do not ask questions, or demand to know why they 
 have trials. They believe in God, and are so sure of His love and 
 wisdom that they are pained by no doubt, no fear, no uncertainty. 
 Peace is their pillow, because they have learned just to be still. 
 Their quietness robs trial of its sharpness, sorrow of its bitterness, 
 death of its sting, and the grave of its victory 
 
 4. Let us wait with prayer. Let us call upon God and spread 
 our case before Him ; tell Him our difficulty, and plead His 
 promise of aid. In dilemmas between one duty and another, it is 
 sweet to be humble as a child, and to wait with simplicity of soul 
 
 1 J. E. Miller. 
 
PSALM XXVII. 14 
 
 27 
 
 upon the Lord. It is sure to be well with us when we feel and 
 know our own folly, and are heartily willing to be guided by 
 the will of God. Let us remember that God has always loved 
 intervals. Intervals there are generally, if not always, in His 
 best dealings with His children — intervals before He bestows 
 His greatest blessings, intervals before He answers prayer. And 
 a great part of man's education lies in these intervals. The 
 intellect is humbled, the heart is curbed, faith is trained, hopes 
 are pointed, promises are sweetened, God is magnified. And are 
 they not the growing times of mercies — the darkness brought in 
 for no other end than that the light may be seen in it ? 
 
 ^ By prayer we link ourselves on to the inexhaustible riches 
 of God. How it comes that, when I pull a switch down in my 
 study, the room is flooded with light no man can say, save that by 
 doing so I have linked my need on to the great centre of light 
 energy in the town. So, all that we can say about those who 
 keep their hearts open towards God and in the love of Christ is 
 that by this means they link their weakness on to the grace and 
 strength of the Eternal. But, mark you, the electric current does 
 not break into my room of itself when my need arises. I have to 
 make a way for it, and more, / have to keep that way open} 
 
 ^ Prayer was the white flame at the very centre of his life. 
 To the throne of Grace, with unfailing mindfulness and with 
 childlike simplicity, he would bring, day by day, his friends, his 
 people, those in special sorrow, sickness, or sin; so filling his 
 petitions with engrossed and concentrated intercession for them 
 in their needs that he became wholly forgetful of his own. Once, 
 when I had been ill, he said to me, I have prayed for you night 
 and morning for five months." And I knew that it was true. 
 In his long life it was true of thousands of others. And he 
 believed, with such intensity and simplicity of conviction as no 
 man can ever have surpassed, that every word of intercession that 
 he uttered went straight to a heavenly Father's ear, and found an 
 answering chord in a heavenly Father's heart.^ 
 
 Unanswered yet, the prayer your lips have pleaded, 
 
 In agony of heart these many years? 
 Does faith begin to fail ? Is hope departing, 
 
 And think you all in vain those falling tears? 
 Say not the Father hath not heard your prayer; 
 You shall have your desire sometime, somewhere. 
 
 ^ Archibald Alexander. 
 
 * Frances Balfour, Dr. MacOregor of St. Cvihberis, 632. 
 
28 WAITING COURAGEOUSLY 
 
 Unanswered yet, though when you first presented 
 This one petition at the Father's Throne, 
 
 It seemed you could not wait the time of asking, 
 So urgent was your heart to have it known ? 
 
 Though years have passed since then, do not despair ; 
 
 The Lord will answer you sometime, somewhere. 
 
 Unanswered yet? Nay, do not say ungranted ; 
 
 Perhaps your part is not yet wholly done; 
 The work began when first your prayer was uttered, 
 
 And God will finish what He has begun. 
 If you will keep the incense burning there, 
 His glory you will see sometime, somewhere. 
 
 Unanswered yet ? Faith cannot be unanswered, 
 Her feet are firmly planted on the rock; 
 
 Amid the wildest storms she stands undaunted. 
 Nor quails before the loudest thunder shock. 
 
 She knows Omnipotence has heard her prayer. 
 
 And cries, It shall be done — sometime, somewhere. 
 
 5. Let us wait with regularity. The most prominent feature 
 of our waiting is too often its spasmodic character. Now and 
 then we draw near to God, but by fits and starts, with long 
 intervals of indifference and prayerlessness between. And that 
 is just about as hopeless as it would be to expect to keep our- 
 selves clean by bathing once a week. Daily our strength drains 
 away, both physical and spiritual, and as the one must constantly 
 be replenished, so must the other. Even earnest bursts of effort 
 at intervals do not count for anything like so much as the quiet, 
 constant keeping in the love of God. Volcanic eruptions have 
 done something to transform the earth's surface, but not nearly so 
 much, geologists tell us, as the quiet, constant forces, the sun, the 
 rain, frost, heat, and wind. And it is by the regular daily waiting, 
 far more than by the infrequent upheaval of desire, that the 
 power of God and the likeness of Christ pass slowly but visibly 
 into the lives of His people. It is the daily meeting with God in 
 spirit, the daily thought of one's humble task as God's call to us 
 to serve Him, the daily sense that we are His children, destined 
 and called in Christ to fellowship with Him, the sense that we 
 are not alone in our little corner, but that He is all about us, so 
 that we live and move and have our being in Him, like islands in 
 
PSALM XXVII. 14 
 
 29 
 
 some great sea — it is that, repeated and continued till it becomes 
 the habit of the spirit, that transfigures life and lifts it to 
 blessedness and power. 
 
 ^ It is related of Schwabe the German astronomer that, 
 wishing to determine the relation between sun-spots and earth- 
 magnetism, he gave himself to the recording of the varying 
 appearances of the sun's surface. For forty-two years the sun 
 never rose a single morning free of clouds above the flat horizon 
 of the plain at Dessau where Schwabe lived but his patient 
 telescope was there to confront it ! The man of science believes 
 in Nature. He waits for it, in the faith that it is, and that it is 
 the rewarder of those that diligently seek it. If only Christian 
 people would realize that it is infinitely more worth their while 
 to wait thus patiently upon God, what wonders of Spirit-filled 
 lives we should see ! ^ 
 
 ^ The other day I stumbled across a little book in which he 
 wrote the names of those for whom he prayed, and the day of the 
 week on which he interceded for them. It was a revelation — for 
 one would have thought that many of those names had been 
 forgotten by him years before. There is a great unity in the list ; 
 they all sorely needed the Divine help. He also prayed daily by 
 name for the members of his family, and each worker of our 
 Church on the Foreign Field was remembered by him. With 
 the map before him he interceded for the many nations of the 
 world.2 
 
 II. 
 
 Courage. 
 
 As many as are the conflicts and perils and hardships of life, 
 so many are the uses and the forms of courage. Courage is 
 necessary, indeed, as the protector and defender of all the other 
 virtues. Courage is the standing army of the soul, which keeps 
 it from conquest, pillage, and slavery. Unless we are brave we 
 can hardly be truthful, or generous, or just, or pure, or kind, or 
 loyal. " Few persons," says a wise observer, " have the courage to 
 appear as good as they really are." You must be brave in order 
 to fulfil your own possibilities of virtue. Courage is essential to 
 
 * Archibald Alexander. 
 
 * Love cmd Life : The Story of J. Denholm Brash^ 65. 
 
WAITING COURAGEOUSLY 
 
 guard the best qualities of the soul, and to clear the way for their 
 action, and make them move with freedom and vigour. 
 
 Courage, an independent spark from Heaven's throne, 
 By which the soul stands raised, triumphant, high, alone; 
 The spring of all true acts is seated here, 
 As falsehoods draw their sordid birth from fear. 
 
 If we desire to be good, we must first of all desire to be brave, 
 that against all opposition, scorn, and danger we may move 
 straight onward to do the right. 
 
 ^ The Eev. Henry Parnaby, M.A., writes: "Only six days ago 
 I had a long talk with the surgeon who attended Principal Simon 
 in Liverpool — Dr. Armour — and he told me something very 
 characteristic of the old Principal. When his trouble had reached 
 a certain stage, Dr. Armour suggested to Dr. Simon that by a very 
 delicate and difficult operation he could be cured. The operation, 
 however, was attended with very great risk, and possibly Dr. 
 Simon would not survive. The decision was left to him, and he 
 took a week to think over it. He went off and consulted his 
 family, and returned a week later to announce that he had decided 
 not to undergo the operation. His reason was this. He was in 
 such dreadful and contmuous pain that he felt he would go into 
 the operation with eagerness, because it promised an end of his 
 trouble either by cure or death. He felt that he would welcome 
 this as an end of his pain, and that therefore he would be dis- 
 playing an unwillingness to endure the purifying pain which he 
 accepted as a means of spiritual discipline from God. Dr. Armour 
 assures me that never in all his wide experience has he found 
 another patient who could give so courageous and honourable a 
 reason for declining to undergo an operation.^ 
 
 ^ One winter night the Mar^chale and two young comrades, 
 Blanche Young and Kate Patrick, went out with shawls on their 
 heads, and made their way to one of the boulevard caf^s. The 
 leader passed the door, and passed it again. She turned to her 
 lieutenants and said, "You have never known your Mardchale 
 till now ; you see what a coward she is ! " 
 
 " 'No, no, no ! " they both protested. 
 
 At last she put her hand on the door, pushed it open, and went 
 in. A man in a white apron was selling drink. Going up to him, 
 she said, " May I sing something ? " 
 
 He stared open-mouthed. 
 
 * F. J. Powicke, David Wortlungton Simon, 297. 
 
PSALM XXVII. 14 
 
 31 
 
 Trembling from head to foot, she repeated, " I should like to 
 sing something," 
 Very well ! " 
 She began : 
 
 Le ciel est ma belle patrie, 
 Les anges y font leur s^jour; 
 
 Le soldat qui lutte et qui prie 
 Y sera bientot k son tour. 
 
 While she sang, Blanche chimed in with her guitar and her 
 second voice. As they proceeded, the smoking, drinking, and 
 card-playing ceased, and every face was turned towards them. 
 They sang on : 
 
 En marche, en marche, 
 Soldats, vers la patrie ! 
 En marche, en marche, 
 Soldats, vers la patrie ! 
 
 When they had finished the hymn, the Marechale thanked 
 her audience, adding that they could hear her again at Eue Auber 
 Hall ; and that she knew a Friend, of whom she wished to tell 
 them. As she and her comrades turned to walk out, the man in 
 the white apron bowed, as if they had done him a service. 
 
 " May I come another time ? " said the Mardchale. 
 
 " Certainly, Mademoiselle ! " ^ 
 
 1. What is the source of courage ? It is waiting on the Lord. 
 That is the truest and deepest source of courage. To believe that 
 He is, and that He has made us for Himself ; to love Him, and 
 give ourselves up to Him, because He is holy and true and wise 
 and good and brave beyond all human thought ; to lean upon 
 Him and trust Him and rest in Him, with confidence that He will 
 never leave us nor forsake us : to work for Him, and suffer for 
 His sake, and be faithful to His service — that is the way to learn 
 courage. Without God what can we do ? We are frail, weak, 
 tempted, mortal. The burdens of life will crush us, the evils of 
 sin will destroy us, the tempests of trouble will overwhelm us, 
 the darkness of death will engulf us. But if we are joined to 
 God, we can resist and endure and fight and conquer in His 
 strength. This is what the Psalmist means in the text, " Wait on 
 the Lord; be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine 
 heart." 
 
 1 J. Strahan, The Marechale (1913), 114. 
 
WAITING COURAGEOUSLY 
 
 Had we the strength ! — Have we perhaps the strength, 
 
 Who have all else beside? Are we not men? 
 
 Is not the Universe our dwelling-place? 
 
 And therefore perfectly in truth for us 
 
 Is not the utmost wholly possible ? . . . 
 
 O, with the baffled and the resolute 
 
 Vanguard of liberal humanity, — 
 
 0 to so purge our lives of the mild hours, 
 
 Our hearts of humble longings and meek hopes, 
 
 Our minds of customs and credulities, 
 
 That we may find the days wholly fulfilled 
 
 And lightened of the Spirit — all the days 
 
 And all things and ourselves, rich and revealed 
 
 In the majestic meanings and the might 
 
 And passion and pure purpose of the soul ! ^ 
 
 U Torstensohn was one of the generals formed in the school of 
 Gustavus Adolphus. To him that great commander transmitted 
 the prosecution of the Thirty Years' War. Physically, he was 
 so shattered and dislocated by disease and deformity that he 
 could neither walk nor ride on horseback. He had to be carried 
 at the head of his forces in a litter. Yet no commander of his 
 age was so resistless and terrible in his onset and so invariably 
 victorious. Let us be loath to accept infirmity as an excuse for 
 uselessness. A naturalist asks : •* How is it that the golden- 
 crested wren, apparently so weak and helpless, can fly right 
 across the North Sea from Norway ? " Because God knows how to 
 fix strange energy within delicate organisms. Our very infirmities 
 through resolution and grace may give us special efficacy.^ 
 
 2. How does waiting on God sustain our courage ? 
 
 (1) Our heart is strengthened by waiting upon God, because 
 we receive a mysterious strength through the incoming of the 
 Eternal Spirit into our souls. No man can explain this, but 
 many of us know what it is. How wonderfully do the secret 
 springs of omnipotence break into the feeble soul and fill it with 
 might in the inner man. Through the sacred anointing of the 
 Holy Ghost we have been made to shout for joy. He that made 
 us has put His hand a second time to the work, and restored to us 
 the joy of His salvation, filled our emptiness, removed our weak- 
 ness, and triumphed in us gloriously. 
 
 ^ G. C. Lodge, Poems and Dramas, ii. 137. 
 a W. L. Watkinson. 
 
PSALM XXVII. 14 
 
 33 
 
 ^ That these days at the Keswick Convention in 1889 were a 
 turning-point in Mr. Macgregor's life, there is not the smallest 
 doubt. That they made his later ministry what it was, is equally 
 certain. To say that he sometimes appeared to claim for this 
 experience and its effects more than the facts altogether warranted, 
 is only to say that, though remarkably enlightened and strengthened 
 by God's Spirit, he remained a fallible human being. But no one 
 who knew George Macgregor, either as a man or a minister, before 
 that crisis and after it, could question that he found then a new 
 secret of strength both for his own life and for his work.^ 
 
 (2) Waiting upon God makes men grow small, and dwarfs the 
 world and all its affairs, till we see their real littleness. Set your 
 great troubles before the infinite God, and they will dwarf into 
 such little things that you will never notice them again. " He 
 taketh up the isles as a very little thing," and " the nations are as 
 a drop of a bucket " ; and this great God teaches us to look at 
 earthly things in the same light as He does, till, though the 
 whole world should be against us, we can smile at its rage. Our 
 worst ills are utterly despised when we learn to measure them by 
 the line of the Eternal. 
 
 Sometimes in the country on a night in early summer you 
 may shut the cottage door to step out into an immense darkness 
 which palls heaven and earth. Going forward into the embrace 
 of the great gloom, you are as a babe swaddled by the hands 
 of night into helpless acquiescence. Your feet tread an unseen 
 path, your hands grasp at a void, or shrink from the contact 
 they cannot realize ; your eyes are holden ; your voice would die 
 in your throat did you seek to rend the veil of that impenetrable 
 silence. 
 
 Shut in by the intangible dark, we are brought up against 
 those worlds within worlds blotted out by our concrete daily life. 
 The working of the great microcosm at which we peer dimly 
 through the little window of science; the wonderful, breathing 
 earth ; the pulsing, throbbing sap ; the growing fragrance shut in 
 the calyx of to-morrow's flower; the heart-beat of a sleeping 
 world that we dream that we know ; and around, above, and inter- 
 penetrating all, the world of dreams, of angels and of spirits. 
 
 It was this world which Jacob saw on the first night of his 
 exile, and again when he wrestled in Peniel until the break of 
 day. It was this world which Elisha saw with open eyes ; which 
 Job knew when darkness fell on him ; which Ezekiel gazed into 
 
 ^ Duncan C. Macgregor, George H. C. Macgregor, 111. 
 PS. xxv.-cxix. — 3 
 
34 
 
 WAITING COURAGEOUSLY 
 
 from his place among the captives; which Daniel beheld as he 
 stood alone by the great river, the river Hiddekel. 
 
 For the moment we have left behind the realm of question 
 and explanation, of power over matter and the exercise of bodily 
 faculties ; and passed into darkness alight with visions we cannot 
 see, into silence alive with voices we cannot hear. Like helpless 
 men we set our all on the one thing left us, and lift up our 
 hearts, knowing that we are but a mere speck among a myriad 
 worlds, yet greater than the sum of them ; having our roots in 
 the dark places of the earth, but our branches in the sweet airs 
 of heaven.^ 
 
 (3) Nothing can give us greater courage than a sincere 
 affection for our Lord and His work. Courage is sure to 
 abound where love is fervent. Look among the mild and gentle 
 creatures of the brute creation and see how bold they are when 
 once they become mothers and have to defend their offspring. 
 A hen will fight for her chicks, though at another time she is 
 one of the most timid of birds. Gilbert White, in his Natural 
 History of Selhorne, tells of a raven that was hatching her 
 young in a tree. The woodman began to fell it, but there she 
 sat ; the blows of the axe shook the tree, but she never moved, 
 and when it fell she was still upon her nest. Love will make 
 the most timid creature strong ; and if you love Christ you will 
 defy all fear, and count all hazards undergone for Him to be your 
 joy. In this sense, too, perfect love casteth out fear ; it " hopeth 
 all things, endureth all things," and continues still to wait upon 
 the Lord. 
 
 ^ In February 1894 she had two of the finest campaigns of 
 her life — at Havre and Kouen. The turbulent beginning at 
 Havre was graphically described by her friend the Princess 
 Malsoff, who accompanied the Marechale in order to have a 
 taste of the vie apostolique. " There was a great tumult in the 
 ' Lyre Havraise.' The Marechale had coipie to publish the word 
 of love and salvation. An immense crowd forced itself into the 
 hall, and who would have dared believe that they had all come 
 simply to present the world with the most scandalous, the most 
 vulgar and odious spectacle that one can imagine ? When the 
 Marechale rose with great dignity and calm . . . she could not 
 make herself heard. Every word was interrupted ; one could 
 see that it was a prepared stroke. One might imagine oneself to 
 
 ^ Michael Faiiless, The Eoadmcnder, 86. 
 
 I 
 
PSALM XXVII. 14 
 
 35 
 
 be in an asylum. But she did not let herself be discouraged ; she 
 persevered ; she walked straight into the midst of the infuriated 
 crowd. She did not tame these wild beasts, but she came out 
 victorious all the same. Tall, beautiful, calm, sustained by her 
 divine conviction and with the strength of a great heart, she 
 came back again and again — our admirable Marechale ! ... In 
 the midst of this infernal and ridiculous tumult a few dite souls 
 felt a noble enthusiasm for this young woman who battled alone 
 against a hostile and wicked crowd. They came to grasp her 
 hand, to express their admiration for her and their shame for 
 those who had broken the simplest laws of hospitahty, politeness, 
 and civilization. Blessed be our Marechale; in her the whole 
 Arm6e du Salut was personified that night in its strength, its 
 faith, its persevering love." ^ 
 
 The Master knows ; He can but see 
 How willingly, how joyfully 
 I would within His vineyard stay 
 To bear the burden of the day. 
 And yet He bids me stand apart 
 With folded hands and longing heart. 
 I see at morn the happy throng 
 Pass by my door with jest and song. 
 They seem so glad, they seem so gay, 
 So ready for the busy day. 
 
 And when at eve they homeward go 
 Sometimes with weary steps and slow. 
 But laden with the sweet new wine. 
 And purple clusters of the vine. 
 And precious sheaves of golden grain 
 To recompense their toil and pain; 
 But that the Lord doth choose for me, 
 I fain within their ranks would be. 
 
 Yet though I can but hope and wait, 
 
 I am not sad or desolate. 
 
 For every day with bounty free 
 
 The Master bringeth gifts to me. 
 
 From out His life there seems to shine 
 
 A wondrous glory into mine. 
 
 My life ! how dark and how unclean. 
 
 How poor and fruitless has it been. 
 
 1 J. Stralian, The Marechale (1913), 62. 
 
WAITING COURAGEOUSLY 
 
 But sure the seed He planted there 
 That should have grown so tall and fair 
 Must now, at last, begin to spring 
 Beneath such heavenly nourishing. 
 
 And if, perchance, I fail to see 
 The thought of God concerning me, 
 I leave in peace my fallow field 
 Till love divine shall make it yield. 
 And when at last the corn and wine 
 Of all His harvests shall be mine, 
 Then shall I know, or soon, or late, 
 They also serve who stand and wait. 
 
The Transience of Sorrow. 
 
 37 
 
Literature. 
 
 Crosthwait, E. G. S., Heavenward Steps, 78. 
 
 Davies (D.), Talks with Men, Women and Children, i. 17. 
 
 Hutton (R. E.), The Crown of Christ, i. 547. 
 
 Ingram (A. F. W.), The Secrets of Strength, 199. 
 
 Maclaren (A.), The Wearied Christ, 241. 
 
 Raleigli (A.), The Way to the City, 79. 
 
 Rawnsley (R. D. B.), Sermons Preached in Country Churches, i. 118; 
 iii. 120. 
 
 Spurgeon (C. H.), Morning by Morning, 134. 
 Wilkinson (J. B.), Mission Sermons, ii. 255. 
 Winterbotliam (R.), Sermons, 214. 
 
 Christian World Pulpit, xxxiii. 233 (H. P. Liddon) ; xxxv. 314 
 
 (R. B. Brindley). 
 Homiletic Review, xlix. 222 (F. Smith). 
 Treasury (New York), xxi. 951 (G. B. F. Hallock). 
 
 38 
 
I 
 
 The Transience of Sorrow. 
 
 His anger is but for a moment; 
 
 In his favour is life : 
 
 Weeping may tarry for the night, 
 
 But joy Cometh in the morning. — Ps. xxx. 5. 
 
 There is an obvious antithesis in the first part of the text, 
 between " his anger " and " his favour." Probably there is a 
 similar antithesis between " a moment " and " life." For although 
 the word rendered " life " does not usually mean a lifetime, it 
 may have that signification, and the evident intention of contrast 
 seems to require it here. So, then, the meaning of the first part 
 of the text is, " the anger lasts for a moment ; the favour lasts 
 for a lifetime." The perpetuity of the one and the brevity of the 
 other are the Psalmist's thought. Then, if we pass to the second 
 part of the text, we observe that there is a double antithesis there 
 also. " Weeping " is set over against "joy " ; the " night " against 
 the " morning." And the first of these two contrasts is the more 
 striking if we observe that the word "joy" means, literally, "a 
 joyful shout," so that the voice which was lifted in weeping is con- 
 ceived of as now being heard in exultant praise. Then, still further, 
 the expression "may endure" literally means "come to lodge." 
 So that Weeping and Joy are personified. Two guests come — 
 one, dark-robed and approaching at the fitting season for such — 
 " the night " ; the other bright, coming with all things fresh and 
 sunny, in the dewy morn. The guest of the night is Weeping ; 
 the guest that takes its place in the morning is Gladness. 
 
 Thus the two clauses of the text suggest substantially the 
 same thought, and that is the persistence of joy and the transitori- 
 ness of sorrow. The one speaks of the succession of emotions in 
 the man; the other, of the successive aspects of the Divine 
 dealings which occasion these. The whole is a leaf out of the 
 
 Psalmist's own experience. The psalm commemorates his 
 
 39 
 
40 THE TRANSIENCE OF SORROW 
 
 deliverance from some affliction, probably a sickness. That is 
 long gone past ; and the tears that it caused have long since 
 dried up. But this shout of joy of his has lasted all these 
 centuries, and is like to be immortal. 
 
 ^ It was Paget himself who had taught us, years before, 
 through his best-known volume. The Spirit of Discipline^ to con- 
 sider carefully the meanings and contrasts of accidie y and of 
 tristitia, and of " the sorrow of the world." I asked him once — it 
 was on a walk over the Col de Checouri at Courmayeur — to 
 expand for me afresh his understanding of the phrase he used to 
 quote from Spinoza: Tristitia est hominis transitio a majore ad 
 minorem perfectionem. He answered gravely and almost in a 
 whisper, " I can never understand Spinoza, but I am quite certain 
 he was right there." ^ 
 
 1. 
 
 Seasons of Sorrow. 
 
 1. Sorrow comes in the night. It comes in the night of 
 worldly reverses. These may not be the worst misfortunes in life, 
 but only those who experience them know their poignancy. It is 
 no small thing to have the savings of a lifetime swept away. 
 Perhaps the storm came, the flood fell, the fire burned, a friend 
 proved false, the crash of plans arrived, a blunder in judgment 
 happened — and the accumulation of years has gone. It repre- 
 sented our toil and tears and thought and love. But it perished 
 in an hour. It promised us happiness and independence in old 
 age. But the promise failed. Tears do not turn dust to 
 diamonds. Eiches on wings fly faster from us than to us. To 
 cry over fortune lost is no wiser than for the miller to weep over 
 water that has flowed past. 
 
 2. Sorrow becomes our guest in the night of broken health. 
 The powers once were vigorous. We ran to our task. Caution 
 was scorned. Life seemed made to combat. We had the strength 
 of Hercules. But something broke. We came against a stone 
 wall. We reached a limit. Our wings were clipped. Suddenly 
 we discovered that the race must be won by swifter feet than 
 ours. Possibly we complain as a recent prisoner of pain who 
 
 * Archbishop Davidson, in Francis Paget, Bishop qf Oxford, xviii. 
 
PSALM XXX. 5 
 
 41 
 
 said, " I cannot see why people should be born into a world like 
 this to suffer. Could I have seen my life from the beginning, and 
 had I been consulted as to whether I should live to suffer, I 
 certainly would have chosen never to have been." Possibly we 
 have money ; but pain hurts the rich and poor alike. Possibly we 
 are religious ; but pain hurts both the infidel and the Christian. 
 Possibly we deny pain or endure it as heroically as Epictetus, the 
 Phrygian philosopher-slave, in the Eoman court, who said, when 
 his master with some instrument of torture cruelly twisted his 
 servant's leg, " If you go on you will break it " ; and who also said 
 calmly, without expressing any of the anguish he felt when his 
 brutal master did go on, " I told you that you would break it." 
 Possibly you despise the old suffering house in which you live as 
 did this same ancient thinker, and define yourself as " an ethereal 
 existence staggering under the burden of a corpse." But what- 
 ever attitude we sustain towards pain, it wrings the stifled cry 
 from our heart, and our face often feels the burning touch of 
 a tear. 
 
 ^ Heine, suffering great physical agony, living in his mattress 
 grave, has given us verse upon verse of sweet sadness — sometimes 
 bitter in harsh complaining against God and man ; while James 
 Thomson, in his great poem on London, " The City of Dreadful 
 Night," even says that, could he not have made a less miserable 
 world, he would not be God for all His glory — a horrible utterance, 
 but yet the answer of a man who has been made heartsick by the 
 poverty and misery of East London, the sight of innumerable 
 children who never know childhood, so soon does life curse them.^ 
 
 3. Sorrow comes to tarry with us in the night of bereavement. 
 It may be only for an infant whose beauty was never caught by 
 a camera, and whose innocent feet were too fair to walk other 
 than streets of the city of God. It may be for a friend or a lover 
 who, in the sweet old days, went out of our life and left us for an 
 imperishable treasure only the sacred memories of hours that can 
 never return. After these many years, were a cross-section made 
 of our soul, we feel that the image of that blessed being would be 
 found mirrored thereon. It may be for a mother, whose voice 
 will never again this side the stars call her child ; or for a father, 
 whose big, brave life will no more bid us follow the path of virtue. 
 
 1 F. Lynch. 
 
42 THE TRANSIENCE OF SORROW 
 
 We know that to-day in the little city of the dead, hard by the 
 city of the living, sleeps the dust of our sacred dead, or under 
 other skies they who are dead to us walk forgetful of old ties and 
 obligations. So onward we all go, each bearing his burden of 
 sorrow. 
 
 If In some instances the Indian mothers literally cry their 
 eyes out ; and if you ask a blind woman how she lost her vision, 
 she may answer that it was by weeping too hard for her lost 
 relatives, and dimness of sight is attributed to the same cause. 
 The wailings of an Indian over his lost relative, and especially of 
 a mother over her lost children, are piercing and heart-rending ; 
 but it is pleasant to see the contrast in this respect between those 
 who are still ignorant of the Gospel and such as have received it. 
 The Christian converts have now learned to accept their bereave- 
 ments as from God's hand in silence and submission, and their 
 mute grief is more impressive than the loud lamentation of the 
 heathen.^ 
 
 ^ Scarlet fever in its most virulent form appeared in Carlisle 
 (where Dr. Tait was then Dean), and, of the six little daughters 
 whose presence had brought radiance to the Deanery, the heart- 
 broken parents were called, within the space of a few weeks, to 
 part with all except the infant who had just been born. One by 
 one, between the 10th of March and the 10th of April, they were 
 laid in the single grave in Stanwix Churchyard. The last entry 
 which has been quoted from the diary was dated March 2. The 
 entry which immediately succeeds it is as follows : — 
 
 " Thursday, Sth May 1856. — I have not had the heart to make 
 any entry in my journal now for above nine weeks. When last 
 I wrote I had six daughters on earth ; now I have one, an infant. 
 0 God, Thou hast dealt very mysteriously with us. We have 
 been passing through deep waters : our feet are well-nigh gone. 
 But though Thou slay us, yet will we trust in Thee. . . . They 
 are gone from us, all but my beloved Craufurd and the babe. 
 Thou hast re-claimed the lent jewels. Yet, 0 Lord, shall I not 
 thank Thee now ? I will thank Thee not only for the children 
 Thou hast left to us, but for those Thou hast re-claimed. I thank 
 Thee for the blessing of the last ten years, and for all the sweet 
 memories of their little lives — memories how fragrant with every 
 blissful, happy thought. I thank Thee for the full assurance that 
 each has gone to the arms of the Good Shepherd, whom each 
 loved according to the capacity of her years. I thank Thee for 
 the bright hopes of a happy re-union, when we shall meet to part 
 
 * Bishop W. C. Bompas, Northern Lights on the Bible, 55. 
 
PSALM XXX. 5 
 
 43 
 
 no more. 0 Lord, for Jesus Christ's sake, comfort our desolate 
 hearts. May we be a united family still in heart through the 
 communion of saints — through Jesus Christ our Lord." ^ 
 
 4. Sorrow comes in the night of the consciousness of sin. In 
 the dim glimmer of the fire on the hearth the angel of penitence 
 brings to our notice stains on our garment which, she assures us, 
 would look a thousand times worse if we saw them in the proper 
 light — saw them as others see them, and, above all, as God sees 
 them. She tells us that such marks can never be removed ; that 
 there are also upon our countenance ugly scars which will always 
 disfigure it ; that it is a hopeless thing when a man has lost his 
 good name ; that when that is lost there is nothing worth keep- 
 ing. She tells us, too, that even those stains which others may 
 not detect God sees ; that sin is sin, whether it be secret or open ; 
 and that, the wide world over and in every age, " the wages of sin 
 is death." 
 
 Yearly I till the vale and sow the seed, 
 
 But in the furrow rots the golden grain; 
 
 My labour is accursed, and all in vain, — 
 The very earth revolteth at my deed. 
 God saith no man shall slay me, though I plead 
 
 Daily for death. He placed this scarlet stain 
 
 Here on my brow, and agonizing pain 
 Gnaws me beneath it — yet He gives no heed. 
 Enoch reproacheth me — the guileless lad — 
 
 With eyes too like that other's, long since dead; 
 
 Eemorse engulfs me in her sanguine flood; 
 I build this City, else I should go mad; 
 
 But, as I work, the frowning walls turn red 
 
 And all the towers drip crimson with his blood.^ 
 
 IL 
 
 The Sojourn of Sorrow. 
 
 1. Sorrow always comes with a mission. It has a message 
 from God to human life. You may get two diametrically opposite 
 motions out of the same machine. The same power will send one 
 
 ^ Life of Ardibisho]} Tait, i. 189. 
 2 Lloyd Mifflin. 
 
 I 
 
44 THE TRANSIENCE OF SORROW 
 
 wheel revolving from right to left, and another from left to right, 
 but they are co-operant to grind out at the far end the one pro- 
 duct. It is the same revolution of the earth that brings blessed 
 lengthening days and growing summer, and that cuts short the 
 sun's course and brings declining days and increasing cold. It is 
 the same motion that hurls a comet close to the burning sun and 
 sends it wandering away out into the fields of astronomical space, 
 beyond the ken of telescope, and almost beyond the reach of 
 thought. And so one uniform Divine purpose fills the life, and 
 there are no interruptions, however brief, to the steady, con- 
 tinuous flow of God's outpoured blessings. All is love and favour. 
 Anger is masked love, and sorrow has the same source and mission 
 as joy. It takes all sorts of weather to make a year, and all 
 tend to the same issue of ripened harvests and full barns. 
 
 ^ I grudged not our noble, lovely child, but rather do delight 
 that such a seed should blossom and bear in the kindly and 
 kindred paradise of my God. And why should not I speak of 
 thee, my Edward ! seeing it was in the season of thy sickness and 
 death the Lord did reveal in me the knowledge and hope and 
 desire of His Son from heaven ? Glorious exchange ! He took 
 my son to His own more fatherly bosom, and revealed in my 
 bosom the sure expectation and faith of His own eternal Son ! 
 Dear season of my life, ever to be remembered, when I knew the 
 sweetness and fruitfulness of such joy and sorrow ! ^ 
 
 ^ " We will not complain of Dante's miseries," said Carlyle ; 
 " had all gone well with him as he wished it, Florence would have 
 had another prosperous Lord Mayor, but the world would have 
 lost the Divina Commedia." 
 
 ^ There came to Glasgow, not so long ago, a pianist of an 
 excellent reputation. I read the Herald's criticism on him, and 
 there was one thing in it that I noted specially. The Herald said 
 that he had always been brilliant — always been wonderful as an 
 executant — but now there was a depth of feeling in him that had 
 never been present in his work before. A day or two afterwards, 
 preaching in a suburb, I met a relative of the pianist. And we 
 fell to talk of him, and of the Herald, and of the Herald's 
 criticism on him. And he said to me, "Did you notice that? 
 And do you know what was the secret of the change ? It was the 
 death of his mother eighteen months ago" He was an only son, 
 unmarried, and he had been simply devoted to his mother. And 
 
 ^ Edward Irving, in Life by Mrs. Oliphant, i. 247. 
 
PSALM XXX. 5 
 
 45 
 
 then she died, and he was left alone, and all the deeps were 
 broken up in him. And now he played as only he can play who 
 knows what life and death are, and what sorrow is.^ 
 
 The dark brown mould's upturned 
 
 By the sharp-pointed plow, 
 And I've a lesson learned. 
 
 My life is but a field 
 
 Stretched out beneath God's sky, 
 Some harvest rich to yield. 
 
 Where grows the golden grain, 
 
 Where faith, — where sympathy? 
 In a furrow cut by pain.^ 
 
 2. Sorrow tarries only for the night. It takes its departure 
 whenever its mission is fulfilled. A thunder-storm is very short 
 when measured against the long summer day in which it crashes ; 
 and very few days have thunder-storms. It must be a bad climate 
 where half the days are rainy. If we were to take a chart and 
 prick out upon it the line of our voyage, we should find that the 
 spaces in which the weather was tempestuous were brief and few 
 indeed as compared with those in which it was sunny and calm. 
 
 ^ Eeferring to the discipline which God's love makes Him use, 
 David says, " For his anger is but for a moment : his favour is for 
 a lifetime. Weeping may come in to lodge at even, but joy 
 Cometh in the morning." There may be weeping. There shall be 
 joy. Weeping won't stay long. There is a morning coming, 
 always a morning coming, with the sunshine and the chorus of 
 the birds. Love's discipling touch that seems at the moment like 
 anger is only for a moment. (The printer wanted to change that 
 word " discipling " to " disciplining " ; but God's tenderness comes 
 to us anew when we realize that disciplining with its sharp edge 
 means the same as discipling, with its softer, warmer touch.) 
 The loving favour is for always, a lifetime of eternal life.^ 
 
 ^ A tourist writes of stopping at Giesbach to look at the 
 wonders of its waterfalls. The party had to pass over one of 
 the falls on a slender bridge through the drenching water, with the 
 wild torrents dashing beneath. It was a trying experience. But 
 
 1 G. H. Morrison, The Afterglow of God, 92. 
 
 * M. D. Babcock, Thoughts for Every-Day Living, 167. 
 
 * S. D. Gordon, Quiet Talks on Service, 210. 
 
46 
 
 THE TRANSIENCE OF SORROW 
 
 once through, a glorious picture burst upon them. There were 
 rainbows above, beneath, and circling on all sides. So the spray 
 of sorrow falls now, and we may have to walk through floods and 
 pitiless torrents, and all may seem a strange, inexplicable mystery. 
 But there will come a time when we shall have passed through 
 these showers of grief, and when we shall stand amid the 
 splendour of rainbows on the shores of glory. Then we shall 
 understand, and see love in every pang and tear.^ 
 
 From the sunshine of Thy dwelling 
 Thou hast sent me this new day, 
 Laden with Thy love excelling, 
 Tidings of Thy glory telling 
 To refresh my way. 
 
 Good and perfect gifts are lying 
 
 Wrapt within its folds of light, 
 Pledges of a faith undying, 
 That earth's sorrow and its sighing 
 Will but last a night.^ 
 
 S. There is a balance of good in the world, using the word 
 "good" in the lowest sense, that is, looking merely on man's 
 animal life, and regarding him only as a denizen, for a little, of 
 this material world. Men are busy, men are happy ; far more 
 happy, at least, than miserable. Some few are miserable utterly ; 
 all are more or less unhappy at times, and for a little. Yes ! that 
 is just it, just what the text says — " for a little " ; the dark time is 
 "for a moment." The brighter times stretch on, and flow into 
 each other, and go far to fill up the life. 
 
 ^ The proportion of solid matter needed to colour the Irwell 
 is very little in comparison with the whole of the stream. But 
 the current carries it, and a trace of dye-stuff will stain miles of 
 the turbid stream. Memory and anticipation beat the metal thin, 
 and make it cover an enormous space. And the misery is that, 
 somehow, we have better memories for sad hours than for joyful 
 ones, and it is easier to get accustomed to " blessings," as we call 
 them, and to lose the poignancy of their sweetness because they , 
 become familiar, than it is to apply the same process to our 
 sorrows, and thus to take the edge otf them. The rose's prickles 
 are felt in the flesh longer than its fragrance lives in the nostrils, 
 
 * J. E,. Miller, Week-Day Religion, 81. 
 ^ G. Matheson, Sacred Songs, 57. 
 
PSALM XXX. 5 
 
 47 
 
 or its hue in the eye. Men have long memories for their pains as 
 compared with their remembrance of their sorrows.^ 
 
 If To her friend Miss Nicholson, whose sympathy brought her 
 much strength and peace, Florence Nightingale wrote in 1846 : 
 " My imagination is so filled with the misery of this world that 
 the only thing in which to labour brings any return, seems to me 
 helping and sympathizing there) and all that poets sing of the 
 glories of this world appears to me untrue : all the people I see 
 are eaten up with care or poverty or disease. I know that it was 
 God who created the good, and man the evil, which was not the 
 will of God, but the necessary consequence of His leaving free- 
 will to man. I know that misery is the alphabet of fire, in which 
 history, with its warning hand, writes in flaming letters the conse- 
 quences of Evil (the Kingdom of Man), and that, without its 
 glaring light, we should never see the path into the Kingdom of 
 God, or heed the directing guide-posts." ^ 
 
 III. 
 
 The Supplanter of Sorrow. 
 
 1. "Joy Cometh in the morning." There are two figures 
 presented before us, the dark-robed and the bright-garmented. 
 The one is the guest of the night, the other is the guest of the 
 morning. The verb which occurs in the first clause of the second 
 half of the text is not repeated in the second, and so the words 
 may be taken in two ways. They may either express how Joy, 
 the morning guest, comes, and turns out the evening visitant, or 
 they may suggest how we took Sorrow in when the night fell, to 
 sit by the fireside, but when morning dawned — who is this sitting 
 in her place, smiling as we look at her ? It is Sorrow transfigured, 
 and her name is changed into Joy. Either the substitution or the 
 transformation may be supposed to be in the Psalmist's mind. 
 Both are true. 
 
 \ Does not the whole teaching of the Cross say that sorrow 
 and pain alone wake us up to reality, and that trial is a truer 
 refiner of character than pleasure ? Of course, this is not our first 
 impression; it needs a revelation to tell it, or at all events to 
 interpret our own experience. You have a proof of that in a 
 
 ^ A. Maclaren, The Wearied Christ, 243. 
 
 * Sir Edward Cook, The Life of Florence Nightingale, i. 58. 
 
48 THE TRANSIENCE OF SORROW 
 
 child's wonder at the expression, " Blessed are they that mourn " ; 
 for how should a happy, careless child divine such a mystery? 
 Life alone can apply the meaning of these words of Christ, or 
 explain how true they are ; for, indeed, they are only subjectively 
 true, deriving their truth not from sorrow and pain in themselves, 
 but from the tempers on which they fall ; so that they are not 
 true always — to some never true. Yet how deep they are, and 
 how such convictions alone can make this life intelligible or 
 tolerable ! That is a blessed faith which feels that there cannot 
 be clouds and gloom for ever — which, ever resting in conviction of 
 what God is, hopes and knows that "joy cometh in the morning." ^ 
 
 Say not that darkness is the doom of light, 
 That every sun must sink in night's abyss, 
 While every golden day declines to this, 
 
 To die and pass at evening out of sight. 
 
 Say rather that the morning ends the night, 
 That death must die beneath the dayspring's kiss — 
 Whilst dawn the powers of darkness shall dismiss. 
 
 And put their dusky armaments to flight. 
 
 Man measures life in this wise; first the morn, 
 And secondly the noontide's perfect prime, 
 And lastly night, when all things fade away : 
 
 But God, ere yet the sons of men were born. 
 Showed forth a better way of marking time — 
 "The evening and the morning were the day."^ 
 
 2. We can anticipate the morning even in our night of sorrow. 
 Even in the midst of the snow and cold and darkness of Arctic 
 regions, the explorers build houses for themselves of the very 
 blocks of ice, and within are warmth and light and comfort and 
 vitality, while around is a dreary waste. There may be two 
 currents in the great ocean ; a cold one may set from the Pole 
 and threaten to chill and freeze all life out, but from the Equator 
 there will be a warm one which will more than counterbalance 
 the inrush of the cold. And so it is possible for us, even when 
 things about us are dark and gloomy, and flesh and natural 
 sensibilities all proclaim to us the necessity of sadness — it is 
 possible for us to be aware of a central blessedness, not boisterous, 
 but so grave and calm that the world cannot discriminate between 
 it and sadness, which yet its possessors know to be blessedness 
 
 ^ Life and Letters of the Rev. F. W. Robertson, 281. 
 
 2 Ellen Thorneycroft Towler, Verses, Wise or Otherwise, 200. 
 
PSALM XXX. 5 
 
 49 
 
 unmingled. Left alone, we may have a companion ; in our 
 ignorance we maybe enlightened; and in the murkiest night of 
 our sorrow we may have, burning cheerily within our hearts, a 
 light unquenchable. 
 
 ^ A traveller entered Milan Cathedral at the dawn of day. 
 The sunbeams fell on the eastern windows. Every pane of 
 glass revealed its beauty. The images of apostle, prophet, angel, 
 and Christ were seen in all their glory. The sun swept on to 
 his zenith and then drove his chariot behind the western Alps. 
 As he did so he flung his beams upon the western windows of the 
 great shrine. Then the glories they contained appeared. Not a 
 figure remained without its light. All the richness of colour and 
 symbolism appeared. So the passing of time and the shining of 
 the consolations of faith into a life transform sorrow into joy and 
 gloom into glory.^ 
 
 Oh, deem not they are blest alone 
 Whose lives a peaceful tenor keep; 
 
 The Power who pities man, hath shown 
 A blessing for the eyes that weep. 
 
 The light of smiles shall fill again 
 The lids that overflow with tears; 
 
 And weary hours of woe and pain 
 Are promises of happier years. 
 
 There is a day of sunny rest 
 
 For every dark and troubled night: 
 
 And grief may hide an evening guest. 
 But joy shall come with early light.^ 
 
 ^ F. Smith, in Homiletic Review^ xlix. 224. 
 2 W. C. Bryant, Poems, 39. 
 
 PS. xxv.-cxix. — 4 
 
KooM TO Live. 
 
 5' 
 
 •1 
 -. 
 
 1 
 
Literature. 
 
 Adams (J.), Sei'mons in Syntax, 51. 
 Ainsworth (P. C), The Pilgrim Church, 201. 
 Clow (W. M.), The Secret of the Lord, 333. 
 Ellis (J.), Through Christ to Life, 52. 
 Miller (J. K), Week- Day Religion, 1. 
 Morrison (G. H.), The Afterglow of God, 143. 
 
 Christian World Pulpit, Ixxix. 253 (B. J. Gibbon) ; Ixxx. 158 (C. F. 
 Perry). 
 
 Treasury (New York), xii. 175 (T. W. Anderson). 
 
 5? 
 
Room to Live. 
 
 Thou hast set my feet in a large place.— Ps. xxxi. 8. 
 
 The idea is common in the Psalms of distress as restraint, irksome 
 confinement. The man in trouble is shut up : he is in a strait 
 place. Consequently the idea of deliverance takes the form of 
 enlargement. The distressed man is led out of a narrow gorge 
 into a wide plain. He dwells now in a broad place. He enjoys 
 the sense of ample space. "Thou hast set my feet in a large 
 place." We have the same figure, although our use of it is 
 perhaps not so common, in our own language. We talk of 
 " straitened circumstances," and again of " room to breathe " and 
 " elbow room." 
 
 I. 
 
 Straitened Circumstances. 
 
 There are agencies and influences always operating, whose 
 nature it is to reduce life to a narrow area. The most potent are 
 sin, trouble, and grinding toil. 
 
 1. The narrowing effect of sin, more than of anything else, seems 
 to be suggested by these words. There is the inherited weakness 
 and the encircling contagion — within us, the evil tendency; 
 without us, the unhallowed opportunity. Sometimes a man ac- 
 cepts the pressing solicitation of evil, or yields to the hot-handed 
 grip of the world's desire; and then with a demeaned dignity 
 and lowered self-respect, he measures life and finds he has but a 
 few square feet in which to stand and call himself a fool. He 
 measures his shame and his weakness — his poor failure — and he 
 says, Life is a narrow place. 
 
 When William Blake the poet was an old man, there came 
 a lady one day to see him. She was beautiful and rich, and she 
 
 S3 
 
54 
 
 ROOM TO LIVE 
 
 had the world at her feet, as we express it. Blake looked at her, 
 as with a look of pity he put his hand upon her head and said, 
 " My child, may God make the world as beautiful to you as it has 
 been to me." Let a young man have a pure imagination and his 
 world will be a world of glory. He may be poor, and his days 
 may be monotonous, but life will be clad for him in royal 
 splendour. And that is where the curse of sin comes in, defiling 
 and polluting everything. Let it once creep into the imagination, 
 and everything bright and beautiful is gone.^ 
 
 So dear to Heav'n is saintly chastity 
 
 That when a soul is found sincerely so, 
 
 A thousand liveried angels lackey her, 
 
 Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt. 
 
 And in clear dream, and solemn vision. 
 
 Tell her of things that no gross ear can hear, 
 
 Till o^t converse with heav'nly habitants 
 
 Begin to cast a beam on th' outward shape, 
 
 The unpolluted temple of the mind. 
 
 And turns it by degrees to the soul's essence. 
 
 Till all be made immortal : but when lust 
 
 By unchaste looks, loose gestures, and foul talk, 
 
 But most by lewd and lavish act of sin, 
 
 Lets in defilement to the inward parts, 
 
 The soul grows clotted by contagion, 
 
 Imbodies, and imbrutes, till she quite lose 
 
 The divine property of her first being. 
 
 Such are those thick and gloomy shadows damp 
 
 Oft seen in charnel-vaults and sepulchres, 
 
 Lingering, and sitting by a new-made grave, 
 
 As loth to leave the body that it lov'd. 
 
 And link't itself by carnal sensuality 
 
 To a degenerate and degraded state.^ 
 
 2. Trouble and adversity make life a small room. It is true 
 that at times a stone pillow brings a man, like dreaming Jacob, 
 near heaven, but generally the heart is full of unsatisfied longings, 
 of unutterable thoughts. We are shut in by sordid circumstances, 
 like the lark by its cheap cage, or we drag behind us a chain of 
 anxiety and regret ; we are clogged by ill-health or mean cares ; 
 parts of our being lie waste, or yield crops that cause pain and 
 shame. At times the sky is grey, the heart full of bitterness. 
 
 1 G. H. Morrison, The Afterglow of God, 143. 
 
 2 Milton, Comus. 
 
PSALM XXXI. 8 
 
 55 
 
 All is so flat and depressing, and no outlook promises better 
 weather to come. 
 
 ^ In every life are there not strange events, unlooked-for 
 catastrophes, heartbreaking bereavements, mysterious contradic- 
 tions, unfathomed problems shed all along our path, in which it 
 seems as though by some sudden combination the very heavens 
 are blotted out ? Do we not sometimes feel like the pelican in 
 the wilderness or the stranger left by the caravan to die alone in 
 a dry and thirsty land where no water is ? Life's heaviest blows 
 often come most unexpectedly. Death appears, and our astonish- 
 ment is even greater than our grief. Losses arise, and we are 
 petrified with surprise as our treasure disappears in the most 
 unlikely directions. Friends and comrades fail us, and amaze- 
 ment almost chokes us. Have we not times in which prayer fails 
 and hope dies down to a poor flicker, and we can do nothing and 
 think nothing, and when we feel as dead men that cumber the 
 ground? Do we not know what it is to walk about with that 
 sickening of heart which makes our food like bitter herbs, and in 
 the morning makes us wish for evening and at night makes us 
 long for morning ? ^ 
 
 ^ From physical weakness, mental distress, or it may be from 
 the faults of others, some lives remain weak and feel it, and, with 
 lessening resources, find increasing pain. To such the following 
 incident will appeal : " I was strongly touched one day," says 
 Dr. Gregory, "by the bedside of an energetic and elastic man 
 of business, sanguine and successful and with a splendid flow 
 of spirits, who was suddenly struck down by illness. With 
 trembling finger and with moistened eyes he pointed to an 
 illuminated text hung in front of him at the foot of his bed, 
 ' Have mercy upon me, 0 Lord ; for I am weak ' — a new and 
 strange experience for one in the flower of manhood, who had 
 hitherto known only high-toned health. He said, 'Do you see 
 that ? ' I answered, ' Yes, and God sees it and hears it too.' ' Ah,' 
 said he, ' I got them to put it there that I might look at it and 
 then from it to God.'" 2 
 
 3. The monotony of our tasks has a narrowing effect on life. 
 The young just entering life find it full of novelty and aglow 
 with romance. All things are possible to them. The world is 
 open before them. They are conscious of latent powers. They 
 see great opportunities. They will go far. They will climb 
 
 1 \V. Bramwell Booth. 2 J. Ellis. 
 
56 
 
 ROOM TO LIVE 
 
 high. "Thou hast set my feet in a large room," they are well 
 able to say. But as they grow older, and find their place in the 
 world, and settle down to their work, the glamour vanishes. 
 They find that their sphere is small, their abilities limited, and 
 their opportunities few. The wide horizon of youth contracts. 
 Work loses its novelty. It becomes wearisome and monotonous, 
 and they are ready to cry, " Thou hast set my feet in a small 
 room ! " 
 
 ^ The girl who goes to the marriage altar, her head full of 
 romance, wakes up from love's young dream to discover that her 
 life is a ceaseless round of cooking, sweeping, dusting, and tidying. 
 Her husband perhaps works in a factory, where he feeds a 
 machine, the same machine, or stokes a fire, the same fire, all day 
 long, and six days a week. I have seen a girl in a factory lining 
 a box with paper, and then lining another box with paper, and 
 continuing to line boxes with paper the livelong day. Oh, for an 
 outdoor life ! ^ 
 
 The close and subtle clasping of a chain, 
 Formed not of gold, but of corroded brass, 
 Whose links are furnished from the common mine 
 Of everyday's event, and want, and wish; 
 From work-times, diet-times, and sleeping-times: 
 And thence constructed, mean and heavy links 
 Within the pandemonic walls of sense 
 Enchain our deathless part, constrain our strength, 
 And waste the goodly stature of our soul. 
 
 Howbeit, we love this bondage; we do cleave 
 
 Unto the sordid and unholy thing, 
 
 Fearing the sudden wrench required to break 
 
 Those clasped links. Behold! all sights and sounds 
 
 In air, and sea, and earth, and under earth. 
 
 All flesh, all life, all ends, are mysteries; 
 
 And all that is mysterious dreadful seems, 
 
 And all we cannot understand we fear. 
 
 Ourselves do scare ourselves; we hide our sight 
 
 In artificial nature from the true, 
 
 And throw sensation's veil associative 
 
 On God's creation, man's intelligence; 
 
 Bowing our high imaginings to eat 
 
 Dust, like the serpent, once erect as they; 
 
 1 B. J. Gibbon. 
 
PSALM XXXI. 8 
 
 57 
 
 Binding conspicuous on our reason's brow 
 Phylacteries of shame; learning to feel 
 By rote, and act by rule (man's rule, not God's!), 
 Until our words grow echoes, and our thoughts 
 A mechanism of spirit.^ 
 
 II. 
 
 Large Eoom. 
 
 There are two ways in which the smallest room can be en- 
 larged indefinitely — one by lifting the roof, the other by pushing 
 back the walls. And in those two ways, by taking off the roof of 
 life until we see God, and knocking away the walls of time until 
 we see eternity, each of us may occupy — and should occupy, 
 as many do — the largest room on earth. 
 
 i. Add God to Life. 
 
 1. Let us add the thought of God to life. God alone can deal 
 effectively with our sin. He alone can give deliverance. And 
 what happens to the man who resolutely takes his place in the 
 battle against sin — his own sin, the world's sin ? Day by day the 
 soul within him, which has its birthplace and its goal beyond the 
 stars, asserts itself, as it discovers larger rights and possibilities, 
 and an ever surer hope of victory gives vision not bounded by 
 life's most pressing and persistent circumstance. Day by day it 
 becomes more apparent that the life of the soul is circled by 
 a horizon that its most daring dreams have never scanned, and 
 that for the pure-hearted the dusty, choking, hand-to-hand en- 
 counter with sin holds promise wider than the world. Let us 
 remember that, if in this day of much striving we are growing 
 sick and weary, we are not fighting for the little patch of trampled 
 earth beneath our feet, where the grass and the flowers have been 
 beaten into common dust. We are fighting for the right and 
 fitness to enter the land that is very far off, where, by the river 
 of nameless peace, men have life because they see God. Surely 
 the life that finds room for a fight like that is a wide life ! 
 
 ^ If our faith is to be true, we need the simple, direct sense 
 
 ^ E. B. Browning, A Sea-side Meditation. 
 
58 
 
 ROOM TO LIVE 
 
 of God the Father that we had as children — we need that ex- 
 panded into a sense of the great, living God. What was dear 
 to us in our childhood's religion is purified and preserved and 
 strengthened by the wider range which the expansion of our 
 life has opened up. In one of Shakespeare's sonnets he writes : 
 
 When to the sessions of sweet silent thought 
 I summon up remembrance of things past, 
 I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, 
 And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight: 
 But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, 
 All losses are restor'd, and sorrows end. 
 
 Now what Shakespeare wrote about this friendship, we may 
 apply to the time in which we are living. It is the thought of 
 God which lifts us up above the melancholy of the past, and 
 delivers us from the weakness that morbid regret instilled into 
 our hearts. We believe in a God of our life who is able to 
 develop our growth. We learn from Jesus to recognize in God's 
 handling of us that any outward change, however unwelcome, 
 must be accompanied by an inward access of moral strength. 
 Whatever God takes from us in that way comes back to us in 
 another form, enriched, enlarged.^ 
 
 2. The thought of God will reveal a purpose in trouble. We 
 shall realize that " in every sorrow of the heart, Eternal Mercy 
 bears a part." God's good purpose runs through our saddened 
 hours. It is then that pride dies and sympathy is born. But 
 if we forget God we reverse this order of things. We grow 
 narrower and colder and harder. We drift into cynicism and 
 pessimism. We are the worse instead of the better for our tears. 
 There is an old saying attributed to Christ that has a double 
 significance. It runs : " He that is near Me is near the fire." 
 To be near the fire is to be tested, perhaps scorched and made 
 hard. But it is also to be warmed and cheered, and the double 
 action is felt by each disciple. Attempts at serious, earnest living 
 will always involve pain, but it will be pain that is compensated 
 by stronger and sweeter strength. Life is neither all sunshine nor 
 all gloom. A restless devil and a changing world will account for 
 discomforts, and there are moments of intense dreariness, gloom, 
 bitterness, and woe. Then I am with you, says the Lord, as a 
 Comforter able to help, to bring Lazarus from the dead ; and this 
 
 1 J. Moliatt. 
 
PSALM XXXI. 8 
 
 59 
 
 is more than we dare ask for or can realize. As the chaplain 
 said to the dying Highlander — "Geordie, 'tis just Jesus"; and 
 where the cloud appears J esus is not far away. 
 
 ^ Mr. A. C. Benson has described in The House of Quiet the 
 life of a man who had attained, after a youth of unstable health, 
 to an apparently sound constitution, and was now living out a full 
 and happy and useful life in London. Suddenly his old delicacy 
 of health reappeared. He consulted an eminent physician. He 
 came out of the consulting-room with a virtual sentence of death. 
 "To say farewell to the bustle and activity of life; to be laid 
 aside on a shelf like a cracked vase, turning as far as possible my 
 ornamental front to the world; to live the shadowed life, a 
 creature of rules and hours — a degrading and humiliating role." 
 But he accepted the will of God. He took up his cross. He 
 passed into " The House of Quiet," expecting only the peace of 
 a difficult resignation. But in " The House of Quiet " a new life 
 began. An unexpected feeling of the possibilities of life dawned. 
 His perceptions became more delicate. The gush of morning air, 
 the liquid song of birds, the sprouting of the green buds, the 
 babble of the stream gave a new delight. His intellectual life 
 grew strong, eager, discerning. A quickened taste for pure and 
 noble reading, and a fresh joy in beauty, filled him with rapture. 
 Then there swelled within him a more deliberate intention of 
 enjoying simple things and of expecting beauty in homely life. 
 At last he awoke to his true service. He had hitherto looked on 
 at life around him with a dimmed eye and dulled ear. Now 
 all the cries of the sick and the pained, and all the eager and 
 appealing voices of the young and wistful, and all the soft, low 
 sobbing of the bereaved fell upon his ears. All the needs, daily 
 and clamant, of his neighbours rose up in appeal. This broken 
 man, walking on the edge of death's abyss, gave up his life and 
 used his feeble strength to help and to comfort others. He 
 found that he had entered a new world. He no longer lived 
 in the isolation of the strong, the successful, the selfish. New 
 felicities swelled within his heart. New and unhoped-for strength 
 was given. His life became a life of faith and love; and that 
 rest which is our deepest satisfaction is always their first- 
 born child.i 
 
 The cry of man's anguish went up unto God: 
 
 "Lord, take away pain — 
 The shadow that darkens the world Thou hast made, 
 
 The close-coiling chain 
 
 1 W. M. Clow, The Secret of the Lord, 333. 
 
6o 
 
 ROOM TO LIVE 
 
 That strangles the heart, the burden that weighs 
 
 On the wings that would soar; 
 Lord, take away pain from the world Thou hast made, 
 
 That it love Thee the more ! " 
 
 Then answered the Lord to the cry of His world: 
 
 "Shall I take away pain 
 And with it the power of the soul to endure. 
 
 Made strong by the strain ? 
 Shall I take away pity that knits heart to heart, 
 
 And sacrifice high ? 
 Will ye lose all your heroes that lift from the fire 
 
 White brows to the sky ? 
 Shall I take away love that redeems with a price, 
 
 And smiles at its loss ? 
 Can ye spare from your lives that would climb into Mine 
 
 The Christ on His cross?*' 
 
 3. The thought of God will change grinding toil into a sweet 
 ministry. 
 
 (1) We shall realize that our sphere is God-appointed. The 
 place in which we find ourselves is the place in which the Master 
 desires us to live our life. 
 
 Thou cam'st not to thy place by accident; 
 It is the very place God meant for thee. 
 
 There is no haphazard in this world. God leads every one of His 
 children by the right way. He knows where and under what 
 influences each particular life will ripen best. One tree grows 
 best in the sheltered valley, another by the water's edge, another 
 on the bleak mountain-top swept by storms. There is always 
 adaptation in nature. Every tree or plant is found in the locality 
 where the conditions of its growth exist, and does God give more 
 thought to trees and plants than to His own children ? He places 
 us amid the circumstances and experiences in which our life will 
 grow and ripen the best. The peculiar discipline to which we are 
 each subjected is the discipline we severally need to bring out in 
 us the beauties and graces of true spiritual character. We are 
 in the right school. We may think that we would ripen more 
 quickly in a more easy and luxurious life, but God knows what is 
 best ; He makes no mistakes. 
 
PSALM XXXI. 8 
 
 6i 
 
 ^ Too often the Christian thinks that he could " walk and 
 please God " if he might first readjust the pathway to his own 
 liking. But surely it is not so. Our work, our home, our 
 appointed circle of intercourse, our temperament, our past, He has 
 made them. It is ours not to re-arrange His plan, but to follow 
 Him along it. There is an instructive passage in the life of 
 Madame de la Mothe Guyon. At an early stage of her blessed 
 walk with God, peculiar trials beset her home life. She had learnt 
 to taste the deep sweetness of solitary communion with the Lord 
 in order to renew her strength for duty. But day by day this 
 was made impossible in ways exquisitely trying. For a time her 
 spiritual prosperity was greatly disturbed. But soon she saw that 
 even in this there lay hidden the will of God, and that while the 
 difficulty lasted she was accordingly to welcome it as from Him. 
 By His grace she did so, and with the surrender, with the trust, 
 there came to her a larger and fuller experience of peace than 
 she had ever known when time seemed at her own disposal.^ 
 
 ^ There is a work for all of us, and there is a work for each, 
 work which I cannot do in a crowd, or as one of a mass, but as 
 one man, acting singly, according to my own gifts, and under a 
 sense of my personal responsibility. There is no doubt associated 
 work for me to do. I must do my work as part of the world's 
 great whole, or as a member of some great body. But I have a 
 special work to do, as one individual, who by God's plan and 
 appointment has a separate position, separate responsibilities, and 
 a separate work ; if I do not do it, it must be left undone. No 
 one of my special fellows can do that special work for me which 
 I have come into the world to do ; he may do a higher work, a 
 greater work, but he cannot do my work. I cannot hand over 
 my work to him, any more than I can hand over my responsi- 
 bilities or my gifts.^ 
 
 (2) We shall regard all the tasks of life as golden opportunities 
 to further a great purpose. After having seen the sordidness and 
 meanness and littleness of things, David still held that life is a 
 grand, free, glorious gift, that it is liberty and opportunity and 
 hope. What was the secret of his wide and worthy view of life ? 
 How had he escaped these narrower and meaner thoughts that 
 crowd into men's minds and belittle their lives ? He had laid 
 hold upon God. He looked at life through the Divine purpose. 
 He found the high and noble meaning of the dusty parable that 
 
 1 H. C. G. Moule, All in Christ, 207. 
 ^Buskin. 
 
62 
 
 ROOM TO LIVE 
 
 men call the day's work. When he talks of life as a large room, 
 it is really his way of saying, " Thy service is perfect freedom." 
 If life is lived to God, then it is wider than any man can measure. 
 
 T[ The Booth children were left in no mist of doubt as to their 
 future. There was an end, a point, a purpose, in their life. They 
 grew up in an atmosphere of decision. Many children are made 
 timid, diffident, ineffective by their training. They are constantly 
 told how naughty they are, till they begin to believe that they 
 are good for nothing. The Booth parents acted on a different 
 principle. They had faith in their children and for their children. 
 When Katie was still a little girl in socks, her mother would say 
 to her, " Now, Katie, you are not here in this world for yourself. 
 You have been sent for others. The world is waiting for you!' ^ 
 
 ^ It was the strange fancy of a little child, writes George 
 MacDonald, as he stood on a summer's evening looking intently 
 and thoughtfully at the great banks of clouds piled like mountains 
 of glory about the setting sun : " Mother, I wish I could be a 
 painter." " Why, my child ? " " For then I would help God to 
 paint the clouds and the sunsets." It was a strange and beauti- 
 ful aspiration. But our commonest work in this world may be 
 made far nobler than that. We may live to touch hues of loveli- 
 ness in immortal spirits which shall endure for ever. Clouds dis- 
 solve and float away. The most gorgeous sunset splendours 
 vanish in a few moments. The artist's canvas crumbles and his 
 wondrous creations fade. But work done for Christ endures for 
 ever. A life of simple consecration leaves a trace of imperishable 
 beauty on everything it touches. Not great deeds alone, but the 
 smallest, the obscurest, the most prosaic, write their record in 
 fadeless lines.^ 
 
 ^ It is possible to bring near that far-distant world and to 
 hold it in our hearts. When the soul's revealing-glass is brought 
 to bear upon it — when eternity swims like a new world into our 
 ken — how differently does life look in the light of that revelation ! 
 The light of eternity playing about the things of time, how it 
 changes everything ! How differently now shall our life be led, 
 once that vision has begun to be ours ! In this light we see our 
 life and work at a new angle, and we change our minds as to the 
 things that are big with importance and the things that are of 
 little value. We see that things are large or small, not so much 
 from the comparison they make with one another, but according 
 as they have in them the elements of eternal meaning and 
 
 1 J. Strahan, The MaHchaU (1913), 10. 
 « J. R. Miller, Week-Day Religion, 90. 
 
PSALM XXXI. 8 
 
 63 
 
 purpose. As to our life's work, it is not so much what we are 
 doing or where we are doing it, as it is how we are doing it and 
 with what purpose in view. The case is well put by Professor 
 Drummond in his own clear-cut way. " An office is not a place 
 for making money, it is a place for making character. A work- 
 shop is not a place for making machinery, it is a place for making 
 men. ... A school of learning is not so much a place for making 
 scholars, as a place for making souls. And he who would ripen 
 and perfect the eternal element in his being will do this by 
 attending to the religious uses of his daily task, recognizing the 
 unseen in the seen, and so turning three-fourths of each day's life 
 into an ever-acting means of grace." In his picturesque study of 
 Lazarus brought back to earth again from heaven, Browning 
 seeks to show the effect that the heavenly vision will have on a 
 man who must still walk the earth. It will mean for him a 
 reversal of the world's judgments as to the meaning of things 
 and the proportion of values. And it will mean for those who 
 watch him a feeling of his unfitness for playing his part as a 
 successful man of the world in the affairs of this life. 
 
 The man is witless of the size, the sum, 
 The value in proportion of all things, 
 Or whether it be little or be much.^ 
 
 ^ The type may be as crude and clumsy as were the first 
 wooden pieces of Faust and Gutenberg, but if the thought be deep 
 and great the imperfection of the medium through which it finds 
 its way to the mind is of small account ; the conditions in which 
 we pass this mortal life may be hard and uncongenial, but if they 
 convey spiritual truths to us, and make us aware of spiritual 
 realities, it were cowardly to complain and ignorant to rebel. 
 The wise traveller, to whom the great scenery or the great art of 
 the world is accessible, does not waste his time on the discomforts 
 of travel or allow his thoughts to dwell on the shortcomings of 
 his inn. The measure of a man's soul is his ability to disregard 
 the hindrances and concentrate his energy on the achievement; 
 to put aside the accidents of a relation, a work, an opportunity, 
 and grasp the reality. If there is, as a wise poet has told us, a 
 soul of goodness in things evil, there is much more certainly a 
 soul of beauty within the form of all relations and duties and 
 works ; and he who is able to carry all his relationships, duties, 
 and work to the mount where the patterns are, to the light of the 
 spiritual order where these mortal things instantly put on immor- 
 tality, has read the open secret and pierced the mystery of life.^ 
 
 ^ J. B. Maclean, The Secret of the Stream, 145. 
 2 H. W. Mabie, The Life of the Spirit, 282. 
 
64 
 
 ROOM TO LIVE 
 
 God and Man are free. 
 Where Freedom is, no other cause is sure. 
 
 Is Purpose then Foreknowledge? — Human will 
 
 May yield and fail to win the victory : 
 
 And God Himself, it may be, turns and bends 
 
 His purposes to further human ends, 
 
 Stooping to serve His servant; so that still 
 
 We find no Purpose that is Prophecy. 
 
 But where both wills, the human and Divine 
 
 Are yoked together, where God ratifies 
 
 The struggling purposes of man, — there lies 
 
 The law unchangeable, the fixed decree 
 
 That nought in earth or heaven shall undermine.^ 
 
 ii. Add Eternity to Life. 
 
 By bringing eternity into life we make it a large place. 
 Everything we do has an effect, an effect upon ourselves, that is 
 eternal. That is the recognition of eternity, and to bring this 
 conception into life is to make it a very wide room. We find life 
 small and tedious because the work we do seems so petty and 
 ineffective. What we do to-day we have to do again to-morrow, 
 still again the third day, and so continually. The baker bakes 
 his bread, but to-morrow it is all eaten and he has to bake another 
 batch, and day after day to go on baking. It seems hopeless to 
 try to feed his customers. "My work is never done," we con- 
 stantly hear. It is generally the housewife who says it. What 
 is the use of cooking, sweeping, dusting and tidying, when to- 
 morrow she has to cook, sweep, dust and tidy again, and all the 
 to-morrows of her life to repeat the programme? Our work 
 seems so futile that the life spent in doing it appears petty, small, 
 unworthy. Yes ; but it is so in appearance only. It is not really 
 so. By our daily work we are manufacturing for eternity. We 
 are making, or we are marring, characters that will last for ever. 
 We are developing, or we are destroying, souls that will go on 
 with this handiwork upon them into eternity. We are fitting, or 
 we are unfitting, ourselves to dwell for ever in the holy light of 
 God. 
 
 ^ If this life is all, then the horizon is near, and the whole 
 scope and outlook of man's highest life cramped and fettered. To 
 
 ^ Roger Heath, Beginnings, 56. 
 
PSALM XXXI. 8 
 
 65 
 
 many a soul it would be a bondage almost as grim as the bondage 
 of Egypt. " Mas'r," pleads Tom, the slave of Uncle Toms Cabin, 
 as he is threatened with death, " after yeVe killed the body there 
 ain't no more ye can do. You may whip me, starve me, burn me, 
 it'll only send me sooner where I want to go." From the fire and 
 water, the cruel terror of his fellow, this pure and beautiful soul 
 was to pass to its vindication and eternal rest. We are always 
 reaching our limits ; there are things we cannot do, ideals we 
 cannot attain, powers we cannot conquer, service we cannot render, 
 but with the breaking of the morning when the spirit enters the 
 Homeland, then surely we must believe we shall see those limits 
 crossed. We shall be in a wealthy place, there will be a fuller, 
 richer life.^ 
 
 'Tis a long road home ; 
 But sleep for aching eyes, 
 
 Best for weary feet, 
 For striving hearts a prize, 
 Silence still and sweet, 
 Wait at the end of the long road home. 
 
 'Tis a hard road home ; 
 Many faint and lag 
 
 Beneath the heavy pack, 
 With feet and hearts that drag, 
 But none looks back — 
 We know there's an end to the hard road home. 
 
 'Tis a dark road home. 
 
 With shadows long and deep, 
 Where timid travellers fall, 
 And scarce their path may keep; 
 But the Light that shines for all 
 Gleams at the end of the dark road home. 
 
 1 C. F. Perry. 
 
 PS. xxv.-cxix. — 5 
 
i 
 
The Beatitude of Forgiveness. 
 
 67 
 
Literature. 
 
 Adams (J.), Sermons in Syntax, 45. 
 
 Dunbar (J. W.), The Beatitudes of the Old Testament, 129. 
 
 Keble (J.), Sermons for the Christian Year : Lent to Passiontidc, 260. 
 
 Mackay (J. J.), Recent Letters of Christ, 124. 
 
 Meyer (F. B,), The Directory of the Devout Life, 15. 
 
 Price (A. C), Fifty Sermons, i. 345. 
 
 Ritchie (A.), Sermon? from St. Ignatius^ Pulpit, 42. 
 
 Smellie (A.), In the Hour of Silence, 303. 
 
 Wilmot-Buxton (H. J.), In Many Keys, 102. 
 
 Children's Pulpit : Second Sunday after Christmas, ii. 204. 
 
 Church of England Pulpit, xxviii. 301. 
 
 Church Year Booh, 1912, p. 49. 
 
 68 
 
The Beatitude of Forgiveness. 
 
 Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. 
 Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity, 
 And in whose spirit there is no guile.— Ps. xxxii. i, 2. 
 
 These words form the preface to a psalm generally understood 
 to have been written in connexion with the great sin of David's 
 life. It sings of that happy time when he had repented of his 
 iniquity, when he had sought mercy and had found it, and then 
 poured out the joy of his heart. It is no marvel that his pent-up 
 feelings burst forth in such words as these, for the experience 
 through which he had passed had been peculiarly dark and bitter. 
 He tells here of the misery which he had undergone. He had 
 kept silence, he says, with the result that his very bones had 
 waxed old, and his moisture had been turned into the drought of 
 summer. He would not confess, he would not repent. To a man 
 with the open nature of David that would mean unspeakable 
 wretchedness, but he persevered in it month after month till the 
 mission of Nathan the prophet broke through his sulky reserve, 
 and let loose the springs of his being. And then how measureless 
 his peace and joy ! Probably no man has ever felt more deeply 
 than he the blessing of forgiveness. He entered into a new world, 
 and being a poet he could not refrain from giving expression to 
 his bliss in this beautiful poem, which begins with the outburst, 
 "Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is 
 covered." 
 
 This psalm has been selected by the Church for one of the 
 "seven penitential psalms." It forms a part of the service of the 
 synagogue on the great Day of Atonement. Yet it is almost as 
 much jubilant as penitent. The writer, while very sensible of his 
 sin, is still more sensible of the fact that his sin is pardoned. 
 While his first words breathe content and gratitude, his last are a 
 shout of rejoicing (ver. 10).^ 
 
 * G. Rawlinson. 
 69 
 
70 THE BEATITUDE OF FORGIVENESS 
 
 ^ Ewald says : " The song is manifestly ancient, original 
 throughout, evidencing a strong spirit. Hardly could the inner 
 misery of a lacerated heart, together with the higher happiness of 
 one again reconciled and healed, be described with more inward- 
 ness, impressiveness, and power than here. The harder the 
 struggle in his heart, so much more glorious is the victory, so 
 much more limpid and joyous is the stream of the earnest word. 
 The colour also of the language is Davidic, and there is no reason 
 to doubt that it was sung after the transaction recorded in 2 Sam. 
 xii." 
 
 I. 
 
 The Eeality of Forgiveness. 
 
 Forgiveness is a reality on God's part, because sin is a reality 
 on our part. Forgiveness, or justification, is sometimes spoken of 
 as "treating the sinner as though he had not sinned." This, 
 however, is but loose, figurative language. Forgiveness implies 
 sin, disobedience to God's law. Therefore God is bound, as the 
 Eighteous One, to take account of sin. He must condemn or 
 pardon it. And our Lord Himself speaks of forgiveness as a 
 definite act. " Son, be of good cheer ; thy sins be forgiven thee." 
 
 1. The Psalmist views sin under three aspects. 
 
 (1) First, he calls it transgression. In its literal sense this 
 means separation, or rending apart, or departure, and so comes 
 to express the notion of apostasy and rebellion. All sin is a 
 departure from God. It is treacherous rebellion. That is to say, 
 it has relation not only to a law, but to a Lawgiver. It is not 
 merely a departure from what is right, it is treason against God. 
 It not only breaks some impersonal ideal of duty, but it is an act 
 of rebellion against a loving Will which is in definite relations to 
 me. And so it assumes a far graver and more solemn aspect than 
 when we think of it as being merely a breach of law, a traversing 
 of duty, a crime against conscience, or society, or public opinion, 
 or expediency, or some abstract idea of morality. It is all these, 
 but it is something much worse than these. The inmost recesses 
 of the ugliness and wickedness of the wicked and ugly thing is 
 this, that it throws into disorder our relations to a living person, 
 that it is rebellion against the Living God. 
 
PSALM XXXII. I, 2 
 
 71 
 
 ^ There is in man an instinct of revolt, an enemy of all law, 
 a rebel which will stoop to no yoke, not even that of reason, duty, 
 and wisdom. This element in us is the root of all sin — das 
 radicale Bose of Kant. The independence which is the condition 
 of individuality is at the same time the eternal temptation of the 
 individual. That which makes us beings makes us also sinners. 
 Sin is, then, in our very marrow, it circulates in us like the blood 
 in our veins, it is mingled with all our substance. Or rather I am 
 wrong : temptation is our natural state, but sin is not necessary. 
 Sin consists in the voluntary confusion of the independence which 
 is good with the independence which is bad ; it is caused by the 
 half-indulgence granted to a first sophism. We shut our eyes to 
 the beginnings of evil because they are small, and in this weakness 
 is contained the germ of our defeat. Frincipiis ohsta — this maxim 
 dutifully followed would preserve us from almost all our catas- 
 trophes. We will have no other master but our caprice — that is 
 to say, our evil self will have no God, and the foundation of our 
 nature is seditious, impious, insolent, refractory, opposed to and 
 contemptuous of all that tries to rule it, and therefore contrary to 
 order, ungovernable and negative. It is this foundation which 
 Christianity calls the natural man. But the savage which is 
 within us, and constitutes the primitive stuff of us, must be 
 disciplined and civilized in order to produce a man. And the 
 man must be patiently cultivated to produce a wise man, and the 
 wise man must be tested and tried if he is to become righteous. 
 And the righteous man must have substituted the will of God for 
 his individual will, if he is to become a saint.^ 
 
 (2) Then another aspect of sin rises before the Psalmist's mind. 
 This evil which he has done, which probably was the sin in the 
 matter of Bathsheba, was not only rebellion against God, but it 
 was, according to this text, in the second clause, " a sin," by which 
 is meant literally missing an aim. So this word, in its pregnant 
 meaning, corresponds with the signification of the ordinary New 
 Testament word for sin, which also implies error, or missing that 
 which ought to be the goal of our lives. That is to say, whilst 
 the former word regarded the evil deed mainly in its relation to 
 God, this word regards it mainly in its relation to ourselves, and 
 that which before Him is rebellion — the assertion of our own 
 individuality and our own will, and therefore in separation from 
 His will — is, considered in reference to ourselves, fatally missing 
 the mark to which our whole energy and effort ought to be 
 * AmieVs Journal (trans, by Mrs. Humphry Ward), 164. 
 
72 THE BEATITUDE OF FORGIVENESS 
 
 directed. All sin, big or little, is a blunder. It is a blunder even 
 if it hits what it aims at, for it aims at the wrong thing. So 
 doubly, all transgression is folly, and the true name for the doer 
 is " Thou fool ! " For every evil misses the mark which, regard 
 being had to the man's obvious destiny, he ought to aim at. 
 " Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever " ; 
 and whosoever in all his successes fails to realize that end is a 
 failure through and through, in whatever smaller matters he may 
 seem to himself and to others to succeed. 
 
 IF Full of far deeper love for what I remember of Turner 
 himself, as I become better capable of understanding it, I find 
 myself more and more helpless to explain his errors and his sins. 
 His errors, I might say, simply. Perhaps, some day, people will 
 again begin to remember the force of the old Greek word for sin ; 
 and to learn that all sin is in essence — "Missing the mark"; 
 losing sight or consciousness of heaven ; and that this loss may be 
 various in its guilt ; it cannot be judged by us.^ 
 
 (3) But the Psalmist sees in his own past behaviour not only 
 rebellion and failure, but iniquity — that is, something twisted or 
 distorted. His conduct is thus brought into contrast with the 
 right line of the plain, straight path in which we ought to walk. 
 We have the same metaphor in our own language. We talk 
 about things being right and wrong, by which we mean, in the 
 one case, parallel with the rigid law of duty, and in the other case, 
 " wrung," or wavering, crooked and divergent from it. There is 
 a standard as well as a Judge, and we have to think of evil not 
 only as being rebellion against God and separation from Him, and 
 as, for ourselves, issuing in fatal missing of the mark, but also as 
 being divergent from the one manifest law to which we ought to 
 be conformed. The path to God is a right line ; the shortest road 
 from earth to Heaven is absolutely straight. 
 
 ^ Every person of a mature age, and in his right mind, 
 remembers turns or crises in his life, where he met the question of 
 wrong face to face, and by a hard inward struggle broke through 
 the sacred convictions of duty that rose up to fence him back. It 
 was some new sin to which he had not become familiar, so much 
 worse perhaps in degree as to be the entrance to him consciously 
 of a new stage of guilt. He remembers how it shook his soul and 
 even his body; how he shrunk in guilty anticipation from the 
 
 ^ Riiskin, Modem Painters^ v. pt. ix. chap. xii. ( Works, vii. 441). 
 
PSALM XXXII. I, 2 
 
 73 
 
 new step of wrong ; the sublime misgiving that seized him, the 
 awkward and but half-possessed manner in which it was taken, 
 and then afterward, perhaps even after years have passed away, 
 •how, in some quiet hour of the day or the wakeful hour of night, 
 as the recollection of that deed — not a public crime, but a wrong, 
 or an act of vice — returned upon him, the blood rushed back for 
 the moment on his fluttering heart, the pores of his skin opened, 
 and a kind of agony of shame and self-condemnation, in one word 
 of remorse, seized his whole person. This is the consciousness, 
 the guilty pang, of sin ; every man knows what it is.^ 
 
 2. Corresponding to the three terms for sin, there are three 
 expressions to signify its removal. The first word means taken 
 away or lifted off, as a burden from aching shoulders. It implies 
 more than holding back penal consequences ; it is the removal of 
 sin itself, and that not merely in the multitudinousness of its 
 manifestations in act, but in the depth of its inward source. This 
 is the metaphor which Bunyan has made so familiar by his picture 
 of the pilgrim losing his load at the cross. The second (" covered ") 
 paints pardon as God's shrouding the foul thing from His pure 
 eyes, so that His action is no longer determined by its existence. 
 The third describes forgiveness as God's not reckoning a man's 
 sin to him, in which expression hovers some allusion to cancelling 
 a debt. 
 
 (1) Sin is here pictured as a burden, lying on the soul. 
 Every sin we commit is making that burden larger and heavier. 
 We do not say it is felt to be heavier ; that would be the sense of 
 sin. The burden is there, whether it be felt or not, and it always 
 grows. If the burden of his sin remains on any sinner it will sink 
 him into ruin. Surely, then, he is a happy man whose burden of 
 sin is lifted off. " Oh, the blessedness of the man whose burden of 
 sin is lifted off ! " Why is he a blessed man ? Because when the 
 burden of sin goes, other things must go with it. When this 
 burden is lifted off, the sentence of death against the sinner is 
 cancelled for ever, the gates of hell are closed against him and 
 will never open to admit him, and heaven's gates are open in a 
 new sense, in that they never can be closed till he is inside. 
 
 ^ The most persistent symbol of Conscience in this first stage 
 is the " burden " — a simple but picturesque emblem of a sense of 
 
 1 T. T. Hunger, Horace Bushnell, 218. 
 
74 THE BEATITUDE OF FORGIVENESS 
 
 guilt. It is on him, though behind him ; it is oppressive, though 
 it leaves his limbs all free for action or advance ; it is rather felt 
 than seen. Somewhat characteristic it is of Bunyan's Christian 
 that this burden of his is " great." ^ 
 
 ^ In 1881, when he was nearing his end, Dante Gabriel 
 Eossetti, though an agnostic, became very anxious for confession 
 and absolution. It was suggested to him that absolution was 
 contrary to his pronounced views. But he said, "I don't care 
 about that. I can make nothing of Christianity, but I only want 
 a confessor to give me absolution of my sins," adding, " I believe 
 in a future life — what I want now is absolution for my sins, 
 that's all." 2 
 
 (2) Again, sin is pictured as inward pollution and filthiness, 
 which must be covered before there can be true blessedness. 
 But not every kind of " covering " will suffice. Many ways of 
 covering sins bring no blessing, but a curse. Some people spend 
 much time and trouble, and exercise great ingenuity, in covering 
 up their sins. They dig deep graves in which they seek to bury 
 them, but every sin they bury is going to have a resurrection. 
 Such coverings never bring any blessedness. " He that covereth 
 his sins shall not prosper." The Psalmist tried for a year to bury 
 his sin. Did he succeed ? Was it a happy year ? Note what 
 
 ' he says about that time : " When I kept silence, my bones waxed 
 old through my roaring all the day long. For day and night thy 
 hand was heavy upon me: my moisture is turned into the 
 drought of summer." When he is brought to a right frame of 
 mind he no longer tries to cover up his sin, but says, " My sin is 
 ever before me." " I acknowledge my sin unto thee, and mine 
 iniquity have I not hid." 
 
 ^ Bees in their hives, when there is anything corrupt and 
 too large for them to remove, fling a covering of wax over it, 
 and hermetically seal it, and no foul odour comes from it. And 
 so a man's sin is covered over and ceases to be in evidence, as it 
 were, before the Divine Eye that sees all things. He Himself 
 casts a merciful veil over it and hides it from Himself.^ 
 
 (3) The third picture of sin is perhaps the most striking of 
 all. It means : " I am a debtor, over head and ears in debt, but 
 
 ^ J. A. Kerr Bain, The People of the Pilgrimage, i. 51. 
 2 A. C. Benson, Life of D. 0. EosseUi, 71. 
 ' A. Maclaren. 
 
PSALM XXXII. I, 2 
 
 75 
 
 the debt is not charged or reckoned against me at all." Still 
 more, it means : " I am guilty, yet the righteous Judge justly 
 pronounces me not guilty." How can that be possible? Let 
 the Apostle Paul explain. He says that "David describes the 
 blessedness of the man to whom the Lord imputeth righteousness 
 without works," and he quotes the text to prove this. David 
 did not say one word about righteousness without works." What 
 does St. Paul mean by saying he did ? The simple fact is that 
 St. Paul supplements David ; he gives the positive side, in addi- 
 tion to David's negative side of the double transaction. St. Paul 
 has his eye on Christ. If sin is not reckoned or charged against, 
 or put to the account of, the believing sinner, it is because it has 
 been imputed, reckoned, charged against, or put to the account 
 of Christ. And if ** righteousness without works" is imputed, 
 reckoned to, or put to the account of, the believing sinner, it is 
 because of what Christ had done. "Him who knew no sin he 
 made to be sin on our behalf ; that we [who knew no righteous- 
 ness] might become the righteousness of God in him." 
 
 ^ A very common idea of the object of the gospel is, that it 
 is to show how men may obtain pardon; whereas, in truth, its 
 object is to show how pardon for men has been obtained, or rather 
 to show how God has taken occasion, by the entrance of sin into 
 the world, to manifest the unsearchable riches of holy compassion. 
 I have observed that even the phrase free offer of pardon is so 
 interpreted that the very existence of the pardon is made to 
 depend on the acceptance of the offer. The benefit of the pardon 
 does most assuredly depend on its being accepted, but the 
 pardon itself is laid up in Christ Jesus, and depends on nothing 
 but the unchangeable character of God.^ 
 
 3. The condition of forgiveness. — The last clause of the text, 
 " In whose spirit there is no guile," seems to refer to the frank 
 sincerity of a confession. He is not like the self-righteous sinner 
 who tries to tell lies to God, and, attempting to deceive Him, 
 really deceives only himself. Whoever opens his heart to God, 
 makes a clean breast of it, and without equivocation or self- 
 deception or the palliations which self-love teaches, says, "I 
 have played the fool and erred exceedingly " — to that man, the 
 Psalmist thinks, pardon is sure to come. 
 
 * Letters of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, i. 379, 
 
76 THE BEATITUDE OF FORGIVENESS 
 
 The great question before the niind. of the Psalmist is how 
 the burden of sin may be removed not from the Divine side, 
 but from the human, and so he states one necessary condition 
 to that removal — confession: "I said, I will confess my trans- 
 gressions unto the Lord ; and thou forgavest the iniquity of my 
 sin " (ver. 5). Sin must be confessed before it is removed. Till 
 a man confesses his sins he hugs them to himself, and refuses to 
 part with them. When he truly confesses them he puts them 
 away by an act of will. Not till then are they removed. God 
 cannot forgive the man who is impenitent, for that man will 
 presently sin again. He cannot forgive, much as He longs so to 
 do, because there is an obstacle in the way. Eepentance removes 
 that obstacle ; it opens the door to the exercise of God's forgiving 
 grace. The moment we repent we are pardoned. 
 
 ^ Excellent as repentance may be in itself, and quite inde- 
 pendent of all results, yet the one ultimate test of it is amendment 
 — amendment, and nothing else. We have done wrong and are 
 sorry for it. What is the test of the value of our sorrow ? Our 
 doing the same thing no more. We desire to be forgiven. We 
 pray to God for that forgiveness. What is to us the certain seal 
 that He has heard our prayer, and by the power of His Son's 
 Cross has finally forgiven us? The seal is that we have been 
 enabled to sin so no more. Put it how you will, you must always 
 come back to that. I do not say that no repentance is worth 
 anything which is followed by further falls. God forbid. I do 
 not say that God never forgives until He also makes the sin 
 impossible. God forbid. But I do say that to ics — to us there is 
 no other proof either of the genuineness of our repentance, or of 
 the certainty of God's forgiveness.^ 
 
 II. 
 
 The Blessedness of Forgiveness. 
 
 In all the benedictions of the Bible the thing brought 
 prominently into notice is not the outward circumstances but the 
 inner state or life of the man who is blessed. Blessedness does not 
 depend on outward possessions, such as worldly goods, or lands, 
 or high birth, or erudite culture. Indeed, there are words of 
 Christ which suggest that they who stand possessed of these 
 
 * Archbishop Temple. 
 
PSALM XXXII. I, 2 
 
 77 
 
 things will find it harder to enter that Paradise which has not yet 
 faded from our world, and to pass through the gates of that city 
 which are before our eyes, if only they were opened to discern 
 them. When He repeated the Sermon of the Mountain-Heights 
 and of the Dawn to the multitudes that stood breathless beneath 
 its spell, He said, " Woe unto you that are rich. Woe unto you 
 that are full. Woe unto you, ye that laugh." He did not mean 
 that such would be necessarily excluded, but that entrance into 
 blessedness would be hard for them. 
 
 1. The forgiven soul enjoys the blessedness of deliverance. The 
 very essence of the benediction is the exquisite sense of trans- 
 gression forgiven, sin covered. This royal sinner knew the felicity 
 in its full range. Through all those weary months of sullen 
 silence which followed David's murder and adultery, he was a 
 most miserable man. He knew that his Divine Judge had not 
 pardoned him. He was conscious all the time of lying under the 
 withering condemnation of God. He felt that his iniquity lay 
 naked and open to the eye of Him with whom he had to do. He 
 might to some extent conceal his fault from his fellows, but in all 
 its hideous enormity it was exposed to the gaze of the Searcher of 
 hearts. Could the king have any peace or comfort under that 
 continual sense of the silent sentence of Heaven on his conduct ? 
 0 what a joyful man he was when the grace of God enabled him 
 to confess, I have sinned," and the sweet response came, " The 
 Lord also hath put away thy sin " ! When he contrasted the 
 sordid wretchedness of the preceding months with his condition, 
 now that the springs of his better nature had found vent, would 
 he not feel that he was in the seventh heaven ? It was not 
 enough for him to say that his transgression was forgiven : he 
 had to supplement that with this other word, that his sin was 
 covered, in order to utter fully his felicity. His Judge had 
 pardoned him, how much was that ! But was it not even more 
 that his Heavenly Father had blotted out his foul guilt, so that 
 it should be never seen or remembered more ? 
 
 ^ Whatever I have studied of the Epistles of St. Paul, and 
 this has been for many years, and with as much yearning eager- 
 ness and breathless awe as I have felt in nothing except the 
 words of the Lord Jesus, has tended to the confirmation of the 
 
78 THE BEATITUDE OF FORGIVENESS 
 
 old evangelic interpretation of them, in which perhaps I should 
 not have seen my way so clearly but for their accordance with 
 my own "experience." All that unutterable sense of sin, that 
 terrible deadly fight with evil, those strivings of the Spirit I went 
 through, and more; all that deliverance, that liberty of the 
 Gospel, that being justified by faith in Christ, that peace with 
 God, that shedding abroad by the Holy Ghost of the love of God 
 in the heart, that coming in of the " new creation " ; all the shades 
 and lights of experience since then. Twenty-three years of such 
 experience, which inwardly is as great and as simple a fact as the 
 facts of seeing and hearing, make me unable to receive, even to 
 perceive, any other interpretation. And I have met with such 
 scores and hundreds who strike hands with me in life and death 
 on these great matters that it is settled " without controversy " 
 to me.^ 
 
 ^ When Saul Kane, the ill-living prodigal whose " rake's 
 progress" John Masefield has so vividly set forth in his poem 
 The Everlasting Mercy, suffered his instant conversion, an im- 
 mediate and wonderful glory filled his soul. 
 
 I did not think, I did not strive, 
 
 The deep peace burnt my me alive; 
 
 The bolted door had broken in, 
 
 I knew that I had done with sin. 
 
 I knew that Christ had given me birth 
 
 To brother all the souls on earth, 
 
 And every bird and every beast 
 
 Should share the crumbs broke at the feast. 
 
 0 glory of the lighted mind, 
 
 How dead I'd been, how dumb, how blind. 
 The station-brook to my new eyes. 
 Was babbhng out of Paradise, 
 The waters rushing from the rain 
 Were singing, " Christ has risen again." 
 
 1 thought all earthly creatures knelt 
 From rapture of the joy I felt. 
 
 The narrow station-wall's brick ledge, 
 The wild hop withering in the hedge, 
 The lights in huntsman's upper storey 
 Were parts of an eternal glory, 
 Were God's eternal garden flowers. 
 I stood in bliss at this for hours. 
 
 ^ Letters of James Smetham, 234. 
 
 i 
 
PSALM XXXII. I, 2 
 
 79 
 
 0 clover tops, half-white, half-red, 
 
 0 beauty from beyond the dead, 
 
 0 blossom, key to earth and heaven, 
 
 0 souls that Christ has new forgiven. 
 
 2. The forgiven soul is blessed, because the whole character 
 and life are lifted to a higher plane. No man can pass from 
 darkness to light, from alienation to reconciliation, without being 
 marvellously transformed by the experience. His whole nature 
 is changed. That is what we mean when we contrast the effect 
 on the human soul of the gospel of grace with that produced by 
 the preaching of mere morality and legality. Sinai thunders at 
 us in vain, and the most eloquent exposition of the beauty of 
 virtue is apt to leave a soul very much where it found it ; but let 
 a sinner come to believe that Christ died for him, that God so 
 loved Him that He spared not His own Son, but delivered Him 
 up for the transgressor, and that in the fountain thus opened for 
 sin and for uncleanness his sins have been washed away for ever, 
 then that forgiven soul will become a living mass of gratitude, of 
 love, of devotion to Him whose grace has saved him. Through 
 all his subsequent life he will be a changed man. He will hate 
 iniquity and love holiness. We cannot say that he will never sin 
 again, but never again can he feel toward sin as he did in the days 
 before he had drunk this wine of heaven. His character will be 
 radically altered, and the life will answer, more or less truly, to 
 the character. 
 
 ^ You stand in some valley, and however brightly the sun 
 may shine, there are shadows ; you climb to the summit of some 
 lofty hill, and it is all sunshine, and no shadows there. Even so, 
 if you rest satisfied with forgiveness of sins merely, brightly as 
 that exhibits God's love, and wonderful as is the grace of it, your 
 peace, and joy, and rest will be all imperfect. Come up into the 
 heavenly places in Christ J esus ; get upon the high tableland of 
 a really Christ-life ; go on to the realization of all the " happinesses " 
 which are linked on to forgiveness; be a little child, and take 
 God at His word about them, without cavil or question ; and then 
 your whole life will be sunlit indeed. Difficulties and sorrows 
 and temptations you may have, and they may multiply as you go 
 on; but you will look down upon them, instead of being over- 
 shadowed by them : and you will see, what in the valley of a low 
 
8o THE BEATITUDE OF FORGIVENESS 
 
 life you cannot see, how God's love lights them all up, and how in 
 very truth they all work together for your good.^ 
 
 3. Happy is he whose sin is forgiven, because new relations 
 are established between God and the soul. To have passed 
 through this experience not only changes a man's character, it 
 puts him permanently on a new footing with God. The pardon 
 comes to him as but one part of what we call the Divine scheme 
 of salvation. Henceforth he does not think of the Almighty as 
 his Judge, but rather as his Heavenly Father. He has been 
 adopted into the family of the Most High, and he knows that all 
 the privileges of adoption, in time and eternity, are secured to 
 him. Christ has become to him as an elder Brother, who is 
 preparing a place for him in that region of the blessed which is to 
 be hereafter their common home. 
 
 This is a side of Christian truth which has not always received 
 the attention it deserves — a neglect the more to be regretted that 
 the doctrine furnishes the reply to the objection sometimes made, 
 that "justification " presents our relations with God in salvation 
 in too exclusively "legal" a light. It would do so if it stood 
 alone ; but it does not stand alone. Adoption, by certain writers, 
 has been treated as part of justification — as the positive side of it, 
 in acceptance. But this is not warranted. If it is wrong to merge, 
 as many do, God's character as J udge in that of Father, it is as 
 wrong to merge His character as Father in that of Judge, and to 
 overlook the fact that God's relation to us is personal as well as 
 judicial. God does not merely pardon the sinner by way of legal 
 acquittal. There is the outflow of paternal tenderness, paternal 
 forgiveness, paternal grace (cf. the Prodigal, Luke xv. 20-24); 
 and the soul that comes to Him is received by Him into a re- 
 lation of sonship — not merely that forfeited sonship which was 
 its destination by creation, but a relation of honour, nearness, and 
 privilege, analogous to Christ's own. "If children, then heirs; 
 heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ " (Kom. viii. 17). 
 
 Here are we dark and weak, yet are we not 
 Excluded from Thy glorious family; 
 
 Pain to Thy children is a transient lot; 
 We suffer, that from sin we may be free. 
 
 1 A. C. Price. 
 
PSALM XXXII. I, 2 
 
 Angels and men, the prophet and the child, 
 These all are what they are by gift of Thine 
 
 No break or gulf is there ; the undefiled 
 Are tenderly made one by birth divine. 
 
 If but a letter of the all-perfect name, 
 If but a mark of the celestial pen, 
 
 Distinguish us, we will, despising shame, 
 Abjuring self, live boldly among men. 
 
 Named after God! a little like to Him, 
 
 In whom the entireness of the name divine 
 
 Brightly involved was once by woes made dim. 
 But now unfolded shines, yet more to shine.^ 
 
 1 T. T. Lynch, TJie Rivulet, 202. 
 
 PS. xxv.-cxix.— 6 
 
The Guiding Eye. 
 
 «3 
 
Literature. 
 
 Bourdillon (F.), Handfuls, 24. 
 
 Brown (J. Baldwin), The Sunday Afternoon, 278. 
 
 Hackett (W. S.), The Land of Your Sojournings, 37. 
 
 Knight (G. H.), Abiding Help for Changing Days, 27. 
 
 Matheson (G.), Words by the Wayside, 16. 
 
 Meyer (F. B.), Christian Living, 78. 
 
 Stone (C. E.), Children's Sunday Afternoons, 186. 
 
 Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), New Ser., xiii. (1876), No. 
 989. 
 
 Voysey (C), Sermons, ii. (1879), No. 1. 
 
 Clergyman's Magazine, 3rd Ser., xii. 96 (H. G. Youard). 
 
 Literary Churchman, xx. (1874) 95. 
 
 Sunday Magazine, 1880, p. 140 (R. H. Smith). 
 
 84 
 
The Guiding Eye. 
 
 I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go : 
 I will counsel thee with mine eye upon thee.— Ps. xxxii. 8. 
 
 It was at the end of a long and bitter trial that this promise was 
 given to the Psalmist. It was by passing through doubt, per- 
 plexity, and despair that he was taught at last to find his way 
 by the light of God. He had tried long and desperately to be his 
 own guide, to trace out a path for himself through life, and it was 
 after many wanderings, and many shameful falls, and much 
 misery, that he was forced to confess that it is not in man that 
 walketh to direct his steps, and that his only way of safety is to 
 give himself up to One who will guide him better than he can 
 guide himself. Feeling his ignorance, and perplexed at times by 
 uncertainty as to his duty, he besought the Lord to teach and to 
 guide him ; and the Lord heard him and answered him, bringing 
 strength to his weakness, light into his darkness, and showing him 
 the way in which he should walk. 
 
 •[f The beautiful suggestiveness of the Authorized Version, " I 
 will guide thee with mine eye," need not be wholly lost, though 
 the Revised Version shows that the Hebrew does not mean that 
 " a look is enough." It means that with a Divine word of counsel 
 in the ear, and the eye of Providence watching from above, the 
 traveller in the pathway of life will be safe.^ 
 
 L 
 
 Our Need of Guidance. 
 
 1. We need guidance because we may deliberately reject God. 
 There are those who may be called the unbridled : the men who 
 care for no restraint ; whose whole life is a challenge, " Who is 
 the Lord, that we should serve him ? " The Psalms are full of 
 
 1 W. T. Davison. 
 
 V 
 
86 
 
 THE GUIDING EYE 
 
 the description of them. They escape the eye and the hand of 
 God to all appearance. But do they indeed escape ? The mere 
 men of the world are the worst of slaves ; and of all men they 
 are the most limited, checked, compelled, by the hand of God. 
 A hard bar meets them at every turn, a check at every breath. 
 God rules them though it be with a rod of iron. Blind to the 
 glance of His eye, they must writhe under the pressure of His 
 hand. 
 
 ^ The pupil spoke : " You said once that the tramcar comes 
 to a standstill if it loses connexion with the aerial wire. I know 
 that very well. Would that my friends who are atheists and 
 pagans knew what a relief it is to find the connexion again. It 
 is like diving in crystal-clear sea-water after perspiring in the 
 heat of the dog-days on a dusty high-road. The heart grows 
 light ; the systematic ill-luck ceases ; one has some success, one's 
 undertakings prosper, one can sleep at night, and neurasthenia 
 ceases. I remember how, after a night of debauchery, the most 
 beautiful landscape at sunrise looked ghastly ; while after a night 
 of quiet sleep the same scene looked paradisal. When we gain the 
 certainty, and the belief founded on certainty, that life is con- 
 tinued on the other side, then we find it easier on this one, and do 
 not hunt after trifles till we are weary. Then we discover the 
 divine lightheartedness of which Goethe speaks, which finds ex- 
 pression in a certain contempt of honours and distinction, pro- 
 motion and money. We become more insensible to blows and 
 abuse. Everything goes more softly and smoothly. However 
 dark the surroundings may be, we become self-luminous, so to 
 speak, and carry the little pocket-lamp hope with us." ^ 
 
 2. There are those whose hearts are divided between God and 
 the world, and who need constraint to keep them in the right 
 way. Some things are already settled in their minds on the 
 subject of the duties and the issues of life. They know already 
 that there is no blessing that is really worth anything but 
 God's. They would weep bitterly, and feel that life was utterly 
 impoverished, if God's presence were gone from it, and they were 
 just left to make the best of a world that they love too well. 
 But they will not risk too much in seeking the Kingdom of God 
 and His righteousness. One eye is always on the world, if the 
 other is on God. They have their comforts, their luxuries, their 
 ^ A, Strindberg, Zones of the Spirit, 111. 
 
PSALM XXXII. 8 87 
 
 pleasures, their possessions, which fill as large a space as the 
 higher things in the horizon round which they sweep their sight. 
 They are not ungodly, they are not indifferent to the benediction 
 of Heaven. But there is a great dead weight to be lifted, a great 
 back-longing to be overcome. They have to be driven in the way 
 which they say they love, and to the end which they profess to 
 desire more than worlds. How many Christians have to be 
 driven in the way of life, at a cost of pain to them, and patience 
 to Him, which God alone knows ! 
 
 ^ It looks to me now like a kind of humble russet-coated epic, 
 that seven years' settlement at Craigenputtock ; very poor in this 
 world's goods, but not without an intrinsic dignity greater and 
 more important than then appeared. It is certain that for living 
 in and thinking in, I have never since found in the world a place 
 so favourable. And we were driven and pushed into it, as if by 
 Necessity, and its beneficent though ugly little shocks and pushes, 
 shock after shock gradually compelling us thither ! " For a 
 Divinity doth shape our ends, rough-hew them how we will": 
 often in my life have I been brought to think of this, as prob- 
 ably every considering person is ; and, looking before and after, 
 have felt, though reluctant enough to believe in the importance 
 or significance of so infinitesimally small an atom as oneself, that 
 the Doctrine of a Special Providence is in some sort natural to 
 man. All piety points that way, all logic points the other ; — one 
 has, in one's darkness and limitation, a trembling faith, and can 
 at least say with the Voices, " Wir heissen euch hoffen" — if it he 
 the will of the Highest.^ 
 
 ^ Do you at all recollect that interesting passage of Carlyle 
 in which he compares, in this country and at this day, the under- 
 stood and commercial value of man and horse ; and in which he 
 wonders that the horse, with its inferior brains and its awkward 
 hoofiness, instead of handiness, should be always worth so many 
 tens or scores of pounds in the market, while the man, so far from 
 always commanding his price in the market, would often be 
 thought to confer a service on the community by simply killing 
 himself out of their way ? Well, Carlyle does not answer his own 
 question, because he supposes we shall at once see the answer. 
 The value of the horse consists simply in the fact of your being 
 able to put a bridle on him. The value of the man consists pre- 
 cisely in the same thing. If you can bridle him, or, which is 
 better, if he can bridle himself, he will be a valuable creature 
 
 ^ Carlyle, Reminiscences , ii. 244. 
 
88 
 
 THE GUIDING EYE 
 
 directly. Otherwise, in a commercial point of view, his value is 
 either nothing, or accidental only. Only, of course, the proper 
 bridle of man is not a leathern one ; what kind of texture it is 
 rightly made of, we find from that command, " Be ye not as the 
 horse or as the mule which have no understanding, whose mouths 
 must be held in with bit and bridle." You are not to be without 
 the reins, indeed ; but they are to be of another kind : " I will 
 guide thee with mine eye." So the bridle of man is to be the 
 Eye of God ; and if he rejects that guidance, then the next best 
 for him is the horse's and the mule's, which have no understand- 
 ing ; and if he rejects that, and takes the bit fairly in his teeth, 
 then there is nothing left for him than the blood that comes out 
 of the city, up to the horse-bridles.^ 
 
 3. There are those who desire and who willingly accept God's 
 guidance. To such God says, " I will instruct thee and teach 
 thee in the way which thou shalt go : I will counsel thee with 
 mine eye upon thee." He will take a personal interest in them. 
 For the guide of men is no Epicurean God, loftily serene and 
 impassive, but one whose interest in the world, whose care for 
 the world, brought Him to live in it that He might share its 
 burden and pain. The gospel is the revelation of how much He 
 cares ; of how much the happiness of His creation, the order of 
 His government, and the satisfaction of His heart depend on the 
 way man takes. He has created a being of wonderful and complex 
 powers, capable, if guided aright, of doing godlike work in the 
 universe, or capable of making it an Aceldama, a Gehenna of 
 wailing and death. And the great work of Heaven is to guide 
 him ; to make him know, trust, and love his guide. Truly " thou 
 shalt guide me with thy counsel, and afterward receive me 
 to glory." When Christ has won this trust from a human spirit, 
 His redemptive work is done. 
 
 ^ To obey the will of the Lord is the secret first of all, of 
 safety — security. "All things work together for good to them 
 that love God." From the moment a planet wheels into its path 
 round the sun, there is nothing that can harm that planet, but 
 just as soon as a star wanders from its orbit, and goes plunging 
 headlong into the depths of space, it is liable to come into clash 
 and crash with the universe of God. I have seen a great piece 
 of machinery that would fill an immense building. Now, suppose 
 1 Euskin, A Joy for Ever, §18 {Works, xvi. 28). 
 
PSALM XXXII. 8 
 
 89 
 
 that in that great piece of machinery, one little wheel, as small, it 
 may be, as a shilling, should drop out of its place and fall into the 
 midst of the machinery, that colossal mechanism moving round 
 and round and round would grind this little wheel among its 
 larger wheels into fragments, if not into powder. The Universe 
 is one great Machine, and God is the Motive Power of it, and 
 when a soul drops out of its place in this great machinery, and 
 falls among the great wheels of God's purpose, it is ground into 
 powder, unless the grace of God puts that wheel back into its 
 place in the vast system. The moment that you find out what the 
 will of God is, and drop into your place, all the universe moves 
 with you, and all the universe moves for you, the whole Godhead 
 is back of you, the wisdom of God, and the power of God, and the 
 love of God, and the grace of God ; and you are as absolutely sure 
 and safe as God is. And so Peter says : " Who is he that shall 
 harm you if you be followers of that which is good ? " ^ 
 
 II. 
 
 God's Method of Guiding us. 
 
 1. God guides His people by imparting to them understanding. 
 There is a threefold assurance in the text: I will make thee 
 wise ; I will point out to thee the way ; I will fix Mine eye upon 
 thee. God will do something in the man. He shall yet be 
 instructed more deeply than ever, and shall find himself never 
 too old to learn. God will do something round about the man. 
 He shall have the guidance of circumstances, of closed and opened 
 doors, which only the wise can understand. Finally, this man 
 being a backslider of proven weakness, God will watch him with 
 fixed attention to correct the least slip. Providential care is 
 shown to be a very complex thing, operating along many lines 
 which converge to the great result. But more particularly for 
 our purpose, it is largely an inward thing, dealing first and fore- 
 most with the mind rather than with the circumstances, accord- 
 ing to this initial promise, "I will make thee wise." Probably 
 circumstances are much more nearly right than people admit, and 
 where failure arises the man himself is generally at fault. Also, 
 men can never be saved from the outside or by the most favour- 
 able circumstances. Deliverance must be wrought supremely by 
 
 1 A. T. Pierson. 
 
90 THE GUIDING EYE 
 
 an inward grace illuminating the mind and making men circum- 
 spect and self-adaptive to win the mastery over life's conditions. 
 It is written that God did not stay the flood, but Noah, being 
 warned by Him, prepared an ark for the saving of his house. The 
 grand resource and secret of the Most High in the protecting of 
 His children is this gift of wisdom. 
 
 The name " Wisdom " pervades the Old Testament, bringing 
 the glimmer of jewels and visions of a good woman's face as 
 tokens of its power to adorn and enrich life. In the text a 
 smaller word is used, indicating circumspection or intelligence; 
 yet that is but wisdom applied practically. The assertion is that 
 we may be made wise to think God's thoughts after Him, in- 
 telligent to recognize the meaning of His way with us, and when 
 understanding fails — as fail sometimes it will — patient to endure 
 with a great trust. Mere acquiescence cannot be the end of our 
 faith. He has called us friends — not puppets. Trials and griefs 
 have no inevitable efiicacy. In every different destiny of joy 
 and sorrow, health and sickness, help and injury, there lie hidden 
 both a use and a misuse, both a blessing and a curse, and only 
 active wisdom can choose the better part. 
 
 If Many still think of God in the way Omar Khayyam thought 
 of Him — as an infinite Chess-player, with the world for His 
 board. There stand bishops and knights and pawns, each on its 
 own square and perhaps untouched for long intervals. But every 
 piece is moved from time to time by the inexorable Hand, and 
 sooner or later every piece is sacrificed for ends that it cannot 
 know. Our duty is simply to trust that God is winning the 
 game in His own way. Thus do the uuinstructed ones most pitifully 
 talk, taking the name of the Lord their God in vain — finding faith 
 a poor futility. They cast their burden upon the Lord in quite 
 the wrong sense, for they lay only the blame of it on Him. They 
 think themselves not so much led through the world as dragged 
 through it, like a child's toy across the parlour floor, meeting with 
 a bump here and a bump there ; and having caught a gleam of 
 religious truth from the nursery or the pulpit, they feel it right 
 to say without conviction, " I suppose the bumps are all for my 
 good." They are puppets in the hand of the Inscrutable One : 
 they are not made wise.^ 
 
 ^ A lady put the universal difficulty to me in a simple but 
 complete statement. " My troubles," she said, " come from the 
 
 ^ W. S. Hackett, The Land of Ymir Sojoumings, 79. 
 
PSALM XXXII. 8 
 
 91 
 
 unkindness of other people, and they are very hard to bear 
 because I know they are not God's will. Unkindness cannot be 
 His will." Her complaint well-nigh covers all the dreary cata- 
 logue of human suffering. . Nearly always it is " somebody's fault." 
 The cotton corner which spreads want over an English county, the 
 opened lamp in the coal-mine which darkens a hundred homes, 
 the careless workmanship at the drain which slays the darling of 
 the household, the heartbreak of a fruitless search for employ- 
 ment — these surely are not the will of your Heavenly Father. 
 Now it is quite true that Atlantic storms may be beyond control. 
 But nothing hinders men from building ships strong enough to 
 weather them. There may be limits which we know not to the 
 miraculous betterment of circumstances outside, but there is no 
 limit to God's power to build up His saints inwardly in strength. 
 He may be barred out of a thousand hearts, but He need not be 
 barred out of mine. And this gospel is ennobling because it is 
 educative. It may be doubted if " God tempers the wind to the 
 shorn lamb," but it is not at all doubtful that He expects men to 
 invent warmer clothing. The blessings of Providence are not for 
 idlers, but for those who are willing to learn wisdom.^ 
 
 2. God guides His own not by force, but by love. The eye is 
 the indicator of the desire ; the lips command ; the hand compels. 
 The lips can plead, but there is an inner plea which the eye alone 
 urges. Those who know the language of the eye have mastered 
 the language of the soul. It implies that a sympathy is already 
 established. When the glance is understood and obeyed, there is 
 perfect concert of mind and heart. A heart tuned to sympathy 
 with the Divine purposes and hopes, leaps forth in glad obedience. 
 It sees no meanings anywhere so joyfully as those which it reads 
 in the eye of God. 
 
 If What is it that makes thy life an intenser note than the 
 music of the stars ? Is it not just the fact that thou art free, 
 just the circumstance that there is no iron belt around thee ? 
 What is this marvellous thing thou callest thy will ? Wherein 
 does its glory differ from the glory which the heavens declare ? 
 Is it not just in this, that thou art not compelled to come in ? 
 There is a guidance for thee, but it is not a star's guidance ; it is 
 a guidance of the eye. It is the only guiding which a will can 
 get without dying. Wouldst thou be driven like a star? then 
 must thou cease to be free. The heavens declare God's glory; 
 
 1 W. S. Hackett. 
 
92 
 
 THE GUIDING EYE 
 
 but it is the glory of His hands. Who shall declare the glory of 
 His Spirit? Not a star however bright, not a pulseless thing 
 however fair ; only something that can throb and strive and 
 choose. He will not guide thee by aught but His eye. He will 
 not compel thee to bear His cross. He will not sacrifice the joy of 
 being loved to the pride of being obeyed. He will draw thee, 
 but He will never drive thee ; He shall guide thee only with His 
 eye.i 
 
 Is God your leader ? — or does He only rein you in ? Are 
 
 you personally conscious of the vast difference between these two 
 experiences ? It is well to be held back from sin, no doubt, but the 
 joy of the God-directed, sanctified man is certainly beyond that 
 of the horse and mule which have no understanding, and whose 
 mouth must be held in with bit and bridle. There is no holiness 
 of a radical sort without Divine, positive, everyday guidance. 
 This differs not only in degree but in kind from negative restraint. 
 The latter may be no more than the rebuke or cry of our own 
 alarmed conscience. Conscience is born with us, born with every 
 man. We possess it without choice of our own. It is liable 
 to error like other human faculties, even though of inestimable 
 value. But God intends us to know Him of our own free choice, 
 and much more intimately than by laws written involuntarily 
 upon our heart. Those latter we have in common with the 
 heathen. They operate upon our fears. Guidance appeals to our 
 faith. " I will guide thee with mine eye," is a promise to God's 
 people which goes far ahead of conscience, and so universally is it 
 intended to be enjoyed that it was given even long before the 
 coming of our Lord. But there is no guidance of this highest 
 kind without the eager and abiding desire for it — a desire strong 
 enough in its faith and intensity to survive during the severest 
 trial and suffering 
 
 3. God guides us, not by showing us at the outset the whole 
 road that lies before us, and instructing us beforehand which turn 
 to take, and what to do in each difficult place ; but, step by step, 
 as we go along. He reveals the path to us, and shows us how to 
 walk. We should be appalled were we to see at a glance all that 
 He sees. He does not guide us so. He Himself sees all ; but He 
 shows it to us, bit by bit, as we can bear the sight, and as it is 
 needful for us to know. When we accept God's guidance, we 
 
 1 G. Matheson, Words by the Wayside, 17. 
 
 2 J. Rendel Harris, Life of F. W. Crossley, 165. 
 
PSALM XXXII. 8 
 
 93 
 
 experience more and more the warm, cherishing, quickening 
 sunhght, the light of God's countenance, shining on, gladdening, 
 and glorifying the life. We escape, too, all that is bitter in the 
 school of discipline, all harm, all loss, all death. Nothing malign, 
 nothing sorrowful, can lurk for a spirit in the path in which it is 
 guided by the eye of God ; while the life-path brightens as it 
 travels, opening into a sphere of boundless activity, of glorious 
 beauty, of perfect blessedness, as it nears the bounds of the eternal 
 world. 
 
 ^ My parents founded every action, every attitude, upon their 
 interpretation of the Scriptures, and upon the guidance of the 
 Divine Will as revealed to them by direct answer to prayer. 
 Their ejaculation in the face of any dilemma was, " Let us cast it 
 before the Lord ! " So confident were they of the reality of their 
 intercourse with God, that they asked for no other guide. They 
 recognized no spiritual authority among men, they subjected 
 themselves to no priest or minister, they troubled their consciences 
 about no current manifestation of " religious opinion." They lived 
 in an intellectual cell, bounded at its sides by the walls of their 
 own house, but open above to the very heart of the uttermost 
 heavens.^ 
 
 4. God's guidance meets all possible circumstances and con- 
 ditions. The eye has infinite capability of expression, and speaks 
 all languages. It thus meets and fits any character, in all its 
 feelings, and in all its circumstances, every moment. And yet it 
 is actually personal. Other guidings," such as laws, or books, or 
 commands, are general, and the same to everybody. The look of 
 " the eye " is essentially individual ; it brings the Guider and the 
 guided into the closest association : " I will guide thee with mine 
 eye." 
 
 ^ Of all bodily organs the most expressive is the eye. I can 
 read in the eye of a friend far more than he utters with the tongue. 
 It is the most accurate of all the heart's dial-plates. It can 
 express joy or grief, entreaty or reproof, approval or dislike. 
 Parents and children, or brothers and sisters, living in the same 
 home, can hold conversations with each other, even in the presence 
 of strangers, by the language of the eye. Small signs pass be- 
 tween them thus which a stranger neither sees nor understands. 
 And just so, those who live in close intercourse with God learn to 
 
 ^ Edmund Gosse, Father and Son, 14. 
 
94 
 
 THE GUIDING EYE 
 
 read what may be called the glances of His eye, small indications 
 of His will which strangers to heart-fellowship with Him cannot 
 read at all.^ 
 
 5. God's guidance is unerring ; it never fails. We read in the 
 Old Testament that God guided His people in various ways — by 
 angels, by dreams, by visions, by prophets, by priests, by Urim 
 and Thummim, by signs and wonders. Although God no longer 
 guides man by these special or extraordinary agencies, yet we may 
 be as certain of God's guidance now as though we saw Him in the 
 heavens with His eye upon us and His finger pointing to the 
 course He desires us to take. By an instinct, by an impression, 
 by a sense of duty, by an exercise of judgment, by the advice of 
 others, by a book, by a sermon, by a passage of Scripture, by 
 helping us in one direction, by hindering us in another — these are 
 the ordinary methods or agencies by which God is ever guiding 
 those who obey His guidance. We are as a vessel being steered 
 to port. There is One with us whose eye is always on the 
 compass, and whose hand, so to speak, is always on the wheel of 
 life. By His eye and by His hand every movement of a man's 
 life is guided. That hand and that eye are hidden, are unnoticed ; 
 but night and day they are in action, ever performing their 
 guiding work till we reach the haven of God's everlasting rest. 
 We may make false moves at times, at times appear to get out of 
 our providential track ; but somehow, so long as the Divine eye 
 is upon us and the Divine hand directs us, we go not far astray, 
 and in the end reach our God-appointed port. 
 
 ^ Keble recalled to men the teaching of Bishop Butler on the 
 moral nature of the evidence by which spiritual convictions were 
 reached. To the mere reason, this evidence could not get beyond 
 suggestive probabilities ; but these probabilities were used, by the 
 living spirit of man, as an indication of the personal Will of God, 
 which could be read by the soul that was in tune with that Will. 
 So probabilities became certitudes. " I will guide thee with mine 
 Eye," was Keble's favourite example of the mode in which Divine 
 truth touched the soul. By deep glimpses, by rare flashes, by a 
 momentary glance, the Eye of God could make us aware of Truths 
 far beyond the understanding of reason. Such Truths possessed 
 authority, which we could not dissect or critically examine. 
 
 ^ G. H. Knight, Abiding Help for Changing Days, 30. 
 
PSALM XXXII. 8 
 
 95 
 
 They were revelations of the mind of Him with whom we had 
 to deal} 
 
 ^ There is a tender awe in knowing that there is some One at 
 your side guiding at every step, restraining here, leading on there. 
 He knows the way better than the oldest Swiss guide knows the 
 mountain trail. He has love's concern that all shall go well with 
 you. There is a great peace for us in that, and with it a tender 
 awe to think who He is, and that He is close up by your side. 
 When you come to the splitting of the road into two, with a third 
 path forking off from the others, there is peace in just holding 
 steady and very quiet while you put out your hand and say, 
 " Jesus, Master, guide here." And then to hear a Voice so soft 
 that only in great quiet is it heard, softer than faintest breath on 
 your cheek, or slightest touch on your arm, telling the way in 
 fewest words or syllables — that makes the peace unspeakable.^ 
 
 Not like the angel with drawn sword. 
 
 Neither with rod threat'ningly ; 
 Leadst Thou, Lord, but fulfill'st Thy word, 
 
 "I will guide thee with Mine eye." 
 
 We see Thee not, but Thou seest us, 
 Be where we may, Thou art nigh; 
 
 Whisp'ring, timid or valorous, 
 
 " I will guide thee with Mine eye." 
 
 Dark days come and our path is dark, 
 
 We know not to go or fly; 
 From the sky falls, like trill of lark, 
 
 "I will guide thee with Mine eye." 
 
 Ah, Lord, we're wayward and we're weak, 
 Our gladness changing to sad sigh: 
 . O keep Thou us as Thou dost speak. 
 And guide us ever with Thine eye.* 
 
 1 H. S. Holland, Personal Studies, 78. 
 
 * S. D. Gordon, Quiet Talks on Personal Problems, 154, 
 
 * A. B. Grosart, Songs of the Day and Nighty 33. 
 
The Goodness of God. 
 
 PS. xxv.-cxix. — 7 
 
Literature. 
 
 Arnold (T.), Sermons, v. 163. 
 
 Ballard (F.), Does it Matter what a Man Believes? 234. 
 
 Bosanquet (C), The Man after God's own Heart, 82. 
 
 Holland (H. S.), Vital Values, 36. 
 
 Simeon (C), Works, v. 240. 
 
 Smith (Mrs. Pearsall), TJie God of all Comfort, 90. 
 
 Symonds (A. R.), Fifty Sermons, 280. 
 
 Vaughan (J.), Sermons to Children, i. 57. 
 
 Voysey (C), Sermons, xv. (1892), No. 31. 
 
 Christian World Pulpit, Ixii. 145 (R. F. Horton). 
 
 ExpositoTf 2nd Ser., iv. 410 (S. Cox). 
 
The Goodness of God. 
 
 O taste and see that the Lord is good : 
 
 Blessed is the man that trusteth in him. — Ps. xxxiv. 8. 
 
 1. No man who looks thoughtfully around him and within can 
 fail to feel at times, as Plato felt, that he needs some wiser and 
 more certain guidance than his own if he is ever to learn what 
 God really is; that God Himself must speak to him and show 
 Himself to him if he is to be sure that God is good, friendly, 
 accessible. Even if we believe that God has spoken to us and 
 shown Himself to us, that we have seen Him in Christ Jesus and 
 found Him altogether good, yet at times, when the burden of 
 all this unintelligible and self-contradictory world lies heavily 
 upon us, or when our own life is darkened by some misery to 
 which there seems neither relief nor end, we lose our assur- 
 ance; we falter where we firmly trod: God seems to shroud 
 Himself in some inaccessible heaven, to retire behind thick clouds 
 we cannot penetrate, to become doubtful to us once more, so that 
 we can no longer see or say that He is good. 
 
 It is an unspeakable relief and comfort to hear any voice which 
 assures us, in clear and cordial tones, that God is good, despite our 
 doubts and fears, that the sun of His love is shining down on the 
 world, though it be hidden from us by the dark clouds that hang 
 about our hearts. And if the voice be that of a man such as 
 we are, yet better and wiser than we are, and wiser and better 
 mainly because he has passed through many such experiences as 
 those by which we are troubled and has found out what they 
 mean — then surely he can give us not comfort only, but the 
 very succour that we most need. 
 
 2. Now the author of this psalm stands in the front rank of 
 those poets who have devoted themselves to the study of the 
 ethical aspects and problems of human life, and he is able to 
 
 99 
 
loo THE GOODNESS OF GOD 
 
 interpret the inner world of character and motive and passion 
 with a precision and a delicacy, a truth and a power never 
 surpassed. Confessedly also, despite the grievous transgression 
 he so bitterly rued, he was a man after God's own heart; 
 a man whose goodness was not of the narrow, ascetic, forbidding 
 type which repels men, but of that large, cordial, and manly type 
 which is most winning and attractive. Nor can we well doubt 
 that his experience was wider and more varied than ours, 
 embraced more radical vicissitudes, swept a larger circle, covered 
 more distant extremes. And not only did he run through the 
 whole gamut of human experience, but at the very time he sung 
 this psalm he was involved in those clouds of undeserved loss, 
 pain, reproach, under which we too often lose our faith in the 
 goodness of God. It would have been pardonable if, under stress 
 of so hard and unmerited a fate, he had brooded over it till the 
 goodness of God had become as doubtful to him as it often be- 
 comes to us under the lesser strain of trials not to be compared 
 with his. But it is from the thick darkness of his adversity 
 that he comes forth, with manly and cheerful courage, to assure 
 us that the Lord is good, and to dwell enjoyingly on the blessed- 
 ness of the man who trusts in Him. Such a testimony, given by 
 such a man at such a moment, may well touch and reassure our 
 hearts. What are our powers of insight as compared with his ? 
 or what our troubles as compared with his ? That, with his 
 powers, he saw no reason to doubt the goodness of the Lord ; that, 
 under his burden, he held fast his confidence in God — this should 
 at least bring some little hope to our hearts when they are heavy 
 and doubtful and sad. And if we believe that he was not only 
 a poet, but an inspired poet, we have in his words a Divine 
 revelation as well as the result of his own illuminated reason and 
 far-reaching experience. It is God who speaks to us and assures 
 us that He is good, and will do us good, however we doubt or 
 distrust Him. 
 
 ^ The following letter was written by Canon Liddon to Dr. 
 King, Bishop of Lincoln, one of his oldest friends, in the second 
 week of his illness, which was destined to proved fatal : " God has 
 laid His hand very heavily upon me ; and I have been through 
 the fire — I greatly needed it. Nothing [is] more wonderful in 
 Him than His goodness to such as I am. Pray for me, that I may 
 
PSALM XXXIV. 8 
 
 lOI 
 
 learn how to be humble and patient, and that this visitation (in 
 the Day of Account) may not be seen to have been as nothing — 
 or worse than nothing — instead of a great means of grace." ^ 
 
 Lifelong our stumbles, lifelong our regret, 
 Lifelong our efforts failing and renewed, 
 While lifelong is our witness, " God is good," 
 
 Who bore with us till now, bears with us yet. 
 
 Who still remembers and will not forget, 
 
 Who gives us light and warmth and daily food; 
 And gracious promises half understood, 
 
 And glories half unveiled, whereon to set 
 
 Our heart of hearts and eyes of our desire ; 
 Uplifting us to longing and to love, 
 
 Luring us upward from this world of mire, 
 Urging us to press on and mount above 
 Ourselves and all we have had experience of, 
 
 Mounting to Him in love's perpetual fire.^ 
 
 L 
 
 The Approach to God. 
 
 1. The Psalmist invites us to put God to the most practical of 
 tests. " O taste and see." Of our five senses taste is the most 
 homely ; of our five senses taste is the most personal ; for what 
 we see, and hear, and smell, and touch, we share with others, but 
 in a peculiarly personal sense the taste is our own. As the 
 proverb says : " There is no disputing about taste." Moreover, 
 the sense of taste is a peculiarly gracious gift of the Creator to 
 us, for, so far as we can tell, we might easily be nourished with 
 food which we did not taste, and all those processes of digestion 
 might go on unconsciously, like the feeding of an engine. But 
 He has given us this faculty of taste, by which we discriminate 
 the different flavours of the food we eat, and get a relish from 
 variety. Now, it is this one of the senses — the most homely, the 
 most personal, and the most gratuitous — that is taken as the 
 image to be used for urging upon us the experience of God. 
 " Taste " is the command. It is as if God came to us with this 
 generous proposal, " I would not have you choose Me until you 
 have tasted Me, nor would I force Myself upon you unless your 
 
 ^ Life and Letters of H. P. Liddm, 384. ^ Christina G. Rossetti. 
 
THE GOODNESS OF GOD 
 
 taste decide." In a marvellous way He puts Himself at our dis- 
 posal for us to try. " Taste and see that the Lord is good." 
 
 ^ There is an Indian story of a queen who " proved the truth 
 by tasting the food." The story tells how her husband, who dearly 
 loved her, and whom she dearly loved, lost his kingdom, wandered 
 away with his queen into the forest, left her there as she slept, 
 hoping she would fare better without him, and followed her long 
 afterwards to her father's court, deformed, disguised, a servant 
 among servants, a cook. Then her maidens came to her, told her 
 of the wonderful cooking, magical in manner, marvellous in flavour 
 and fragrance. They are sure it is the long-lost king come back 
 to her, and they bid her believe and rejoice. But the queen fears 
 it may not be true. She must prove it ; she must taste the food. 
 They bring her some. She tastes and knows. And the story ends 
 in joy. " 0 taste and see that the Lord is good." ^ 
 
 2. The secret of goodness can be found only by personal ex- 
 perience. Men know what sin is, by experience. They do not 
 know what holiness is, and they cannot obtain the knowledge of 
 its secret pleasure, till they join themselves truly and heartily to 
 Christ, and devote themselves to His service — till they " taste," 
 and thereby try. One may ask, Of what value, of what distinct 
 force and bearing, as an evidence of truth, is this appeal to ex- 
 perimental proof ? To this we may answer, first, that while the 
 mere fact of any religious or ethical system making such an 
 appeal would by no means prove its truth, for a false system might 
 profess to do the same, still no system could be true which shrank 
 from it. It would argue a consciousness of being untrue to the 
 realities of things, otherwise it would not fear the ordeal of ex- 
 perience. So far, therefore, it is a fair presumption in favour of 
 the Bible that throughout its language, expressed or implied, is 
 " Taste and see." And this presumption, it is next to be observed, 
 rises into positive inductive proof, in proportion to the duration, 
 extent, and diversity of the trial. As in experimental philosophy 
 we arrive at a general law by an induction of particular instances, 
 and the result is satisfactory in proportion to the multiplication 
 of concurring instances and the absence of antagonistic ones, 
 so is it with the argument for the Bible as derived from 
 experimental proof. In this case the induction is overwhelming. 
 
 ^ Amy Wilson Carmichael, Things as they are in India, 253. 
 
 J 
 
PSALM XXXIV. 8 
 
 103 
 
 From the beginning it has been undergoing this ordeal. Millions 
 have tried it, and have set to their seal that God's Word is true. 
 From age to age the testimony has rolled on, swelling in its pro- 
 gress into one mighty and majestic volume. And thus, borne on 
 the echoes of successive generations, the voice of that testimony 
 has reached our ears, and the burden of its cry is still the same, 
 " 0 taste and see that the Lord is good : blessed is the man that 
 trusteth in him." 
 
 ^ It is in his inner experience of the glorified Christ that we 
 are to look for the secret and source of Eaymund Lull's doctrine 
 and life — what he thought, what he was, what he suffered. And 
 this must be true of all true missionaries. They do not go out 
 to Asia and to Africa to say, " This is the doctrine of the Christian 
 Church " ; or, " Your science is bad. Look through this microscope 
 and see for yourselves and abandon such error " ; or, " Compare 
 your condition with that of America and see how much more 
 socially beneficial Christianity is than Hinduism or Confucianism 
 or Islam." Doubtless all this has its place — the argument from 
 the historic evidences of Christianity, the argument from the 
 coherence of Christianity with the facts of the universe, the 
 argument from fruits. But it is also all secondary. The primary 
 thing is personal testimony: "This I have felt. This He has 
 done for me. I preach whom I know."^ 
 
 Experience bows a sweet contented face. 
 Still setting to her seal that God is true: 
 Beneath the sun, she knows, is nothing new 
 
 All things that go return with measured pace, 
 
 Winds, rivers, man's still recommencing race: — 
 While Hope beyond earth's circle strains her view, 
 Past sun and moon, and rain and rainbow too. 
 
 Enamoured of unseen eternal grace. 
 
 Experience saith, " My God doth all things well " : 
 And for the morrow taketh little care. 
 
 Such peace and patience garrison her soul: — 
 While Hope, who never yet hath eyed the goal, 
 With arms flung forth, and backward floating hair, 
 
 Touches, embraces, hugs the invisible.^ 
 
 3. This is a mode of proof available to every man, without 
 distinction or exception. It requires neither learning nor logic to 
 
 ^ R. E. Speer, Some Great Leaders in the World Movement, 46. 
 * Christina G. Rossetti, Verses, 105. 
 
I04 THE GOODNESS OF GOD 
 
 conduct it. The appeal is simply this, " Taste and see ; trust in 
 the Lord and thou shalt be blessed." Whatever doubts there 
 might have been before the time of our Lord Jesus Christ, there 
 can be little doubt now that this experience of the great souls is 
 meant to be the experience of every soul. For ever since our 
 Lord and Master came to us in that homely speech of His, and 
 proposed that we should taste Him, eat His flesh, and drink His 
 blood, and ever since He reminded us that it is in that kind of 
 intimate personal communion that life comes, and not otherwise, 
 He has made it clear that there is with Him no selection. He 
 does not choose the people at His banquet ; He does not say, " Let 
 the rich or let the worthy come." The whole point of it is, " Go 
 out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come 
 in " ; " whosoever will, let him drink " ; " come, buy wine and milk 
 without money and without price." 
 
 ^ Madame Guyon possessed the feminine rather than the 
 masculine relation between the soul and God; but that is the 
 beauty of this relation — that it does not depend upon sex or age ; 
 it is equally significant to the woman as to the man. There 
 is something essentially delicate and sweet in this woman-soul 
 opening to God. Follow the process. She comes in stillness and 
 quietness and solitude to wait upon Him. She utters His name, 
 and pauses ; she says a word to Him, and waits to listen ; she will 
 not speak much, lest she should not hear. Presently she hears ; 
 it is the response, He is coming. " Oh, my soul, be still ; hush 
 thy words ; He is here ! " He speaks, and now she speaks again, 
 and presently from speech to silence she comes into the sanctuary 
 of His presence, and there it is all still — activity which does not 
 move. Oh, the joy, the rapture of what seems passionless passion ! 
 He is speaking, she is hearing; the soul is throbbing on the 
 heart of God. What a marvellous experience it is, this tasting 
 God!i 
 
 ^ Has the love of Christ worked any real change in our 
 feelings towards God ? Has there broken out yet in our hearts 
 the beautiful bright spring of thankfulness, or the deep fount of 
 holy sorrow ? Have we ever felt the promptings of remorse, the 
 pangs of penitence, as we thought of the goodness of God in giving 
 us Jesus Christ ? . . . Has the goodness of the Lord ever got a 
 hold of our hand and turned us right round, and begun to lead us 
 gently along the road that ends in a new mind about God, a mind 
 
 » R. F. Horton. 
 
PSALM XXXIV. 8 
 
 at peace with Him ? That is what God's goodness leads to. If 
 you have not seen the sunshine streaming down that lane, the sun 
 has never shone for you. If you have never heard that in the 
 patter of the rain, it has yet to fall a new way for you. If the 
 sweetest voice you ever heard on earth never sounds in that strain, 
 there is a music in it yet for you. If your father's wisdom, your 
 teacher's help, your friend's love have not pointed out this track, 
 there is a meaning in them hitherto missed by you. Oh, never 
 say you have known the goodness of God as it can be known, as 
 He would have it known, if it does not sometimes make you bow 
 your head in your prayer and stop speechless, and nearly break 
 your heart. Speak not of God's goodness if it has not cast you at 
 the feet of Christ ; if it has not made you feel after and find the 
 hem of His garment, and hold on for dear life.^ 
 
 4. The test must be applied under certain conditions, if the 
 result is to prove satisfactory. Look at verses 13 and 14 of this 
 psalm. Does a man want that taste of God ? Then " Keep thy 
 tongue from evil, and thy lips from speaking guile. Depart from 
 evil, and do good ; seek peace, and pursue it." The tongue that 
 is to taste God must be true, the lips into which that food is to 
 pass must be pure, and the life must be a life that is compatible 
 with so high a companionship and so intimate a communion. 
 "Oh, then," you say, "it is impossible to me; for my lips are 
 unclean, and my tongue is untrue ; what you say is possible for 
 the good is not possible for me, the bad." But read on to verse 
 18 — " The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, and 
 saveth such as be of a contrite spirit." So it appears that there 
 are two conditions for this tasting of God. The one is that you 
 shall be perfectly pure in heart and speech, and then you can 
 taste Him ; but if you are not pure, if you are defiled with sin, 
 then you shall be contrite and broken-hearted, and your God will 
 come that you may taste Him. It is not His intention that any 
 should go unfed at the banquet which He has laid for the children 
 of men. 
 
 ^ A very popular picture of Watts which usually holds the 
 spectator spellbound is taken from the Arthurian Epic. Eiding 
 through the forest, with its tangled vegetation graphically painted. 
 Sir Galahad has suddenly caught a glimpse of the mystic Sangreal, 
 which was concealed from all ordinary vision. 
 
 1 R. W. Barbour, Thoughts, 30. 
 
io6 THE GOODNESS OF GOD 
 
 The times 
 
 Grew to such evil that the holy cup 
 
 Was caught away to Heaven, and disappear'd. 
 
 The knights of King Arthur had gone in search of this hidden 
 treasure. At the same time and in the same place, one could see 
 it and another could not. The knights had the vision of the Grail 
 in proportion to their purity. To some of them who saw it, it 
 appeared veiled with a luminous cloud. But Sir Galahad, the 
 knight of pure heart and unselfish living, who lost himself to save 
 himself, beheld the glorious thing itself, clear and distinct. It is 
 at this supreme moment when the heavenly vision appears to him 
 that he is painted by the artist. He dismounts from his white 
 horse, and stands bareheaded with fascinated eyes gazing upon the 
 glorious vision revealed to him in the luminous sky through a 
 break in the trees, and lighting up his face and armour. . . . The 
 inner meaning of the subject will come to us as the view of the 
 Grail came to Sir Galahad, when our eye is single and our heart 
 is pure, suddenly and unexpectedly ; and we shall find that the 
 idea which underlies the whole picture, and makes it lovely with 
 a loveliness far surpassing that of hue and form so vividly de- 
 lineated, is an intensely modern one, and as applicable to our 
 day as to the far-off times of King Arthur,^ 
 
 II. 
 
 The Discovery of the Goodness of God. 
 
 1. The soul that tastes makes a great discovery ; it finds that 
 God is good. It is a stupendous act of courage by which the soul 
 of man pushes through the tangled jungle of natural powers 
 that stop his progress and embarrass him; and thrusts himself 
 through; and emerges into the open spaces under a clear sky; 
 and finds himself face to face with God. Those powers have had 
 him as their own. He has been their creature, their captive 
 prey. He has been carried to and fro by feeling, instincts, 
 desires, appetites, interests, ambitions. So he has grown. So 
 it has always been. Passions, fears, hates, joys, loves — these 
 welled up from unknown sources ; these made him their puppet. 
 Whither they impelled he went. They were strong in their grip. 
 They were terribly, horribly real, 
 
 1 Hugh Macmillan, The Life- Work of Q. F, Watts, 175. 
 
PSALM XXXIV. 8 
 
 107 
 
 Yet through all this wild riot the spirit thrust its way, like a 
 tender blade through the grass and stony soil. Up it came. It 
 showed itself a new and strange force amid the mob of tyrannous 
 impulses that tugged and strained to beat it down. Still it 
 persevered ; still it insisted ; still it drew itself upward, beyond 
 all that clung and encumbered, seeking still the intangible, the 
 unseen. It threw all competing experiences aside, it pressed on 
 towards a secret goal of its own ; it strove, it wrestled, it sought 
 in all strange places, and on lonely mountain-peaks, and in 
 hidden silences. It sought something that haunted and fled, 
 and escaped and returned; and was very near, yet very far; 
 something that for ever evoked and yet for ever evaded. It 
 sought it through blundering incantations and bloody rites, and 
 down by foul ways and by weird devices. It sought and failed, 
 and cried aloud in its failure and cut its flesh with knives ; it 
 tore itself, it foamed, it went mad. It lost itself in obscure magic. 
 Yet still it sought that which its heart desired. 
 
 At last out of a wilderness of effort, strewn with the wreckage 
 of a thousand false hopes, it arrived ; it found ; it felt ; it 
 touched ; it knew. Lo ! this, this is God. This is what explains 
 all. This is it. This is the experience that it craved ; this is the 
 consummation ; this is religion. " 0 taste and see " (so man cried) 
 " how gracious the Lord is ! " Spirit and spirit meet. Soul and 
 God are one. How deep the peace ! How keen the joy ! 
 Blessed ! blessed is the man that putteth his trust in 
 Him.i 
 
 1[ In the Divinity Hall at Aberdeen John Duncan was 
 impressed with Dr. Mearns's prayers to the " Great King," and 
 his cogent reasonings convinced him intellectually of the existence 
 of the living God. The gain was to him invaluable. " It was 
 Dr. Mearns," he frequently said to me, " who satisfied me of the 
 existence of God " ; and through life he remembered the debt with 
 lively gratitude. But the conviction had been reached by a 
 logical process, without any more direct mental perception ; rather 
 his reason accepting, than his mind seeing it. The next stage 
 of light seems almost to belong to the operation of the Spirit 
 of God, and to involve on his part a special resistance in not 
 following it up to spiritual fruit. It was the breaking in of a 
 light which he looked back upon to the last as an era in his life, 
 
 1 H. Scott Holland, Vital Values, 40. 
 
io8 THE GOODNESS OF GOD 
 
 and spoke of as a season of indescribable joy. His own words to 
 me were nearly if not exactly these : " I first saw clearly the 
 existence of God in walking along the bridge at Aberdeen; it 
 was a great discovery to me ; I stopped and stood in an ecstasy 
 of joy at seeing the existence of God." I think he also added, 
 "I stood and thanked God for His existence." To another 
 friend he said, When I was convinced that there was a God, I 
 danced on the Brig o' Dee with delight." ^ 
 
 Expecting Him my door was open wide: 
 
 Then I looked round 
 
 If any lack of service might be found, 
 And saw Him at my side : — 
 
 How entered, by what secret stair, 
 
 1 know not, knowing only He was there.^ 
 
 ^ I shall never forget the hour when I first discovered that 
 God was really good. I had of course always known that the Bible 
 said He was good; but I had thought it only meant He was 
 religiously good ; and it had never dawned on me that it meant 
 He was actually and practically good, with the same kind of 
 goodness as He has commanded us to have. The expression, 
 "the goodness of God," had seemed to me nothing more than 
 a sort of heavenly statement, which I could not be expected to 
 understand. And then one day I came, in my reading of the 
 Bible, across the words, " 0 taste and see that the Lord is good," 
 and suddenly they meant something. "The Lord is good," I 
 repeated to myself. What does it mean to be good ? What 
 but this, the living up to the best and highest that one knows. 
 To be good is exactly the opposite of being bad. To be bad is to 
 know the right and not to do it, but to be good is to do the best 
 we know. And I saw that, since God is omniscient, He must 
 know what is the best and highest good of all, and that therefore 
 His goodness must necessarily be beyond question. I can never 
 express what this meant to me. I had such a view of the real 
 actual goodness of God that I saw nothing could possibly go 
 wrong under His care, and it seemed to me that no one could ever 
 be anxious again. And over and over since, whep appearances 
 have been against Him, and when I have been tempted to question 
 whether He had not been unkind, or neglectful, or indifferent, 
 I have been brought up short by the words, " The Lord is 
 good"; and I have seen that it was simply unthinkable that 
 
 ^ A. Moody Stuart, Recollections of John Duncan^ 17. 
 
 2 T. E. Brown, Old John and Other Poems, 181. 
 
PSALM XXXIV. 8 
 
 109 
 
 a God who was good could have done the bad things I had 
 imagined.^ 
 
 ^ The Lord's goodness surrounds us at every moment. I walk 
 through it almost with difificulty, as through thick grass and 
 flowers.2 
 
 ^ He took his pain and all the trials of his days, and said, 
 " They say there is a better land, but it is hard to believe." Thus 
 he was a true pilgrim, for it is only stupid people who think 
 that the vision of the loveliest city in the loveliest land dims the 
 pilgrim's eyes to the fair beauties of this world. He did not make 
 the most of two worlds ; but as he lived to be worthy of that city 
 with foundations, God counted him worthy to find along the dusty 
 road of traffic and toil and pain the well of deep joys which only 
 the true pilgrim can discover. These wells were at many stages 
 of the day's road : he found one deep spring of pure, sparkling 
 water in the morning reading of the Bible and hymn-book ; an- 
 other when his hands were clasped in prayer.^ 
 
 2. The true standard of goodness we find in Jesus Christ. 
 Ordinary human nature measures its purity and nobility by itself, 
 by the customs of society, by the decrees of law courts, by the 
 maxims of current philosophy. The blessed life takes its estimate 
 from the doctrine and spirit of Jesus. This means a higher "^nned 
 goodness which we call holiness, and applies only to those w. ^, 
 besides being virtuous in their actions, are possessed with an un- 
 afi'ected enthusiasm of goodness, and besides abstaining from vice, 
 regard even a vicious thought with horror. Here is an ideal 
 which ordinary ethics not only do not reach, but do not even 
 attempt. When Jesus says, " If ye know these things, blessed are 
 ye if ye do them," the test is as spiritual as it is practical. " These 
 things " include what He referred to as a pure heart ; an inner 
 life, that is, which is utterly true to both the great commands, as 
 He interpreted and emphasized them. How much more this 
 means than the honesty which keeps men out of prison, and the 
 kindness which makes daily life tolerable, no words are needed 
 to show. The blessed life receives Christ Jesus as Lord ; that is 
 the open secret of its ethical and spiritual superiority to every 
 other life. 
 
 (1) The hope of the world lies in its vision of goodness, in its 
 
 1 Mrs. Pearsall Smith. 2 y^^ Barbour, Thoughts, 107. 
 
 ^ Love and Life : The Story of J. Denholm Brash, 198. 
 
no THE GOODNESS OF GOD 
 
 realization of character. The only radical and final remedy for 
 human misery is in the remoulding of human character. It is a 
 potent truth, alike for good and ill, that character is influenced by 
 environment. But it is even more true and potent that environ- 
 ment is influenced by character. The elevation of individual 
 character is an old highway to social happiness, but it is confessedly 
 difficult, and many eager philanthropists have sought for shorter 
 cuts. Sooner or later, however, the return has to be made to the 
 only road. What it all comes to is that the blessed life is ulti- 
 mately the only hope of humanity. Christendom may sadly fail to 
 teach or to exemplify this hope. But that is not the failure of 
 Christianity. For the needs of the whole world, Christianity has 
 never yet been tried. The modern Christian, like the ancient 
 Israelite, is continually forsaking the true God to worship idols. 
 Hence the Church's impotence to bless the world. But if only the 
 profession of Christianity did mean on all hands the embodiment 
 of the blessed life, full churches would be but a small fraction of 
 the result. Much more may be affirmed with no less truth — even 
 this,- that the curses of civilization (which may well alarm un- 
 belief) would come to an end as surely as noxious bacteria in 
 sunlight ; society would be leavened with even more certainty than 
 yeast leavens dough ; human sorrows would be brought to their 
 natural and tolerable minimum; and the nations would be in 
 such assurance of permanent peace that the millions expended 
 on murderous battleships could be utilized for the abolition of 
 poverty and the enrichment of humanity. 
 
 ^ There is one signal service which the appeal of the Christian 
 character is peculiarly apt to render in the cause of faith. It is 
 often the only power which can confront the steady, surreptitious, 
 miserable pressure with which the sins of Christians fight against 
 the work of Christ. It may be that the contest between these 
 two forces covers by far the greater part of the whole battlefield ; 
 and that, while critics and apologists, with their latest weapons 
 (or with the latest improvement of their old ones), are charging 
 and clashing amid clouds of dust — with the world still thinking 
 that here at last is the real crisis — the practical question between 
 belief and disbelief is actually being settled for the vast majority 
 of men by the silent and protracted conflict between the con- 
 sistent and the inconsistent lives of those who alike profess them- 
 selves Christians ; the conflict between the contrasted experience 
 
PSALM XXXIV. 8 
 
 III 
 
 of Christ's Presence manifest in goodness, and Christ's Name dis- 
 honoured in hypocrisy, or blindness, or indifference.^ 
 
 (2) Goodness is attainable through faith in Christ. For men 
 and for nations alike, life is largely if not wholly made up of 
 habits. The blessed life, whether on the large or the small scale, 
 is certainly a question of blessed habit. But this is not the whole 
 case. Destiny, we know, turns on character, just as character is 
 decided by habits. But habits are neither more nor less than the 
 repetition of acts. Let the first act be worthy, then let repetition 
 confirm it, and habit becomes not only easy but the sure prophecy 
 of destiny. The true beginning of the blessed life is plain, viz., to 
 receive Christ Jesus as Lord. The repetition of that supreme act 
 of the soul, as each day dawns and throughout all the duties it 
 brings, is the pledge of the habit which makes character. That 
 character not only ensures destiny but contributes in the interim 
 to other characters and destinies on every hand. Social reform 
 yields no hope of any golden age without purified and ennobled 
 individual character. For that, there is no such ideal or 
 guarantee on earth as the blessed life which is " rooted and built 
 up " in Jesus Christ. 
 
 ^ In June, G. F. Watts wrote asking Shields to lunch any day 
 at Little Holland House. He knew nothing of the work Shields 
 was commencing, but said : " I should like to have an occasional 
 chat about serious art. I wish you would kindly send me a line 
 and tell me the correct colours for the draperies of Faith. I 
 know you are an authority." To which Shields replied : " For 
 answer to your question and compliment, I am no 'authority.' I 
 know none on the subject but the Authority of the Word revealed. 
 Paul declared Faith is God's gift. She is heaven-born. She is 
 the assurance of heavenly things to mortals shut in by sensuous 
 things, therefore the skies' hue is hers, her mantle and her wings : 
 and for her robe, white — unspotted. And this because they who 
 seek righteousness by works fail of that which only Faith gives. 
 The 'fine linen of the Saints' symbolizes their righteousness in 
 the Apocalypse, and it is said that their robes were made * white 
 in the blood of the Lamb.' If I seek where alone I look to find, 
 this is what is given me, and it is the best I can offer in response 
 to your question. I bow to tradition only where it agrees with 
 the written Word." ^ 
 
 * Francis Paget, Bishop of Oxford, 178. 
 
 * E. Mills, Life and Letters of Frederic Shields, 309. 
 
112 
 
 THE GOODNESS OF GOD 
 
 3. Having once tasted, we must continue tasting. Those who 
 have once tasted of God, have contracted a passion that grows in 
 being fed. Because they have tasted they must come again and 
 again to stay an appetite which, though always being met, is 
 always on the increase. The tasting of this meat is not to be the 
 tasting of an occasional delicacy, it is to be the eating of daily 
 bread. 
 
 ^ There was a man who once lived in a place where, close to 
 his house, he had a spring of water. At a little distance from 
 him, there was another spring. We shall call the spring close to 
 his house, " the nether spring," and the other, a little way off, 
 " the upper spring." So he had the nether and the upper spring. 
 The nether spring looked very pleasant when the sun was 
 shining ; the water sparkled in its rays ; yet, when looked at more 
 closely, the water was black and dark, and very often grew 
 muddy, and the flowers on the side of it never lasted long ; and 
 people who drank a great deal of the water from the nether 
 spring seemed to grow sick. The other spring, a little way off, 
 came out of the rock ; it required a great deal of patience to get 
 it ; ■ but if the cup was held long enough, it would always get 
 filled, and you were never sick from it. 
 
 Now this man who lived in the cottage near the nether 
 spring always went to it ; he did not like the trouble of going to 
 the upper spring. He had not sufiicient patience. So it went 
 on for many years. At last he came to the nether spring and 
 it was dry, not a drop of water in it. So he was obliged to go 
 to the upper spring; he had to wait some time, but at last 
 he had a cup of nice, pure water. It was so sweet, and he 
 enjoyed it much. He had never before tasted such water. The 
 nether spring flowed on again, but ever after he went to the 
 upper ; and when asked why he went so far, he said, " I cannot 
 leave the upper spring ; having once tasted it, I cannot go back 
 to the nether spring." ^ 
 
 III. 
 
 Satisfaction in the Goodness of God. 
 
 1. Those who discover the goodness of God are content to 
 trust Him. To be religious is to trust God, and to do that is to 
 be free from the fear of evil. He who trusts shall not be afraid 
 
 * James Yaughan. 
 
PSALM XXXIV. 8 
 
 113 
 
 of evil tidings, his heart is fixed, trusting in the Lord. To be 
 reUgious is to keep God's commandments, and the path of 
 rectitude cannot but be the path of happiness. Of course we 
 must not disguise the fact that to be truly religious is to deny 
 one's self and to take up the cross. But even that carries with it 
 its own blessedness. Suffering and sacrifice for the good of 
 another bring to one's soul a peculiar sweetness and satisfaction. 
 How much more must this be the case when it is done for God ! 
 " Take my yoke upon you," said Christ, not concealing that His 
 religion is a yoke, " and ye shall find rest unto your souls." 
 
 ^ Miss Trotter was penurious in small things, but her 
 generosity could rise to circumstances. Her dower was an 
 annuity from the estate of Mortonhall. She had a contempt for 
 securities, and would trust no bank with her money, but kept all 
 her bills and banknotes in a green silk bag that hung on her 
 toilet-glass. On each side of the table stood a large white bowl, 
 one of which contained her silver, the other her copper money. 
 One day, in the course of conversation, she said to her niece, " Do 
 
 ye ken, Margaret, that Mrs. Thomas E is dead ? I was gaun 
 
 by the door this morning, and thought I would just look in and 
 speer for her. She was very near her end, but quite sensible, and 
 expressed her gratitude to God for what He had done for her and 
 her fatherless bairns. She said she was leaving a large, young 
 family with very small means, but she had that trust in Him that 
 they would not be forsaken, and that He would provide for them. 
 Now, Margaret, ye'U tell Peggy to bring down the green silk bag 
 that hangs on the corner of my looking-glass, and ye'll tak' twa 
 thousand pounds out 0' it, and gi'e it to Walter Ferrier for behoof 
 of thae orphan bairns ; it will fit out the laddies, and be something 
 to the lassies. I want to make good the words, that ' God wad 
 provide for them,' for what else was I sent that way this morning, 
 but as a humble instrument in His hands ? " ^ 
 
 2. He who has tasted the goodness of God and has learned 
 the secret of happiness will seek to share his experience with 
 others. Fire will cease to have either heat or light as it burns, 
 before the blessed life will be hidden away in heart-secrecies, 
 buried like the one talent in useless seclusion. Every man or 
 woman who rises above carnality and custom and selfishness into 
 the pure brightness and calm strength of communion with Christ 
 
 ^ J. A. Doyle, Susan Ferrier, 18. 
 PS. xxv.-cxix. — 8 
 
114 
 
 THE GOODNESS OF GOD 
 
 must go on to exemplify His word, " Ye are the salt of the earth ; 
 ye are the light of the world." Egoism is as intolerable without 
 altruism as altruism is impossible without egoism. In the blessed 
 life there is no conflict between these two. Bather do they 
 supplement and stimulate each other. The human self, by very 
 reason of its enrichment beyond utterance through receiving 
 Christ Jesus as Lord, will never cease to feel, and act upon the 
 feeling — 
 
 0 that the world might taste and see 
 
 The riches of His grace ! 
 The arms of love that compass me 
 
 Would all mankind embrace. 
 
 ^ When persons only wish for the happiness of another, and 
 when they never pass a day without doing a kindness, how can 
 they be otherwise than happy ? And when difficulties are very 
 great they have only to ascend to the level of doing the will of 
 God; they will be happy still. If they are determined to act 
 rightly, to live as the best men and women have lived, there is 
 no. more difficulty of unbelief. They see, not having seen, they go 
 out trusting in God, but not knowing whither they go. There is 
 no delight in life equal to that of setting the world right, of 
 reconciling things and persons to one another, by understanding 
 them, not by embittering them. True sympathy with every one 
 is the path of perfect peace.^ 
 
 ^ A poor man came home one day and brought five peaches : 
 nice beautiful peaches. He had four sons ; he gave one to each 
 and one to his wife. He did not say anything, but just gave them. 
 At night he came home again, and then he said, " How were the 
 peaches — all nice ? " I will tell you what each of the four boys 
 said. 
 
 The eldest boy said, " Oh yes, father, delicious. I ate my peach, 
 and then I took the stone very carefully, and went and planted it 
 in the garden, that we may have another peach-tree some day." 
 " Well," said the father, " very prudent ; look out for the future." 
 
 Then the little boy said, " Oh, father, 'twas exceedingly nice. 
 I ate all mine, and mother gave me half hers, and I threw 
 away the stone." " Well," said the father, " I am glad you liked 
 it, but perhaps if you had been a little older, you would have 
 acted differently." 
 
 The second boy said, Yes, father, I will tell you what I did 
 with mine ; I picked up the stone my little brother threw away, 
 
 ^ B. Jowett, in Life and Letters, ii. 402, 
 
PSALM XXXIV. 8 
 
 115 
 
 broke it, and ate the kernel ; I enjoyed that exceedingly ; but I 
 did not eat my peach, I sold it. I could buy a dozen peaches 
 with what I got for it." The father said, " That may be right, but 
 I think it was a little covetous." 
 
 Then he said to the third boy, " Well, Edward, what did you do 
 with your peach ? " Edward came forward reluctantly ; but in 
 answer to his father, he replied, " I took it to poor little George, 
 who is sick down the lane. He would not take it, so I left the 
 peach on his bed and ran away." 
 
 Which of the four peaches was sweetest ? " Taste and see " 
 the way to enjoy anything.^ 
 
 * James Vaughan, Sermons to Children, i. 67. 
 
God of Nature and God of Grace. 
 
 X17 
 
Literature. 
 
 Daries (J. A.), Seven Words of Love, 165. 
 Dearden (H. W.), Parochial Sermons, 68. 
 Gray (W. A.), The Shadow of the Hand, 198. 
 Hanks (W. P.), The Eternal Witness, 142. 
 Maclaren (A.), A Yearns Ministry, ii. 211. 
 
 Christian World Pulpit, xxiiv. 188 (W. G. Horder) ; xl. 169 (L. Abbott) ; 
 
 Ixxv. 60 (E. E. Newell). 
 Church Times, July 28, 1911 (J. W. Horsley). 
 Preacher^s Magazine, vii. 439 (K. Brewin). 
 Twentieth Century Pastor^ xxviii. (1911) 201 (J. E. Flower). 
 
God of Nature and God of Grace. 
 
 Thy lovingkindness, O Lord, is in the heavens ; 
 Thy faithfulness reacheth unto the skies. 
 Thy righteousness is like the mountains of God ; 
 Thy judgements are a great deep. — Ps. xxxvi. 5, 6. 
 
 The landscape from which the Psalmist has borrowed his lessons 
 in all probability lay beside him while he mused. We imagine 
 him at the time a fugitive from Saul. He is hid in some desert- 
 retreat, with the everlasting hills round about him, and the gleams 
 and the shadows of a summer noon overhead. He had been cast 
 out from the comforts of an earthly home, but God was his 
 dwelling-place and his refuge. Hunt him as men might, they 
 could not drive him where Jehovah's righteousness did not environ 
 him, and the wings of His lovingkindness stretch to shadow and 
 protect. Out there, amidst the silence and restfulness of nature, 
 God's breath was about him to cool and to strengthen, and His 
 voice spoke comfort and peace. So the Psalmist speaks little of 
 himself. He mentions his trials and perils only for the sake of 
 dismissing them. From the wickedness and the craft of men he 
 is fain to turn to the goodness and the faithfulness of God, of 
 which all things around were eloquent. 
 
 ^ I was struck with the fact that Scripture is adapted to every 
 land, on Sunday week, as I sat in the little English Church at 
 Zermatt, right under the shadow of the gigantic Matterhorn, and 
 read such passages as these on its walls: "Ye frost and cold, 
 bless ye the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him for ever." " Ye 
 mountains and hills, bless ye the Lord, praise Him and magnify 
 Him for ever." And as day after day I moved about in a land 
 where in every direction the eye rested on gigantic peaks, 
 whose crests were often lost in the clouds, these words were ever 
 rising in my mind : " Thy righteousness is like the mountains of 
 God." 1 
 
 1 W. Garrett Horder. 
 "9 
 
I20 GOD OF NATURE AND OF GRACE 
 
 I. 
 
 The Lovingkindness of God. 
 
 "Thy lovingkindness, O Lord, is in the heavens." 
 
 The "mercy" or "lovingkindness" of which the Psalmist 
 speaks is very nearly equivalent to the New Testament " grace." 
 Both mean substantially this — active love communicating itself 
 to creatures who are inferior, and who might have expected some- 
 thing else to befall them. Mercy is a modification of love, in- 
 asmuch as it is love to an inferior. The hand is laid gently upon 
 the man, because if it were laid with all its weight it would crush 
 him. It is the stooping goodness of a king to a beggar. And 
 mercy is likewise love in its exercise to persons that might expect 
 something else, being guilty. As a general coming to a body of 
 mutineers with pardon and favour upon his lips, instead of with 
 condemnation and death, so God comes to us forgiving and bless- 
 ing. • All His goodness is forbearance, and His love is mercy, 
 because of the weakness, the lowliness, and the ill desert of us on 
 whom the love falls. 
 
 1. As the heavens are high above the earth, so God's loving- 
 kindness evermore transcends man. Far above the towers that 
 men's hands have reared, the waves that the tempests uplift, the 
 peaks that the earth has heaved, the heaven stretches its distant 
 curtain, embracing but surmounting them all. And so with the 
 mercy of our God. It is the one all-enfolding, all-transcending 
 fact in God's moral universe, lifting itself far above the region of 
 human experience and analogy. It is high ; we cannot attain to 
 it. It is far above man's mercies, for our " goodness extendeth 
 not to God's," and while " greater love hath no man than this, that 
 a man lay down his life for his friends," God " commendeth his 
 love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.'' 
 It is far above man's deserts, for we are " not worthy of the least 
 of all the mercies, and of all the truth " which He showeth to His 
 servants. It is far above man's sins, for high as he has heaved 
 the mountains of his provocations, God's mercy can transcend 
 the loftiest. It is far above man's prayers and conceptions, for 
 
PSALM XXXVI. 5, 6 
 
 121 
 
 as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are His ways higher 
 than our ways, and His thoughts than our thoughts, and He " is 
 able to do exceeding abundantly above all we ask or think." 
 
 Great God ! I stood beneath the skies one night, 
 When all Thy stars were out, serene and clear, 
 And tried to think of Thee, and feel Thee near, 
 When, suddenly, a sense of all Thy might. 
 Thy times to come, Thy wonders out of sight, 
 Struck chill on me — my spirit reeled for fear ; 
 Scarce certain of the ground I stand on here, 
 I shrank abased beneath Thy awful height ; 
 When soft as dew, a word of Holy Writ 
 Fell on my troubled mind ; " Thy mercy, Lord, 
 Is greater than the heavens" — then all above, 
 Around, beneath, took comfort from the word; 
 For 'twas as if the heavens were newly lit 
 With their best, brightest star — the Star of Love. 
 
 2. Like the face of the summer sky, the lovingkindness of 
 God is unalterable. The earth which the sky overshadows has 
 seen many mutations. " Surely the mountain falling cometh to 
 nought, and the rock is removed out of its place. The waters 
 wear the stones ; thou washest away the things that grow out of 
 the dust of the earth." Eivers have altered their courses. The 
 sea has shifted its ancient bounds. Forests have sunk in swamps. 
 Empires have risen and fallen. The grass rustles and the lizards 
 bask by the broken columns of cities that pulsed with the 
 interests and sounded with the traffic of busy men. Generation 
 after generation has come and gone, and the place that knew 
 them once knows them no more for ever. Beneath there is 
 nothing but flux, restlessness, change. But the sky has looked 
 down on it all, serene and unvarying, amidst all the overturning 
 and mutations of the countless years. Time writes no wrinkles 
 on its steadfast blue. Orion hangs his glittering sword, and the 
 Pleiades weave their mystic braids, just as they did for Isaac 
 when he went forth to the field to meditate at the eventide ; for 
 Abraham when God took him out from his tent, and bade him 
 I look up to heaven with the promise of a seed that should be as 
 the stars of heaven for multitude ; for Adam when the first day 
 faded over him, and the glories of the night revealed themselves 
 
122 GOD OF NATURE AND OF GRACE 
 
 amidst the balm and the silences of an unstained Eden. So with 
 the mercy of God. All down the ages His covenant has stood, 
 ordered in all things and sure amidst all changes, free from 
 variableness or any shadow of turning. As the heavens that 
 were formed of old " continue unto this day according to God's 
 ordinance," so does the word that is settled there. 
 
 ^ Miss K. having told Dr. Duncan that a young man had said 
 at a meeting that " there was not mercy in God from everlasting 
 — there could not be mercy till there was misery," he said, 
 " God is unchangeable ; mercy is an attribute of God. The man 
 is confounding mercy with the exercise of mercy. There could 
 not be the exercise of mercy till there was misery ; but God was 
 always a merciful God. You might as well say that there could 
 not be justice in God till there were creatures towards whom to 
 exercise punitive justice." ^ 
 
 3. Like the canopy of heaven, the lovingkindness of God is 
 all-embracing. "The noblest scenes of earth," it has been said, 
 " can be seen and known but by few ; it is not intended that man 
 should live always in the midst of them ; he injures them by his 
 presence, he ceases to feel them if he be always with them. But 
 the sky is for all. Bright as it is, it is not * too bright or good 
 for human nature's daily food.' It is fitted in all its functions 
 for the perpetual comfort and exaltation of the heart." No rough 
 hand can sully the clear blue vault above, as it unfolds its 
 splendour and dispenses its blessings for a worldful at once, and 
 that without money or price. Be your dwelling-place on the 
 bleakest and dreariest swamp, without a tree or a hill to diversify 
 its surface, you have still overhead a picture of loveliness and of 
 mystery as often as you choose to look up. Thread the narrowest 
 thoroughfare of a crowded town, and far above the filth and 
 squalor, between the eaves of the tall and tottering tenements 
 that enclose you, there are strips of clear blue sky, reminding 
 you that, whatever be the restlessness, the sorrow, and the vice 
 below, there is nothing above but beauty, purity, and peace. So 
 again with the mercy of our God ; it is exceeding broad. It is 
 the attribute of all attributes that is ever engirdling and over- 
 shadowing us, making its existence known through a thousand 
 channels, in a thousand ways. Mercy is the very sphere in which 
 
 * David Brown, Memoir of John Duncan, 422. 
 
 J 
 
PSALM XXXVI. 5, 6 
 
 123 
 
 we live and move ; it is swift as the light of heaven, near to us 
 as its circling breaths. And it is just as free. Eich and poor, 
 high and low, all have alike a share in it. And as it is the gift 
 of God to all, so is it the gift of God to all in all circumstances, 
 throughout every change of their changing lives. 
 
 ^ The Doctor must keep his temper : this is often worse to 
 manage than even his time, there is so much unreason, and 
 ingratitude, and peevishness, and impertinence, and impatience, 
 that it is very hard to keep one's tongue and eye from being 
 angry; and sometimes the Doctor does not only well, but the 
 best when he is downrightly angry, and astonishes some fool, or 
 some insolent, or some untruth doing or saying patient ; but the 
 Doctor should be patient with his patients, he should bear with 
 them, knowing how much they are at the moment suffering. Let 
 us remember Him who is full of compassion, whose compassion 
 never fails ; whose tender mercies are new to us every morning, 
 as His faithfulness is every night; who healed all manner of 
 diseases, and was kind to the unthankful and the evil; what 
 would become of us, if He were as impatient with us as we often 
 are with each other ? If you want to be impressed with the 
 Almighty's infinite loving-kindness and tender mercy, His 
 forbearance, His long-suffering patience, His slowness to anger, 
 His Divine ingeniousness in trying to find it possible to spare 
 and save, think of the Israelites in the desert, and read the 
 chapter where Abraham intercedes with God for Sodom, and 
 these wonderful peradventures." ^ 
 
 ^ My fear is not of expanding, but of contradicting, the 
 Gospel which we are sent to preach ; not of seeing too strong a 
 testimony in the Bible to the will of Him in whom is light and no 
 darkness at all, but of limiting its testimonies to meet my narrow 
 conceptions ; not of exaggerating the duty of the Church to be a 
 witness against all hard and cruel conceptions of our Father in 
 Heaven, which lead to a confusion between Him and the Spirit of 
 Evil, but of not perceiving how manifold are the ways in which 
 that duty should be fulfilled. I am sure that if the Gospel is not 
 regarded as a message to all mankind of the redemption which 
 God has effected in His Son; if the Bible is thought to be 
 speaking only of a world to come, and not of a Kingdom of 
 Eighteousness and Peace and Truth with which we may be in 
 conformity or in enmity now ; if the Church is not felt to be the 
 hallower of all professions and occupations, the bond of all classes, 
 the instrument of reforming abuses, the admonisher of the rich^ 
 
 ^ Dr. John Brown, Horce Suhsecivce, ii. 35 (appendix). 
 
124 GOD OF NATURE AND OF GRACE 
 
 the friend of the poor, the asserter of the glory of that humanity 
 which Christ bears — we are to blame, and God will call us to 
 account as unfaithful stewards of His treasures.^ 
 
 II. 
 
 The Faithfulness of God. 
 
 "Thy faithfulness reacheth unto the skies." 
 
 God's faithfulness is in its narrowest sense His adherence to 
 His promises. It implies, in that sense, a verbal revelation, and 
 definite words from Him, pledging Him to a certain line of 
 action. He hath said, and shall He not do it? He will not 
 alter the thing that is gone out of His lips. It is only a God who 
 has actually spoken to men that can be a " faithful God." He 
 will not palter with a double sense, keeping His word of promise 
 to the ear, and breaking it to the hope. And not only His 
 articulate promises, but also His own past actions, bind Him. 
 He is always true to these ; and not only continues to do as He 
 has done, but discharges every obligation which His past imposes 
 on Him. The ostrich was said to leave its eggs to be hatched in 
 the sand. Men bring men into positions of dependence, and then 
 lightly shake responsibility from careless shoulders. But God 
 accepts the cares laid upon Him by His own acts, and discharges 
 them to the last jot. He is a " faithful Creator." Creation brings 
 obligations with it — obligations on the creature, obligations on the 
 Creator. If God makes a being, God is bound to take care of the 
 being that He has made. If He makes a being in a given fashion, 
 He is bound to provide for the necessities that He has created. 
 According to the old proverb, if He makes mouths it is His 
 business to feed them. And He recognizes the obligation. His 
 past binds Him to certain conduct in His future. We can lay 
 hold on the former manifestation, and we can plead it with Him. 
 "Thou hast been, and therefore Thou must be." "Thou hast 
 taught me to trust in Thee ; vindicate and warrant my trust by 
 Thy unchangeableness." So His word. His acts, and His own 
 nature, bind God to bless and help. His faithfulness is the 
 
 ^ Life of Frederick Denison Maurice^ ii. 227. 
 
PSALM XXXVI. 5, 6 
 
 125 
 
 expression of His unchangeableness. "Because he could swear 
 by no greater, he sware by himself." 
 
 ^ I believe that love and righteousness and justice in God mean 
 exactly the same thing, namely, a desire to bring His whole moral 
 creation into a participation of His own character and His own 
 blessedness. He has made us capable of this, and He will not 
 cease from using the best means for accomplishing it in us all. 
 When I think of God making a creature of such capacities, it 
 seems to me almost blasphemous to suppose that He will throw 
 it from Him into everlasting darkness, because it has resisted His 
 gracious purposes towards it for the natural period of human life. 
 No, He who waited so long for the formation of a piece of old red 
 sandstone will surely wait with much long-suifering for the 
 perfecting of a human spirit.^ 
 
 1. The faithfulness of God reaches to the clouds of sin and 
 remorse. — Think of David after his terrible fall. The clouds 
 gathered round him then as they never gathered before. As he 
 had sow^ed, so he was reaping ; and no sufferings are so terrible or 
 so testing as the sufferings that are the obvious outcome and 
 natural retribution of a man's own follies and crimes. What of 
 the darkness that envelops him then — when the sword that he 
 had lifted against Uriah was turned against himself, and he ex- 
 perienced in the sins of his family the reproduction of his own, to 
 the overshadowing and embitterment of his later years ? Youth 
 gone from him, his spirit crushed — does the man lose his hope and 
 let go his hold on the promise of a truth-keeping God ? Behind 
 clouds such as these, does he fail to grasp and to cling to the faith- 
 fulness he spoke of in the years long gone by ? Listen : " Although 
 my house be not so with God ; yet he hath made with me an ever- 
 lasting covenant, ordered in all things, and sure : for this is all 
 my salvation, and all my desire, though he make it not to grow." 
 Yes, whom God loves He loves throughout, and He loves to the 
 end. 
 
 ^ A friend once showed an artist a costly handkerchief on which 
 a blot of ink had been made. " Nothing can be done with it now, 
 it is absolutely worthless." The artist made no reply, but carried it 
 away with him. After a time he sent it back, to the great surprise 
 of his friend, who could scarcely recognize it. In a most skilful 
 and artistic way he had made a fine design in India ink, using the 
 ^ Letters of Thomas Urskine of Linlathen, ii. 242. 
 
126 GOD OF NATURE AND OF GRACE 
 
 blot as a basis, making the handkerchief more valuable than ever. 
 A blotted life is not necessarily a useless life. Jesus can make a 
 life beautiful though it has been marred by sin.^ 
 
 2. The faithfulness of God reaches to the clouds of trouble. — 
 God has hid His Church ere this in the mountain mists and in 
 the deep places of the earth, till they were dead or vanished that 
 sought its life. 
 
 ^ You remember the story of the godly family whose home lay 
 across the track a returning army was expected to follow, when 
 flushed with victory and athirst for rapine and blood. " Be a wall 
 of fire unto us, 0 God," was the prayer which the father put up 
 as he knelt at the household altar ere retiring for the night, and 
 having thus committed himself and his circle to the hands of a 
 preserving God, he and they together laid them down in peace, 
 and took their quiet rest, knowing who it was that made them 
 dwell in safety. The night-watches hastened on, morning came, 
 and the family awoke. All was unwontedly dark and still when 
 they rose. There was no light from chink or from window, nor 
 sound of stirring life around. Noiselessly, and all unseen, the 
 hand whose protection they craved stole forth from the wintry 
 heavens, not, indeed, in the shape of a wall of fire, but in some- 
 thing as sufficient and safe — in wreath upon wreath of driven 
 snow. Meanwhile the foe had passed by, and had gone on his 
 way, and those whom he threatened breathed freely, for they knew 
 that their tabernacle was at peace.^ 
 
 III. 
 
 The Eighteousness of God. 
 
 "Thy righteousness is like the mountains of God." 
 
 1. The idea in the mind of the Psalmist was that the righteous- 
 ness of Jehovah is fixed and unchangeable. Men's ideas of 
 righteousness may change. Those of one age may differ from those 
 of another ; one land may have a different standard from that of 
 another. But in spite of this there is an everlasting, an unchanging 
 righteousness in God. Nothing in this world so impresses the 
 mind with the idea of unchangeableness as the great mountains. 
 
 ^ Twentieth Century Pastor y xxviii. (1911) 252. 
 a W. A. Gray, The Shadow of the Hamd, 15. 
 
PSALM XXXVI. 5, 6 
 
 127 
 
 The dwellings of men in the valleys are ever undergoing change ; 
 at every visit something new strikes one — the fields which men 
 cultivate produce their different crops, the forests on the mountain 
 sides grow denser and taller, the rivers alter their course, even the 
 sea is restless, now receding from and now encroaching on the land ; 
 but the great mountains seem to be lifted to a realm beyond 
 change. The snow upon them, it is true, is ever melting; the 
 glaciers between them are ever moving, but the granite rock 
 beneath seems ever the same. The generations of men who dwell 
 beneath them live their little life and pass away ; year after year 
 new and wondering eyes look up to these mountains, but there they 
 stand, the most impressive symbol of permanence in a world of 
 change. 
 
 (1) The mountains are stable and permanent. — The mountains 
 were thought to be the most ancient parts of the earth, the frame- 
 work on which the Great Architect of the Universe had builded ; 
 next the earth generally ; and then the world, or, in the Hebrew 
 sense, the fruitful, habitable part of the earth. So in the 
 Athanasian Creed, " The Father eternal, the Son eternal, and the 
 Holy Ghost eternal." Eternal and changelessly the same through- 
 out eternity, and therefore we do not read, " Thou wast God from 
 everlasting," or, " Thou wilt be God world without end " ; but, 
 "Thou art God, the same past, present, and to come." As we 
 look up to-day, so have the successive generations of men lifted 
 up their eyes to the mountains that speak to each of an unimagin- 
 able and almost limitless past. 
 
 ^ Stand at the mountain's foot and look up at its high head, 
 and remember how it has braved many a storm which hissed itself 
 out of breath over it, and it still remains to-day scarred like a 
 veteran, it is true, but yet proud and firm on the victorious field. 
 
 His proud head the airy mountain hides 
 Among the clouds ; his shoulders and his sides 
 A shady mantle clothes; his curling brows 
 Frown on the gentle stream, which calmly flows ; 
 While winds and storms his lofty forehead beat, — 
 The common fate of all that's high and great. 
 
 It was not yesterday that it was reared ; it will not fall to-morrow ; 
 but it has seen generation after generation come and go, with all 
 their faith and fear, their love and lust, their weal and woe ; and 
 
128 GOD OF NATURE AND OF GRACE 
 
 to-day it looks down upon another race which trusts and trembles, 
 sins and sorrows, loves and laughs, as though they were the first 
 that mountain ever looked upon. Oh ! if it could only speak, it 
 would tell us how the actors constantly change on the stage of 
 Time; that the play, now tragic, now comic, oftenest common- 
 place, is always the same, and that it has seen it acted over and 
 over again ; and yet it looks on with no tired look. Whenever 
 you see the mountain, you see that which is very old, and that 
 which is very young. The signs of its age are also the symbols 
 of its youth. It transmutes the furrows of its old age into the 
 dimples of childhood's laughter. Perpetual youth is the preroga- 
 tive of the old mountain. It lasts, lives on- 
 Eternal pyramids, built not with hands. 
 
 From linked foundations that deep-hidden lie. 
 Ye rise apart, and each a wonder stands ! 
 
 Your marble peaks, which pierce the clouds so high, 
 Seem holding up the curtain of the sky; 
 
 And there, sublime and solemn, have ye stood, 
 While crumbling Time, o'er-awed, passed reverent by. 
 
 Since Nature's resurrection from the flood. 
 Since earth, new born, again received God's plaudit, " Good ! " 
 
 How many races have ye seen descend 
 
 Into Time's grave, the lowly with the great ; 
 
 How many kingdoms seen asunder rend. 
 
 How many empires fall, how many centuries end ? ^ 
 
 (2) The righteousness of God is more permanent than the 
 mountains. — Though the mountains seem as if they did not change, 
 yet they do change. The atmospheric influences which play upon 
 them do alter them, though the alteration may be imperceptible 
 to men who can observe them only for a few brief years. But 
 absolutely without change is the righteousness of God. How is 
 God's righteousness shown ? Most of all in His kindness. And 
 so Isaiah says, " For the mountains shall depart, and the hills be 
 removed; but my righteousness shall not depart from thee, 
 neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the 
 Lord that hath mercy on thee." There is one thing in this 
 universe of change which is absolutely without change, and that 
 is the eternal righteousness : " I the Lord change not ; therefore 
 ye, 0 sons of Jacob, are not consumed." Here is a resting-place 
 ^ J. A. Davies, Seven Words of Love, 168. 
 
PSALM XXXVI. 5, 6 129 
 
 for our souls. In this world nothing abides in one stage. We 
 move from childhood to youth, from youth to manhood, from 
 manhood to old age, from old age to the unseen world, but God 
 changes not. We pass into new relationships, from being 
 children to being parents, from having to serve to having to 
 govern, from the active government of manhood to the quiescent 
 stage of old age ; friends drop from our side, old bonds are broken, 
 new bonds are formed; but in the midst of this sea of change! 
 where the waters are ever in movement, now receding, now ad- 
 vancing, there is a rock which abides— the righteousness of God. 
 There is one point on which the eye can rest. There is one spot 
 on which the foot can be planted. There is one place of anchor- 
 age for the soul— the rightousness of God. 
 
 H Geologists tell us that these giants of Bernese mountains 
 ire but a third now of their original height, and we know how to 
 luote Euskm, "The hills, which, as compared with human beings 
 5eem everlasting, are in truth as perishing as they, their veins of 
 lowing fountain weary the mountain heart, as the common pulse 
 iocs ours; the natural force of the iron crag is abated in its 
 ippomted time, like the strength of the sinews in a human old 
 ige; and it is but the lapse of the larger years of decay which 
 n the sight of the Creator, distinguishes the mountain range' 
 rom the moth and the worm." Yet God and His attributes and 
 !ven His relations to man, remain unchanged, and from this 
 reasury Isaiah picks out the two jewels of kindness and peace 
 or our thankful contemplation.^ 
 
 Tl Arthur Clough, whose early death prevented him from 
 .ecommg the foremost poet of the age, and who passed through 
 aany spiritual vicissitudes, felt and expressed this in his noble 
 mes : 
 
 It fortifies my soul to know 
 
 That, though I perish. Truth is so: 
 
 That, howsoe'er I stray and range, ' 
 
 Whate'er I do, Thou dost not change. 
 
 I steadier step when I recall ^ 
 
 That, if I slip, Thou dost not fall.2 
 
 2. The righteousness of God is like the great mountains in 
 8 power to inspire awe, wonder, and reverence. The great 
 
 ^ J. W. Horsley, in The Chwrch Times. July 28 1911 
 * W. Garrett Horder. j > - 
 
 PS. xxv.-cxix. — 9 
 
I30 GOD OF NATURE AND OF GRACE 
 
 height of mountains, the vastness of their bulk, and their far- 
 reaching extent overawe the spectator, and dwarf him into 
 insignificance in their presence. Their dark and frowning crags, 
 their awful chasms, and their mysterious yet gigantic forms shut 
 his lips in silent awe, and chasten his thoughtless spirit into 
 seriousness and reflection. If they should fall upon him he is 
 crushed like an insect by the foot. A thunder-storm among the 
 mountains is an awful thing. Once experienced, it will never be 
 forgotten. The Law of Moses was fitly given amid thunderings 
 and lightnings and a great earthquake among the mountains of 
 Sinai. Like the great mountains the righteousness of God is an 
 awful thing. When we are first convinced of sin and stand in 
 the presence of God we tremble and cry out for fear. 
 
 ^ "So Christian turned out of his way to go to Mr. Legality's 
 House for help : but behold, when he was got now hard by the 
 Hill, it seemed so high, and also that side of it that was next the 
 wayside, did hang so much over, that Christian was afraid to 
 venture further, lest the Hill should fall on his Head ; wherefore 
 there he stood still ; and wotted not what to do. Also his burden- 
 now seemed heavier to him than while he was in his way. There 
 came also flashes of fire out of the Hill that made Christian 
 afraid that he should be burned : here therefore he sweat, and did 
 quake for fear." ^ 
 
 (1) The real greatness of the mountains appears only as we 
 approach them. We look up at them from the valleys and fancy 
 that an hour's climb will bring us to their summit. It seems 
 as if we could shoot an arrow to the top ; but we begin to climb, 
 and as we climb they seem to lift their heads higher and higher. 
 And so it is with the righteousness of God. Until we begin to 
 strive after it, it seems within easy reach; it is only when we 
 begin the long ascent that its height is really felt, and the 
 higher we go the loftier does it appear. The man who has 
 climbed highest in the way of righteousness knows best how 
 great is the distance he has yet to climb. Indeed, to the man 
 who has not begun to strive after righteousness, it seems most 
 easy of attainment. It seems to him far easier to be righteous 
 than to be learned, or muscular, or inventive. He stands more 
 amazed at some great work of art, or literature, or mechanical 
 contrivance than at the sight of righteousness in man. And 
 
 * Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress (Cambridge edition), 162. 
 
PSALM XXXVI. 5, 6 131 
 
 why ? The one can be apprehended by the eye and the other 
 can be apprehended only by the heart, and his heart has not 
 been trained by the pursuit of righteousness to appreciate its 
 glory. Eighteousness is only spiritually discerned. It cannot be 
 I seen by the eye, or heard by the ear, or felt by the hand. It 
 needs a deeper faculty. The delicate, subtle fancy of poetry, or 
 j the grace of art, or the exquisite suggestiveness of the noblest 
 music is not discerned by the uncultured. Preparation is 
 ^needed before any of these can be discerned. And the beauty of 
 holiness, which is only another name for righteousness, is not 
 revealed save to those who, by striving after it, have realized the 
 difficulty and glory of its attainment. Only those who have 
 begun to walk in the way of righteousness know how lofty, how 
 far olf, how difficult to reach, is the position to which the great 
 Master, Christ, calls us when He says, " Be ye therefore perferjt, 
 even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." 
 
 If About ten days ago we started from the valley of Zermatt 
 which IS Itself some thousands of feet above the level of the sea' 
 and for nearly five hours were climbing up to the well-known 
 Gorner Gratz, and when we reached it, the Matterhorn, instead 
 of seemmg nearer, positively seemed farther off, the distance to 
 the summit appeared greater. When we were in the valley the 
 lower mountains around its base seemed to lessen the distance 
 ind only when these were scaled could we realize its awful 
 leight.^ 
 
 (2) The summits of the mountains are clearly revealed only as 
 ihe sun lifts the clouds. And so it is with the righteousness of 
 ,^od. Clouds and darkness are round about Him, until Christ, 
 )he Sun of Eighteousness, arises, and brings Him into view.' 
 Before, all was mystery and gloom to men. Their eyes could not 
 nerce the cloud. They feared as they entered therein. But on the 
 nystery Christ threw His revealing light, so that the clouds were 
 ifted and all stood out in startling clearness. And then men be^ran 
 0 realize that the righteousness which seemed so repellent was 
 •ut the vesture of love; nay, that there could not be any real 
 ighteousness unless, at its very heart, there was the fire of love; 
 list as there could not be any verdure or beauty on the earth but 
 or the central core of fire within. 
 
 ^ W. Garrett Border. 
 
 I 
 
132 GOD OF NATURE AND OF GRACE 
 
 I stand upon the mount of God, 
 
 With sunlight in my soul; 
 I hear the storms in vales beneath, 
 
 I hear the thunders roll. 
 
 But I am calm with Thee, my God, 
 
 Beneath these glorious skies ; 
 And to the height on which I stand 
 
 Nor storms nor clouds can rise. 
 
 Oh, this is life ! Oh, this is joy ! 
 
 My God, to find Thee so! 
 Thy face to see, Thy voice to hear. 
 
 And all Thy love to know. 
 
 3. Mountain chains have been a refuge for the oppressed in 
 all ages. Liberty, bruised and broken on the level plain, has fled 
 into the mountain ranges and there has found a refuge. Out of 
 the level plains of Egypt Israel escapes and finds its life in the 
 rocky ranges of Mount Horeb. In the mountains of Palestine the 
 Israelites escape from Moabitish hosts on the east of them and the 
 Philistine hosts on the south of them. In the mountain caves of 
 En-gedi David hides from the persecuting hosts of Saul. In the 
 mountains Greece finds its escape from the overwhelming Persian 
 hosts. In the mountains of Switzerland liberty is cradled, while 
 all over Europe despotism is triumphant. In the mountains of 
 Northern Italy the Waldenses keep alive the Protestant religion 
 before Protestantism has been born. 
 
 We are not accustomed to think that God is a refuge because 
 of His righteousness. We rather, perhaps, think His righteous- 
 ness closes His heart to us in our sinfulness. Perhaps we will say 
 that a good man, a benevolent man, a merciful man, will serve as 
 a refuge to us in our hour of need, but not a man strong in his 
 righteousness. And yet, if we will consider a little, it is not the 
 righteousness, it is the unrighteousness, of men that makes them 
 unmerciful and therefore repellent. One man repels another, not 
 because the first man is too righteous to have mercy, but because 
 he is not righteous enough. The men that are fighting scepti- 
 cism are half sceptics. The man who only half believes is at 
 enmity with the man who does not believe at all, because he is in 
 
PSALM XXXVI. 5, 6 
 
 133 
 
 perpetual fear lest his half -belief shall be taken away from him ; 
 but he who is anchored, by a chain that cannot be broken, to the 
 eternal verities has no fear, and therefore has a heart open to all 
 argument and all reasons, and considers them with patience and 
 gentleness. So it is a dormant sense of unrighteousness in us that 
 makes us afraid of the unrighteous. 
 
 ^ In that marvellous story, Hawthorne's Marble Faun, when 
 Miriam has fallen into a great sin and comes to Hilda, and Hilda 
 will not receive her because of that sin, bidding her not come 
 nearer, and Miriam cries, "Because I have sinned I need your 
 friendship the more," Hilda replies, " If I were one of God's angels, 
 incapable of stain, I would keep ever at your side and try to lead 
 you upward. But I am a poor, lonely girl, and God has given me 
 my purity, and told me to take it back to Him unstained, and I 
 dare not associate with the criminal lest I carry back to Him a 
 stained and spotted garment." It is the consciousness of a 
 dormant impurity in the pure Hilda that makes her dread to 
 receive to her heart the impure as her companion. It is not 
 Hilda's perfection of righteousness, it is her imperfection, that 
 makes her fail as a refuge to poor, sinful, despairing Miriam. 
 Now, God's righteousness is of the kind that never can be 
 harmed.^ 
 
 IV. 
 
 The Judgments of God. 
 
 " Thy judgements are a great deep." 
 
 By "judgments" are not meant merely the acts of God's 
 punitive righteousness, the retributions that destroy evil-doers, but 
 all God's decisions and acts in regard to man. Or, to put it into 
 other and briefer words, God's judgments are the whole of the 
 " ways," the methods of the Divine government. So St. Paul, allud- 
 ing to this very passage, when he says, " How unsearchable are his 
 judgments," adds, as a parallel clause, meaning the same thing, 
 " and thy ways past finding out." That includes all that men call, 
 in a narrower sense, judgments ; but it includes, too, all acts of 
 kindness and loving gifts. God's judgments are the expressions 
 of His thoughts, and these thoughts are thoughts of good and not 
 of evil. 
 
 * Lyman Abbott. 
 
134 GOD OF NATURE AND OF GRACE 
 
 Perhaps it was the great and wide sea that the Psalmist 
 thought of while he spoke — the secret of whose depths only Omni- 
 science could see, the noise of whose billows only Omnipotence 
 could still. Or perhaps it was some land-locked lake, on whose 
 shining surface he looked down, as it crisped with the breezes or 
 slept in the calms of a long summer day. But in either case, the 
 picture yields a ready lesson : " Thy judgments," he says, " are a 
 great deep." It is the one touch that is needed to enhance the 
 description ; for what were mercy, faithfulness, and righteousness, 
 without infinite wisdom to plan and direct the whole ? But this 
 wisdom is evermore a great deep, unsearchable and unfathomable, 
 whether it lies in the heart of God as His purpose, or in the word 
 of God as His statutes, or in the ways of God as His Providence. 
 " Canst thou by searching find out God ? Canst thou find out the 
 Almighty unto perfection ? It is high as heaven ; what canst 
 thou do ? deeper than hell ; what canst thou know ? The measure 
 thereof is longer than the earth, and broader than the sea." " 0 
 the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God ! 
 How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding 
 out!" 
 
 1. The deep means mystery. We cannot escape the mystery 
 in life, it is true, just as we cannot explore all ocean's secrets. 
 But it is not wisdom to think we have touched bottom because the 
 plummet ceases to descend. The plumb line slackens in our hands. 
 But that may mean only that life is too deep for our pessimists' 
 soundings, which have never gone deeper than the shifting surface 
 tides. What is the obscurity of the sea ? Not that which comes 
 from mud, or anything added, but that which comes from depth. 
 As far as a man can see down into its blue-green depths they are 
 clear and translucent ; but when the light fails and the eye fails, 
 there comes what we call obscurity. The sea is clear, but our 
 sight is limited. 
 
 II Here towers Vesuvius ; there at its feet lie the waters of 
 the bay. So the Kighteousness springs up like some great cliff, 
 rising sheer from the water's edge, while its feet are laved by the 
 sea of the Divine judgments, unfathomable and shoreless. The 
 mountains and the sea are the two grandest things in nature, and 
 in their combination sublime; the one the home of calm and 
 
PSALM XXXVI. 5, 6 
 
 135 
 
 silence, the other perpetual motion. But the mountain's roots 
 are deeper than the depths of the sea, and though the judgments 
 are a mighty deep, the righteousness is deeper, and is the bed of 
 the ocean.1 
 
 2. The righteousness of God is seen in His judgments. In 
 God's nature the mountain height answers back to the sea deep ; 
 the great deep of judgment reflects the mountain summits of 
 righteousness in its clear calm. We need to remember this great 
 truth of the unity of God's purpose in the world; for the age 
 which disputes most passionately the justice of God's judgments 
 is the age which most completely ignores or opposes His com- 
 mands. A man on the cliff can look much deeper into the ocean 
 than a man on the level beach. The farther we climb the farther 
 we shall see down into the " sea of glass mingled with fire " that 
 lies placid before God's throne. Let us remember that it is a 
 hazardous thing to judge of a picture before it is finished, of a 
 building before the scaffolding is pulled down ; and it is a hazardous 
 thing for us to say about any deed or any revealed truth that it 
 is inconsistent with the Divine character. Let us wait a bit ! 
 " Thy judgments are a great deep." The deep will be drained off 
 one day, and we shall see the bottom of it. Let us judge nothing 
 before the time. 
 
 If If we believe in the Father and His good purpose towards 
 us, what we require of affliction and of suffering, what we have a 
 right to require, is this, that it should be felt to be helping us and 
 purifying us. God gives us a natural sense of justice, implanting 
 it deep in our hearts ; and it is through this sense of justice that 
 all the best victories of humanity have been won. . . . The Father 
 cannot have it in His heart that we should merely be crushed and 
 silenced by our punishment ; that we should submit, simply be- 
 cause there is no way out, as a little bird submits to be torn by a 
 hawk. If our submission is like that, it is worth nothing ; it only 
 plunges our spirit in deeper darkness.^ 
 
 II One night when I was recently crossing the Atlantic, an 
 officer of our boat told me that we had just passed over the spot 
 where the Titanic went down. And I thought of all that life and 
 wreckage beyond the power of man to recover and redeem. And 
 I thought of the great bed of the deep sea, with all its held 
 
 * A. Maclaren. 
 
 * k C. Benson, Thy Rod and Thy Staff, 106. 
 
136 GOD OF NATURE AND OF GRACE 
 
 treasure, too far down for man to reach and restore. " Too far 
 down ! " And then I thought of all the human wreckage en- 
 gulfed and sunk in oceanic depths of nameless sin. Too far gone ! 
 Tor what? Too far down! For what? Not too far down for 
 the love of God ! Listen to this : " He descended into hell," and 
 He will descend again if you are there. " If I make my bed in 
 hell, thou art there." "Where sin abounded, grace did much 
 more abound." " He lore our sin " ; then He got beneath it ; 
 down to it and beneath it ; and there is no human wreckage 
 lying in the ooze of the deepest sea of iniquity that His deep love 
 cannot reach and redeem. What a Gospel ! However far down, 
 God's love can get beneath it ! ^ 
 
 1 J. H. Jowett, Things That Matter Most {191Z), 17. 
 
Life and Light. 
 
 «37 
 
Literature, 
 
 Benson (E. W.), Boy-Life, 32. 
 
 Brooks (P.), Sermons Preached in English Churches, 89. 
 Cooke (G. A.), The Progress of Revelation, 3. 
 Creighton (M.), The Heritage of the Spirit, 185. 
 Matheson (G.), Leaves for Quiet Hours, 192. 
 Morrison (G. H.), The Unlighted Lustre, 30. 
 Stone (D.), The Discipline of Faith, 31. 
 
 Thackeray (F. St. John), Sermons Preached in Eton College Chapel, 105. 
 Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), viii. (1871), No. 742; xxii. 
 
 (1883), No. 1232 ; xxiii. (1883), No. 1259. 
 Cambridge Review, ix. Supplement No. 232 (R. Machray). 
 Christian Commonwealth, xxxii. (1912) 437 (R J. Campbell). 
 Christian World Pulpit, xvi. 106 (J. B. Heard) ; xx. 392 (J. B. Tinling). 
 Church of England Pulpit, Ixiii. 76 (M. P. Maturin). 
 Churchman's Pulpit : The Epiphany, iii. 286 (G. F. Terry). 
 Preacher's Magazine, v. (1894) 97 (C. New). 
 Sunday Magazine^ 1881, p. 702 (J. Robertson). 
 
 X38 
 
Life and Light. 
 
 For with thee is the fountain of life: 
 
 In thy light shall we see light. — Ps. xxxvi. 9. 
 
 St. Augustine asks, " What is the fountain of life, unless Christ ? " 
 and he adds, " He who is the Fountain is the Light." Our Lord 
 said, " Whensoever I am in the world, I am the light of the 
 world " ; and again, " I am the light of the world ; he that 
 followeth me shall have the light of life." This is further 
 explained by St. John, with reference to our Lord as the Word : 
 " That which hath been made in him is life, and the life was the 
 light of men." Thus we have continually associated together as 
 in the text the two ideas of life and light, both finding their 
 fullest meaning in our Lord Jesus Christ. As gifts or possessions 
 from Him and through Him, we cannot separate them. The 
 presence of the one bespeaks the presence of the other, and each 
 the recreating presence of the Spirit of God. Light necessarily 
 comes to us if there is life, and life necessarily issues when light 
 enters. 
 
 ^ On some of the Alpine passes there are rude shelters for dis- 
 tressed travellers, but they are only shelters ; they hold no food, no 
 water, no light, no warmth ; the man they have saved may perish 
 within their walls. The Eedeemer is sometimes thought of as a 
 mere refuge to flee to from condemnation. How imperfect that 
 is ; for though we are saved from condemnation we have as many 
 wants as heart-beats ; but when the eyes of the refugee are opened 
 he sees a home there, and everything he needs for all time, for 
 all events, for all perfection. We flee to Him for safety, but He 
 puts this song into our mouth : 
 
 Thou, 0 Christ, art all I want, 
 More than all in Thee I find.^ 
 ^ Charles New. 
 
 139 
 
140 
 
 LIFE AND LIGHT 
 
 L 
 
 The Source of Life. 
 
 " With thee is the fountain of life." 
 
 1. God is the fountain of life in the merely physical sense. 
 He has life in Himself, and He communicates His life in multi- 
 tudinous forms. He does not derive His life : it rises eternally 
 in Himself. The life we need is ever flowing from God. All the 
 life in the universe, visible and invisible, is from Him. Vegetable 
 life with its myriad forms, in hedgerow, garden, forest, and field ; 
 animal life from the tiniest animalculas to the mammoths of 
 Eastern lands ; human lives — which die, we are told, at the rate 
 of nearly 4000 every hour, their places being taken by as many 
 more ; lives in the unseen world, the innumerable inhabitants of 
 the unseen state. Space throbs and palpitates with life. What 
 a conception it gives of the almightiness of our Heavenly Father ! 
 Of all this life He is the source. 
 
 2. But life is more than physical existence; it is fellowship 
 with the Unseen. When God passed from the formation of 
 His other creatures to the creation of man, He added something 
 over and above what they had, something direct from Himself 
 to make life ; He " breathed into his nostrils the breath of life ; 
 and man became a living soul." Sin changed the base of life; 
 it made another base necessary. God put all life into His Son. 
 And that life which is in Christ is the real spring and essence of 
 all that constitutes true human life. There must be generation 
 from Him ; there must be contact with Him ; there must be union 
 with Him to make life — life properly so called — the life which 
 is the being of a man — the life that fulfils the end of life — the 
 life that is for ever and for ever. The beginning of life, then, 
 man's real life, is oneness with the Lord Jesus. 
 
 ^ Life in the Old Testament is primarily the physical, earthly 
 life, the sum of energies which make up man's actual existence. 
 The soul separated from the body does not cease to be, but it 
 forfeits its portion in the true life. Two factors, however, were 
 latent in the Old Testament conception from the beginning, and 
 became more and more prominent in the course of the later 
 
PSALM XXXVI. 9 
 
 141 
 
 development. In the first place, the radical element in life is 
 activity. Mere physical existence is distinguished from that 
 essential life which consists in the unrestricted play of all the 
 energies, especially of the higher and more characteristic. In 
 the loftier passages of the Psalms, more particularly, the idea of 
 " life " has nearly always a pregnant sense. It is associated with 
 joy, prosperity, peace, wisdom, righteousness; man "lives" 
 according as he has free scope for the activities which are most 
 distinctive of his spiritual nature. God Himself is emphatically 
 the "living one." He is the creative, ever -active God — 
 sufficient to Himself, the source of all reality and power. Life 
 is His supreme attribute, distinguishing Him from men with their 
 thousand weaknesses and limitations. The other factor in the 
 Old Testament conception is even more important in its bearing 
 on later thought. Since God alone possesses life in the highest 
 sense, fellowship with Him is the one condition on which men 
 can obtain it. "With thee is the fountain of life." In the 
 higher regions of Old Testament thought, life and communion 
 with God are interchangeable ideas. The belief in immortality 
 is never expressly stated, but, as Jesus Himself indicates, it was 
 implicit in this knowledge of a God " who was not the God of the 
 dead, but of the living." ^ 
 
 3. And this life is conveyed to man through Christ. He 
 secures it for us by the surrender of His own life, His sacrifice 
 on Calvary, thus making it possible for the Father to bestow 
 it righteously on us who are unworthy of it. And He, Christ 
 crucified and alive again, is the medium of its communication. 
 Again and again He claims, and it is claimed for Him, that He is 
 the Author of life. " I am come," He says, " that they might have 
 life, and that they might have it more abundantly " ; " He that 
 hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God 
 hath not life"; "The gift of God is eternal life through Jesus 
 Christ our Lord " ; " God hath given to us eternal life, and this 
 life is in his Son." The Father is the fountain, but, said Christ, 
 " If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink." 
 
 ^ Like the great aqueducts that stretch from the hills across 
 the Eoman Campagna, His Incarnation brings the waters of the 
 fountain from the mountains of God into the lower levels of our 
 nature, and the fetid alleys of our sins. The cool, sparkling 
 treasure is carried near to every lip. If we drink, we live. If 
 1 E. F. Scott, The Fourth Gospel, 235. 
 
142 
 
 LIFE AND LIGHT 
 
 we will not, we die in our sins, and are dead whilst we live. Stop 
 the fountain, and what becomes of the stream ? It fades between 
 its banks, and is no more. You cannot live the life of the animal 
 except that life be joined to Him. If it could be broken away 
 from God it would disappear as the clouds melt in the sky, and 
 there would be nobody, and you would be nowhere. You cannot 
 break yourself away from God physically so completely as to 
 annihilate yourself. You can do so spiritually ; some do it, and 
 the consequence is that they are dead ! You can be made alive 
 from the dead, if you will lay hold on Jesus Christ, and get His 
 life-giving spirit into your heart.^ 
 
 (1) The fountain is mysterious in its origin. This is perhaps 
 the thought that first occurs to any one who stands by the rushing 
 fountain pouring forth its stream of life ; and the mystery has 
 led the uninstructed nations to curious conjectures as to the 
 origin of these fountains. 
 
 ^ Some years ago the engineers engaged in constructing the 
 water-works of the city of Beyrout set themselves to the task of 
 exploring the caverns from which issues the permanent supply of 
 the Dog Kiver. After great labour and repeated expeditions they 
 succeeded in penetrating to a distance of three-quarters of a mile 
 into the heart of the mountain ; but as they passed onward from 
 lake to torrent, now under lofty dome, and again through narrow 
 and tortuous channels, the water was undiminished in its volume, 
 and finally a roaring cataract barred their progress and forbade 
 them to search farther into the secret of the living stream. 
 
 So is it that life, after all our inquiries into its nature and 
 origin, remains hidden from us. We are conscious of its existence, 
 we can see its effects, but in itself it is a mystery, even as the 
 great Giver of it, the Fountain of Life, dwells in thick darkness. 
 We can only say, " In his hand is the breath of all living." In 
 Him we " live, and move, and have our being." ^ 
 
 (2) The fountain is free and full in its flow. The people of 
 the East call water the " gift of God " ; and so throughout 
 Scripture the invitation is repeated in various forms : " Ho, 
 every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters." " If any man 
 thirst, let him come unto me and drink." For " the gift of God 
 is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." This stream of 
 spiritual life, though in its origin far above the level of human 
 
 * A. Maclaren. 
 
 ^ J. Robertson, in Sunday Magazine, 1881, p. 703, 
 
PSALM XXXVI. 9 
 
 143 
 
 nature, bursts forth in our nature, and at a level within reach of 
 the poorest and the vilest. At the lowest point of the humiliation 
 of the Son of God it was manifested. Though springing from the 
 bosom of the eternal hills it runs in the valleys, and he that 
 would have life must first know the power of death. The Eock 
 of Ages cleft for us is the point at which we receive the gift of 
 God, and we receive it without money and without price. 
 
 ^ The water of the fountain will flow of its own necessity. 
 It is in its very nature that it must flow if only we do not wilfully 
 hinder it. It is always flowing into an open heart.^ 
 
 (3) The fountain of life brings life wherever it flows. 
 
 ^ One of the most striking of all the fountains of Syria is the 
 fountain of Fijeh, in Anti-Lebanon, which furnishes at one spring 
 from the solid rock three-fourths of the waters of the river Barada, 
 the ancient Abana of Damascus. The traveller pitches his tent 
 under the walnut-trees that overhang the fountain ; lulled to 
 sleep by it at night, he hears it at every waking hour ; and when 
 the rising sun pierces through the thick foliage its rays fall upon 
 the sparkling river, rushing on with undiminished strength. By 
 night and by day, when swollen by the rains of winter, and after all 
 the snow on the highest heights has disappeared, for six long months 
 of drought, the fountain pours forth its stream of life. And the 
 nodding oleanders dip their flowered heads in its stream, and the 
 poplars and walnut-trees draw their deep life from its waters, and 
 orchards and gardens flourish along its iDanks, and it scatters life 
 and beauty wherever it goes. But let us leave for a little the 
 narrow valley in which it holds its course, and as we bend off to 
 the left and its sound fades away on the ear, let us observe how 
 vegetation gets scantier and poorer, till, within sight and almost 
 within hearing of the river, we stand in a dry, parched wilderness. 
 Proceeding still across the arid waste we reach the summit of a 
 hill that is burnt up by the summer sun, and we have before us a 
 view that is unparalleled in the East, perhaps unequalled in the 
 world. A plain of vast extent is bounded on all sides by barren 
 deserts, but in its centre, embedded in a belt of living green, is a 
 city of a hundred and fifty thousand souls, for the river is there, 
 and whithersoever the river comes there is life.^ 
 
 (4) The water of the fountain is always seeking to rise to the 
 level from which it came. This makes the very life and beauty 
 of the fountain. So will it be with " the fountain of life." It will 
 
 ^ James Vauglian. 
 
 * J. Robertson, in Sunday Magazine, 1881, p. 704. 
 
144 LIFE AND LIGHT 
 
 always be mounting to the height, the heavenly height from 
 which it sprang, bearing us up and up to that world from which 
 it came ; and though it never reaches it, it will aspire to it ; it will 
 always be nearing it, continually approaching the heaven of its 
 birth, the God of its creation. 
 
 ^ It is difficult to be always true to ourselves, to be always 
 what we wish to be, what we feel we ought to be. As long as we 
 feel that, as long as we do not surrender the ideal of our life, all is 
 right. Our aspirations represent the true nature of our soul much 
 more than our everyday life.^ 
 
 Alas ! long-suffering and most patient God, 
 Thou needst be surelier God to bear with us 
 Than even to have made us ! Thou aspire, aspire 
 From henceforth for me ! Thou who hast Thyself 
 Endured this fieshhood, knowing how as a soaked 
 And sucking vesture it can drag us down 
 And choke us in the melancholy Deep, 
 Sustain me, that with Thee I walk these waves, 
 Eesisting ! — breathe me upward. Thou in me 
 Aspiring, who art the way, the truth, the life, — 
 That no truth henceforth seem indifferent, 
 No way to truth laborious, and no life. 
 Not even this life I live, intolerable ! ^ 
 
 II. 
 
 The Source of Light. 
 
 '* In thy light shall we see light." 
 
 God is " the Father of lights." The sun and all the stars are 
 only lights kindled by Him. It is the very crown of revelation 
 that " God is light, and in him is no darkness at all." Light seems 
 to the unscientific eye, which knows nothing about undulations 
 of a luminiferous ether, to be the least material of material things. 
 All joyous things come with it. It brings warmth and fruit, 
 joyfulness and life. Purity, and gladness, and knowledge have 
 been symbolized by it in all tongues. The Scripture uses light, 
 and the sun, which is its source, as an emblem for God in His 
 holiness and blessedness and omniscience. 
 
 ^ Max Miiller. ^ E. B. Browning. 
 
PSALM XXXVI. 9 
 
 145 
 
 The Psalmist saw the world all full of seekers after light ; he 
 was a seeker after light himself. What he had discovered, and 
 what he wanted to tell men, was that the first step in a hopeful 
 search after light must be for a man to put himself into the 
 element of light, which is God. The first thing for any man to 
 do who wanted knowledge was to put himself under God, to make 
 himself God's man ; because both he who wanted to know and 
 that v/hich he wanted to know had God for their true element 
 and were their best and did their best only as they lived in Him. 
 
 ^ When I try to describe to myself this thought of David 
 about man's seeing all light in the light of God, no picture like 
 the picture of a true and docile childhood seems to me to express 
 it. A child in his father's house learns everything within the 
 intelligence and character of his father, who has provided all things 
 there, and is perpetually throwing light upon their proper use. 
 Everything has its own qualities, but those qualities are made 
 distinct and vivid to the child by their relation to the master of 
 the house. Not purely in themselves, but in his father's use of 
 them and in their relationship to him does the child come to know 
 the tools of the workshop, the furniture of the parlour, and all the 
 apparatus of domestic life. So, I believe, it is with the child's 
 knowledge of the larger house, the world-house, of which God is 
 the Father.! 
 
 1. Nothing is seen in its own light — not even a visible thing. 
 A landscape is not seen in its own light ; it is perceived very much 
 in the light of yesterday. How little of what you see is mere 
 perception ! Every sight of nature is tinged with the light of 
 memory. The poet looks from the bridge at midnight upon the 
 rushing waters ; but what he sees is not the flowing tide ; it is a 
 tide of memory that fills his eyes with tears. You listen to the 
 babbling of the brook ; but what you hear is not the babbling, it 
 is the utterance of a dear name. You visit Eome, you visit 
 Jerusalem, you visit Greece ; do you see any of these by its own 
 light ? No ; they are all beheld by the light of yesterday ; there 
 is their glory, there lies their gold ! Even so," cries the Psalmist, 
 " it is with this world ; if you want to see it, you must look at it 
 by the light of another world — God's coming world." He does 
 not mean that when we quit the scenes of earth we shall have 
 blight light in heaven. It is more than that. It is for the scenes 
 ^ P. Brooks, Sermons Preached in English Churches, 104. 
 PS. XXV.-CXIX. — 10 
 
146 ' LIFE AND LIGHT 
 
 of earth he wants the heavenly light. He says you cannot 
 interpret your own skies without it. We often say that in the 
 light of eternity earthly objects will fade from our sight. But the 
 Psalmist says that, until we get the light of eternity, earthly 
 objects will never be in our sight. It is by the light of the 
 Celestial City — the City which has no need of the sun — that 
 alone we can tell what here is large and what here is small. 
 
 ^ Jesus knew the streets of Jerusalem and the lanes of 
 Galilee and the history of His mysterious Hebrew people, and the 
 hearts of the lilies and the souls of men ; but He knew them all 
 differently from the way in which the Hebrew scribes and 
 scholars knew them. To Him they were all full of light. There 
 is no other description of His knowledge that can tell its special 
 and peculiar character like that. It was all full of light. And 
 the other peculiarity of it was just as clear. It was full also of 
 God. He knew everything as God's child in God's house. The 
 history of the prophets and the heart of the lily both meant 
 something about His Father. These two peculiarities belonged 
 together. The world was full of light to Him because it was full 
 of God. It was God's light in which He saw the deeper light in 
 everything.^ 
 
 2. If we need God's light to appreciate natural beauty and to 
 grasp intellectual truth, much more do we need it to apprehend 
 spiritual realities. It is in communion with Him who is the 
 Light as well as the Life of men that we see a whole universe of 
 glories, realities, and brightnesses. Where other eyes see only 
 darkness, we behold " the King in his beauty, and the land that is 
 very far off." Where other men see only cloudland and mists, 
 our vision will pierce into the unseen, and there behold "the 
 things which are," the only real things, of which all that the eye 
 of sense sees are the fleeting shadows, seen as in a dream, while 
 these are the true, and the sight of them is sight indeed. They 
 who see by the light of God, and see light therein, have a vision 
 which is more than imagination, more than opinion, more than 
 belief. It is certitude. Communication with God does not bring 
 with it superior intellectual perspicuity, but it does bring a per- 
 ception and an experience of spiritual realities and relations, which, 
 in respect of clearness and certainty, may be called sight. Many 
 of us walk in darkness, who, if we were but in communion with 
 ^ P. Brooks, Sermons Preached in English Churches, 106, 
 
PSALM XXXVI. 9 
 
 147 
 
 God, would see the lone hillside blazing with chariots and horses 
 of fire. Many of us grope in perplexity, who, if we were but 
 hiding under the shadow of God's wings, would see the truth and 
 walk at liberty in the light which is knowledge and purity and 
 
 joy. 
 
 (1) It needs a God to make God known. — Light has this pro- 
 perty, that it is at once the vehicle and that which is borne by 
 the vehicle ; it is the revelation and its channel, and this twofold 
 property of light remains the same whether we regard it as the 
 old school of physicists did — as an actual emanation of particles ; 
 or as the new school do — as only an undulation or vibration of 
 some invisible ether itself at rest. The oft-quoted line of the 
 poet, that we may rise from nature up to nature's God, then, is 
 either a truism or a sophism; a truism if we mean only that 
 nature reveals something of God's character while it conceals the 
 rest ; a sophism, if we mean that man, by the unassisted light of 
 his natural faculties, is able to discover the invisible things of 
 God. We can know God only by Himself. The light must be 
 Divine by which we see that there is anything whatever Divine 
 to see and behold. 
 
 ^ When Dante has reached the Ninth of the Heavenly 
 Spheres he catches his first glimpse of the Godhead, the Central 
 Point on which " Heaven and all Nature hangs," surrounded by 
 nine circles of fire, which he is told are the nine choirs of angelic 
 beings. But though he can see them in their operation, his 
 vision is too imperfect to see them as they are. He must drink 
 of the Eiver of Light. Then he beholds the Eose of the Blessed, 
 with its myriads of saints. But still he is unable to see God. 
 The Virgin Mary procures this grace for him, and gazing on the 
 Central Point he sees three circles, like rainbows, and, being 
 illuminated by a flash of Divine Light, he comprehends the 
 mystery of the Holy Trinity and of the Incarnation. 
 
 (2) Only in God's light can we truly see ourselves, — We wish 
 really to know ourselves, our own real being and position. What 
 are we ? Where do we stand in the scale of God's creation, as 
 God sees us ? We are so many things wrapped up in one ; we 
 are, alas ! a mass of contradictions — so very different at different 
 times. What am I ? What am I, as an angel sees me ? As 
 truth sees me? As God sees me? What am I? I grow so 
 perplexed when I go down into the dark depths of my own soul. 
 
148 
 
 LIFE AND LIGHT 
 
 No natural light can clear up this. There must be a light from 
 outside, a light from above. " In thy light," the soul will have to 
 say at last out of all its searchings — "in thy light shall I see 
 light." Down in those hidden crevices of my own innermost, 
 blackest being, Lord, give me light to see clearly what I am. 
 
 ^ " John Leech," says Dean Hole, " had an original and effec- 
 tive method of reprimanding his children. If their faces were 
 distorted by anger, by a rebellious temper, or a sullen mood, he 
 took out his sketch book, transferred their lineaments with a 
 slight exaggeration to paper, and showed them, to their shameful 
 confusion, how ugly naughtiness was." ^ 
 
 3. The full effulgence of the Divine Light was manifested in 
 Christ, who is both God and the Eevealer of God. He is the 
 light which alone is uncreated light, " bright effluence of bright 
 essence increate " — slanguage which Milton strangely enough has 
 applied to material light, but which is inappropriate unless 
 applied to Him who is the true Sun of Eighteousness. As for 
 material light, however subtle and ethereal, it is not Divine ; the 
 creature is not to be confounded with the Creator in this way. 
 The language of the Psalmist is more careful and guarded : Thou 
 " coverest thyself with light as with a garment." Light, in fact, 
 is like a garment, or veil, or fleecy cloud, across the moon's disc, 
 which part reveals and part conceals. So it is of all the material 
 works of God, and hence the allegory of the ancients was not in- 
 exact which represented nature by the symbol of the veiled Isis. 
 There is something seen through the veil, but more remains be- 
 hind which we cannot see through. The same symbol was seen 
 in the sanctuary, where a thick curtain hung between the Holy 
 Place and the Most Holy of All ; that curtain, woven within 
 and without with cherubim, signifying this, that what was seen 
 was the multiform appearance of creation, of which the cherubim 
 were the symbol, while behind was that which no man hath seen 
 or can see — God in Himself. 
 
 (1) Christ lights up the unlighted lustre in our nature. — Con- 
 version is the lighting up of our nature with the spark of God's 
 Holy Spirit out of heaven. When a man is converted he does 
 not get new brains ; he does not get new senses or capacities ; he 
 is still surrounded by the old relationships, and he still moves in 
 
 1 E. E. Welsh, God's Gentlemen, 41. 
 
PSALM XXXVI. 9 149 
 
 the selfsame world. But men have been heard to tell the story of 
 their conversion, and they have said, " The stars seemed new to 
 me, and even the sun shone differently." And we have known 
 men who had made every one round them miserable develop into 
 true gentlemen when God met with them. Nor can any one 
 move among our peasantry, and see the wisdom and weight and 
 power of certain characters, without perceiving how much it 
 has meant for them that they have known the living and true 
 God. What has happened to them ? Have they received new 
 faculties ? No, it is not that— the lustre was always there. But 
 the light of all light has entered their circuit now, and the spark 
 that IS God's has kindled the spiritual candle: it is not a differ- 
 ence of added lustre ; it is just that the lustre has been lighted up. 
 
 wiT^^^ ?°?!^r''f,''^ conversion played so large a part in Bishop 
 Wilkmsons life that it demands a few words, because it is so 
 often misunderstood. Conversion, in its perverted sense, is often 
 used to describe a sort of mental crisis in which, under the 
 influence of hysterical excitement and rhetorical intoxication the 
 spirit IS hypnotized into an experience so abnormal that it 
 otten has a permanent effect on character, and has in retrospect 
 the appearance of a Divine interposition. That was not what 
 Wilkinson meant by conversion. He believed, indeed, that it 
 often came suddenly upon the soul, but that it was only a natural 
 step in a chain o circumstance, like the parting of the avalanche 
 rom the snowfield. What he meant by it was a realization of 
 truth of the personal relation with God, so vivid and indubitable 
 that the soul could never be in any doubt as to its redemption 
 and Its ultimate destiny. But he believed that this might be a 
 tranquil and reasoned process, though in the case of sin-stained 
 lives he was inclined to feel that the break with the past must 
 otten be ot the nature of an instantaneous revulsion, a sudden per- 
 ception of the hideousness of sin, and a dawning of the light of 
 
 (2) Christ sheds light for us on the manifold paths of duty —It 
 is wonderful how, when a man lives near God, he comes to know 
 what he ought to do. That great Light, which is Christ is like 
 the star that hung over the Magi, blazing in the heavens, and vet 
 stooping to the lowly task of guiding three wayfaring men along 
 a muddy road upon earth. So the highest Light of God comes 
 down to be a Lantern for our paths and a Light for our feet. 
 
 ^ A. C. Benson, The Leaves of the Tree, 116. 
 
LIFE AND LIGHT 
 
 Now the light comes just as we are ready to obey the will of the 
 Most High. Abraham had to leave his home and go out, not 
 knowing whither he went. Moses had to return from the home 
 he had in Midian to the country where they had sought his life. 
 The people of Israel had to journey into the great and terrible 
 wilderness. The prophets had to pass through stern ordeals. 
 The apostles must leave all and follow Christ. St. Paul must 
 bow his neck under the yoke of Him whom a moment before he 
 was persecuting, and say, " Lord, what wilt thou have me to do ? " 
 And do we not know that the light of God is most fully in our 
 souls when by Divine grace we are uprooting self-indulgence and 
 self-will ? 
 
 ^ To St. Francis of Assisi, as he set out to join the champion 
 of the Church, Walter de Brienne, intoxicated with the idea that 
 he himself was destined to become a great leader, came a vision at 
 Spoleto. " Francis," called the voice of God, " who can make thee 
 the better knight, the Master or the servant, the rich man or the 
 poor ? " " The Master," said Francis, " not the servant, the rich 
 man, not the poor." Then said the voice : " But thou leavest the 
 Master for the servant and the rich man for the poor." And 
 Francis said : " What dost Thou will that I should do, O my 
 Lord ? " And the Lord said : " Turn thee back to thy own land, 
 for the vision that thou didst see meant heavenly and not earthly 
 equipment, and it shall be given thee by God and not by man." 
 Obedient to the vision, Francis gave up all thought of rejoining 
 the band of Assisan soldiers, and rode slowly home that day, 
 revolving in his mind this grace vouchsafed of direction in the 
 path of the Spirit. It must have been from this time that he 
 felt it was to no mundane glory he was being guided, but rather 
 to the glory which vanquishes the world. One wonders how the 
 struggle shaped itself, how keen were the pangs which moved 
 him, as one fair temporal hope after another took on the like- 
 ness of a phantasm and trembled into nothingness at the potent 
 presence of these unwonted and unseen realities. One wonders 
 how his spirit stirred and shook as their amazing intervention 
 became indubitable ; how the unequal contest agonized and 
 astounded him; how, step by step, the spiritual gained upon 
 the temporal, whilst his shrinking flesh cried aloud in the 
 suffering of death. Only this we know: he obeyed, and, in 
 obedience to the Will, he found the Way, the way of the Cross, 
 Christ Jesus, from which he never swerved.^ 
 
 ^ A. M. Stoddart, Francis of Assisi, 71. 
 
PSALM XXXVI. 9 
 
 Then fiercely we dig the fountain : 
 
 Oh ! whence do the waters rise ? 
 Then panting we climb the mountain : 
 
 Oh ! are there indeed blue skies ? 
 We dig till the soul is weary, 
 
 Nor find the water-nest out; 
 We climb to the stone-crest dreary, 
 
 And still the sky is a doubt ! 
 
 Let alone the roots of the fountain; 
 
 Drink of the water bright ; 
 Leave the sky at rest on the mountain, 
 
 Walk in its torrent of light ; 
 Although thou seest no beauty, 
 
 Though widowed thy heart yet cries. 
 With thy hands go and do thy duty, 
 
 And thy work will clear thine eyes.^ 
 George MacDonald, A Book of Dreams {Poetical Works, i. 394). 
 
Delighting in the Lord. 
 
 IS3 
 
Literature. 
 
 Conn (J.), Hie Fulness of Tiine^ 117. 
 
 Cox (S.), The Bird's Nest, 238. 
 
 Houchin (J. W.), The Vision of God, 31. 
 
 Mackey (H. 0.), Miniature Sermons, 1. 
 
 Maclaren (A.), Sermons Preached in Manchester, ii. 245. 
 
 Eeynolds (H. K.), Notes of the Christian Life, 111. 
 
 Voysey (C), Sermons, viii. (1885), No. 32. 
 
 Christian World Pulpit, xxvii. 93 (H. W. Beecher). 
 
 Church of England Magazine, xxxi. 139 (J. Ayre). 
 
 '54 
 
Delighting in the Lord. 
 
 Delight thyself also in the Lord ; 
 
 And he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.— Ps. xxxvii. 4. 
 
 1. The anthem, " 0 rest in the Lord," taken from Mendelssohn's 
 oratorio "Elijah," is composed of words which many persons 
 imagine to be a text accurately quoted from the Bible. This is, 
 however, nowhere to be found as Mendelssohn quotes it, but is a 
 compilation of two separate verses. Scarcely any music could be 
 sweeter to an anxious and weary heart than this pathetic song, " 0 
 rest in the Lord, wait patiently for Him, and He will give thee 
 thy heart's desire." It seems cruel to say a word to detract from 
 the gracious comfort and hope conveyed by the words. Yet we 
 shall be gainers and not losers by greater accuracy and truth, and 
 shall find the promise "He will give thee thy heart's desire" 
 none the less fulfilled. Mendelssohn's made-up text is amply true, 
 was true for him in fact as it has been true to so many of us in 
 our varied lives and in the fulfilment of our heart's desires. Yet 
 there is a higher truth still, and to that the Psalmist gives 
 expression here. " Delight thyself also in the Lord ; and he shall 
 give thee the desires of thine heart." 
 
 2. The text might be correctly paraphrased, " Delight in the 
 Lord, and then thou mayest trust thy desires ; they will be the 
 forerunners of blessings, the beginning of their own realization." 
 " Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for 
 they shall be filled." Delight thyself in the Lord, and thou wilt 
 desire strongly only what is in harmony with His will, and best 
 for thyself. All thy wishes will be brought into subjection to His 
 will, and thou wilt crave only those things which He is ready and 
 anxious to bestow upon thee. 
 
 There are many beautiful psalms in the Psalter, but I am 
 disposed to think that this psalm is the most beautiful of them all. 
 There is a strain of old experience in it, of ripe and mellow 
 
 155 
 
156 DELIGHTING IN THE LORD 
 
 wisdom, of thoughtful and tranquil affection, which at once stirs 
 and calms our hearts. I can never read it but it calls up before 
 me the figure of a venerable and kindly old man, who has seen 
 much and endured much, but has at last won for himself a sacred 
 tranquillity and peace which no change and no alarm can disturb ; 
 who, now that he is old, does not forget either that he has been 
 young or what his hot, eager youth was like ; and who, in the calm 
 evening of his days, draws upon the accumulated stores of his 
 knowledge and experience for the benefit of those in whom the 
 fires of youth still burn hotly, and tries to save them from many 
 a conflict, and many a defeat, by teaching them the secret of 
 peace.^ 
 
 ^ There is a passage in Wordsworth's Prelude which expresses 
 both the craving and its satisfaction, with all the poet's high serious- 
 ness and moving simplicity. He had risen, in his unrest of mind, 
 before the dawn. In the grey light of the morning, he brooded 
 over his life and its meaning. As the sun rose and flooded meadow 
 and stream and the far-off shining sea with light, and as the birds 
 awoke to song and the labourer came forth with quiet and honest 
 content to his work in the field, all the stillness and charm of the 
 scene fell upon him with refreshing and renewing power. 
 
 Ah ! need I say, dear Friend ! that to the brim 
 My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows 
 Were then made for me ; bond unknown to me 
 Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly 
 A dedicated Spirit. On I walked 
 In thankful blessedness, which yet survives.^ 
 
 I. 
 
 Practising the Presence of God. 
 
 1. Delighting in God means, to begin with, realizing the 
 presence of God. If men will not sometimes think of God, He 
 will become merely a name to them. If they glance toward 
 Him only now and again, and with an unobservant and undesiring 
 eye, He will become strange and shadowy, and will remain un- 
 known. We do not become sure of God by 'mustering up the 
 arguments for His being and His purpose in the world. No 
 
 1 S. Cox, The Bird's Nest, 238. 
 
 2 W. M. Clow, The Secret of the Lord, 219. 
 
PSALM xxxvii. 4 
 
 157 
 
 heart ever stood up in a passionate conviction of God's presence 
 because it had been told that His footprints were marked upon 
 the rocks. No mind was ever driven by the logic of history to 
 assent with a deep persuasion to the personal providence of the 
 Almighty. These things have their place and their power. They 
 are byways of evidence in which a believing heart will sometimes 
 walk. But the only certainty which can satisfy the mind and 
 stir the heart is an ethical and a religious, a moral and a spiritual 
 consciousness of God. Faith is an opening of the eyes that we 
 may see. It is in prayer that we rise most swiftly and most 
 convincingly into this faith which sees. It is in prayer that we 
 have the sure consciousness of God. Even although a man may 
 kneel with a haze over his mind and a chill upon his spirit, he 
 will not kneel in vain. 
 
 ^ In the beginning of Brother Lawrence's noviciate, he spent 
 the hours appointed for private prayer in thinking of God, so as 
 to convince his mind of, and to impress deeply upon his heart, 
 the Divine existence, rather by devout sentiments than by 
 studied reasonings and elaborate meditations. By this short and 
 sure method, he exercised himself in the knowledge and love 
 of God, resolving to use his utmost endeavour to live in a con- 
 tinual sense of His Presence, and, if possible, never to forget 
 Him more. When he had thus in prayer filled his mind full 
 with great sentiments of that Infinite Being, he went to his work 
 appointed in the kitchen (for he was cook to the Society). When 
 he began his business, he said to God, with a filial trust in Him : 
 " 0 my God, since Thou art with me, and I must now, in obedience 
 to Thy commands, apply my mind to these outward things, I 
 beseech Thee to grant me grace to continue in Thy presence ; and 
 to this end, do Thou prosper me with Thy assistance, receive all 
 my works, and possess all my affections." . . . When he had 
 finished, he examined himself how he had discharged his duty : 
 if he found well, he returned thanks to God; if otherwise, he 
 asked pardon ; and, without being discouraged, he set his mind 
 right again and continued his exercise of the Presence of God, as 
 if he had never deviated from it. " Thus," said he, " by rising 
 after my falls, and by frequently renewed acts of faith, and love, 
 I am come to a state, wherein it would be as difficult for me not 
 to think of God as it was at first to accustom myself to it." 
 
 As Brother Lawrence had found such comfort and blessing in 
 walking in the Presence of God, it was natural for him to recom- 
 mend it earnestly to others ; but his example was a stronger 
 
158 DELIGHTING IN THE LORD 
 
 inducement than any arguments he could propose. His very 
 countenance was edifying; such a sweet and calm devotion 
 appearing in it as could not but affect all beholders. And it was 
 observed that in the greatest hurry of business in the kitchen, he 
 still preserved his recollection and his heavenly-mindedness. He 
 was never hasty nor loitering, but did each thing in its season, 
 with an even, uninterrupted composure and tranquillity of spirit. 
 " The time of business," said he, " does not with me differ from 
 the time of prayer, and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, 
 while several persons are at the same time calling for different 
 things, I possess God in as great tranquillity as if I were upon 
 my knees at the Blessed Sacrament." ^ 
 
 2. Delighting in the Lord implies sympathy with His mind 
 and character. It means that His pure and holy character is the 
 absorbing object of thought, that in the contemplation of it the 
 mind is free from all suspicions, all hard thoughts and rebellious 
 feelings ; that, while it dwells on this high theme with reverence 
 and with awe, it also finds in it a source of deepest joy. 
 
 Five years before he left us, one who has since his death 
 been much in men's minds had an illness which was of a very 
 critical character. For some days he said nothing, and he was 
 supposed to be quite unconscious. After his recovery he referred, 
 one day, to this, the presumably unconscious, part of his illness. 
 " People thought," he said, " that I was unconscious, but the fact 
 was that although I could not speak I heard all that went on in 
 the room, and I was well occupied." To the question, "What 
 were you doing ? " he answered, " By God's mercy, I could re- 
 member the Epistle for the fourth Sunday in Advent, out of the 
 Philippians, which begins, 'Eejoice in the Lord alway.' This I 
 made a framework for prayer ; saying the Lord's Prayer two or 
 three times between each clause, and so dwelling on the several 
 relations of each clause to each petition in the Lord's Prayer." 
 How he did this he explained at some length, and then added, 
 " It lasted me, I should think, four or five hours." To the question, 
 "What did you do after that?" he answered, " I began it over 
 again. I was very happy : and, had it been God's will, did not 
 wish to get better." ^ 
 
 3. Delighting in God means holding close communion with 
 Him. Communion is that quiet, intimate, tender intercourse with 
 
 ^ Brother Lawrence, The Practice of tJie Presence of Ood. 
 ^ H. P. Liddon, Passiontide Sermons, 271. 
 
PSALM XXXVII. 4 
 
 159 
 
 God in which we may ask nothing, confess nothing, and cease 
 even from thanksgiving. We simply speak face to face with God 
 as a man speaks to his friend. Communion may pass beyond 
 speech into a calm and absorbing and yet strangely wakeful 
 silence. God is not content always with silence only. He loves, 
 we may truly believe, to hear the human voice rising and falling 
 in the accents of prayer. Samuel's childish treble when he cried, 
 " Speak, Lord ; for thy servant heareth," was sweeter to Him 
 than the perfect music of a boy's clear young voice in a choir to 
 its leader. God misses " His little human praise," with its doubt 
 and fear trembling in every tone, when we pray only with the 
 inner whisper of our thought and meditation. But there are 
 times when the spirit of prayer may be too swift and too tender 
 for words. Every man is a possible mystic in the best sense of 
 that word, for every man may enter into that intercourse with 
 God in which the hours pass by in the silence of a perfect con- 
 fidence. 
 
 ^ Wesley, in his Journal tells us again and again that when 
 worn and ill he cast himself without words on the bosom of God. 
 Chalmers declares that, when greatly wearied and distressed in 
 mind, he gave himself up to quietism, and was much refreshed. 
 These were both men of strong practical wisdom, and not moody 
 and dreamy recluses. We must not think that when Christ con- 
 tinued " all night in prayer to God " He stretched out the arms of 
 His petitions and thanksgiving in words which fell upon His own 
 ear. We can be sure that His time was passed in still meditation. 
 He rose into a rapture in which there was no speech, a silence 
 that was felt and loved of God. To Him the Father was 
 
 A presence felt the livelong day, 
 A welcome fear at night.^ 
 
 ^ I see that every good and wise man who is held up to my 
 admiration and imitation in the Bible desired nothing less, and 
 could be satisfied by nothing less, than communion with God. 
 Every word in the Book of Psalms, in the Gospels, in the Epistles, 
 and in the Prophecies tells me this. They wished to know God, 
 not in a vague, loose sense, but actually to know Him as a 
 friend. Starting with no preparatory notions of God, but ready 
 to receive everything He told them, they welcomed each new 
 dispensation only because it told them something more of God ; 
 
 1 W. M. Clow, The Secret qf the Lord, 181. 
 
i6o DELIGHTING IN THE LORD 
 
 because it enabled them more intelligently, more practically, more 
 literally to converse with Him. I observe that all their sorrow 
 arose from the loss of God's presence, all their joy from the 
 possession of it, all their pleasure in expecting heaven from 
 anticipation of it. I observe that they shrunk from the contempla- 
 tion of no side or phase of God's character, that His holiness and 
 His mercy were equally dear to them, and that, so far from 
 viewing them as separate, they could not admire one without the 
 other. They could not delight in His love unless they believed 
 that He would admit no sin into His presence, for sin and love 
 are essentially hostile ; they could not adore His holiness unless 
 they believed that He had some way of removing their sinfulness 
 and imparting His own character to them. The plain, obvious 
 study of the Bible tells me this.^ 
 
 4. Lastly, delighting in God means entire surrender to God's 
 will. The highest attitude in prayer is not desire, or aspiration, 
 or praise. It is surrender. In surrender we open our whole 
 being to God as a flower opens itself to the sun, and we are filled, 
 up to our measure, with His Divine energy. It is because man 
 can be filled with the fulness of God that he has been chosen of 
 God as His instrument in the world. In one true sense God set 
 bounds to His power when He created man. He placed a further 
 limit on Himself when He committed dominion to him. God 
 now works through man, and if man will not work the works of 
 God, the works of God remain undone. 
 
 ^ Esther. — But that must be the best life, father. That must 
 be the best life. 
 
 Rufus. — What life, my dear child ? 
 
 Esther. — Why, that where one bears and does everything 
 because of some great and strong feeling — so that this and that 
 in one's circumstances don't signify. 
 
 Rufus. — Yea, verily: but the feeling that should be thus 
 supreme is devotedness to the Divine Will.^ 
 
 ^ It is best to limit oneself to what is strictly necessary, to live 
 austerely and by rule, to content oneself with a little, and to 
 attach no value to anything but peace of conscience and a sense 
 of duty done. It is true that this itself is no small ambition, and 
 that it only lands us in another impossibility. No, — the simplest 
 course is to submit oneself wholly and altogether to God. Every- 
 
 ^ Life of Frederick Denison Maurice^ i. 132. 
 2 George Eliot, Felix Holt, 
 
PSALM XXXVII. 4 
 
 i6i 
 
 thing else, as saith the Preacher, is but vanity and vexation of 
 spirit. It is a long while now since this has been plain to me, 
 and since this religious renunciation has been sweet and familiar 
 bo me. It is the outward distractions of life, the examples of the 
 world, and the irresistible influence exerted upon us by the current 
 of things which make us forget the wisdom we have acquired and 
 the principles we have adopted. That is why life is such 
 weariness ! This eternal beginning over again is tedious, even to 
 repulsion. It would be so good to go to sleep when we have 
 gathered the fruit of experience, when we are no longer in 
 opposition to the supreme will, when we have broken loose from 
 self, when we are at peace with all men.^ 
 
 Blindfolded and alone I stand, 
 With unknown thresholds on each hand; 
 The darkness deepens as I grope, 
 Afraid to fear, afraid to hope, 
 Yet this one thing I learn to know 
 Each day more surely as I go. 
 That doors are opened, ways are made, 
 Burdens are lifted or are laid. 
 By some great law unseen and still, 
 Unfathomed purpose to fulfil, 
 " Not as I will." 
 
 Blindfolded and alone I wait; 
 Loss seems too bitter, gain too late; 
 Too heavy burdens in the load 
 And too few helpers on the road; 
 And joy is weak and grief is strong, 
 And years and days so long, so long: 
 Yet this one thing I learn to know 
 Each day more surely as I go, 
 That I am glad the good and ill 
 By changeless law are ordered still, 
 "Not as I will." 
 
 " Not as I will " : the sound grows sweet 
 
 Each time my lips the words repeat. 
 
 " Not as I will " : the darkness feels 
 
 More safe than light when this thought steals 
 
 Like whispered voice to calm and bless 
 
 All unrest and all loneliness. 
 
 ^ AmieVs Journal (trans, by Mrs. Humphry Ward), 115. 
 PS. XXV.-CXIX. — II 
 
i62 DELIGHTING IN THE LORD 
 
 "Not as I will," because the One 
 Who loved us first and best has gone 
 Before us on the road, and still 
 For us must all His love fulfil, 
 "Not as we will."i 
 
 II. 
 
 The Satisfaction of Desire. 
 
 1. Nothing more disastrous could happen than that God 
 should gratify the desires of all men. If God were to permit for 
 one short hour that all human desires should be satisfied, it is 
 impossible to calculate the dire confusion and pitiless despair that 
 would prevail. Ignorance would unsettle every natural law; 
 selfishness would break down every barrier ; oppression, lust, and 
 rapine would leap forth with fury. It is true that prisons, 
 hospitals, and workhouses might disgorge their occupants, poverty 
 might leap into affluence, and diseases and devils be cast out of 
 Buffering humanity. The slave might snap his fetters, and many an 
 oppressed sufferer might rush forth to freedom and to life ; but amid 
 the widespread despair excited by the greatest curse that had ever 
 fallen on humanity, the prayer would ascend, " 0 God, take back 
 our liberty ; bind us once more by Thy laws ; Thou, and Thou alone, 
 knowest what is best for us. Fence us round with Thine ordin- 
 ances; restore to us Thy government; let us know once more that 
 Thou alone canst speak, and it shall be done ; Thou alone com- 
 mand so that it shall stand fast ! " 
 
 ^ The fables, the philosophy, and the experience of all nations, 
 are crowded with lessons that men are blind, and ignorant, and selfish, 
 and know not what is best for them ; that they cannot enumerate 
 their mercies ; that the overruling of an infinite Mind and Will 
 is the only refuge for their ignorance, the only hope of the race. 
 He must be a bold man, or a fool, who would dare to take his lot 
 into his own government, and be the master of his own destiny. 
 The same principle will apply equally well, if we suppose our 
 merely human desires to be made the measure of God's benedic- j 
 tions to us — of the spiritual blessings which are of the greatest I 
 necessity for us. Some are longing for more power to work, when 
 probably God sees that they want more patience to endure, more 
 
 ^ Helen H, Jackson, Verses, 
 
PSALM XXXVII. 4 
 
 163 
 
 power to feel. Some are ever yearning after new truth, when 
 God sees that their need is to understand more fully the truth 
 already within their reach.^ 
 
 I 2. When we delight in God, we are freed from the distraction 
 of various desires by the one master attraction. Such a soul is 
 still as the great river above the falls, when all the side currents 
 and dimpling eddies and backwaters are effaced by the attraction 
 that draws every drop in the one direction; or like the same 
 stream as it nears its end, and, forgetting how it brawled among 
 rocks and flowers in the mountain glens, flows " with a calm and 
 equable motion " to its rest in the central sea. When we possess 
 God, all other desires are put in their right place. The presence 
 of the king awes the crowd into silence. When the full moon is 
 in the nightly sky, it makes the heavens bare of flying cloud-rack, 
 and all the twinkling stars are lost in the peaceful, solitary 
 splendour. So let delight in God rise in our souls, and lesser 
 lights pale before it — do not cease to be, but add their feebleness, 
 unnoticed, to its radiance. The more we have our affections set 
 on God, the more shall we enjoy, because we subordinate. His 
 gifts. The less, too, shall we dread their loss, the less be at the 
 mercy of their fluctuations. The capitalist does not think so 
 much of the year's gains as the needy adventurer, to whom they 
 make the difference between bankruptcy and competence. If we 
 have God for our " enduring substance," we can face all varieties 
 of condition, and be calm, saying : 
 
 Give what Thou wilt, without Thee I am poor, 
 And with Thee rich, take what Thou wilt away. 
 
 ^ Some men make themselves God, without knowing what 
 I they are doing. The deity they appeal to is really their deeper, 
 higher self. When they feel God's approval, it is really their own 
 self-praise. When God reproaches them, it is their own self- 
 rebuke. When they go apart from the world to hold communion 
 with Him, it really is an entrance into their own self-conscious- 
 ness. To other men some good fellow-man, more or less con- 
 sciously and completely enlarged into an ideal of humanity, 
 answers the same purpose, and is in reality their God. To still 
 others, a vague presence of a high purpose and tendency felt in 
 everything — Tennyson's "one increasing purpose," and Arnold's 
 ^ H, R. Reynolds, Notes of the Christian Life^ 115. 
 
i64 DELIGHTING IN THE LORD 
 
 " something not ourselves which makes for righteousness." This 
 fulfils the end and makes the substitute for God. But none of 
 these supply the place of a true Personality outside ourselves, 
 yet infinitely near to us.^ 
 
 3. To delight in God is to have a desire for spiritual good ; 
 and the desire for spiritual good never goes unsatisfied. No man 
 ever prayed but in the moment he was a better and a wiser man. 
 To go into the sanctuary of God is to understand. To let our 
 requests be made known unto God is to gain the peace that 
 passeth all understanding. As we pray, our sins are set in the 
 light of God's countenance. We see the beauty of holiness. We 
 behold the beauty of the Lord. We open the sluice-gates of the 
 soul, and the swelling tides of God's love and grace flood within. 
 New penitence, new resolves, new endeavours are born in the 
 depth of the will. That truth is written large in the history of 
 every saint. Prayer is a mode of power within to learn the mind 
 of Christ. His words and deeds become memorable and signifi- 
 cant to us. We sometimes receive a more vivid insight into what 
 He was, and did, as we serve Him in the toilsome duties of life. 
 But when we pray, then those spiritual changes which are vital, 
 determining, eternal, take place within. F. W. H. Myers, in his 
 poem on St. Paul, so full of the seer's insight into the history of 
 the soul, has set this truth in impassioned verse. He is speaking 
 of Paul's shame at his failure, and he conceives him in the pain 
 of his penitence, seeking the presence and the peace of Christ. 
 
 Straight to Thy presence get me and reveal it, 
 Nothing ashamed of tears upon Thy feet, 
 
 Show the sore wound and beg Thine hand to heal it, 
 Pour Thee the bitter, pray Thee for the sweet. 
 
 Then with a ripple and a radiance thro' me, 
 
 Eise and be manifest, 0 Morning Star ! 
 Flow on my soul, Thou Spirit, and renew me, 
 
 Fill with Thyself, and let the rest be far. 
 
 4. When we delight in the Lord, our desire is not so much 
 to have as to be and do. We cease to crave exclusively for 
 temporal good, for personal and physical gratification, for the 
 
 ^ Fhillips Brooks : Memories of his Life, 457. 
 
PSALM xxxvn. 4 155 
 
 supply of what we call our wants, and we crave, instead, to be 
 what our Creator and Father wishes us to be, and to do what 
 He wishes us to do. Delighting in the Lord does not mean 
 I ceasing to be human, ceasing to have wants and natural lawful 
 desires for success and happiness; it means that all these 
 native and lawful wishes become subordinate to a higher desire 
 still, so that, for its sake, we are willing to forgo all the rest. 
 We may be hungry and thirsty, yet our meat and drink will be 
 to do the will of Him who sent us here and to finish His work. 
 We may be poor and needy, but we shall esteem the words of 
 God and obedience to His law " better than thousands of gold and 
 silver," or, in other words of the Psalmist, "more than our 
 necessary food." We may be hungering for a love which is out of 
 our reach, or sorrowing for the loss of a love that can never return, 
 and yet find in God a love passing the love of woman. We may 
 be toiling all day, and our very sleep may be broken by festering 
 care, by even a holy anxiety to bring our work to completion, and 
 yet we shall find something better and higher than success in the 
 knowledge that we are working for God and doing our best and 
 80 earning His approval. If the greatest and supreme of all our 
 delights is in being and in doing what God wills, nothing can 
 frustrate His purpose to give us our heart's desire. 
 
 Tf Christianity seeks not to cramp man's nature, saying to him 
 constantly, "Thou shalt not"; but it leads on, up to freer air and 
 wider space, wherein the soul may disport itself. It is God we 
 follow. Obeymg God is freedom. Our souls are like closed 
 rooms, and God is the sunlight. Every new way we find in which 
 to obey Him we throw open a shutter. Our souls are as enclosed 
 bays, and God is the ocean. The only barrier that can hinder 
 tree communication is disobedience. Each duty performed is the 
 breaking down of a reef of hindrance between our souls and God 
 permitting the fulness of His being to flow in upon our souls' 
 Lt IS when we remember the greatness of the nature which God 
 bas given us that we come into a full understanding of our 
 relations to God. At some time every man comes to realize the 
 neaning of the life he is living; the secret sins hidden in his 
 leart rise against him. Then we would hide ourselves from God 
 t we could But the only way to run from God is to run to 
 tlim. ihe Infinite Knowledge is also the Infinite Pity.i 
 
 ^ Phillips Brooks : Memories of Ms Life, 630. 
 
The Crowning of the Year. 
 
 167 
 
Literature. 
 
 Little (H. TV,), Arrows for the King's Archers, 50. 
 Mursell (W. A.), Sermons on Special Occasions, 95. 
 Rylance (J. H.), in The Complete Preacher, ii. 180. 
 
 Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxv. (1879), No. 1475. 
 Wilmot-Buxton (H. J.), In Many Keys, 265. 
 Wilson (J. M.), Sermons Preached in Clifton College Chapel, ii. 35. 
 Churchman's Pulpit : Harvest Thanksgiving, Pt. 97, p. 68 (T. B. 
 
 Johnstone) ; Pt. 98, p. 81 (J. S. James). 
 Treasury (New York), xiv. 585 (J. D. M'Caughtry). 
 
 i68 
 
The Crowning of the Year. 
 
 Thou crownest the year with thy goodness ; 
 And thy paths drop fatness.— Ps. Ixv. ii. 
 
 In the midst of great political convulsions, of a shaking of nations 
 and kingdoms, Jehovah had manifested His goodness to His 
 people by sending down a blessing upon their flocks and their 
 fields. The folds were full of sheep, the valleys stood so thick 
 with corn that they laughed and sang; the garners were filled 
 with all manner of store. Peace had been given to Zion as well 
 as plenty. A year of blessing, temporal and spiritual, had been 
 " crowned " by a secure provision against the drought and famine 
 which had at one time threatened the chosen people. 
 
 I. 
 
 "Thou hast set a crown upon the year of thy goodness." 
 Such is the literal rendering of the text. God is represented as 
 setting the crown of completeness and perfection upon a long 
 process. In the previous verses we have a graphic picture of how 
 the grain is prepared. We see the plough at work, scooping out 
 farrows and turning up ridges by one and the same process : and 
 the Divine Co-operator dealing with both according to need and 
 capacity. The furrows are naturally receptive of the streams 
 which flow in abundance from those upper and invisible channels 
 of God which are full of water ; and what they thus receive, they 
 hold and convey to the roots of the young plants. The turned-up 
 ridges need to be settled down and closed well in upon the 
 precious seed which they have received. The same rain that does 
 the one does the other : fills the furrows and settles the ridges. 
 Divine agriculture is economic of means, various in adaptations. 
 But soon the surface becomes encrusted, and might imprison the 
 tender blade, did not the gentler after-showers with their myriad 
 drops come to soften the soil and make it easily permeable. And 
 
I70 THE CROWNING OF THE YEAR 
 
 so, as eyes of wonder look on, and discreet judgment calculates 
 how many dangers have been passed as the green crop carpets the 
 earth, devotion exclaims, " The sprouting thereof thou dost bless." 
 
 God crowns the world of men as well as the world of nature. 
 Human life and character and experience have their supreme 
 culminating moments. Love comes to crown the solitary life. 
 Success comes to crown legitimate ambition — not forgetting that 
 there may be a true success in honourable failure. Influence 
 comes to crown character. Friendship comes to crown the long- 
 ings of the heart. Trust and confidence and admiration come to 
 crown the life lived in honest toil, and with a single eye to the 
 common welfare. But the culmination is a process : the crown is 
 sometimes long deferred. It is deferred in nature, yet experience 
 has taught us to expect it. It looks as if nothing were being done 
 during the dreary, sterile months of winter. The earth seems to 
 be dead, and God appears to have withdrawn. Yet if our hearing 
 were acute enough, we might lay our ear to the ground in 
 December and hear the pulse still beating in that mighty bosom, 
 and by and by we shall behold again the riotous life of spring. 
 We must not despond when there is a winter season in our mental 
 growth, in our spiritual experience, in our church life. In these 
 higher regions, the crown is often long withheld. But if a man 
 is all the time reading, observing, studying, thinking, though there 
 be no immediate visible result, there will come a moment of 
 rapturous emancipation when he realizes that cold fetters, as it 
 were, have fallen from his brain, and left him free to enter upon 
 a richer and riper life of understanding. God has crowned the 
 intellectual year. 
 
 •[J Tennyson was in his 81st year when he wrote " Crossing the 
 Bar." He showed the poem to his son, who exclaimed, " That is 
 the crown of your life's work." " It came in a moment," was the 
 aged poet's reply. Yes, but however instantaneous was the 
 inspiration, the hymn had behind it a lifetime of careful, pains- 
 taking, even fastidious work. 
 
 11 Marcus Dods was a probationer for six years before 
 being called to Eenfield Church, Glasgow. During these years 
 of waiting he was sometimes so discouraged as to think of giving 
 up the ministry altogether. In a letter to his sister he wrote : 
 " Do these two years and more waiting not show that I am seek- 
 ing my work in the wrong direction, or why do they not show this, 
 
PSALM Lxv. II 
 
 171 
 
 or how long would show this ? Possibly you may say, ' Wait till 
 some evident call to some other work arises ' ; but then, of course, 
 evident calls enough would soon arise were I to put myself in the 
 way of them, e.g., were I to go along to Clark the publisher and 
 ask him for some work, or go out to Harvey of Merchiston and 
 ask him for some ; whereas, so long as I keep myself back from 
 such openings they are not a tenth part so likely to arise. But 
 apart from growlery, let me give you a problem. I will give it you 
 in the concrete, as being easier stated and easier apprehended. Is 
 it right of me to wait and see whether I get a call or no, and let 
 this decide whether I ought or ought not to take a charge ? To me 
 it seems not (though it's just what I'm doing), and on this ground, 
 because in fact we find that God has often suffered men to enter 
 the Church who were not worthy — because, that is, the call of the 
 people does not always represent the call of God." He was after- 
 wards Professor of Exegesis and Principal of the New College, 
 Edinburgh.^ 
 
 II. 
 
 The harvest crown comes as the reward of human labour. 
 Man is called to be a co-worker with God. The sun and the rain 
 may do their best, and the earth yield all its quickening powers, 
 but the harvest would be but a heap of wild and tangled weeds 
 without the constant work and toil of man. The earth will show 
 its wondrous fecundity. Every seed that drops into its bosom 
 must grow or die, and it is man's part to curb the wild extrava- 
 gance of nature, to destroy that which is mere weed or worthless, 
 in order that there may be room for the good to grow and ripen. 
 God gives little even in nature without our toil ; He never gives 
 a rich and bounteous harvest unless we give our work, and care, 
 and watchful supervision over its growth. 
 
 The world is but a great harvest-field, in which, each in his own 
 place, we are called forth to take our part, and to do our share of 
 labour. Neither by the structure of our nature, nor by the con- 
 stitution of society, is there any room for the idler, or any possibility 
 of true enjoyment and happiness without work. If we want to 
 be truly happy, to attain in any measure to the real use and en- 
 joyment of life, work of some kind we must have. There ought 
 to be no play without work. No man is entitled to enjoyment 
 who does not purchase it by labour. The sweetest holiday is that 
 
 * Early Letters of Marcus Bods, 198. 
 
172 THE CROWNING OF THE YEAR 
 
 which we have earned by strenuous application. God has so made 
 us that we must find our pleasure either in working, or as the 
 reward of working. 
 
 ^ There are certain countries of such tropical luxuriance and 
 fertility that you have only to tickle the earth with a hoe, and she 
 laughs with a harvest. But you do not find the highest type of 
 men where Nature is so kind. There is an enervating kindness. 
 In these Northern lands men have a tussle with the earth to make 
 her yield up her fruits, and they become the stronger for their 
 battle with the elements. But they invariably find that God 
 answers the prayer of their labour. There is a flourishing kitchen 
 garden behind the hotel at Gairloch, reclaimed from the barest 
 and barrenest bit of moorland I ever saw. All that countryside 
 is just wild mountain, bare rock, shaggy heath, and desolate moor ; 
 to get a kitchen garden out of such a spot is a triumph. It must 
 have needed some considerable faith to make the attempt, and it 
 was justified. God is always ready to supply if man only has 
 conscience enough to demand. " He is faithful that promised." ^ 
 
 ^ " My Father worketh hitherto, and I work." And I work ! 
 Say that too. If you destroy the sequence, life loses heart, and 
 joy, and meaning, and value. Swing into line with the eternal 
 energy, be a force among forces, a toiler, a producer, a factor, and 
 life never loses its tone and flavour, its bead or glamour. There 
 is no real taste to bread nor bliss in sleep for the idler. He is the 
 doubter, the sceptic, the unhappy man. His idleness proclaims 
 him diseased and decaying.^ 
 
 Get leave to work 
 In this world — 'tis the best you get at all; 
 For God, in cursing, gives us better gifts 
 Than men in benediction. God says, "Sweat 
 For foreheads," men say "crowns," and so we are crowned, 
 Aye, gashed by some tormenting circle of steel 
 Which snaps with a secret spring. Get work, get work; 
 Be sure 'tis better than what you work to get.^ 
 
 III. 
 
 And yet the harvest is the gift of God, and should link man 
 to God. Man can only do a little ; he ploughs and sows, and 
 
 » W. A. Mursell. 
 
 ^ M. D. Babcock, ThougJds for Every-Day Living, 16. 
 ' E. B. Browniug. 
 
PSALM Lxv. II 
 
 173 
 
 makes what preparation he can, and then he has to sit down and 
 wait. He can hasten nothing. If he goes out and waves his 
 hands magically over the brown furrows, nothing happens ; if he 
 stamps and rages, he does but reveal his impatience, and emphasize 
 his own impotence. He must work, and then he must wait ; and 
 there is something profoundly religious and infinitely suggestive 
 in that waiting. What is he waiting for ? God. For aught we 
 know, God could do the work instantly ; the harvest might follow 
 immediately upon the seed-sowing, like the genii in the fairy 
 tale. God could bring the gift at once on man's asking. But our 
 world is not the world of the Arabian Nights. God chooses to 
 wait on man's co-operation. He allows him to do so much that 
 man is tempted to suppose that he is himself the author of the 
 whole process of production. But man has not cleared up the 
 mystery of growth by calling it Evolution. Whatever scientific 
 explanation the human mind can offer of a harvest-field, the 
 element of mystery remains precisely where it was before, and it is 
 that element of mystery that makes us fall down and worship ; it is 
 that element of mystery that fills us with a wonder akin to prayer ; 
 it is that element of mystery that turns every flower into an 
 altar, and makes a sanctuary of every cornfield. God thus keeps 
 His hold of us by the persistence of the mysterious element in 
 things. If we could explain the harvest, we could explain God, 
 and our fairest vision would fade into the light of common 
 day. 
 
 ^ In harvest time the Greek saw the good goddess Ceres 
 bearing her golden sheaves; the modern farmer too frequently 
 sees only the result of his own knowledge, or of the latest patent 
 manure. We pity the poor heathen Greek ; ought we not rather 
 to pity ourselves ? ^ 
 
 The seed was spread in the furrowed earth, 
 
 And nurtured long in the gloom it lay. 
 
 Till the beckoning hours led on its birth 
 
 And drew it up to the laughing day. 
 
 The young spring soothed and cherished the blade. 
 
 And summer 'stablished the stately stem. 
 
 And the Lord was glad of the thing He'd made, 
 
 The fair green ears and the fruit of them. 
 
 » H. J. Wilmot-Buxton. 
 
174 THE CROWNING OF THE YEAR 
 
 Summer had worked her will, and past 
 With her world of green, and autumn arose 
 And over the prospering tillage cast 
 A glory of change; the marshalled rows 
 Of bearded barley and four-square wheat 
 And pale oats, bearing a hundredfold, 
 Bipened under her shapely feet, 
 And out of the green ear grew the gold. 
 
 God, how wonderful this the thing. 
 
 The new-old miracle Thou hast done, 
 
 This proud triumphant fashioning. 
 
 Through rains and wind and shine of the sun, 
 
 Of ripe and rich abundance, borne 
 
 To-day to the sheltering homes of men ; 
 
 For us Thy Spirit among the corn 
 
 Has moved, and one has grown as ten.^ 
 
 IV. 
 
 The crown of harvest is woven in the loom of winter. Out 
 of December comes June. Out of the Cross is fashioned the 
 Crown. Perpetual summer would be loss unutterable. Perpetual 
 summer would be perpetual mockery. There is no greenness of 
 the grass in June unless there be the chillness of November. 
 God needs the one if He would make the other ; fashions the glory 
 out of the decay ; lays the field under the grip of ice that it may 
 be golden with the waving grain. 
 
 11 If any one should ask me where I have seen, in the course 
 of my journeyings, the freshest verdure and the greenest grass, I 
 think I might surprise you with my answer. I have seen the 
 tenderest foliage where the fire has recently swept through the 
 forest. Whether it was because of the contrast provided by the 
 blackened timbers or not, I cannot say, but the truth is I never 
 saw such tender green as springs amongst the blackened embers 
 of the forest fire. Certain it is I have never seen such graces 
 as those that spring when the tribulation has passed by. Oh ! 
 what a scorching flame it was ; but the grass grows green there, 
 and the flowers spring tender there by reason of the fire. There 
 was a soil prepared which has suited the tender growth. Thank 
 God for the tribulation that makes us greener and tenderer in 
 consequence.^ 
 
 * J. Drinkwater, Poems of Men and Hours, 24, ^ Thomas Spurgeon, 
 
PSALM Lxv. II 
 
 175 
 
 ^ I suppose there are many of us who are lovers of the Tweed. 
 It is so beautiful, that river Tweed, and is so haunted by a 
 hundred memories. And yet that river, in whose gentle murmur- 
 ing we catch the echo of unforgotten voices, rises where everything 
 is bleak and bare. There is no beauty that we should desire it 
 there. There is only the desolate and lonely moor. There is no 
 song, no shadowing of tree, no gathering of the great dead beside 
 its waters. Out of that winter God has made its summer, and to 
 that summer come a thousand pilgrims, who know not, for they 
 have never seen, the bleak and barren region of its rise.^ 
 
 ^ Christ was content to have His crown of glory fashioned in 
 agony. He took to Himself a crown of thorns. He came to wear 
 it, and He would have no other. After the miracle of the loaves 
 the people would have crowned Him with an earthly crown, and 
 He fled from them. He was afraid of them. He hid Himself in 
 a quiet place. They wanted to give Him an honour He could 
 not accept. They wanted to put around His brow the golden 
 circlet of a brief popularity and a civic leadership. But He 
 would not have it. There was a crown of thorns waiting for Him, 
 and He would not be defrauded of it. There was a coronation 
 day coming, and it must not be anticipated. He was going by a 
 path that few would be willing to follow — unto an honour that 
 few would be wishful to win. Oh, who is strong enough and brave 
 enough to go on as Christ went treading underfoot the golden 
 crown of gain and reaching out after the thorny crown of 
 sacrifice? He chose between the crown that glitters and the 
 crown that wounds. He refused the one that He might wear the 
 other* 
 
 It was a thorn, 
 
 And it stood forlorn 
 In the burning sunrise land : 
 
 A blighted thorn 
 
 And at eve and morn 
 Thus it sighed to the desert sand : 
 
 Every flower, 
 
 By its beauty's power, 
 With a crown of glory is crowned; 
 
 No crown have I ; 
 
 For a crown I sigh, 
 For a crown that I have not found. 
 
 1 G. H. Morrison, The Afterglow of God, 94. 
 
 2 p. C. Ainswortli, A Thornless World, 194. 
 
 i 
 
176 THE CROWNING OF THE YEAR 
 
 Sad thorn, why grieve? 
 
 Thou a crown shalt weave, 
 But not for a maiden to wear ; 
 
 That crown shall shine 
 
 When all crowns save thine 
 With the glory they gave are gone. 
 
 For thorn, my thorn, 
 Thy crown shall be worn 
 By the King of Sorrows alone.^ 
 
 V. 
 
 The crown of harvest is not for ornament and beauty only, 
 but for utility and beneficence. The ripe grain becomes the 
 seed of future harvests. The husbandman takes of his best corn, 
 safe in his granary, and casts it into the earth. He sacrifices 
 what is precious to him for the sake of the harvest in the future. 
 So it is with those who work for worldly success. They sacrifice 
 time, rest, ease, comfort ; they deny themselves pleasure now that 
 they may reap a rich harvest in the end. So must it be with 
 those who sow for eternity. They must deny themselves, they 
 must sow in tears, they must go forth weeping and bearing this 
 good seed. Jesus, our Master, sowed in tears, sowed in the agony 
 and bloody sweat. He sacrificed Himself that He might gather 
 the glorious harvest of a world redeemed, of a Church bought 
 with His Precious Blood. He gave up His Sacred Body, like a 
 seed to be bruised and crushed by cruel hands, and to be sown 
 in the furrow of the grave. But the harvest came. That Body 
 sown in the weakness of death was raised in the power of the 
 resurrection, and so Jesus reaped the harvest for Himself and 
 for us His people. 
 
 ^ The story of a night of seemingly fruitless toil, which resulted 
 in great blessing, is retold in the Illustrated Missionary News. 
 Miss Harris, of Medak, in India, utterly tired out, was one even- 
 ing about to return home, when the son of the head-man of an 
 important village, who had been poisoned, was hurriedly brought 
 into the compound. She saw it was impossible to save him, and 
 yet she kept the night vigil, rendering him the most menial 
 service — service hardly fit for the village scavenger. The father 
 
 ^ Owen Meredith. 
 
PSALM Lxv. II 
 
 177 
 
 and brothers watched all the time, and although the missionary 
 returned home utterly spent next morning, feeling as if nothing 
 had been accomplished, the chief and his family, as they watched, 
 had judged between Hinduism and the Gospel of Christ, and 
 within six months the whole of the large family of the village 
 chief was baptized ; soon a church and school were founded in the 
 village, and from the chief's family there are now (so runs the 
 encouraging report) no fewer than ten evangelists and Bible- 
 , women. 
 
 • 
 
 A Sower went forth to sow; 
 
 His eyes were dark with woe; 
 I He crushed the flowers beneath his feet, 
 
 I Nor smelt their perfume, warm and sweet, 
 
 That prayed for pity everywhere. 
 
 He came to a field that was harried 
 
 By iron, and to heaven laid bare; 
 
 He shook the seed that he carried 
 
 O'er that brown and bladeless place. 
 
 He shook it, as God shakes the hail 
 
 O'er a doomed land, 
 
 When lightnings interlace 
 
 The sky and the earth, and his wand 
 
 Of love is a thunder-flail. 
 
 Thus did that Sower sow; 
 
 His seed was human blood. 
 
 And tears of women and men. 
 
 And I, who near him stood. 
 
 Said : " When the crop comes, then 
 
 There will be sobbing and sighing, 
 
 Weeping and wailing and crying. 
 
 Flame, and ashes, and woe." 
 
 It was an autumn day 
 When next I went that way. 
 And what, think you, did I see ? 
 What was it that I heard, 
 What music was in the air? 
 The song of a sweet- voiced bird? 
 Nay — but the songs of many, 
 Thrilled through with praise and prayer. 
 Of all those voices not any 
 Were sad of memory; 
 PS. xxv.-cxix. — 12 
 
THE CROWNING OF THE YEAR 
 
 But a sea of sunlight flowed, 
 
 A golden harvest glowed, 
 
 And I said: "Thou only art wise, 
 
 God of the earth and skies ! 
 
 And I praise Thee, again and again. 
 
 For the Sower whose name is Pain."^ 
 
 » E. W. Gilder, The Sower. 
 
The Burden-Bearing God. 
 
 X79 
 
Literature. 
 
 Ainswortli (P. C), A Thornless World, 154. 
 Barrett (G. S.), Musings for Quiet Hours, 27. 
 Clifford (J.), The Secret of Jesus, 57. 
 Cuyler (T. L.), Stirring the Eagle's Nest, 39. 
 Dix (M.), Christ at the Door of the Heart, 195. 
 Forbes (J. L.), God's Measure, 175. 
 Hamilton (J.), TVorhs, vi. 430. 
 Jowett (J, H.), Thirsting for the Springs, 41. 
 Maclaren (A.), Expositions : Psalms li.-cxlv., 93. 
 Matheson (G.), Messages of Hope, 145. 
 Morrison (G. H.), The Afterglow of God, 320. 
 Neville (W. G.), Sermons, 312. 
 Raleigli (A.), Quiet Besting -Places, 331. 
 
 Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xlix. (1903), No. 
 Talmage (T. de W.), Sermons, vi. 145. 
 
 Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), ix. (1872), No. 793. 
 Christian World Pulpit, lii. 74 (T. J ones). 
 Church of England Pulpit, xxxviii. 195. 
 
 Clergyman's Magazine, 3rd Ser., ii. (1891) 247 (H. G. Youard). 
 Literary Churchman, xxxii. (1886) (M. Fuller), 355. 
 
 i8o 
 
The Burden-Bearing God. 
 
 I Blessed be the Lord, who daily beareth our burden.— Ps. Ixviii. 19. 
 
 HE occasion of this psalm was the removal of the ark to Zion 
 iter it had been returned by the Philistines. Under the figures 
 i' a military invasion and occupation and settlement of the land, 
 'avid represents Jehovah as Leader conquering His enemies,' 
 assessing Himself of their land, choosing a city for the seat of 
 is Empire, and advancing in triumphal procession to enter upon 
 is chosen residence. In the passage of the ark, the sign of 
 'od's presence, through the land to the site on Mount Zion, 
 iiosen as the religious Metropolis of the world, David sees a 
 [petition in the religious realm of the earlier march into and 
 Dcupation of the country in the birth- time of the nation. His 
 lind runs back to that first victorious advance of God through 
 le desert at the head of His chosen race; to the entrance of the 
 ictorious people into the land of Canaan; to the establishment of 
 Ion as the place of His settled worship; and he sees in this 
 icond and more illustrious establishment of Zion as the place of 
 iDd's rest not only the security for the blessedness of his own 
 lad, but the promise of a universal dominion, of which the fitful 
 i3ams of peace and happiness that they had as a nation under the 
 ;w monarchy formed but a faint and imperfect foreshadowing. 
 
 And then, as he thinks of the splendid issue of this Divine 
 icupation of Mount Zion, and the establishment there of the true 
 Drship, he breaks forth into a direct ascription of praise to God. 
 b looks back on the long years of the Divine patience and 
 I'bearance ; on not only the special times of deliverance, but the 
 iy-by-day guardianship and sustenance of God, and as he does so 
 says : 
 
 "Blessed be the Lord, who daily beareth our burden 
 Even the God who is our salvation." 
 
 181 
 
i82 THE BURDEN-BEARING GOD 
 
 ^ In the Authorized Version this verse reads thus : " Blessed be 
 the Lord, who daily loadeth us with benefits," the last two words 
 being in italics, to show that they are not in the original. In 
 point of fact, the Hebrew is equally capable of both interpreta- 
 tions, and may be rendered either, "Blessed be the Lord, who 
 daily burdens us," that is, " with benefits " ; or, " Blessed be the 
 Lord, who daily beareth our burden." The great objection to the 
 rendering which has become familiar to us all, " who daily loadeth 
 us with henejits'' is that these essential words are not in the 
 original, and need to be supplied in order to make out the sense. 
 Whereas, on the other hand, if we adopt the suggested emenda- 
 tion, " who daily beareth our burden," we get a still more beauti- 
 ful meaning, which requires no forced addition in order to bring it 
 out. There is a still more attractive rendering found in several of 
 the ancient versions : " Blessed be the Lord who daily beareth us." 
 
 L 
 
 The Inevitable Burden. 
 
 Perhaps the most perplexing element in life is the wide sway 
 of tli£ Inevitable. The area of our freedom of choice is so pain- 
 fully limited that, though we are turned into a capacious garden, 
 stored with an incalculable wealth of flower and fruit, yet we can 
 do so little ourselves, and are of so little account, that we are fain 
 to despise our inheritance and neglect the care of our flower-beds 
 and the watch of the fruit-trees. The life we contrive for our- 
 selves is unexpectedly broken up or overpressed, till it has none 
 of the shape and little of the beauty we intended ; indeed, it some- 
 times seems little more than a central thoroughfare for the irre- 
 sistible steeds of fate. The youth descries his far-off goal, and 
 with measureless pluck and brightest hope sets out resolved to 
 reach it, but is tripped up before he has travelled many yards ; 
 and though he rises, gains his feet and attempts the herculean 
 task a hundred times, it is to find himself nearer indeed, but only 
 to what is now a receding mark. The man of business builds his 
 barns larger in time for them to be burnt by the desolating fire, 
 or sends his boat to sea to be destroyed by the despotism of the 
 storm. Pettiness and weariness eat the heart out of the life of 
 artist and artisan, patriot and poet, and make existence and toil 
 
PSALM Lxviii. 19 
 
 poor and bitter as the apples of Sodom. Thus life not only has 
 its burdens but, in a true and not ignoble sense, it is itself a 
 burden. 
 
 1. There is the awful burden of personal existence. It is a 
 solemn thing to be able to say "I." And that carries with it 
 this, that, after all sympathy, after all nestling closeness of affec- 
 tion, after the tenderest exhibition of identity of feeling, and of 
 swift godlike readiness to help, each of us lives alone. Like the 
 inhabitants of the islands of the Greek Archipelago, we are able 
 to wave signals to the next island, and sometimes to send a boat 
 with provisions and succour, but we are parted, " with echoing 
 straits between us thrown." Every man, after all, lives alone, 
 and society is like the material things round about us, which are 
 all compressible, because the atoms that compose them are not in 
 actual contact, but separated by slenderer or more substantial 
 films of isolating air. Thus there is even in the sorrows which 
 we can share with our brethren, and in all the burdens which we 
 can help to bear, an element which cannot be imparted. " The 
 heart knoweth its own bitterness " ; and neither " stranger " nor 
 other " intermeddleth " with the deepest fountains of " its joy." 
 
 ^ Dr. M^^Laren began to feel more keenly the inevitable 
 solitariness of old age, as one by one his contemporaries left him. 
 Reviewing old days in Lancashire, he said on one occasion, 
 'There were three — Stowell Brown went home; there were 
 two — Charles Williams gone — and I am left alone, it is very 
 solitary." Two of his sisters reached ninety years of age and 
 beyond it, but between 1903 and 1906 they, and two brothers-in- 
 law and a sister-in-law, died. Eeferring to these family losses, 
 he writes : " I feel as if we were like shipwrecked sailors 
 slinging to the keel of an upturned boat, and seeing one after 
 another lose their hold and sink. But thank God, we shall rise, 
 ind not sink when our hands can no longer grasp the seen. 
 Each departure brings us sensibly more face to face with our 
 30on-coming turn. May the gate open a little as we draw nearer 
 :t, and give us some beam of the light within. Let us keep nearer 
 30 the Lord of life and we shall be ready for our passing into life." ^ 
 
 2. Then again there is the burden of responsihility, which each 
 iias to bear for himself. A dozen soldiers may be turned out to 
 
 ^ E. T. M'^Laren, Dr. M'^Laren of Manchester, 242. 
 
i84 THE BURDEN-BEARING GOD 
 
 make a firing party to shoot the mutineer ; and no man knows 
 who fired the shot, but one man did fire it. And although there 
 may have been companions, it was his rifle that carried the 
 bullet, and his finger that pulled the trigger. We say, " The 
 woman Thou gavest me tempted me, and I did eat." Or we say, 
 " My natural appetites, for which I am not responsible, but Thou 
 who madest me art, drew me aside, and I fell " ; or we may say, 
 "It was not I; it was the other." And then there rises up in 
 our hearts a veiled form, and from its majestic lips comes, " Thou 
 art the man " ; and our whole being echoes assent — Mea culpa ; 
 mea maxima culpa — " My fault, my exceeding great fault." No 
 man can bear that burden for me. 
 
 ^ Mr. Gladstone sometimes so far yielded to his colleagues as 
 to sanction steps which he thought not the best, and may in 
 this have sometimes erred ; yet compromises are unavoidable, for 
 no Cabinet could be kept together if its members did not now and 
 then, in matters not essential, yield to one another. When all the 
 facts of his life come to be known, instances may be disclosed 
 in which he was the victim of his own casuistry or of his defer- 
 ence to Peel's maxim that a minister should not avow a change of 
 view until the time has come to give effect to it. But it will also 
 be made clear that he strove to obey his conscience, that he acted 
 with an ever-present sense of his responsibility to the Almighty, 
 and that he was animated by an unselfish enthusiasm for humanity, 
 enlightenment, and freedom.^ 
 
 3. Closely connected with the burden of responsibility there is' 
 another — the burden of the inevitable consequences of transgression, 
 not only in the future, when all human bonds of companion- 
 ship shall be broken, and each man shall " give account of himself 
 to God," but here and now. The effects of our evil deeds come 
 back to roost ; and they never make a mistake as to where they 
 should alight. If I have sown, I, and no one else, will gather. 
 No sympathy will prevent to-morrow's headache after to-night's 
 debauch, and nothing that anybody can do will turn the sleuth 
 hounds off the scent. Though they may be slow-footed, they 
 have sure noses and deep-mouthed fangs. " If thou be wise, thou 
 shalt be wise for thyself ; but if thou scornest, thou alone shalt 
 bear it." 
 
 * J. Biyce, Studies in Contemporary Biography, 452. 
 
PSALM Lxviii. 19 185 
 
 If While Farrar dared not set limits to the infinite mercy of 
 an all-merciful God and Father, none ever pointed with sterner 
 finger to the ineluctable Nemesis that attends on sin. " The man 
 , who is sold under sin is dead, morally dead, spiritually dead ; and 
 such a man is a ghost, far more awful than the soul which was 
 once in a dead body, for he is a body bearing about with him a 
 dead soul. Better, far, far better for him to have cut off the right 
 hand, or plucked out the right eye, than to have been cast as he 
 has been, now in his lifetime — and as he will be cast until he 
 repents, even beyond the grave, into that Gehenna of aeonian 
 fire ! It shall purify him, God grant, in due time ; but oh ! it 
 shall agonize, because he has made himself, as yet, incapable of 
 any other redemption. So that if any youth have wickedly 
 thought in his heart that God is even such an one as himself — that 
 he may break with impunity God's awful commandments, that he 
 may indulge with impunity his own evil lusts, let him recall the 
 sad experience of Solomon, * Walk in the ways of thine heart, and 
 in the sight of thine eyes; but know thou, that for all these 
 things God will bring thee into judgment.' Let him remember 
 the stern warning of Isaiah, ' Woe unto them that call evil good, 
 and good evil ; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness ; 
 that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter ! Therefore as the 
 fire devoureth the stubble, and the flame consumeth the chaff, so 
 shall their root be as rottenness, and their blossom shall go up as 
 dust : because they have cast away the law of the Lord of hosts, 
 and despised the word of the Holy One of Israel.' " ^ 
 
 4. The burdens grow with the growing life of man, so that the 
 more the man has the more he has to carry ; the severer the test 
 of what he is in himself, of his conscience and heart, his sympathy 
 and will, his faith and love. The boy strong, agile, without work 
 and without want, is as free from care as a frisky kitten. The 
 man solitary, without friend or home or responsibility, carries all 
 his cares under his hat, and the thinner his life, the less there is 
 of anxiety. But the father of a family is the bond of the house, 
 the support of wife and children, and must bear himself erect 
 under the cares of the home, of business, of parish, and of State. 
 Add life, and you add care. Enlarge your world, and you increase 
 your burdens. All strong emotions, all really great ideas, outleap 
 our individual life, and carry us to the larger, deeper, fuller life 
 of the world. Therefore the greatest life is the most burdened, 
 
 ^ R. Farrar, Life of Bean Farrar^ 269. 
 
i86 THE BURDEN-BEARING GOD 
 
 and the saintliest soul feels the mystery and greatness of human 
 life most of all. To the Greek, life is sunshine and joy ; beauty 
 swims in upon the soul ; his spirit is glad and he carries no care ; 
 but the Hebrew, with his stern, inexorable righteousness, his 
 awful sense of stewardship, his solemn knowledge of a " covenant 
 with the Eternal," cries out for deliverance from the taint of guilt 
 and the burden of perplexity ; and of all the Hebrews it is the 
 man of widest culture, maturest thought, and loftiest aspiration 
 who exclaims, " 0 wretched man that I am ! who shall deliver me 
 from this body of death ? " 
 
 ^ Who can tell us of the power which events possess — 
 whether they issue from us, or whether we owe our being to 
 them ? Do we attract them, or are we attracted by them ? Do 
 we mould them, or do they mould us ? Are they always unerr- 
 ing in their course ? Why do they come to us like the bee to the 
 hive, like the dove to the cote ; and where do they find a resting- 
 place when we are not there to meet them ? Whence is it that 
 they come to us ; and why are they shaped in our image, as 
 though they were our brothers ? Are their workings in the past 
 or in the future ; and are the more powerful of them those that 
 are no longer, or those that are not yet ? Is it to-day or to- 
 morrow that moulds us ? Do we not all spend the greater part 
 of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come 
 to pass ? I have noticed the same grave gestures, the footsteps 
 that seemed to tend towards a goal that was all too near, the pre- 
 sentiments that chilled the blood, the fixed, immovable look — I 
 have noticed all these in the men, even, whose end was to come 
 about by accident, the men on whom death would suddenly seize 
 from without. And yet were they as eager as their brethren, 
 who bore the seeds of death within them. Their faces were the 
 same. To them, too, life was fraught with more seriousness than 
 to those who were to live their full span. The same careful, 
 silent watchfulness marked their actions. They had no time to 
 lose ; they had to be in readiness at the same hour ; so completely 
 had this event, which no prophet could have foretold, become the 
 very life of their life.^ 
 
 Here in our little island-home we bide 
 
 Our few brief years — the years that we possess. 
 
 Beyond, the Infinite on every side 
 
 Holds what no man may know, though all may guess. 
 
 ^ M. Maeterlinck, ^he Treasure of the Humble, 51. 
 
PSALM Lxviii. 19 
 
 187 
 
 Earth, that is next to nothing in the sum 
 Of things created — a brief mote in space, 
 
 With all her aeons past and yet to come. 
 How we miscalculate our size—our place! 
 
 Yet are we men — details of the design, 
 
 Set to our course, like circling sun and star; 
 
 Mortal, infinitesimal, yet divine 
 
 Of that divine which made us what we are. 
 
 And yet this world, this microscopic ball, 
 This cast-up grain of sand upon the shore, 
 
 This trivial shred and atom of the ALL, 
 Is still our Trust, that we must answer for. 
 
 A lighthouse in the Infinite, with lamps 
 That we must trim and feed until we die; 
 
 A lonely outpost of the unseen camps 
 
 That we must keep, although we know not why. 
 
 Maker of all ! Enough that Thou hast given 
 This tempered mind, this brain without a flaw, 
 
 Enough for me to strive, as I have striven, 
 
 To make them serve their purpose and Thy law.^ 
 
 XL 
 
 The Bukden-Beaeer. 
 
 The Psalmist employs here that name of God which most 
 strongly expresses the idea of supremacy and dominion. Eule 
 and dignity are the predominant ideas in the word "Lord," as, 
 indeed, the English reader feels in hearing it ; and then, side by 
 side with that, there lies the thought that the Highest, the 
 Kuler of all, whose absolute authority stretches over all mankind, 
 stoops to this low and servile office, and becomes the burden- 
 bearer for all the pilgrims who put their trust in Him. This 
 blending together of the two ideas of dignity and condescension to 
 lowly offices of help and furtherance is made even more emphatic 
 if we glance back at the context of the psalm. For there is no 
 
 * Ada Cambridge, The Hand in the Dark^ 12. 
 
i88 THE BURDEN-BEARING GOD 
 
 place in Scripture in which there is flashed before the mind of 
 the singer a grander picture of the magnificence and the glory of 
 God than that which glitters and flames in the previous verses. 
 The majestic greatness of God described in its earlier part seems 
 purposely intended to heighten our sense of the wonder and 
 blessedness of this God stooping from heaven to take on Himself 
 the burdens which rest on His children on the earth. 
 
 And if we look deeper, this is not a case of contrast. It is 
 not that there are sharply opposed to each other these two 
 things, the gentleness and the greatness, the condescension and 
 the magnificence, but that the former is the direct result of the 
 latter ; and it is just because He is Lord, and has dominion over 
 all, that, therefore, He bears the burdens of all. For the responsi- 
 bilities of the Creator are in proportion to His greatness, and 
 He who has made man has thereby made it necessary that He 
 should, if we will let Him, be Burden-bearer and our Servant. 
 The highest must be the lowest, and just because God is high 
 over all, therefore is He the Supporter and Sustainer of all. So 
 we may learn the true meaning of elevation of all sorts, and from 
 the example of the loftiest may draw the lesson for our more 
 insignificant varieties of height, that the higher we are, the more 
 we are bound to stoop, and that men are then likest God, when 
 their elevation suggests to them responsibility, and when he that 
 is chiefest becomes the servant. 
 
 1. God takes our burdens upon Himself. — There are burdens 
 that men can help us with, but the heaviest burdens are those 
 they cannot touch. "The heart knoweth its own bitterness." 
 The burden of a hidden grief, of a besetting sin, of a lifelong 
 trial of disease or of sorrow through the wrong-doing of others — 
 men may not help much here. But God can and does help. He 
 enters into the very life of those whom He teaches to trust Him. 
 It is not they themselves who do the good things and speak the 
 kind words and think the holy thoughts that go to the upbuilding 
 of their spiritual house. It is God. He " worketh in you both to 
 will and to do of his good pleasure." And so of the care that is 
 cast upon Him. He bears it as He bears the sin. He is in the 
 burdened soul, and so, though the outward and visible trial be 
 unremoved, yet God bears it, for the Divine strength is in the 
 
PSALM Lxviii. 19 
 
 heart. God infuses His own power into the soul, until the down- 
 ward pressure is no longer felt, and the burden is known to be 
 effectually " cast upon the Lord." 
 
 ^ The word redemption, all the past which it implies, all the 
 future which it points to, has for me a wonderful charm. I 
 cannot separate the idea of deliverance from the idea of God, or 
 ever think of man as blessed except as he enters into God's re- 
 deeming purpose, and labours to make others free. The bondage 
 of circumstances, of the world, but chiefly of self, has at times 
 seemed to me quite intolerable, the more because it takes away all 
 one's energy to throw it off, and then the difficulty of escaping to 
 God ! of asking to have the weight taken away ! Oh there is 
 infinite comfort in the thought that He hears all our cries for 
 rescue, and is Himself the Author and Finisher of it.^ 
 
 2. God's help is continual. — He daily beareth our burden. He 
 will not suffer us, if we are guided by His teaching and Spirit, to 
 think of Him as simply transcending our life, living above it, and 
 out of it, and looking on it as from a distance ; He assures us that 
 He shares it, is in it, and through and over and under all ; in it 
 always ; Himself bearing the burdens of it, not now and again, at 
 far-separated intervals and in the special crises of our experience ; 
 but " daily " — " Blessed be the Lord, who daily beareth our 
 burden." It is the monotonous daily pressure of the same weight, 
 in the same wearying way, that slays the hope in us and makes 
 us sigh for the wings of a dove to bear us away to some place of 
 freedom and rest ; and it is exactly that " daily " hour-by-hour 
 burden God Himself carries for us, and with us, and so sustains 
 us and trains us. Like some river that runs by the wayside and 
 ever cheers the traveller on the dusty path with its music, and 
 offers its waters to cool his thirsty lips, so, day by day, in the slow 
 iteration of our lingering sorrows, and in the monotonous recur- 
 rence of our habitual duties, there is with us the ever-present help 
 of the Ancient of Days, who measures out daily strength for the 
 daily load, and never sends the one without proffering the other. 
 
 ^ In feudal times the peasantry used to build their little 
 cottages beneath the shadow of their lord's castle-walls so that in 
 time of need they could easily take refuge within the stronghold, 
 and so that by their very proximity to their master's dwelling he 
 might be reminded that they cast upon him the burden of their 
 
 * Life of Frederick Dcnison Maurice, i. 520. 
 
I90 THE BURDEN-BEARING GOD 
 
 safe-keeping. So may we build the frail house of life beneath the 
 shadow of the Almighty, that in the day of sore need we may 
 surely find the way into the secret of His presence. 
 
 Never a battle with wrong for the right, 
 Never a contest that He doth not fight, 
 Lifting above us His banner so white; 
 Moment by moment we're kept in His sight. 
 
 Never a trial and He is not there, 
 
 Never a burden that He doth not bear. 
 
 Never a sorrow that He doth not share. 
 
 Moment by moment we're under His care.^ 
 
 3. God hears our hurden hy sharing it. — A physical burden is 
 one thing, a spiritual another, and there is no such literal trans- 
 ference in the moral realm as to make the spirit oblivious of the 
 existence of such a thing as a burden at all. But in this they are 
 alike, that those who help can help only on condition of them- 
 selves undergoing the pressure from which they release others. 
 If you want to relieve any one of trouble, you must bear it your- 
 self. Only s6 can spiritual release be secured. You give blessing 
 at the price of feeling pain. As has been well said, " There is no 
 bearing of a moral burden without feeling it to be a burden." 
 And if God bears our burdens, then the pressure and the pain of 
 them become His. Our trouble becomes His trouble, and our 
 sorrow His sorrow. " In all their afflictions he was afflicted." 
 
 If any one still insist that it seems irreverence, if not 
 blasphemy, to speak of a suffering God, or to ascribe in any way 
 pain or unhappiness to the Ever-Blessed, then, let me add, it may 
 in some measure meet his difficulty to reflect that all moral 
 Buffering contains or carries with it what may be called an element 
 of compensation, in virtue of which it is transmuted into a deeper 
 joy. . . . And if this be so, then surely what we must find in 
 Christ as the God-man is, not a being who stript or emptied 
 Himself of His essential divinity in order to share in the weakness 
 and suffering of humanity, but a manifestation of God in all the 
 plenitude of the Divine Nature ; and the whole life of the Man 
 of Sorrows — His earthly lowliness. His mortal weakness, grief, and 
 sorrow, His loneliness and forsakenness, His drinking of the cup 
 of suffering to the very dregs, yea, in His very crucifixion and 
 
 1 P. C. AinsAvorth, A ITiomless World, 159. 
 
PSALM Lxviii. 19 
 
 191 
 
 death — must be to us the disclosure of an ineffable joy triumphing 
 over sorrow, of a Divine bliss in sacrifice which is the last, highest 
 revelation of the nature of God.^ 
 
 4. It is not the lurden, hut the hur den-hearer, that God sustains. 
 —It is not the heavy sorrow, but the bleeding heart that He 
 takes into His strong keeping. And here we may notice the 
 significant rendering of this text found in some of the most 
 ancient versions : " Blessed be the Lord, who daily beareth us." 
 So we can give God our burden only by giving Him our life. At 
 this point the figure of a burden fails to represent accurately the 
 toil and trouble of life, unless we remember it is a burden that 
 cannot be laid down. It is bound to our shoulders by the cords 
 of many necessities. Divine and human, and the answer to our 
 prayer for help does not come in a loosening of these cords, but in 
 inward refreshment of spirit. So the exhortation to us to cast 
 our burden on the Lord and this promise of His sustaining grace 
 do not speak to us of an occasional expedient to which the more 
 trying experiences of life may drive us, but of the true relation of 
 our life to God day by day. 
 
 TI A father sitting in his study, sent his little boy upstairs to 
 fetch a book that had been forgotten. The boy was long gone, 
 and after a time the father thought he heard the sound of sobbing 
 on the stairs. He went out, and at the top of the staircase he 
 saw his son crying bitterly, with the great book he had tried to 
 lift and carried so far, lying at his feet. " Oh, father ! " the lad 
 cried, " I cannot carry it, it is too heavy for me ! " In a moment 
 the father ran up the stairs, and stooping down, took up both the 
 little lad and the book in his strong arms, and carried them down 
 to the room below. Before he reached it, the child's tears were 
 all dried up, and he was leaning on his father's arm, the burden 
 and the trouble gone.^ 
 
 6. When God thus hears our hurden the hurden itself becomes a 
 Messing.— It carries him that carries it. It is like the wings of a 
 bird; it is like the sails of a ship. In many lands the habit 
 prevails, especially amongst the women, of carrying heavy loads 
 on their heads ; and all travellers tell us that the practice gives a 
 dignity and a grace to the carriage, and a freedom and a swing to 
 the gait, which nothing else will do. Depend upon it, that so 
 
 1 John Caird. 2 G. S. Barrett, Musings for Quiet Hours, 29. 
 
192 THE BURDEN-BEARING GOD 
 
 much of our burdens of work and weariness as is left to us, after 
 we have cast them upon Him, is intended to strengthen and 
 ennoble us. 
 
 11 The bearing of God has been likened to a father carrying his 
 child, to an eagle taking her young upon her wings, to the shepherd 
 with the lamb in his bosom. But no shepherd, nor mother-bird, 
 nor human father ever bore as the Lord bears. For He bears from 
 within, as the soul lifts and bears the body. The Lord and His 
 own are one. " To me," says he who knew it best, " to me to live 
 is Christ." ... It is not the sight of a visible leader, though the 
 Gospels have made the sight imperishable, it is not the sound of 
 Another's Voice, though that Voice shall peal to the end of time, 
 that Christians only feel. It is something within themselves; 
 another self — purer, happier, victorious. Not as a voice or example, 
 futile enough to the dying, but as a new soul, is Christ in men.^ 
 
 ^ The hindrances that baffle or overwhelm us, the small 
 annoyances that rob our days of zest and sweetness, the body's 
 perpetual chafing tyranny, in all these we are facing universal 
 conditions, and bidden to realize a universal being. An infinit- 
 esimal fraction of the burden that God bears is on our shoulders 
 — but we are not bearing it alone. This spiritual toil is no 
 degrading punishment laid on us merely for our sins, but the 
 measure of our sonship. Infinite patience seems often to be all 
 that is asked of us. But patience is Godlike — patience is love 
 submitting, and enduring, transmuting poison to sweetness in the 
 life, as surely as enthusiasm is love conquering and striving, and 
 flowing out towards God and man. Nor can we draw distinctions 
 concerning their relative value to God.^ 
 
 The bonds that press and fetter, 
 That chafe the soul and fret her, 
 What man can know them better, 
 0 brother men, than I ? 
 
 And yet, my burden bearing. 
 The five wounds ever wearing, — 
 I too in my despairing 
 
 Have seen Him as I say; — 
 Gross darkness all around Him 
 Enwrapt Him and enwound Him, — 
 0 late at night I found Him 
 
 And lost Him in the day! 
 
 * George Adam Smith. * May Kendall. 
 
PSALM Lxviii. 19 
 
 193 
 
 Yet bolder grown and braver 
 At sight of one to save her 
 My soul no more shall waver, 
 
 With wings no longer furled, — 
 But cut with one decision 
 From doubt and men's derision 
 That sweet and vanished vision 
 
 Shall follow thro' the worlds 
 
 ^ F. W. H. Myers, A Vision. 
 
 PS. xxv.-cxix. — 13 
 
Sun and a Shield. 
 
 19J 
 
Literature. 
 
 Davies (D.), Talhs with Men, Women and Children, v. 145. 
 Foxell (W. J.), God's Garden, 142. 
 
 Kirkpatrick (A. F.), The Boole of Psalms (Cambridge Bible), 509. 
 
 Maclaren (A,), The Book of Psalms (Expositor's Bible), ii. 449. 
 
 Morrison (G. H.), The Unlighted Lustre, 65. 
 
 Peabody (F. G.), Mornings in the College Chapel, ii. 127. 
 
 Pearce (J.), l%e Alabaster Box, 96. 
 
 Pearse (M. G.), The God of Our Pleasures, 49. 
 
 Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxviii. (1882)- 
 No. 1G59. 
 
 Voysey (C.), Sermons, xi. (1888), No. 20. 
 
 Wiseman (N.), Children's Sermons, 36. 
 
 Christian World Pulpit, xxiv. 332 (H. W. Beecher). 
 
 196 
 
A Sun and a Shield. 
 
 The Lord God is a sun and a shield.—Ps. Ixxxiv. ii. 
 
 An ancient legend tells that Abraham, in his untaught devoutness 
 and yearning reverence, took the sun for his God until he observed 
 the setting of its beams in the west. In the absence of authentic 
 revelation, it is no more strange that reflective and reverential 
 minds should exclaim, in the presence of a world of light " The 
 sun is our God," than that the Heaven-instructed Hebrew singer 
 dwellmg in the light of God's countenance, should declare, " The 
 Lord God is a sun " ; for a more fitting material symbol of God than 
 the sun It would be difficult to find, whether we consider the 
 vastness of it, the glory of it, or the beneficence of it. Hidden by 
 Its very glory ! So far off, yet finding out our distant world and 
 bathing It m its genial warmth, breathing about it a new hope ' 
 So mighty, yet so gentle! Stooping not only to the lowest and 
 least forms of life, but ministering to its hidden and shapeless 
 beginnings. 
 
 Could there be a more felicitous and apposite representation of 
 Him of whom an Apostle wrote : God is light, and in him is no 
 darkness at all" ? As the sun opens the gates of day, floods the 
 world with light, gives it without stint to palace or cottage to 
 peasant and prince, and enables us to discern a thousand plelsing 
 objects, so God shines into our lives and gives us power to see 
 a thousand moral glories. The secret of seeing is not in us God 
 IS the great revealer. We are the organs favoured with the holy 
 visions. We can see only what He is pleased to show us But 
 He IS not slow to reveal Himself to our understanding nor is 
 the hght madequate. No nook or corner of our being need go 
 unirradiated. If we open the life to God as we open the eye to 
 the sun, we shall no longer be children of the darkness " For God 
 who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined 
 in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of 
 jod in the face of Jesus Christ." 
 
 197 
 
198 
 
 A SUN AND A SHIELD 
 
 If Nowhere else in the Old Testament is Jehovah directly- 
 called a sun, though the ideas conveyed by the metaphor are 
 frequent. Cp. Ps. xxvii. i; Isa. x. 17, Ix. 19, 20; Mai. iv. 2. 
 Perhaps the prevalence of sun-worship in the East led to the 
 avoidance of so natural and significant a metaphor. Even here 
 the oldest Versions either had a different reading or shrank from 
 a literal rendering. The LXX and Theodotion have : " Eor the 
 Lord God loveth mercy and truth." The Targ. paraphrases : " For 
 the Lord God is like a high wall and a strong shield," reading 
 shemesh (=sun), but taking it in the sense of "battlement" 
 (E.V. "pinnacles"), which it has in Isa. liv. 12. The Syr. gives: 
 " Our sustainer and our helper." Only the later Greek Versions 
 render the Massoretic text literally.^ 
 
 ^ In his Hibbert Lectures on the Keligion of the Babylonians 
 Professor Sayce quotes a hymn to Samas the Sun-god, beginning : 
 
 0 Sun-god, king of heaven and earth, director of things above 
 and below, 
 
 0 Sun-god, thou that clothest the dead with life, delivered by 
 
 thy hands, 
 Judge unbribed, director of mankind, 
 
 Supreme is the mercy of him who is the lord over difficulty, 
 Bidding the child and offspring come forth, light of the world. 
 Creator of all thy universe, the Sun-god art thou. 
 
 ^ Another time Napoleon breaks out [in conversation with 
 Gourgaud] : " Were I obliged to have a religion, I would worship 
 the sun — the source of all life — the real God of the earth." 2 
 
 I heard a Saint cry to the Sun — "Be dim. 
 Why shouldst thou rule on high with boastful ray, 
 Till fools adore thee as the God of Day, 
 Bobbing thy Master's honour due to Him ? " 
 But the sun-spirit, thro' each radiant limb 
 Translucent as a living ember coal, 
 Glowed. At the anger of the seraph soul 
 His golden orb trembled from boss to rim. 
 
 Then made he answer as a dove that sings, 
 "God's glory is my glory, and my praise 
 Only His praising. They, who kneel to me, ^ 
 See thro' the waving of my orient wings 
 A choir of stars with voices like the sea, '> 
 Singing hosanna in the heavenly ways."^ ^ 
 
 I 
 
 ' A. F. Kirkpatrick, The Book of Psalms, 509. 
 
 2 Lord Rosebery, Napoleon: The Last Phase, 171. ' Lord De Table j. 
 
PSALM Lxxxiv. II 
 
 199 
 
 I. 
 
 God is a Sun. 
 
 1. The sun is the centre of power in the system where it 
 stands. There is nothing that can hold out against it. All 
 planets are obliged to own their allegiance to it. They march 
 to its music. They cannot wander or get out of the path which 
 its power prescribes for them. The sun is the governor of the 
 planetary kingdom — central, uncontradicted, un wasting, unex- 
 hausted and inexhaustible, steadfast, going forth for ever and for 
 ever. So there is a sublime centre in that higher creation, in 
 conscious human life. In the realm of intelligence, in the realm 
 of righteousness or morality, in the great superior realm of mind, 
 there is a central power. Amidst all the apparent detonations 
 and explosions and miscarriages of minor human life upon this 
 sphere there is, nevertheless, a great central influence that is 
 holding mankind to their career, to their general orbit. The 
 government of God in its extensiveness, in its patient persever- 
 ance, in its power universal, could not be more fitly represented 
 than by this symbolization of the sun itself. The universality of 
 God — "omnipresence," as it is called — is a thing somewhat 
 difficult to be understood, as all things that reach toward or are 
 born of the infinite are to finite intelligence; nevertheless, the 
 outreaching of the sun is everywhere. Both of the poles recognize 
 its presence. The equator never abandons the light and warmth 
 of the sun. Wherever the earth and all its luminaries may travel, 
 and wherever the satellites of the sun may go, there is its power. 
 There is no thunder, no utterance in it. It is silent, but it is 
 there. 
 
 H Fenelon had many friends affectionately attached to him, in 
 Versailles, Paris, and other parts of France ; but in his banishment 
 he saw them but very seldom. Many of them were persons of 
 eminent piety. " Let us all dwell," he says in one of his letters, 
 " in our only Centre, where we continually meet, and are all one 
 and the same thing. We are very near, though we see not one 
 another; whereas others, who even live in the same house, yet 
 live at a great distance. God reunites all, and brings together the 
 remotest points of distance in the hearts that are united to Him. 
 
200 
 
 A SUN AND A SHIELD 
 
 I am for nothing but unity ; that unity which binds all the parts 
 to the centre. That which is not in unity is in separation ; and 
 separation implies a plurality of interests, self in each too much 
 fondled. When self is destroyed, the soul reunites in God ; those 
 who are united in God are not far from each other. This is the 
 consolation which I have in your absence, and which enables me 
 to bear this affliction patiently, however long it may continue." ^ 
 
 2. Another idea is suggested by the sun. Many of us have 
 been oppressed by the thought of a distant God ; we sometimes 
 have thought of Him as far away, as having His throne in the 
 remote heaven of heavens. But if the sun can have its being 
 ninety million miles away, and yet can fall with such power as to 
 heat a continent, and with such exquisite nicety as to make the 
 rosebud redden, why should it seem a thing incredible to us that 
 the Creator who fashioned that glorious lamp should dwell apart 
 immeasurably far, yet touch and turn and bless and save 
 humanity ? He takes up the isles as a very little thing — the 
 nations before Him are as nothing. Yet He knows the way that 
 I take ; He understands my thought ; He will not quench the 
 smoking flax nor break the bruised reed. Powerful, yet very far 
 away ; thoughtful and tender, though hidden in the distance. 
 
 ^ God is the God of all, and yet He is my God. At the same 
 moment He pervades heaven and earth, takes charge of the 
 sustenance, progress, and growing happiness of the unbounded 
 creation, and He is present with me, as intent upon my character, 
 actions, wants, trials, joys, and hopes, as if I were the sole object 
 of His love.2 
 
 3. God is a sun: that is infinity of blessing. No man 
 among us can conceive the measure of the light and heat of the 
 sun. They are beyond conception great. Light and heat have 
 been continually streaming forth throughout many ages, yet all 
 that has come forth of it is far less than that which still remains. 
 For all practical purposes the light and heat of the sun are 
 infinite ; and certainly in God all blessedness is absolutely infinite. 
 There is no measuring it. We are lost. We can only say, " Oh, 
 the depths of the love and goodness of God ! " In being heirs of 
 God we possess all in all. There is no bound to our blessedness 
 in God. Further, if God be called a sun, it is to let us know 
 
 ^ T. G. Upham, Life of Madame Guyon, 455. ^ W. E. Chaiiniiig. 
 
 J 
 
PSALM Lxxxiv. II 
 
 20I 
 
 that we have obtained an immutability of blessedness, for He is 
 " the Father of lights with whom is no variableness, neither 
 shadow of turning." God is not love to-day and hate to-morrow ; 
 He saith, " I am God, I change not." There are said to be spots 
 in the sun which diminish the light and heat which we receive ; 
 but there are no such spots in God; He shines on with the 
 boundless fulness of His infinite love toward His people in Christ 
 Jesus. " This God is our God for ever and ever." If we were to 
 live as long as Methuselah, we should find His love and power 
 and wisdom to be the same, and we might confidently count upon 
 being blessed thereby. What treasures of mercy do we possess in 
 being able to say, " 0 God, thou art my God " ! We have the 
 source of mercy, the infinity of mercy, and the immutability of 
 mercy to be our own. 
 
 ^ What is the glory of the sun ? Is it its power, its energy, 
 or is it not the way in which it finds out things one by one and 
 gives itself away to them ? I have watched the sun rising amidst 
 the mountains, crowning them with gold and robing them with 
 purple, until they stood like lords-in-waiting arrayed for the 
 coming of their king, and it has seemed in keeping with the sun's 
 greatness. But little by little it rose higher, and now it covered 
 the fir trees with glory, and now it lit up the moss of the rock. 
 Still higher rose the sun, and then it reached the meadows, and 
 every tiny grass blade caught its warmth and energy, and every 
 flower had its golden cup filled to the brim. And lower still it 
 went down, to the seeds that were buried in darkness, and 
 whispered to them of hope, and put new strength into them. 
 Think if I could tell the tiny flower how far off the sun is, how 
 many myriads of miles away, how great it is, how splendid in its 
 majesty. " Surely," the flower would say, " it can never stoop to 
 me, or find me out, or care for me, or minister to my want ! " 
 Ah, but it does ; it gives itself to the flower with such tenderness 
 and thoroughness as if there were not another in the round world. 
 Surely this is the glory of our God. We think of Him in the 
 greatness of His power. We sing of Him, " Who is like unto 
 thee . . . glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing wonders ? " 
 But is not this His glory, that He comes to us away by ourselves, 
 one by one, and gives Himself to us separately, stooping to the 
 lowest, reaching to the farthest off, finding out the most hidden ? 
 The sun is not going to put to shame the ingenuity of our 
 Father's love.^ 
 
 ^ M. G. Pearse, The God of our Pleasures, 56. 
 
202 
 
 A SUN AND A SHIELD 
 
 \> Behold the sun, that seemed but now 
 
 Enthroned overhead, 
 Begmning to decline below 
 
 The globe whereon we tread ; 
 And he, whom yet we look upon 
 
 With comfort and delight, 
 Will quite depart from hence anon, 
 
 And leave us to the night. 
 
 Thus time, unheeded, steals away 
 
 The life which nature gave ; 
 Thus are our bodies every day 
 
 Declining to the grave ; 
 Thus from us all our pleasures fly 
 
 Whereon we set our heart; 
 And when the night of death draws nigh 
 
 Thus will they all depart. 
 
 Lord ! though the sun forsake our sight, 
 
 And mortal hopes are vain. 
 Let still Thine everlasting light 
 
 Within our souls remain ; 
 And in the nights of our distress 
 
 Vouchsafe those rays divine. 
 Which from the Sun of Kighteousness 
 
 For ever brightly shine ! ^ 
 
 4. Without a favourable medium and a suitable object, the 
 sunlight can do little. All the sunlight of all time cannot 
 illumine a man who is blind. The suns of all the seasons can 
 avail nothing for the dead. There must be the faculty to receive 
 the light and to respond to it. The sun cannot give life, it can 
 only develop it. It cannot transform the nature. But He who 
 is the Light of the World is also the Lord and Giver of life. See 
 Him by whom grace and truth come to us. See Him as He 
 bends over the couch of the dead maiden, and, taking her by the 
 hand, says, " Maiden, arise." See Him as He lays those fingers 
 on the blind man's eyes and says, " Be opened." In Him the 
 blessed grace of forgiveness is ours. His coming is in relation to 
 our sins — His very name is Jesus, for He shall save His people 
 from their sins. " The wages of sin is death ; but the gift of God 
 
 1 George "Wither. 
 
PSALM Lxxxiv. II 
 
 is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." He gives to us a 
 new nature whose instinct it is to know God and to serve Him. 
 He will give grace. And we have to receive that grace, and avail 
 ourselves of it. The golden sun shall in vain pour its beauty 
 where the plough has not turned the furrow and the seed-corn 
 has not been flung. Man's work is to avail himself of the sun 
 and to adapt himself to its times and seasons. And even so it is 
 with God's grace. It cannot avail him anything who does not 
 receive it and respond to it. " As many as received him, to them 
 gave he power to become the sons of God." 
 
 ; ^ Eichard Jefferies is closely akin to Wordsworth in his over- 
 powering consciousness of the life in nature. This consciousness 
 is the strongest force in him, so that at times he is almost sub- 
 merged by it, and he loses the sense of outward things. In this 
 condition of trance the sense of time vanishes ; there is, he asserts, 
 no such thing, no past, or future, only now, which is eternity. In 
 The Story of my Hearty a rhapsody of mystic experience and 
 aspiration, he describes in detail several such moments of exalta- 
 tion or trance. He seems to be peculiarly sensitive to sunshine. 
 As the moon typifies to Keats the eternal essence in all things, so 
 to Jefferies the sun seems to be the physical expression or symbol 
 of the central Force of the world, and it is through gazing on sun- 
 light that he most often enters into the trance state.^ 
 
 \ Francis Thompson in his " Orient Ode " seems to worship 
 the Sun, but it is because he finds Christ in that symbol : 
 
 Lo, of thy Magians I the least 
 
 Haste with my gold, my incenses and myrrhs, 
 
 To thy desired epiphany, from the spiced 
 
 Eegions and odorous of Song's traded East. 
 
 Thou, for the life of all that live 
 
 The victim daily born and sacrificed; 
 
 To whom the pinion of this longing verse 
 
 Beats but with fire which first thyself did give, 
 
 To thee, 0 Sun — or is't, perchance, to Christ ?2 
 
 V 5. The heat and light of the sun come to this world through 
 the surrounding atmosphere. Without the envelope of closely 
 clinging air that engirdles this globe like some diaphanous gar- 
 ment, the heat of the sun and all the light of it would fall in- 
 
 * C. F. E. Spurgeon, Mysticism, in English Literature, 68. 
 2 E. Meynell, The Life of Francis Thompson (1913), 210. 
 
204 
 
 A SUN AND A SHIELD 
 
 effectually on the earth. When we climb a mountain we get 
 nearer the sun ; would one not naturally think that it ought to 
 get hotter there ? As a matter of fact it gets colder as we rise 
 till we reach the peaks that are robed with perpetual snow. The 
 reason is that we are piercing through that air which wraps and 
 enwraps this little earth of ours. It is the atmosphere that 
 mediates the sun, that catches and stores and distributes the heat. 
 Were there no air, but only empty space, then the greenest 
 valley would be like Mont Blanc, and the tropics would be ice- 
 bound in a perpetual winter, though the sun in itself were as 
 fiery-hot as ever. 
 
 May we not make use of this mystery of nature to illumin- 
 ate a kindred mystery of grace ? It is one of the ways of 
 God to grant His blessings through an intermediary. You say 
 that the sun is the source of heat and light ; why then should 
 anything be intruded between earth and sun ? One can only 
 answer. So the Creator works — without that mediating element 
 all is lost. You say that God is the source of love and blessing ; 
 why should anj^thing intervene betwixt God and man ? One can 
 only answer that it is the way of heaven to grant its richest 
 blessing through a mediator. How often men and women have 
 said, " I do not feel any need of Clirist or Calvary. I beheve in 
 God, I reverence and worship God; but the sacrifice and the 
 atonement just confuse me. They appear to be outside of me 
 altogether ; I cannot make them real to my heart." But through 
 every sphere of God's activity runs the great principle of media- 
 tion. The presence of Christ is like the air, making available for 
 our need the love of God. Eemove the atmosphere, and the sun 
 will still shine in heaven. Take away Jesus, and God will still be 
 love. Banish the air, and the sun will not lose its heat. Banish 
 the Christ, and God will not lose His power. But with the air 
 gone, the glory of the sun will never so fall as to bless our little 
 world, and with Jesus banished, the mercy and love of God may 
 stream on other realms but not on ours. Christ is the mediator 
 of the better covenant. He stands — the vital breath — 'twixt 
 God and us. Through Him the sunshine of heaven's love can 
 reach us, and in the rays of that sunshine we are blessed. 
 
 ^ What was said with truth of Bishop Fraser of Manchester 
 was, in a less direct and practical way, true of Stanley : " He was 
 
PSALM Lxxxiv. II 
 
 205 
 
 daily bringing down light from Heaven into the life of other 
 people." No one could long come in contact with Stanley 
 without feeling that he was walking in the light, and without 
 being affected by its radiation. It was this background that gave 
 dignity to his simplicity of character, that preserved the spiritual 
 elements of his nature from materialism, that gilded his social 
 intercourse with a tenderness, an unobtrusiveness, a sincerity, an 
 evenness of temper, and a consideration for others, that permeated, 
 purified, and strengthened the society in which he moved.^ 
 
 11. 
 
 God is a Shield. 
 
 To the Psalmist God was not only a Sun radiating forth good 
 but also a Shield protecting from evil — the source not only of life 
 and joy but also of security. As the Sun, God may be considered 
 as dwelling in inaccessible light ; whilst as a Shield He may be 
 regarded as so protecting His people that they cannot be 
 approached. Life may be looked upon as a battle-field, on which 
 we. have protection from God, if we are on His side ; for the battle is 
 His. By the figure of a shield, this verse is connected with ver. 9 : 
 " Behold, 0 God our shield, and look upon the face of thine anointed." 
 
 ^ The ancient warrior bore strapped on his arm a shield 
 of brass or of wood covered with leather, armed with which he 
 rushed into battle and turned death aside. In modern warfare 
 the shield is quite unserviceable ; it hangs with bows and arrows 
 in the museum of ancient armour. But, as Parker says, " No word 
 ever becomes obsolete which has once deeply touched the heart 
 of humanity. The shield will always be a weapon of spiritual 
 warfare ; God will never cease to be a shield to all them that trust 
 in Him." The believer's defence is complete ; before and behind, 
 on the right hand and on the left, he is beset by the protective 
 power of God. This was a favourite thought of Luther's, whose 
 famous spiritual battle-song opens with the words : 
 
 A safe stronghold our God is still, 
 A trusty shield and weapon. 
 
 "What will you do," Luther was asked, ''if the Duke, your 
 protector, should no longer harbour you ? " " I will take my 
 shelter," he answered, " under the broad shield of Almighty God," 
 * R. E. Prothero, Life of Dean Stanley, ii. 23. 
 
206 
 
 A SUN AND A SHIELD 
 
 Modern nations, with their immense armies and fleets, are apt 
 to forget how insecure they are without that Divine protection. 
 Toolish are they if they " put their trust in reeking tube and iron 
 shard." He who spread His shield over Abraham and his little 
 Hebrew army must equally be the " Lord of the far-flung battle 
 line." He is the ultimate safeguard of all national greatness, and 
 no weapon formed against Him shall prosper.^ 
 
 1. The Lord is to us first a sun and then a shield. Eemember 
 how David puts it elsewhere: "The Lord is my light and my 
 salvation." Light first, salvation next. He does not save us in 
 the dark, neither does he shield us in the dark. He gives enough 
 sunlight to let us see the danger so that we may appreciate the 
 defence. We are not to shut our eyes and so find safety, but we 
 are to see the evil and hide ourselves. Ought we not to be very 
 grateful to God that He so orders our affairs ? Ours is not a 
 blind faith, receiving an unknown salvation from evils which are 
 unperceived ; this w^ould be a poor form of life at best. No, the 
 favour received is valued because its necessity is perceived. The 
 heavenly Sun lights up our souls, and makes us see our ruin and 
 lie down in the dust of self-despair; and then it is that grace 
 brings forth the shield which covers us, so that we are no more 
 afraid, but rejoice in the glorious Lord as the God of our salvation. 
 
 ^ Most people in their religious experience think of God as 
 a shield. He stands between them and the storm. They hide 
 beneath the shadow of His wings. It is the religion of special 
 Providence and of Divine interposition. God shields His people 
 from the burning heat. Keligion is a protective system — a very 
 present help in time of trouble. Some people, on the other hand, 
 think of God as a sun. When all is bright and cloudless, then they 
 can believe, but when it storms, then the universe seems God- 
 less. When God is in heaven, all's right with the world. I 
 remember a comfortable and church -going citizen who was over- 
 taken by a great domestic sorrow, and said of it, " It never 
 occurred to me that such a thing could happen." He had grown 
 so in the habit of living in the sunshine that he was as helpless 
 as a child in the dark.^ 
 
 2. Look at the text in another way. When the sun shines 
 upon a man he is made the more conspicuous by it. Suppose a 
 hostile army to be down in the plain, and a soldier in our ranks is 
 
 1 J. Strachan, Hebrew Ideals, i. 74. « F. G. Peabodj. 
 
PSALM Lxxxiv. II 
 
 207 
 
 sent upon some errand by his captain. He must pass along the 
 hillside. The sun shines upon him as he tries to make his way 
 among the rocks and trees. Had it been night he could have 
 moved safely, but now we fear that the enemy will surely pick 
 him off; for the sunshine has made him conspicuous. He will 
 have need to be shielded from the many cruel eyes. Christian 
 men are made conspicuous by the very fact of their possessing 
 God's grace. " Ye are the light of the world," and a light must be 
 seen. *' A city set on a hill cannot be hid." If God gives light, 
 He means that light to be seen ; and the more light He gives us 
 the more conspicuous we shall be. He is our sun, and He shines 
 upon us ; we reflect His light, and so become ourselves a light ; 
 and in doing so we run necessary risks. The more brightly we 
 shine the more will Satan and the world try to quench our light. 
 This, then, is our comfort. The Lord God, who is a sun to us, will 
 also be a shield to us. Did He not say to Abraham, " Fear not, 
 Abram : I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward " ? 
 
 If By the term shield is meant that our salvation, which would 
 otherwise be perilled by countless dangers, is in perfect safety 
 under God's protection. The favour of God in communicating life 
 to us would be far from adequate to the exigencies of our condi- 
 tion, unless at the same time, in the midst of so many dangers, He 
 interposed His power as a buckler to defend us.^ 
 
 ^ Grove mentioned that at some period when Havana was 
 under martial law, a man had been killed in a row in the street. 
 Everybody ran away except an Englishman, who, having nothing 
 to do with the murder, thought there was no occasion to do so, 
 and was, of course, immediately arrested. Some one naturally 
 was found to swear that he was the culprit, and he was sentenced 
 to be shot next morning. The English Consul (Mr. Crawford), 
 hearing what was going on, went in full uniform to the place of 
 execution and claimed the man as a British subject. The officer 
 in charge of the firing party showed his orders, and said he could 
 not give him up. " Very well," said Mr. Crawford, " at least you 
 will not object to my shaking hands with him before he is shot ? " 
 " By no means," was the answer. He then walked up, whipped 
 the Union Jack out of his pocket and threw it round the man. 
 " Now," he said to the officer, " shoot if you dare." The officer 
 applied for instructions to the Governor, and the prisoner's 
 innocence was soon made clear.^ 
 
 1 Calvin. ^ M. E. Grant Duff, Notes from a Diary, 1892-5, i. 126. 
 
The Home of the Soul. 
 
 xxv.-cxix. — 14 
 
Literature. 
 
 Cliflford (J.), Social Worship an Everlasting Necessity ^ 26. 
 Glover (E,.), The Forgotten Resting-placey 3. 
 Liddon (H. P.), Christmastide in St. Paul's^ 240. 
 Marten (C. H.), Plain Bible Addresses, 173. 
 Myres (W. M.), Fragments that Remain, 122. 
 Kendall (G. H.), Charterhouse Sermons^ 276. 
 Eicliards (W. R.), For Whom Christ Died, 141. 
 Shannon (F. F.), The SouVs Atlas, 68. 
 
 Spurgeon (C. H.), New Park Street Pulpit, i. (1855), No. 46. 
 Stephen (R.), Divine and Human Influence, ii. 255. 
 Christian Commonwealth, xxxi. (1911) 557 (R. J. Campbell). 
 Christian World Pulpit, xlvii. 396 (W. Sinclair) ; Ixiv. 419 (E. 
 Eland) ; Ixv. 102 (R. Rainy). 
 
 axo 
 
The Home of the Soul. 
 
 Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place 
 In all generations. — Ps. xc. i. 
 
 The 90th Psalm, says Isaac Taylor, might be cited as perhaps the 
 most sublime of human compositions, the deepest in feeling, the 
 loftiest in theologic conception, the most magnificent in its imagery. 
 True is it in its report of human life as troubled, transitory, and 
 sinful; true in its conception of the Eternal — the Sovereign 
 and the Judge, and yet the refuge and the hope of men who, 
 notwithstanding the most severe trials of their faith, lose not their 
 confidence in Him, but who, in the firmness of faith, pray for, 
 as if they were predicting, a near-at-hand season of refreshment. 
 Wrapped, one might say, in mystery, until the distant day of 
 revelation should come, there is here conveyed the doctrine of 
 Immortality ; for in this very plaint of the brevity of the life of 
 man, and of the sadness of these his few years of trouble, and 
 their brevity, and their gloom, there is brought into contrast the 
 Divine immutability : and yet it is in terms of a submissive piety : 
 the thought of a life eternal is here in embryo. No taint is there 
 in this psalm of the pride and petulance, the half-uttered blasphemy, 
 the malign disputing or arraignment of the justice or goodness of 
 God, which have so often shed a venomous colour upon the language 
 of those who have writhed in anguish, personal or relative. There 
 are few, probably, among those who have passed through times of 
 bitter and distracting woe, or who have stood, the helpless spec- 
 tators of the miseries of others, that have not fallen into moods of 
 mind violently in contrast with the devout and hopeful melancholy 
 which breathes throughout this Ode. Eightly attributed to the 
 Hebrew lawgiver or not, it bespeaks its remote antiquity, not 
 merely by the majestic simplicity of its style, but negatively, by 
 the entire avoidance of those sophisticated turns of thought which 
 belong to a late — a lost — age, in a people's intellectual and moral 
 
212 THE HOME OF THE SOUL 
 
 history. This psalm, undoubtedly, is centuries older than the 
 moralizing of that time, when the Jewish mind had listened to 
 what it could never bring into a true assimilation with its own 
 mind — the abstractions of the Greek Philosophy.^ 
 
 1. There was a tradition among the Jews, although these tradi- 
 tions are not altogether trustworthy, that Moses, the man of God, 
 wrote this psalm or prayer. And it has always been felt that the 
 psalm seemed to have some special connexion with, or reference 
 to, the experience and the impressions of the children of Israel 
 in the days that they were doomed to wander up and down in the 
 wilderness without being allowed to enter into the Promised Land. 
 And there is much in the psalm that corroborates that view. It 
 is the psalm of a generation of men who felt themselves to be 
 wasting away under God's wrath, consumed by His anger. They 
 are spending their years as a tale that is told. The vanity and 
 emptiness of life are pressed home upon them with great severity. 
 At the same time, it is not a psalm of mere wailing and lamenta- 
 tion. Very far from it. There is the exercise of faith in it, not 
 only in the first verse, but in the appeal to God to come and dwell 
 with them as their case requires, and make them experience His 
 mercy. The cloud is dark that hangs over the congregation, but 
 faith is still, as it were, seeing the bow in the cloud. 
 
 2. By whomsoever written, the psalm makes it plain that the 
 writer was thinking and speaking not only for himself, but for all 
 his own people of Israel, if not for the whole race of mankind. 
 These opening words are the Eternal Gospel of the Fatherly Love 
 of God, in which the sons of men can ever find their "home." 
 How precious is that last word, and what a pity that our trans- 
 lators did not adopt it instead of " dwelling place." Alas ! how 
 many there are whose dwelling-place is not a "home." The 
 Prayer-Book Version is a little better in giving us the word 
 " refuge " ; for to most of us home is the best refuge we can find, 
 if not the only one. It is our retreat after the toils and turmoils 
 of the busy world, our refuge from the strife of tongues, our 
 covert from the scornful rebuke of the proud. Our home, if it be 
 as God intended it should be, is the place where all that is best 
 
 ^ Isaac Taylor, Spirit of the Hebrew Poetry ^ 161. 
 
PSALM xc. I 
 
 213 
 
 and sweetest in life is cherished and enjoyed, the one sacred shrine 
 where even the outcast can find love, and the stern, hard heart 
 can also find an opportunity for giving a little love in return. 
 Home is the scene of our keenest anxieties and our bitterest 
 griefs, no less than of our most restful peace and of our highest 
 joys. But in the process of evolving and growing mankind, all 
 things are yet unfinished and imperfect ; even our very homes 
 are not full enough of purity and peace and love to satisfy the 
 immortal heart of man. Defect, disturbance, and decay, with all 
 the varied chances of this mortal life, make even the best of 
 homes partial and transient. Our immortal souls want ever- 
 lasting security, unbroken peace, unalloyed happiness. Nothing 
 less than the Eternal God can be a perfect refuge, a perfect home, 
 for the souls of His children. And in Him is all that the most 
 craving and grasping can possibly desire. God has made us so 
 that nothing shall, nothing can, ever satisfy us but Himself. And 
 when we have found Him, and made Him our real refuge and 
 home, we have gained the Eternal Peace, which the whole world 
 can neither give nor take away. 
 
 ^ " Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations." 
 Beside that venerable and ancient abode, that has stood fresh, 
 strong, incorruptible, and unaffected by the lapse of millenniums, 
 there stands the little transitory canvas tent in which our earthly 
 lives are spent. ... If I make God my Eefuge, I shall get some- 
 thing a great deal better than escape from outward sorrow — 
 nam.ely, an amulet which will turn the outward sorrow into joy. 
 The bitter water will still be given me to drink, but it will be 
 filtered water, out of which God will strain all the poison, though 
 He leaves plenty of the bitterness in it ; for bitterness is a tonic. 
 The evil that is in the evil will be taken out of it in the measure 
 in which we make God our Eefuge, and all will be " right that 
 seems most wrong," when we recognize it to be " His sweet will." ^ 
 
 1. 
 
 Home. 
 
 1. Men everywhere have either burrowed under the ground or 
 built above it, and sought to provide some kind of place in which 
 
 ^ A. Maclaren, The God of the Amen, 166. 
 
214 THE HOME OF THE SOUL 
 
 they might dwell, and which they call home. Eude and im- 
 perfect it often is, made of such materials as they could 
 find to hand, or in such ways as their faculties could devise. 
 Or where civilization and intelligence have advanced or wealth 
 abounded, men have built houses larger, more splendid, and 
 furnished with ample conveniences. But in all, the aim and 
 desire have been to have a place where they couid obtain 
 shelter and rest. 
 
 The wilderness episode in Israel's life meant that they had no 
 home. They were always moving, moving — all the year, and then 
 another year, for forty years. Never settling down at home, 
 always moving — you might well call such an experience a wilder- 
 ness. Old Egypt, the land of bondage, had been bad enough ; but 
 at least there were homes in Egypt, and it was no wonder if at 
 times the people longed to turn back into Egypt. Homes had 
 been promised in Canaan, but that promise was for the benefit of 
 their children. These adult Israelites through one long forlorn 
 generation must be always moving. And the long-continued 
 homelessness taught them something. For all time to come the 
 memory of that homeless wilderness would make them value the 
 homes that God should give them in Canaan. 
 
 ^ Archbishop Leigh ton died in an inn in 1684 during a visit 
 to London. He had often expressed a wish to die in an inn 
 "because it looks so like a pilgrim's going home, to whom this 
 world is all a pilgrimage." ^ 
 
 ^ How passionately the longing could possess Stevenson is 
 familiar to all those who have read the thoughts of home from 
 abroad in Songs of Travel and Vailimcb Letters. In a deeper 
 sense, as it concerned the inward life, the same thing is true. 
 Apparently an unresting traveller in the spiritual country, he yet 
 had come to rest upon certain great convictions, in which his 
 spirit had its home. These he expresses often with an evident 
 sense of relief and the comfortable jjeace of assurance. In the 
 longest journey of all, the lifelong journey, the same shadowy but 
 hospitable and firelit sweetness awaits its close. The Covenanters 
 pass the dark river amid a " storm of harsh and fiercely jubilant 
 noises " which add a tenfold peacefulness to the shores which 
 they had reached. For himself, who does not know the Eequiem 
 which, written seven years before his death, was inscribed upon 
 his tombstone at the last : 
 
 ^ A. Alexander, in The Exjpository Times, xii. 563. 
 
PSALM xc. I 
 
 215 
 
 Under the wide and starry sky, 
 Dig the grave and let me lie. 
 Glad did I live and gladly die, 
 
 And I laid me down with a will. 
 This be the verse you grave for me ; 
 "Here he lies where he longed to be; 
 Home is the sailor, home from sea, 
 
 And the hunter home from the hill." 
 
 Such words imply more than they express ; perhaps they mean 
 more than the speaker knows. In them we hear echoes of a great 
 voice that calls home the thinker to faith, the struggler to 
 achievement, and the dead from dying to a new life. And so 
 there is arrival as well as travel, after all. Indeed the two are 
 combined in regard to faith, and achievement, and that dimly 
 seen but beautiful country beyond the grave. In all these, the 
 true life is at once making for a land that is very far off, and 
 yet at the same time it is ever coming home.^ 
 
 Now more the bliss of love is felt, 
 
 Though felt to be the same; 
 'Tis still our lives in one to melt, 
 
 Within love's sacred flame: 
 
 Each other's joy each to impart. 
 Each other's grief to share; 
 
 To look into each other's heart, 
 And find all solace there: 
 
 To lay the head upon one breast, 
 To press one answering hand, 
 
 To feel through all the soul's unrest, 
 One soul to understand: 
 
 To go into the teeming world. 
 
 The striving and the heat, 
 With knowledge of one tent unfurl'd 
 
 To welcome weary feet: 
 
 A shadow in a weary land. 
 
 Where men as wanderers roam : 
 
 A shadow where a rock doth stand — 
 The shadow of a Home.^ 
 
 * John Kelman, The Faith of Robert Louis Stevenson, 183. 
 2 George J. Bomanes. 
 
2l6 
 
 THE HOME OF THE SOUL 
 
 2. There are places in which men live, calling them homes, 
 but in which there is no comfort, and not even the appearance of 
 it. Poor, wretched dwellings and abodes of poverty, squalor, and 
 suffering, where there is scarce a glow on the hearth to warm, or 
 a morsel on the table to soothe the pangs of hunger. Or there 
 are dwellings of misery and wretchedness from vice and its effects, 
 scenes of brawling, strife, and anger. Or there are abodes where, 
 though there may be earthly abundance and luxuries, there is a 
 moral coldness, a want of sympathy and affection between those 
 who dwell under the same roof ; and so with all its comforts, it is 
 a home of misery. But it is not such that we associate with the 
 true idea of home, for the right and good and true home is a place 
 of happiness and comfort. 
 
 ^ How can those who do not know Christ and our Father's 
 home in heaven form any idea of them save from what they see 
 in us and our homes ? That is the way the heathen learn of 
 Christ and heaven. In Hangchow, China, Mrs. Mattox had been 
 accustomed to invite the little children to her home and make 
 them happy there. Once a Chinese teacher was talking to some 
 of them, and asked, " Where do you want to go when you die — 
 to heaven ? " " No," they answered. " To hell ? " " No." Where, 
 then, do you want to go ? " " To Mrs. Mattox's house," they re- 
 plied. They could not imagine anything more heavenly than that.^ 
 
 3. There is no place on earth which is so dear to the heart as 
 home, if the home is such as we usually associate with the name. 
 It is connected with our earliest and happiest resolutions. It is 
 the place round which are twined the most tender and hallowed 
 memories. It is the spot in which are centred our fondest 
 affections, and it contains in it the hopes of all the purity and 
 goodness which are to come hereafter. However humble or lowly, 
 still it is home, a dearer and a sweeter spot than all the world 
 beside. And it is one of the most endearing aspects in which God 
 can be regarded, when He is revealed as the home of His people, 
 as the habitation, *' the dwelling and abiding place," of the soul in 
 all time and under every circumstance. 
 
 ^ Arriving in New York, after their tour in Canada, the party 
 proceeded by the night train to Washington, where they spent a 
 day driving round and seeing all the chief buildings, and then, two 
 
 ^ R. E. Specr, Men Who were Found Faithful ^ 141. 
 
PSALM xc. I 
 
 217 
 
 days afterwards, they went on board the " Lucania." My father 
 writes: "Never shall I forget the joy of this morning and the 
 excitement of seeing, as we drove up, the funnels of the grand 
 ' Lucania ' : I passed through the crowded wharf as on enchanted 
 ground, and stepped on board with a feeling of delight and gratitude 
 reaching almost to ecstasy. Thank God for this trip, for all His 
 mercies, for all the kindness of friends and for the pleasure and 
 instruction of the experience ; but oh, the joy of returning to the 
 old country, and to home ! That swallows up all other gratification 
 in one great rejoicing. When at length I reach the gates of death, 
 may I have the same joy in prospect of the heavenly home ! " ^ 
 
 If As one contemplates Mr. Gladstone's triumphs, one finds 
 oneself recurring in memory to the beautiful background of 
 domestic quiet and stately dignity in which he was as much or 
 more at home than in the public gaze. I can see him now in an 
 old wideawake and cloak — trudging off in the drizzle of an October 
 morning to an early service. I remember how, at Hawarden in 
 1896, on one of the sad evenings after my father's death, I dined 
 alone with him and one other guest, and with what beautiful 
 consideration he talked quietly on about things in which he 
 thought we should be interested — things that needed neither 
 comment nor response, and all so naturally and easily, that one 
 hardly realized the tender thoughtfulness of it all. And last of 
 all, I remember how I came one evening at a later date to dine at 
 Hawarden, and was shown into a little half -lit ante-room next the 
 dining-room. He was just at the beginning of his last illness, and 
 he was suffering from discomfort and weakness. There on a sofa he 
 sat, side by side with Mrs. Gladstone ; they were sitting in silence, 
 hand in hand, like two children, the old warrior and his devoted 
 wife. It seemed almost too sacred a thing to have seen ; but it is 
 not too sacred to record, for it seemed the one last perfect trans- 
 figuring touch of love and home.^ 
 
 II. 
 
 God our Home. 
 
 Moses was a homeless man. Early in life he had fled from 
 Pharaoh's court, where he had been brought up. When he lived 
 in Midian as the son-in-law of Jethro, he took part in the 
 wandering life of the desert tribes. When he was called upon 
 to deliver the children of Israel from Egypt, and to be their 
 
 1 The Life of Henry J. Pope, by his Son, 174. 
 ^ A. C. Benson, Along the Road, 53. 
 
2l8 
 
 THE HOME OF THE SOUL 
 
 leader and lawgiver, he shared their wanderings for forty years 
 in the great and terrible wilderness, where they had no fixed 
 abode. In all their journeys they had before them the prospect 
 of Canaan, the good land which God was to give them for a 
 possession. But Moses was not permitted to enter upon that 
 goodly inheritance. He was to see it from afar from Mount 
 Pisgah, but he was to die in the wilderness, where "no man 
 knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day." And so the old man, 
 who knew no home or lasting abode on earth, finds his home and 
 refuge in Him. He contrasts the eternity and unchangeableness 
 of God with the transitory and fleeting circumstances of man. 
 Thinking of the past generations, he remembered what God was 
 to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, when they had no fixed abode, 
 but confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on earth. 
 And looking to future generations he discerned beyond the earthly 
 Canaan the city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker 
 is God. And so, for the homeless man and the homeless people, 
 faith beheld the promise of a dwelling-place, a home, in the Lord. 
 
 Nay, by no cumulative changeful years, 
 
 For all our bitter harvesting of tears, 
 
 Shalt thou tame man, nor in his breast destroy 
 
 The longing for his home which deadens joy. 
 
 Not blindly in such moments, not in vain, 
 
 The open secret flashes on the brain, 
 
 As if one almost guessed it, almost knew 
 
 Whence we have sailed and voyage whereunto; 
 
 Not vainly, for albeit that hour goes by, 
 
 And the strange letters perish from the sky, 
 
 Yet learn we that a life to us is given 
 
 One with the cosmic spectacles of heaven, — 
 
 Feel the still soul, for all her questionings, 
 
 Parcel and part of sempiternal things ; 
 
 For us, for all, one overarching dome, 
 
 One law the order, and one God the home.^ 
 
 1. God is the natural home of the soul. In that home it was 
 born, from that great Father our spirits came, " traiHng clouds of 
 glory from God, who is our home." To live and dwell in Him, 
 nurtured by His care, fed by His bounty, watched by His grace, 
 
 1 F. W. H. Myers, The Renewal of Youth. 
 
PSALM xc. I 
 
 219 
 
 guarded by His mercy ; to be brought up and kept in His love, 
 and to love Him with our heart and soul, and there and then to 
 find all peace, rest, and blessedness — that is our purpose and our 
 destiny, that the design and blessedness of our existence. And 
 only in Him do we find what we require — protection against 
 temptation, shelter from trials, and refuge from calamity, light in 
 the midst of darkness, warmth to cheer our dulled and deadened 
 hearts, release from the burden of sin, deliverance from the power 
 of passion, food for our hunger, safety from every evil, and rest, 
 quiet, peaceful rest, to our agitated and worn hearts. 
 
 ^ When we have been long in a foreign land, associating with 
 strangers or casual acquaintances who have little interest in us, 
 and no love for us ; if we have been ill, far away from home and 
 friends, and have had no friendly faces to smile on us, and no 
 sweet, tender sympathy to soothe us, how gladsome it is, after such 
 an experience, to leave that land of exile and strangeness and to 
 sail for home, where we know — 
 
 There is an eye will mark 
 Our coming, and look brighter when we come. 
 
 And how cheering and comforting it is for us to know that, 
 though now we are wanderers from home, our home in God still 
 awaits us, the door is ever open to receive us, and the kind, 
 compassionate Father watching for us, eager for our return, and 
 ready to receive us and enfold us in His love, and set us in royal 
 state at His own right hand to partake of His fulness, to be with 
 Him and His dear and loved ones, whose faces will beam on us 
 with tenderness and whose hearts will overflow to us with 
 sympathy and affection; and that out of that home we shall 
 never again go, but be there in infinite joy and glory for evermore. 
 Your soul leaves its house of clay within which it has dwelt here 
 below. Where shall that soul, when it goes, find rest and home ? 
 
 Here is the house, 
 
 Empty and lone; 
 Where is the home of that which is gone, 
 Out in the regions of boundless black space, 
 Floating and floating, no space, no place? 
 Or did it gather its wealth and remove 
 To the home up above? 
 All's still in the house here below, 
 God grant that the soul that has wandered away, 
 Be not homeless to-day. 
 
220 THE HOME OF THE SOUL 
 
 Into Thy house, 
 
 Lord, take us straight, 
 Lest we be left in the darkness to wait; 
 Lest we be lost in realms without sun, 
 And wander for ever where mansion is none, 
 Crying without, " Let us in ! Let us in ! " 
 When the feast shall begin, 
 And the door shall be shut.^ 
 
 2. Home suggests a place where care is thrown aside, while the 
 affections expand themselves freely and fully, and loving looks 
 and kindly words and gentle deeds are the order of the day. 
 When God is said to be the refuge or home of man, it is meant 
 that God offers man His best and tenderest welcome ; that in 
 God, and God alone, man finds that which yields perfect repose 
 and satisfaction to all the pure and tender sympathies of his 
 nature. For man's higher or spiritual self the One Eternal Being 
 is what the fireside represents to the heart's affection — a sphere 
 in which man may abandon himself to perfect enjoyment, to that 
 unrestrained delight which accompanies a sense of being among 
 friends, with wliom reserve is neither necessary nor possible. 
 
 There is a presence moving in that home, anticipating all 
 our wants, cheering us when we are sad, hushing us when we 
 are fretful and impatient, smoothing us when we are ruffled, 
 ministering to us when we are in suffering ; and the soul, enfolded 
 in God's great, tender love, finds rest and blessedness. And as it 
 is a home of love, it is one in which there is no coldness or 
 reserve. In the world there is always a certain reserve. There 
 are joys which delight us, but which others cannot care for. 
 There are sorrows, cares, anxieties which trouble us, but in which 
 others have no interest. There are things that we do not tell 
 and cannot tell. Even with our most familiar acquaintances, 
 there are some chambers in our heart kept locked from them. 
 But at home, in a home of love, everything is open, frank, 
 free, natural ; we throw off all restraint, unbosom all our heart's 
 cares and troubles ; we know we shall get sympathy ; we speak 
 to interested ears and loving hearts, whose joys and sorrows are 
 ours. We are not afraid to whisper our secrets. It is to no rude 
 and heartless gaze we expose them. We do not fear ridicule or 
 
 ^ R. Stephen, Divine and Human Influence, ii. 271. 
 
 I 
 
PSALM xc. I 
 
 221 
 
 cold indifference. We confide in hearts which love us as they 
 love themselves. And we get relief by others sharing and 
 bearing with us. So the soul finds sympathy in God. 
 
 H Lord, I have viewed this world over, in which Thou hast set 
 me ; I have tried how this and that thing will fit my spirit, and 
 the design of my creation, and can find nothing on which to rest, 
 for nothing here doth itself rest, but such things as please me for 
 a while, in some degree, vanish and flee as shadows from before 
 me. Lo ! I come to Thee — the Eternal Being — the Spring of 
 life — the Centre of rest — the Stay of the Creation — the Fulness 
 of all things. I join myself to Thee ; with Thee I will lead my 
 life, and spend my days, with whom I aim to dwell for ever, 
 expecting, when my little time is over, to be taken up ere long 
 into Thy eternity.^ 
 
 3. The Old Testament is rich in promises that God will supply 
 the earthly needs of those whose trust is in Him. He fed His 
 people with manna in the wilderness ; He satisfieth our mouth 
 with good things (Ps. ciii. 5). He prepareth a table before us in 
 the presence of our enemies (Ps. xxiii. 5). The promise to those 
 who trust in the Lord is that verily they shall be fed (Ps. xxxvii. 
 3). And the Psalmist records his lifelong experience that he 
 had never "seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging 
 bread" (Ps. xxxvii. 25). And He who gives us our daily bread 
 also satisfies the higher needs of our souls. This blessed fact is 
 fully developed in the New Testament ; but even the Old Testa- 
 ment saints record that they panted for God "as the hart 
 panteth after the water brooks " (Ps. xlii. 1) ; that by Him their 
 " soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness (Ps. Ixiii. 5). 
 " He satisfieth the longing soul, and filleth the hungry soul with 
 goodness " (Ps. cvii. 9). If we make the Lord our habitation, all 
 our wants, spiritual and temporal, will be supplied. 
 
 ^ As is a mother to her babe, so is God to us. She makes 
 the children's home — not the two-roomed cottage of the peasant, 
 with the bare walls and scant furniture, nor the many-roomed 
 ducal palace, with its teeming wealth and oppressive luxury ; but 
 the love and light, the warm kisses and tender care, the sweet 
 smile and the strong soul of the mother — she, and all that she is, 
 makes "Home, sweet, sweet Home." She is the dwelling-place 
 of the child's heart, the satisfaction of desire, the unfailing 
 
 * Jolin Howe, The Vanity of Man as Mortal. 
 
222 THE HOME OF THE SOUL 
 
 nourishment of the child's life. What God has made that mother 
 to her child, He Himself is to us men — orr asylum of peace, our 
 refuge from passing foes, our dwelling-pUce and home from age 
 to age.^ 
 
 4. The inviolability of home is the spirit of our English 
 proverb, that a man's house is his castle. And in this sense God 
 is the Home of the soul ; the soul finds in the presence of God 
 a protection against the enemies which threaten it with ruin in 
 the rough life of the world. In this sense David cries, " I will 
 love thee, 0 Lord, my strength. The Lord is my rock, and my 
 fortress and my deliverer ; my God, my strength, in whom I will 
 trust; my buckler and the horn of my salvation, and my high 
 tower." Or again, "Be thou my strong rock for an house of 
 defence to save me. For thou art my rock and my fortress." 
 Or, again, ** Be thou my strong habitation, whereunto I may 
 continually resort; thou hast given commandment to save me; 
 for thou art my rock and my fortress." Once more, " He that 
 dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under 
 the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, He is my 
 refuge and my fortress ; my God, in whom I will trust. For he 
 shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the 
 noisome pestilence. He shall cover thee with his pinions, and 
 under his wings shalt thou take refuge: his truth is a shield 
 and a buckler." ^ 
 
 ^ One incident of the voyage to America served as a sharp 
 test to Wesley of his own spiritual condition. Amongst the 
 passengers he found a little group of Moravian exiles, who, by the 
 simplicity and seriousness of their piety, strangely interested him. 
 A storm broke over the ship one evening just as these simple- 
 minded Germans had begun a religious service ; Wesley describes 
 what follows : " In the midst of the Psalm wherewith their 
 service began, the sea broke over, split the mainsail in pieces, 
 covered the ship, and poured in between the decks as if the great 
 deep had already swallowed us up. A terrible screaming began 
 amongst the English. The Germans calmly sang on. I asked 
 one of tliem afterwards, * Were you not afraid ? ' He answered, 
 ' I thank God, no.' I asked, * But were not your women and 
 children afraid ? ' He replied mildly, ' No ; our women and 
 
 * J. Clifford, Social Worship, 26. 
 
 2 II. P. Liddou, Christmastide Sermons, 243. 
 
 i 
 
PSALM xc. 1 
 
 children are not afraid to die.' From them I went to their cry- 
 ing, trembling neighbours, and pointed out to them the difference 
 in the hour of trial between him that feareth God and him that 
 feareth Him not." ^ 
 
 5. The soul that talks to God rises out of a narrow and selfish 
 individualism into fellowship, not only with the Eternal Creator, 
 but also with the vast and various family of God in the past, 
 present, and future. We are dwelling in the same home as our 
 fathers and brothers and sons. Israel is there in its completeness. 
 God is the eternal home of the race. " The elders who, through 
 faith, obtained a good report," in the grey dawn of the world, 
 dwelt therein. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the founders of Israel, 
 had long since passed away, but their home was not broken up, 
 for they still lived in and to God. Indeed, all our dead live in 
 Him, for He is not the God of dead men, but of living men, for 
 all live unto Him. Thus we are already all together with the 
 Lord. 
 
 •[f Bunyan's Mr. Fearing was " kept very low, and made his 
 life burdensome to himself by fear of death. But as he came 
 near to his end his fear disappeared, and " he went over at last 
 not much above wetshod," sending, as his last message to his 
 friends, the brave words, " Tell them all, it's all right." ^ 
 
 1 W. H. Fitchett, TFesley and His Century, 98. 
 
 2 J. Clifford, Social JVorshij), 31. 
 
i 
 
 1 
 
The Right Use of Time. 
 
 xxv.-cxix. — 15 
 
Literature. 
 
 Darlow (T. H.), The Upward Calling, 346. 
 
 Gregg (D.), Our Best Moods, 339. 
 
 Hobhouse (W.), The Spiritual Standard, 210. 
 
 Hodge (C), Princeton Sermons, 346. 
 
 Lee (R.), Sermons, 268. 
 
 Lefroy (E. C), The Christian Ideal, 102. 
 
 Morgan (G. E.), Dreams and Realities, 49. 
 
 Murray (W. H.), The Fruits of the Spirit, 157. 
 
 Prothero (G.), The Armour of Light, 33. 
 
 Smellie (A.), In tU Secret Place, 396. 
 
 Trimmer (E,.), Thirsting for the Living Waters, 132. 
 
 Tyng (S. H.), The People's Pulpit, iv. 205. 
 
 Christian World Pulpit, Iviii. 65 (M. G. Pearse). 
 
 Guardian, Ixvii. (1912) 418 (J. W. Willink). 
 
 Homiletic Review, 1. 379 (M. G. Pearse). 
 
 Literary Churchman, xxiii. (1877) 540. 
 
 National Preacher, xxxiv. 33 (A. Barnes). 
 
 Preacher's Magazine, viii. 657 (T. Puddicombe) ; xxii. 67 (J. Edwards). 
 
 396 
 
The Right Use of Time. 
 
 So teach us to number our days, 
 
 That we may get us an heart of wisdom.— Ps. xc. 12. 
 
 1. This psalm of man's pilgrimage through all generations has in it, 
 says Ewald, something unusually arresting, solemn, sinking deep 
 into depths of the Divinity. Moses might well have been seized 
 by these awful thoughts at the close of his wanderings ; and the 
 author, whoever he be, is clearly a man grown grey with vast 
 experience, who here takes his stand at the close of his earthly 
 course." The verses of the psalm have become the funeral hymn 
 of Christendom, which every Church recites at the burial of its 
 dead. 
 
 The slow, sad experience of life wrought out in the Psalmist 
 a twofold result — he has learned the secret both of detachment 
 and of attachment. This aged pilgrim grows more and more 
 weaned from the world and detached from things trivial and 
 temporal; he stands aloof and absolved from the accidents of 
 existence. But he clings closer and closer still to things unseen 
 and eternal, and is made partaker of their everlastingness. Such 
 should be the effect of a right numbering of the days and years as 
 they escape us — to teach at last that, though the world passeth 
 away, and the lust thereof, yet he who doeth the will of God 
 abideth for ever. 
 
 2. But he has learned more than that. He has learned that 
 
 God is from everlasting to everlasting. It would help to cheer us 
 
 if we could lay this thought to heart, numbering our days, not 
 
 merely to realize their brevity, but to realize by contrast the 
 
 length of God's yeai-s. We have but a short time to work, and it 
 
 is well to remember that, in order that we may be diligent. But 
 
 God has a whole eternity wherein to work, and it is well to 
 
 remember that also, so that we may cease from fretfulness and 
 
 227 
 
228 THE RIGHT USE OF TIME 
 
 impatience at the slow progress of the Divine Kingdom. It is by 
 so numbering both our years and God's that we attain to a wise 
 heart. 
 
 ^ Time was Napoleon's most precious commodity, and for 
 every stage and state of life he had a routine from which he 
 deviated most unwillingly. In these years his days were spent 
 in the careful husbanding of every hour.^ 
 
 A Prayer for Instruction. 
 
 "Teach us." 
 
 1. At first thought it would seem as though we needed not to 
 be instructed on such a subject. It would seem as though man's 
 mortality were so evident that it would be impossible for him to 
 hide it from himself. Nevertheless, he does hide it from himself, 
 and on this account no prayer is more important than the prayer 
 of the text. The demonstration of human mortality is in a 
 hundred generations of the dead. It is in the ground beneath 
 our feet, which is billowy with graves full of the dust which once 
 lived in human forms and spoke and was loved. It is in the long 
 line of the one hundred thousand human lives which every day 
 pass the boundary-line from time into eternity and melt into 
 nothingness before our eyes. It is in every tick of the clock which 
 marks the passage of some immortal soul and declares the death- 
 rate of the world. Yet, humanity at large does not realize the 
 mortality of humanity. So thoroughly unrealized is the mortality 
 of man that the first condition of right living, the fundamental 
 thought of a wise life, is ignored and undreamed of by thousands 
 and thousands. 
 
 ^ We can number other men's days and years, and think they 
 will die ere it be long, if we see them sick or sore or cold : but we 
 cannot number our own. When two ships meet on the sea, they 
 which are in one ship think that the other ship doth sail exceed- 
 ingly fast, but that their ship goeth fair and softly, or rather 
 standeth still, although in truth one ship saileth as fast as the 
 other ; so every man thinks that the other post and run and fly 
 ^ W. M. Sloane, Napoleon Bonaparte, ii. 253. 
 
PSALM xc. 12 
 
 229 
 
 to the grave, but that himself standeth stock still, although, in- 
 deed, a year with him is no longer than it is with the other.^ 
 
 ^ I remember, in the seminary, a fellow student who had 
 upon the crown of his head a tumour that was constantly grow- 
 ing. The physicians told him that it was impossible, by any 
 effort of human skill, to relieve him. He was waiting the 
 moment when, in its growth, it should at last pierce the hard 
 bone of the skull ; and he knew that the moment that should be 
 accomplished, he would fall dead. God has spared him these 
 many years to preach the gospel. But, when others were full of 
 frolic and fun, I noted the serious mirth of that man. He lived 
 in a division of his days. He counted nothing in the future. He 
 finished each day's work when the night came.^ 
 
 2. The uncertainty of human life and the vanity of human 
 wishes have always been the theme of the satirist as well as of 
 the preacher. But satire by itself is no remedy ; it can, at best, 
 only point out the disease. In the very fact that nothing is 
 certain about life except its uncertainty, we have a safeguard. 
 We know roughly the limits by which we are circumscribed ; we 
 know enough to warn, but not enough to paralyse. Could we 
 look forward with absolute certainty to half a century of health 
 and vigour, we might be carried away even more than we are by 
 the pride of life. Did we know that death awaited us in the near 
 future, our spirits would be dulled, our ardour damped in carry- 
 ing out legitimate schemes of useful work. As it is, we may con- 
 struct our averages of life, we may frame our insurance tables for 
 the mass with some approach to accuracy ; but we cannot predict 
 the length of an individual life, save when medical skill can 
 anticipate by a little the decree which has already gone forth. It 
 is a merciful dispensation that has so ordered things. God would, 
 indeed, have us to ponder over the mysteries which surround our 
 existence, but not in such a way as to sap the power of action in us. 
 
 ^ Herein is the secret, the true alleviation of the burden of 
 to-morrow; not the false and feeble attempt to oppose care by 
 carelessness, to turn from the anxieties and troubles of life to a 
 wild recklessness, assuming only a painful jauntiness which con- 
 ceals the pain. The true remedy is not forgetfulness, but faith. 
 This is the peace of God which passeth all understanding, which 
 guards the heart and calms the fevered life. To the soul which 
 
 1 Henry Smith. 2 g. H. Tyng. 
 
230 THE RIGHT USE OF TIME 
 
 has this noble courage born of faith no turn of affairs can come 
 amiss. He is not open to the blows of chance. It is not mere 
 resignation : it is glad confidence that all things work together 
 for good to them that love the Lord. "If I should intend 
 Liverpool and land in heaven," said John Howe about a passage 
 from Ireland. If, what then ? To John Howe, who knew that the 
 eternal God was his refuge, and underneath were the everlasting 
 arms, what shadow could the future have? Why should he be 
 bowed down by the burden of to-morrow ? As his days, right on 
 till the last sand had run, right on till the last gasp of breath, so 
 would be his strength.^ 
 
 IL 
 
 A Wise Enumeration. 
 
 "Teach us to number our days." 
 
 1. What does it mean to " number our days " ? Not just to 
 calculate the chances of our own survival in this world — which 
 we may easily gather from the actuarial tables of an insurance 
 company. It means to take the measure of our days as compared 
 with the work to be performed, with the provision to be laid up 
 for eternity, with the preparation to be made for death, with the 
 precaution to be taken against judgment to come. It is to 
 estimate human life by the purposes to which it should be 
 applied, by the eternity to which it must conduct. It means to 
 gauge and test our own career in the light of its moral and 
 spiritual issues. And as God teaches us this, we understand the 
 secret of true wisdom. For wisdom lies in a just estimate of the 
 real value of things. " What shall it profit a man ? " remains the 
 final question. As Plato said, in one of his mystical sentences, 
 it is the art of measurement which would save the soul. 
 
 2. The Psalmist's petition in effect asks that we shall so mind 
 the things of this world as not to forget their issues ; and that we 
 shall so mind the things of eternity as not to forget that they are 
 to be gained through godliness, righteousness, and sobriety in using 
 the things of time. The sublime motive in the distance must not 
 overpower us, so that we shall be rendered unfit for discharging 
 our present duty, small and insignificant though it may be ; nor 
 
 1 Hugh Black, Comfort, 189. 
 
PSALM xc. 12 
 
 231 
 
 must we be so engrossed with the present duty as to lose sight of 
 the grand motive, which redeems from littleness every duty, how- 
 ever small, which is a means to so great an end. 
 
 3. The true way to number our days is not so to number them 
 that they seem to include the result of our lives, but so to number 
 them that they seem to include simply the beginning of our lives. 
 They and all they bring are only stepping-stones which lead us 
 up to the threshold of a nobler life, nobler in its opportunities, 
 occasions, and the character of its joy. Life is not mere existence, 
 the coming and the going of breath, and its coming again ; life 
 means all that it includes of feeling and thinking and doing and 
 growth. And the heavenly life is only the continuing of our 
 activities and the multiplication of serviceable occasions along 
 those high levels and stretches of being to the altitude of which 
 we are lifted by the movement of prior activities, as birds are 
 lifted by the movement of their wings. The man who numbers 
 his days rightly, numbers them not as if they ended anything, but 
 as if they began something. He thinks of them in their termina- 
 tion as bringing him not to an end but to a beginning — a 
 beginning for which, if rightly used, they prepare and fit him. 
 
 ^ " What would you wish to be doing," was the question once 
 put to a wise man, " if you knew that you were to die the next 
 minute ? " " Just what I am doing now," was his reply, though 
 he was neither repeating the creed nor telling his religious ex- 
 perience, but, for aught I know, posting his accounts, or talking 
 merry nonsense with his children round the fire. Nothing that is 
 worthy of a living man can be unworthy of a dying one; and 
 whatever is shocking in the last moment, would be disgraceful in 
 every other.^ 
 
 ^ The family motto of Dr. Doddridge was Dum vivimus, 
 vivamus, which in its primary significance is, to be sure, not very 
 suitable to a Christian divine ; but he paraphrased it thus : — 
 
 Live, while you live, the epicure would say, 
 And seize the pleasures of the present day. 
 Live, while you live, the sacred preacher cries, 
 And give to God each moment as it flies. 
 Lord, in my views let both united be, 
 I live in pleasure, when I live to Thee.^ 
 
 ^ James Martineau. ^ Gentleman's Magazine, 1786, p. 36. 
 
232 THE RIGHT USE OF TIME 
 
 Life is unutterably dear, 
 
 God makes to-day so fair; 
 Though heaven is better, — being here 
 
 I long not to be there. 
 
 The weights of life are pressing still, 
 
 Not one of them may fall; 
 Yet such strong joys my spirit fill, 
 
 That I can bear them all. 
 
 Though Care and Grief are at my side, 
 
 There would I let them stay, 
 And still be ever satisfied 
 
 With beautiful To-day !i 
 
 III. 
 
 The Units of Life. 
 
 *• Our days." 
 
 1. Notice the writer's unit of computation in measuring life. 
 He speaks not of years, not even of months or weeks, but of days. 
 There is something very impressive in such a mode of reckoning. 
 A year is a long period ; and while we may hope for years of life, 
 be they many or few, the passage of time is not continuously felt 
 by us. But days — how they rush past and fly away with a 
 rapidity which on reflection is almost appalling! Even the 
 heedless man must feel the ebb of life when it comes to be 
 calculated by days. Yet as we see the winged hours go by, we are 
 apt to think as lightly of them as if the series would never cease. 
 We sleep and play and busy ourselves with what we call the 
 serious business of life without much reference to the rising and 
 setting of the sun. A day lost, a day half wasted, a day misused, 
 causes us no poignant regret. We are so confident that many 
 others are still in store for us. As they have come and gone in 
 the past, so will they come and go in the future. We must admit, 
 if we are pressed, that the supply is not absolutely unlimited. An 
 end will be reached at some indefinite epoch, but not yet — not 
 yet ; and if meanwhile we are careless or prodigal, we anticipate 
 » Charlotte F. B. Rog6. 
 
PSALM xc. 12 
 
 233 
 
 many opportunities of " making up for lost time " — as if it were 
 ever possible to make up for lost time ! 
 
 Oh, Day, if I squander a wavelet of thee, 
 A mite of my twelve hours' treasure, 
 The least of thy gazes or glances, 
 
 (Be they grants thou art bound to or gifts above measure) 
 
 One of thy choices or one of thy chances, 
 
 (Be they tasks God imposed thee or freaks at thy pleasure) 
 
 ■ — My Day, if I squander such labour or leisure, 
 
 Then shame fall on Asolo, mischief on me ! ^ 
 
 2. On our maps we have lines to mark the parallels of latitude 
 — but these lines are only on the map. Crossing the equator or 
 the tropics you see no score in the water, no line in the sky, to 
 mark it ; the vessel gives no lurch, no call is emitted from the 
 deep ; it is only the man of skill, the pilot or the captain, with his 
 eye on the signs of heaven, who can tell that an event has 
 happened, and that a definite portion of the voyage is completed. 
 And, so far, our life is like a voyage on the open sea, every day 
 repeating its predecessor — the same watery plain around and the 
 same blue dome above — each so like the other that you might 
 fancy the charmed ship was standing still. But it is not so. The 
 watery plain of to-day is far in advance of the plain of yesterday, 
 and the blue dome of to-day may be very like its predecessors, but 
 it is fashioned from quite another sky. 
 
 Their advent is as silent as their going. 
 They have no voice nor utter any speech, 
 No whispered murmur passes each to each. 
 As on the bosom of the years' stream flowing, 
 They pass beyond recall, beyond our knowing, 
 Farther than sight can pierce or thought can reach. 
 Nor shall we ever hear them on Time's beach. 
 No matter how the winds of life are blowing. 
 
 They bide their time, they wait the awful warning 
 Of that dread day, when hearts and graves unsealing. 
 The trumpet's note shall call the sea and sod. 
 To yield their secrets to the sun's revealing: 
 What voices then shall thrill the Judgment morning, 
 As our lost hours shall cry aloud to God? 2 
 
 ^ Browning, Pippa Passes. * R. T. W. Duke. 
 
234 THE RIGHT USE OF TIME 
 
 3. Is it because God gives us time so imperceptibly that none 
 of us estimates the full value of time ? The individual moment is 
 not looked upon as a precious grain of gold. One could prove this 
 in many ways ; but let us be satisfied with one way. Take, as an 
 example, the names of our various methods of getting rid of time. 
 These indicate our undervaluation of time. Notice some of these 
 names : " pastime," i.e., what consumes and uses up the hours 
 easily; "amusement," i.e., what prevents musing or meditation; 
 " diversion," i.e., what turns aside ; " entertainment," i.e., what 
 holds in suspense or equilibrium. These words, which are in 
 common use, indicate and reveal a wrong condition of thought 
 and feeling about time. They characterize it as a drug in the 
 market to be got rid of at any price and in any quantity, whereas 
 it is the most precious trust we have. 
 
 ^ The illusion haunts us, that a long duration, as a year, a 
 decade, a century, is valuable. But an old French sentence 
 says, " God works in moments," — " En peu d'heure Dieu labeure." 
 We ask for long life, but 'tis deep life, or grand moments that signify. 
 Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical. Life is un- 
 necessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a 
 smile, a glance — what ample borrowers of eternity they are 
 
 Forenoon and afternoon and night, — forenoon 
 And afternoon and night, — forenoon and — what ? 
 The empty song repeats itself. No more ? 
 Yea, that is life : make this forenoon sublime, 
 This afternoon a psalm, this night a prayer. 
 And Time is conquered, and thy crown is won.* 
 
 IV. 
 
 Reckoning with a Purpose. 
 
 " So teach us to number our days, that we may get us an heart of wisdom." 
 
 The reckoning must be made with a purpose. Objectless 
 meditations, and laments without a practical outcome, will avail 
 nothing. The result of our counsels must be the attainment of 
 " wisdom," and wisdom does not consist in the mere recognition 
 of a truth, however momentous. It is a small thing to face the 
 
 1 Emerson. * Edward Rowland Sill. 
 
PSALM xc. 12 
 
 235 
 
 fact of the shortness of human life, and call it an evil not to be 
 avoided by any. The shallowest of heathen philosophies could 
 tell us that. " So teach us to number our days, that we may get 
 us an heart of wisdom." 
 
 1. Wisdom is a great word, because the idea it symbolizes is 
 great. It is greater than knowledge, for knowledge symbolizes 
 only what one has received. Knowledge signifies the ac- 
 cumulation of facts, the gathering and retention of information, 
 the reception on the part of our memories of whatever has 
 been discovered. But wisdom represents that finer power, that 
 higher characteristic of mind, which suggests the proper applica- 
 tion of facts, the right use of knowledge, the correct direction of 
 our faculties. Knowledge is full of error. The stubble and the 
 chaff lie together in its chambers, and both represent it. But 
 wisdom never errs. It separates the wheat from the chaff. It 
 discards what is worthless, and retains only the valuable. Know- 
 ledge represents the results of human industry. Wisdom re- 
 presents the characteristic of Divinity. He whose heart is applied 
 to wisdom has put himself in such a position that he can think 
 divinely — think as God would think in his place. 
 
 ^ Wisdom signifies an acquisition, by means of the soul's 
 faculty of perception, of true knowledge ; and the lack of such 
 knowledge is ignorance. The idea, held by many people, that 
 wisdom is a gift bestowed on a few privileged souls is erroneous. 
 Wisdom is open to all, without price or favour. Wisdom, beauti- 
 ful and divine, represents the highest development of the human 
 soul. There is a path leading from the lowest to the highest, and 
 it is open equally to all. As soon as a man begins to seek for 
 knowledge and truth, he begins to advance out of ignorance and 
 to acquire wisdom. The desire for knowledge and truth is itself 
 an evidence of wisdom.^ 
 
 2. Now wisdom for time and for eternity does not lie in the 
 pursuit of pleasure, not even in the pursuit of happiness, but in 
 the cultivation of a rising life. This is not to say that happiness 
 may never be hoped for or enjoyed when it comes. If we did not 
 desire to be happy, we should be more than human, — or less. 
 But the only way of obtaining happiness is to renounce altogether 
 the pursuit of it. "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his 
 
 ^ R. H. Hodgson, Glad Tidings , 42. 
 
236 THE RIGHT USE OF TIME 
 
 righteousness, and all these things" — things which go to make 
 life happy — " shall be added unto you." Self -consecration is the 
 root of all true happiness. It is the one thing that ensures con- 
 tentment here and hereafter; the one thing that will bring a 
 man peace at the last. Only by losing our life in God can we 
 hope to find it immortalized. Only by a dedication of all that we 
 have, and are, and desire, shall we attain to the perfect existence. 
 This is wisdom and this is happiness. 
 
 ^ The third chapter of Dr. Hanna's Memoir describes Dr. 
 Chalmers' ordination to his Fifeshire parish of Kilmany, in the 
 Maytime of 1803 ; but we have to journey on to the eighth chapter 
 and the winter of 1811, before the preacher has any Gospel to pro- 
 claim. Through the intervening years Chalmers was more 
 interested in mathematics than in the New Testament, and in his 
 lectures to the students of St. Andrews on chemistry and geology 
 than in the spiritual welfare of his people. " The author of this 
 pamphlet," he wrote in self-defence, " can assert, on the authority 
 of his own experience, that, after the satisfactory discharge of his 
 parish duties, a minister may enjoy five days in the week of un- 
 interrupted leisure for the prosecution of any science in which 
 his taste may dispose him to engage." Years afterwards, in a 
 debate in the Assembly of 1825, he recanted the words and con- 
 fessed his error amid the deathlike stillness of the House. " I 
 have no reserve in saying that the sentiment was wrong, and that, 
 in the utterance of it, I penned what was most outrageously 
 wrong. Strangely blinded that I was ! What, sir, is the object 
 of mathematical science ? Magnitude, and the proportions of 
 magnitude. But then, sir, I had forgotten two magnitudes. I 
 thought not of the littleness of time ; I recklessly thought not of 
 the greatness of eternity." ^ 
 
 3. The end of life is not to live the maximum number of hours 
 in pleasure, but to form a character for all eternity ; and if we 
 want to take stock of loss and gain aright, we must look into 
 our own hearts. We must see what treasure it is to which they 
 are drawn, whether above or below. Let us not scruple to put 
 this to familiar and matter-of-fact tests ; there should be no false 
 dignity about religion. Let us ask ourselves plain questions like 
 these: Has our time been frittered away, in society, in amuse- 
 ment, in the thousand distractions of life — harmless, perhaps, each 
 one taken by itself, but in the aggregate fatal to the usefulness 
 * A. Smellie, Robert Murray M'^Cheyne, 13. 
 
PSALM xc. 12 
 
 237 
 
 and true greatness of life ? Has God been crowded out of 
 our thoughts ? Has our hold on the unseen diminished ? Have 
 we become more encrusted with earthly things, till we find it im- 
 possible to look up, prayer being more difficult and the thought of 
 religion more unwelcome ? Is our moral courage less ? Are we 
 more afraid to confess God before men, or to protest against 
 insults which we hear offered to His name ? Are we more haunted 
 by evil thoughts, and less able to resist them ? Have we grown 
 in patience, cheerfulness, humility? Are we more ready to do 
 the " little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness," which have 
 none of the charm of heroism, and remain unknown beyond the 
 narrowest circle ? Has our will grown in strength, so that we 
 are less at the mercy of " chance desires " and sudden temptations, 
 more at unity with ourselves, more settled in the drift and direc- 
 tion of our lives ? And an answer we can give to these if we take 
 the trouble — not necessarily the same answer to all, not perhaps 
 an unqualified answer to many, but still something that will 
 show US whether we are being carried along by the stream or 
 making way against it. 
 
 ^ The universe is full of miracle and mystery ; the darkness 
 and silence are set for a sign we dare not despise. The pall of 
 night lifts, leaving us engulphed in the light of immensity under 
 a tossing heaven of stars. The dawn breaks, but it does not 
 surprise us, for we have watched from the valley and seen the pale 
 twilight. Through the wondrous Sabbath of faithful souls, the 
 long day of rosemary and rue, the light brightens in the East ; and 
 we pass on towards it with quiet feet and opening eyes, bearing 
 with us all of the redeemed earth that we have made our own, 
 until we are fulfilled in the sunrise of the great Easter Day, and 
 the peoples come from north and south and east and west to the 
 city which lieth foursquare — the Beatific Vision of God.^ 
 
 Time speeds on his relentless track. 
 
 And — though we beg on bended knees — 
 
 No prophet's hand for us puts back 
 The shadow ten degrees : 
 
 Yet dream we each returning spring, 
 
 When woods are decked in gold and green, 
 
 The dawning year to us will bring 
 The best that yet has been. 
 
 ^ Michael Fairless, Tloe Boadmend&r, 90. 
 
THE RIGHT USE OF TIME 
 
 Which is an earnest of the truth 
 
 That when the years have passed away, 
 
 We shall receive eternal youth 
 And never-ending day. 
 
 An angel to each land and clime 
 Shall locust-eaten years restore, 
 
 And swear by Him who conquered Time 
 That Time shall be no more.^ 
 
 Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler, Love's Argument. 115. 
 
God's Inner Circle. 
 
 939 
 
Literature. 
 
 Broughton (L. G.), The Soul- Winning Church, 50. 
 Butler (H. M,), University and Other Sermons, 254. 
 Darlow (T. H.), The Upward Calling, 38. 
 Edmunds (L.), Sunday hy Sunday, 193. 
 Hutton (J. A.), The Fear of Things, 45. 
 Landels (W.), Until the Day Break, 24. 
 Maclaren (A.), Last Sheaves, 160. 
 Norton (J. N.), Every Sunday, 257. 
 Pearson (A.), The Claims of the Faith, 64. 
 Pierson (A. T.), TJie Heights of the Gospel, 63. 
 Price (A. C), Fifty Sermons, iv. 297 ; viii. 73. 
 Ealeigli (A.), Rest from Care and Sorrow, 1. 
 Spurgeon (C. H.), Till He Come, 23. 
 Watkinson (W. L.), The Ashes of Roses, 114. 
 Christian World, Nov. 10, 1910 (J. H. Jowett). 
 
 Christian World Pulpit, Ix. 378 (W. Glover) ; Ixx. 285 (A. S. Renton) ; 
 
 Ixxi. 219 (G. H. Morgan). 
 Weekly Pulpit, i. 3 (P. T. Forsyth). 
 
GoD's Inner Circle. 
 
 He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High 
 Shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.— Ps. xci. i. 
 
 The beauty of the language of this poem fitly corresponds to the 
 grandeur of the thoughts which it conveys. The Psalmist here 
 sings " to one clear harp in divers tones " ; and the central thought 
 which he exhibits in its different aspects is that of God's response 
 to man. For every advance on man's part there is an immediate 
 and corresponding advance on God's part. When man goes out to 
 seek God, God meets him more than half-way. When he calls 
 upon God, God will answer him. Loving faith on man's part will 
 be met by faithful love on the part of God. This is in the first 
 verse, of which the whole psalm is an expansion. If man dwells 
 " in the secret place of the Most High," he shall abide " under the 
 shadow of the Almighty." We have here the condition and 
 promise. 
 
 11 In his later years, Calvin's colleague at Geneva was 
 Theodore de Beza (1519-1605), the writer of the metrical version 
 of Psalm Ixviii., which was the battle-song of the Huguenots. 
 Taste for the culture of the Eenaissance, passion for poetry, 
 worldly success and fame, had weakened the impression of the 
 religious training of his youth. A dangerous illness revived his 
 former feelings. Escaping from the bondage of Egypt, as he 
 called his previous life, he took refuge with Calvin at Geneva. 
 In 1548, when he for the first tim^e attended the service of the 
 Eeformed Assembly, the congregation was singing Psalm xci., 
 " Whoso dwelleth under the defence of the Most High shall abide 
 under the shadow of the Almighty." He never forgot the effect 
 of the words. They supported him in all the difficulties of his 
 subsequent life ; they conquered his fears, and gave him courage 
 to meet every danger.^ 
 
 H " The 91st Psalm is a mountain of strength to all believers " ; 
 80 General Gordon wrote from Gravesend in 1869, one of the six 
 
 1 R. E. Prothero, Th& Psalms in Human Life, 1^- 
 PS. xxv.-cxix. — 1 6 
 
242 GOD'S INNER CIRCLE 
 
 quiet years which he used to speak of as the happiest of his life. 
 Again, thirteen years later, in January 1882, he wrote thus from 
 Mauritius : " I dwell more or less (I wish it were more) under the 
 shadow of the Almighty." 
 
 I. 
 
 In the Secret Place. 
 
 1. " He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High." 
 We get the clearest idea of the meaning of this phrase by an 
 examination of the different passages in the Psalms where the 
 word here translated "secret place" occurs. Thus in Psalm 
 xxxi. 20, we read : " Thou shalt hide them in the secret of thy 
 presence"; also in Psalm Ixxxiii. 3, where another form of the 
 same word occurs, we read of God's " hidden ones." From these 
 and similar passages we find that the word is usually connected 
 with the idea of a fugitive hiding from his pursuers. It calls up 
 before us the picture of a man running away from his enemies. 
 Weary and panting, he knows not where to hide himself, and in 
 his despair he flees to some friend of his and seeks protection, and 
 the friend hides him in a secret place. The fugitive gives his 
 all into the keeping of his friend. He places his life in his friend's 
 hands, and he has now power of life and death over him. So, 
 then, the man who dwells in " the secret place of the Most High " 
 is he who ventures his all upon God. With a sure and steadfast 
 trust, with a simple but unwavering faith, he gives himself, his 
 all, into the keeping of God. He surrenders himself to God, and 
 by that very act he is taken near to God ; he is put in the secret 
 place of the Most High and becomes one of " God's hidden ones." 
 By his act of absolute self-surrender he has attained to that state 
 which the Apostle Paul describes in language very similar to that 
 of the Psalmist — only going a little further than the latter with 
 his imperfect light could go — when he says, " Ye died, and your 
 new life is hid with Christ in God." 
 
 ^ We are like vessels which are near a lee shore in the night. 
 The darkness of the open sea is safer for the skilled seaman than 
 the line of the shore. Our safety is to stand out in the bosom of 
 the dark ; it is to press into the mysteries of God. Why is it 
 
PSALM xci. I 
 
 243 
 
 that our moral nature, even the religious, is too often shallow and 
 poverty-stricken ? It is because we do not pursue the growing 
 knowledge of God on our own account. We are religious, or at 
 least we are always in danger of being religious, without spiritual 
 growth, and spiritual growth surely means spiritual insight. We 
 cease to become sensible of spiritual enrichment. We come to a 
 time of Kfe when we are content to say, " I get no secrets from 
 God now." Eevelations do not arrive ; doors are not opened in 
 Heaven ; new vistas of faith do not spread away before the soul. 
 Faith runs on upon the level, and it does not mount, and it does 
 not soar. God becomes by habit a uniform Presence to us. He 
 is not denied. We do not venture to deny Him. I was almost 
 going to say we had not the courage to deny Him. But, at any 
 rate, we do not deny Him. We only disregard Him, like the air 
 and the sky. We do not give our minds seriously and deliberately 
 to realizing Him. We do not pore upon Him until fold after 
 fold removes, and depth after depth opens, and we look into His 
 heart. The secret, the secret of the Most High is not with us.^ 
 
 2. While this is the general idea, it is possible that the immedi- 
 ate figure of " the secret place " may have been borrowed from the 
 arrangements and appointments of the Temple. There was the vast 
 outside world stretching on every side beyond the Temple walls ; 
 then the outer courts of the Temple; then the inner chambers 
 and precincts ; then the Holy Place with its golden candlestick 
 and table of shewbread ; and last of all, the Holy of Holies, the 
 secret place, the mystic abiding-place of the eternal God. And 
 every Jew thought reverently and almost awfully of that secret, 
 silent place where God dwelt between the cherubim. He turned 
 towards it, he worshipped towards it, his desire moved towards 
 it; it was the mysterious centre of his adoration and service. 
 And that arrangement and apportionment of the Temple became 
 to the Psalmist the type and the symbol of human life. Life 
 could be all outside, or it could spend itself in outer courts, on the 
 mere fringe of being, or it could have a secret place where every- 
 thing found significance and interpretation and value in the 
 mysterious fellowship of God. That seems to be the primary 
 meaning of life " in the secret place " ; it is life abandoning the 
 mere outside of things, refusing to dwell in the outer halls and 
 passages of the stately temple of being, and centralizing itself in 
 
 1 P. T. Forsyth. 
 
244 GOD'S INNER CIRCLE 
 
 that mysterious interior of things where " cherubim and seraphim 
 continually do cry, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty." 
 
 ■J The necessity of an inward stillness hath appeared clear to 
 my mind. In true silence strength is renewed, and the mind is 
 weaned from all things, save as they may be enjoyed in the Divine 
 will; and a lowliness in outward living, opposite to worldly 
 honour, becomes truly acceptable to us. In the desire after 
 outward gain the mind is prevented from a perfect attention to 
 the voice of Christ; yet being weaned from all things, except 
 as they may be enjoyed in the Divine will, the pure light shines 
 into the soul. Where the fruits of the spirit which is of this 
 world are brought forth by many who profess to be led by the 
 Spirit of truth, and cloudiness is felt to be gathering over the 
 visible church, the sincere in heart, who abide in true stillness, 
 and are exercised therein before the Lord for His name's sake, 
 have knowledge of Christ in the fellowship of His sufferings; 
 and inward thankfulness is felt at times, that through Divine 
 love our own wisdom is cast out, and that forward, active part in 
 us is subjected, which would rise and do something without the 
 pure leadings of the spirit of Christ.^ 
 
 ^ Don't be too much taken up with excitements social and 
 intellectual. The depths of life are still and ought not to be 
 ruffled by every wanton breeze, else they lose the capacity which 
 they ought to possess of being that centre of rest, and peace, and 
 content, to which we can withdraw when wearied of the world 
 which is too much with us. Life to be worth anything at all 
 must have a moral basis. After all, it is the root of the matter, 
 unless the universe was made in jest.^ 
 
 3. The Church is, in God's idea, a home where we recover from 
 the fatigue of effort, when we take a new hold of high purposes 
 from which our hand had slackened ; a place of compensations ; 
 a place from which we see our life more truly, for we see 
 more than itself. Here, in this house, we may feel something, 
 some one, even God, in the form and manner of Jesus Christ, 
 coming between us and the things which would dishearten us and 
 work despair. Here we may sit under a shadow, under the shadow 
 of thought and faith. Here we may come under the rebuke and 
 deliverance of high and unworldly considerations ; here we may 
 receive the emancipation which comes the moment we adopt the 
 
 ^ The Journal of John Woolman, 29. 
 ' Memoir of Robert Herbert Story , 401. 
 
PSALM xci. I 
 
 245 
 
 spiritual view and seek not our own will but the will of God. To 
 seek the face of God in worship is the instinct of the soul which has 
 become aware of itself and its surroundings. Life and death are 
 the great preachers. It is they who ring the church bells. That 
 instinct for God, that instinct for the shadow, will never pass 
 away. It may only become perverted and debased. The 
 foundation — which is man's need for God, for guidance, for 
 cleansing, for support, and that again is but God's search for man, 
 God's overtures to man — the foundation standeth sure. 
 
 ^ Whatever temple science may build there will always need 
 to be hard by a Gothic chapel for wounded souls.^ 
 
 " A little chamber " built " upon the wall," 
 With stool and table, candlestick and bed, 
 Where he might sit, or kneel, or lay his head 
 
 At night or sultry noontide: this was all 
 
 A prophet's need: but in that chamber small 
 
 What mighty prayers arose, what grace was shed, 
 What gifts were given — potent to wake the dead, 
 
 And from its viewless flight a soul recall! 
 
 And still what miracles of grace are wrought 
 In many a lonely chamber with shut door. 
 
 Where God our Father is in secret sought. 
 And shows Himself in mercy more and more! 
 
 Dim upper rooms with God's own glory shine. 
 
 And souls are lifted to the life Divine.^ 
 
 4. The secret place is not to be limited to a particular locality, 
 but means nearness to God, the close fellowship into which the 
 soul enters, the inner circle of communion in which the soul 
 realizes vividly the Divine presence. Some may associate such 
 communion with one locality, and some with another, according 
 to their individual experience. But this matters not. The 
 essential thing is the nearness of the soul to God, its entering 
 into His presence with the full consciousness that He graciously 
 regards it, and will hear its prayer and accept its homage, 
 breathing its feelings and desires into His ear, and spreading all 
 its case before Him. His is not that distant and formal inter- 
 course which one man may hold with another when, in the open 
 
 1 F. Paulsen, Ethics. » R. Wilton. 
 
246 GOD'S INNER CIRCLE 
 
 and crowded places of the city, they have to restrain themselves 
 because of being exposed to the observation of others ; it is that 
 intimate and unrestrained intercourse which friend holds with friend 
 when they meet in privacy, where no other eye sees or ear hears, 
 and each communicates to the other not the things which are 
 open to public observation, but the secret and hidden feelings of 
 the heart. Eeverently, although freely and confidently, does the 
 worshipper in the secret place speak to God as a child to its 
 father, giving expression to all his feelings, whatsoever they may 
 be. 
 
 ^ " Fellowship with the living God," says Andrew Bonar in 
 his graphic little sketch of Samuel Eutherford, " is a little dis- 
 tinguishing feature in the holiness given by the Holy Ghost. . . . 
 Rutherford could sometimes say, * I have been so near Him, that 
 I have said I take instruments (documents by way of attestation) 
 that this is the Lord,' and he could from experience declare, * I 
 dare avouch, the saints know not the length and largeness of 
 the sweet earnest, and of the sweet green sheaves before the 
 harvest, that might be had on this side of the water, if we only 
 took more pains.' . . . All this," adds Bonar suggestively, " is 
 from the pen of a man who was a metaphysician, a controversialist, 
 a leader in the Church, and learned in ancient scholastic lore." 
 
 Where is that secret place of the Most High ? 
 And who is He ? Where shall we look for Him 
 That dwelleth there? Between the cherubim, 
 That o'er the seat of grace, with constant eye, 
 And outspread wing, brood everlastingly? 
 Or shall we seek that deeper meaning dim, 
 And as we may, walk, flutter, soar, and swim, 
 From deep to deep of the void, fathomless sky ? 
 Oh ! seek not there the secret of the Lord 
 In what hatli been, or what may never be; 
 But seek the shadow of the mystic word — 
 The shadow of a truth thou canst not see: 
 There build thy nest, and, like a nestling bird, 
 Find all thy safety in thy secrecy.^ 
 
 5. How are we to maintain our life of fellowship with God ? 
 How arc we to dwell in the Secret Place ? The Psalmist doubt- 
 less would find guidance in the ways and ministries of the Temple. 
 
 ^ Hartley Coleridge. 
 
PSALM xci. I 
 
 247 
 
 (1) The spirit of reverence must be cherished. There was to 
 be no tramping in the sacred courts. He was to move quietly, as 
 in the presence of something august and unspeakable. And that 
 is the very first requisite if we would dwell in the secret place — 
 the reverent spirit and the reverent step. The man who strides 
 through life with flippant tramp will never get beyond the outer 
 courts. He may " get on," he will never " get in " ; he may find 
 here and there an empty shell, he will never find " the pearl of 
 great price." Irreverence can never open the gate into the secret 
 place. 
 
 (2) The second thing requisite in the Temple ministry to 
 any one who sought the fellowship of the secret place was the 
 spirit of sacrifice. No man was permitted to come empty-handed 
 in his movements towards the secret place. " Bring an offering, 
 and come into his courts." And in that Temple-ministry the 
 Psalmist would recognize another of the essential requisites if he 
 would dwell in the secret place. That offering meant that a man 
 must surrender all that he possesses, of gifts and goods, to his 
 quest of the central things of life. For there is this strange 
 thing about the strait gate which opens into the secret place : it 
 is too strait for the man who brings nothing ; it is abundantly 
 wide for the man who brings his all. No man deserves the 
 hallowed intimacies of life, the holy tabernacle of the Most High, 
 who does not bring upon the errand all that he is, and all that he 
 has. Life's crown demands life's all. 
 
 (3) And other Temple-ministries in which the Psalmist would 
 find principles of guidance would be the requirement of prayer 
 and praise. " Sing unto the Lord a new song." Such was to be 
 one of the exercises of those who sought the grace and favour of 
 the holy place. They were to come wearing the garment of 
 praise. And therefore the Psalmist knew that praise was to be 
 one of the means by which he was to possess the intimacies 
 of the secret place. And praise is still one of the ministries by 
 which we reach the central heart of things, the hallowed abode 
 where we come to share " the secret of the Lord." And praise is 
 not fawning upon God, flattering Him, piling up words of empty 
 eulogy ; it is the hallowed contemplation of the greatness of God, 
 and the grateful appreciation of the goodness of God. And with 
 praise there goes prayer — the recognition of our dependence upon 
 
248 GOD'S INNER CIRCLE 
 
 the Highest, the fellowship of desire, the humble speech which co- 
 operates in the reception and distribution of grace. 
 
 ^ " I passed my time in great peace, content to spend the 
 remainder of my life there, if such should be the will of God. I 
 employed part of my time in writing religious songs. I, and my 
 maid La Gautiere, who was with me in prison, committed them 
 to heart as fast as I made them. Together we sang praises to 
 Thee, 0 our God ! It sometimes seemed to me as if I were a little 
 bird whom the Lord had placed in a cage, and that I had nothing 
 to do now but to sing. The joy of my heart gave a brightness to 
 the objects around me. The stones of my prison looked in my 
 eyes like rubies, f esteemed them more than all the gaudy 
 brilliancies of a vain world. My heart was full of that joy which 
 Thou givest to them who love Thee in the midst of their greatest 
 crosses." ^ 
 
 Let praise devote thy work and skill employ 
 Thy whole mind, and thy heart be lost in joy. 
 Well-doing bringeth pride, this constant thought 
 Humility, that thy best done is naught. 
 Man doeth nothing well, be it great or small. 
 Save to praise God ; but that hath saved all : 
 For God requires no more than thou hast done, 
 And takes thy work to bless it for His own.^ 
 
 ^ The wise man will act like the bee, and he will fly out in 
 order to settle with care, intelligence, and prudence on all the 
 gifts and on all the sweetness which he has experienced, and on 
 all the good which God has done to him ; and through the rays 
 of the sun and his own inward observation he will experience a 
 multitude of consolations and blessings. And he will not rest on 
 any flower of all these gifts, but, laden with gratitude and praise, 
 he will fly back again toward the home in which he longs to 
 dwell and rest for evermore with God.^ 
 
 IL 
 
 Under His Shadow. 
 
 The man who commits himself to God, and dwells in Him, 
 has this promise, that he will abide under the shadow of the 
 Almighty. There are two names of God used in the text, " The 
 
 1 Madame Guyon, in Life^ by T. C. Upham. * R. Bridges. 
 
 8 M. Maeterlinck, Ruyshroeck and the Mystics, 130. 
 
PSALM xci. I 
 
 249 
 
 Most High " and " The Almighty " ; and when we remember the 
 deep religious significance which the different names of God had 
 for the Hebrew, and the careful way in which they are used 
 throughout the whole of the Old Testament, so that in general 
 it is true that that name of God is used which alone serves to 
 indicate the particular aspect of God's character or government 
 upon which the writer wished to lay stress ; when we remember 
 this, we are justified in looking for a meaning in the distinction 
 between the two names of God used here. The man to whom the 
 promise is made seeks to dwell in the secret place of " the Most 
 High." He seeks to be near God as the " Most High " God, the 
 God of surpassing excellence. He desires the company of Him 
 who is " Most High " because He is most holy. The character 
 which he contemplates in God is not so much His power as His 
 holiness. He desires to be near God, not because of what God 
 can do for him, but because of what God is ; it is in the thought 
 of God's goodness that he rests secure. It is the holiness of 
 Jehovah that attracts him ; it is the beauty of the Lord his God 
 that he would behold continually. To the man who thus disin- 
 terestedly seeks after Him God will reveal Himself in the character 
 of the Almighty. The power of the Almighty shall be round about 
 him. " Because he hath set his love upon me, therefore will I de- 
 liver him ; I will set him on high, because he hath known my name." 
 This man is to " abide under the shadow of the Almighty." 
 
 This wonderful Psalm has always been a favourite with the 
 Mystic and the Quietist. For it expresses what we may call the 
 Beatitude of the Inner Circle. Most religions have distinguished 
 carefully between the rank and file of the faithful, and that select 
 company of initiates who taste the hidden wisdom and have access 
 to the secret shrine. From the nature of the case some such 
 distinction exists even in the Kingdom of Heaven. Christ Him- 
 self allowed a difference between " His own friends " and those 
 many disciples who are servants still. Only we must never forget 
 on what this difference depends. The Father, who is Lord of 
 heaven and earth, has seen good to hide His secrets from the wise 
 and prudent, and to reveal them unto babes. While from the 
 inmost sanctuary of Christian experience a Voice cries continually, 
 " Whosoever will let him come freely — if he be content to come 
 as a little child." ^ 
 
 1 T. H. Darlow, The Upwa/rd Calling, 38. 
 
250 GOD'S INNER CIRCLE 
 
 1. What does the Psalmist mean by "abiding under the 
 shadow " ? Does he mean to say that the shadow of the Almighty 
 rests on the secret place ? At first sight it would seem so, but 
 such a conclusion would not be in harmony with the trend of 
 thought throughout the Psalm. What he appears really to teach 
 is that, when a man regularly communes with God in secret, then, 
 wherever he goes, the shadow of the Almighty shall rest upon 
 him, and in times of trial and danger shall shelter and protect 
 him. As the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night 
 went before the children of Israel, and was both a guide and a 
 shelter to them, so the shadow of the Almighty shall ever rest upon 
 those who dwell in the secret place of the Most High. A shadow 
 is produced when some object intercepts the light. Here it re- 
 presents God placing Himself in front of the sun, to screen His 
 people from heat. The sun shall not smite them by day, nor the 
 moon by night. 
 
 ^ The last poems of Miss Havergal are published with the 
 title. Under His Shadow, and the preface gives the reason for the 
 name. She said, " I should like the title to be, Under His Shadow. 
 I seem to see four pictures by that : under the shadow of a rock 
 in a weary plain ; under the shadow of a tree ; closer still, under 
 the shadow of His wing ; nearest and closest, in the shadow of 
 His hand. Surely that hand must be the pierced hand, that may 
 oftentimes press us sorely, and yet evermore encircling, upholding, 
 and shadowing." ^ 
 
 2. Now it is one thing to be touched by the shadow of the 
 Almighty, another to abide within that shadow. One has not 
 lived long, or has lived only on the surface, who has never for a 
 moment been touched by the shadow of God. It may have fallen 
 upon us in one or other of several experiences. It may have come 
 to us in some reverse of fortune, in some change in our prospects. 
 Or it may have come to us in some bodily illness or the threaten- 
 ing of some illness. Or it may have come to us, as so much with 
 regard to the unseen world comes to us all, in the great silence 
 of a bereavement. But there is probably not one of adult years 
 who has not had at least one experience which has touched him 
 to the quick and has brought him for the time being face to face 
 with God. And yet, if we are strict with ourselves, we shall have 
 
 » C. H. Spurgeon, Till He Comet 23. 
 
PSALM xci. I 
 
 251 
 
 to confess that as the trouble eased the high seriousness which it 
 brought began to pass away, so that probably not one of us has 
 worked out into our life and character the holy intentions which 
 we proposed to ourselves on a certain day when our heart was 
 sore. We have lost from ourselves a certain dignity, a certain 
 superiority to the world which was ours in days that we can still 
 recall, when some suspense was keeping our heart open, when in 
 some precious concern of our life we were depending utterly upon 
 God for something. To be touched — that is the work of God, the 
 work of life upon us ; whereas to abide requires the consent of our 
 will. In order to abide it needs that the whole man, who knows 
 that in the personal crisis God was singling him out, shall live 
 henceforth by the wisdom and calling of that hour. It needs 
 that he shall depart from all the iniquity which the light of that 
 holy hour revealed to him. 
 
 II The original meaning of the word here translated " abide " 
 is " to wrap up in a garment for warmth and rest during the cool 
 of the night." The reflexive form of the verb is here used : " He 
 that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall wrap 
 himself round in the shadow of the God of Might." Nearness to 
 God is to be to him as the garment which the traveller wraps 
 around him as he goes to sleep in the desert, when the chills of 
 night descend. God's immediate presence is to be wrapped round 
 about him for his protection.^ 
 
 3. God's protection does not mean exemption from outward 
 calamities. But there is an evil in the calamity that will never 
 come near the man who is sheltered under God's wing. The 
 physical external event may be entirely the same to him as to 
 another who is not covered with His feathers. Here are two 
 partners in a business ; the one is a Christian man, and the other is 
 not. A common disaster overwhelms them. They become bank- 
 rupts. Is insolvency the same to the one as it is to the other ? 
 Here are two men on board a ship, the one putting his trust in 
 God, the other thinking it all nonsense to trust anything but him- 
 self. They are both drowned. Is drowning the same to the two ? 
 As their corpses lie side by side, you may say of the one, but only 
 of the one, "There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any 
 
 ^ A. S. Renton. 
 
252 
 
 GOD'S INNER CIRCLE 
 
 plague come nigh thy dwelling." For the protection that is 
 granted to faith is to be understood only by faith. 
 
 T[ " If you believe in God," wrote Eobert Louis Stevenson, 
 " where is there any more room for terror ? If you are sure that 
 God, in the long-run, means kindness by you, you should be 
 happy." Fighting a losing battle with death, he wrote: "The 
 tragedy of things works itself out blacker and blacker. Does it 
 shake my cast-iron faith ? I cannot say that it does. I believe in 
 an ultimate decency of things ; aye, and if I woke in hell, should 
 still believe it." Let us thank God for the faith of that high and 
 brave soldier of suffering, going up and down the earth in quest 
 of health, and singing as he went : 
 
 If to feel in the ink of the slough, 
 
 And sink of the mire. 
 
 Veins of glory and fire 
 
 Eun through and transpierce and transpire, 
 
 And a secret purpose of glory in every part. 
 
 And the answering glory of l3attle fill my heart; 
 
 To thrill with the joy of girded men, 
 
 To go on forever and fail and go on again, 
 
 And be mauled to the earth and arise. 
 
 And contend for the shade of a word and a thing not 
 
 seen with the eyes: 
 With the half of a broken hope for a pillow at night; 
 That somehow the right is the right 
 And the smooth shall bloom from the rough : 
 Lord, if that were enough? 
 
 4. But the promise is absolutely true in a far higher region 
 — the region of spiritual defence. For no man who lies under 
 the shadow of God, and has his heart filled with the continual 
 consciousness of that Presence, is likely to fall before the assaults 
 of evil that tempt him away from God ; and the defence which 
 He gives in that region is yet more magnificently impregnable 
 than the defence which He gives against external evils. For, as 
 the New Testament teaches us, we are kept from sin, not by any 
 outward breastplate or armour, not even by the Divine wing lying 
 above us to cover us, but by the indwelling Christ in our hearts. 
 His Spirit within us makes us " free from the law of sin and death," 
 and conquerors over all temptations. Every step taken into a 
 higher, holier life secures a completer immunity from the power 
 
PSALM xci. I 
 
 253 
 
 of evil. Virtucally there is no temptation to those who climb high 
 enough ; they still suffer the trial of their faith and principle, 
 but they have no evil thought, no affinity with evil ; it exercises 
 over them no fascination ; it is to them as though it were not. 
 Never deal with temptation on low utilitarian grounds of health, 
 reputation, or interest. If you have a vice, convict it at Sinai ; 
 arraign it at the bar of the Judgment Day ; make it ashamed of 
 itself at the feet of Christ ; blind it with heaven ; scorch it with 
 hell ; take it into the upper air where it cannot get its breath, and 
 choke it. 
 
 And chok'st thou not him in the upper air 
 His strength he will still on the earth repair. 
 
 ^ Migratory birds invisible to the eye have been detected by 
 the telescope crossing the disc of the sun six miles above the earth. 
 They have found one of the secret places of the Most High ; far 
 above the earth, invisible to the human eye, hidden in the light, 
 they were delightfully safe from the fear of evil. Thus it is with 
 the soul that soars into the heavenly places ; no arrow can reach 
 it, no fowler betray it, no creature of prey make it afraid: it 
 abides in the shadow of the Almighty.^ 
 
 How good it is, when weaned from all beside, 
 With God alone the soul is satisfied. 
 
 Deep hidden in His heart ! 
 How good it is, redeemed, and washed, and shriven, 
 To dwell, a cloistered soul, with Christ in heaven. 
 
 Joined, never more to part ! 
 How good the heart's still chamber thus to close 
 
 On all but God alone — 
 There in the sweetness of His love repose. 
 
 His love unknown ! 
 All else for ever lost — forgotten all 
 
 That else can be ; 
 In rapture undisturbed, 0 Lord, to fall 
 
 And worship Thee.^ 
 
 ^ W. L. Watkinson, The Ashes of Roses, 117. 
 8 Frances Bevan, Hymns of Tcr Steegcn, 36. 
 
Strength and Beauty. 
 
 «S5 
 
Literature. 
 
 Goodwin (H.), Parish Sermons, iv. 95. 
 Holden (J. S.), Life's Flood-Tide, 172. 
 
 Kirkpatrick (A. F.), The Booh of Psalms (Cambridge Bible), 577. 
 
 Maclaren (A.), The Booh of Psalms (Expositor's Bible), iii. 65. 
 
 Purves (G. T.), Faith and Life, 177. 
 
 Simpson (A. L.), The Near and the Far VieWy 219. 
 
 Wilson (F. E,.), The Supreme Service, 15. 
 
 Wirgman (A. T.), The Spirit of Liberty, 104. 
 
 Christian World Pulpit, xlviii. 180 (F. L. Goodspeed) ; liii. 157 (C. S. 
 Home) ; Ixii. 238 (W. J. K. Little) ; Ixx. 23 (J. Waddell) ; Ixxiv. " 
 147 (F. Tite). 
 
 Churchman's Pulpit : Harvest Thanksgiving and Choir Festivals, Pt. 
 99, p. 399 (G. A. Poole). 
 
 i 
 
Strength and Beauty. 
 
 Strength and beauty are in his sanctuary.— Ps. xcvi. 6. 
 
 The Psalmist, in that lyrical outburst of adoration from which the 
 text is taken, professes to have discovered two qualities which 
 are revealed in combination in the character of God, and which, 
 such is the suggestion. He will Himself communicate to devout, 
 worshipful, and aspiring souls. These two qualities are strength 
 and beauty. Neither quality is of itself uncommon ; it is their 
 combination that is so rare. Somehow in this world the strong 
 is not usually the beautiful, and the beautiful is not the strong. 
 We think of the beautiful in nature as the fragile, the delicate, 
 the evanescent. We think of the strong, and with its massive 
 solidity it is difficult to associate any thought of grace and loveli- 
 ness. But this psalm was a hymn for the Temple ; and if it be 
 true, as we suppose, that there yet remained many of the glorious 
 pillars which adorned that magnificent structure, it is conceivable 
 that they suggested to the Psalmist's mind this rare combination 
 of qualities. For these pillars of the Temple were of radiant 
 marble, stately and splendid in themselves, and with the added 
 decoration of capitals nobly carved in all manners of exquisite 
 device. And not the pillars alone, but the whole majestic pile 
 itself, was it not the standing witness to the truth that the God 
 whom it represented to men was at once strong and beautiful ? 
 For its durability and solidity was equalled only by its magnifi- 
 cence ; the strength of its stone by the beauty of its colouring and 
 the glory of its decoration. The architects of that ancient cathedral 
 seem to have derived their ideas from nature ; and to have seen 
 that He who laid the enduring foundations of the earth decorated 
 .the world which He made with the gold of the crocus, the crimson 
 iof the field-lily, or the blue of the gentian and the harebell; and 
 they built for Him a fane which, like the world He built for fehem, 
 PS, xxv.-cxix. — 17 
 
 i 
 
258 STRENGTH AND BEAUTY 
 
 was strong and beautiful, massive, but full of delicate colour. As 
 
 was this temple of their God, so was the God of the Temple — 
 in His Divine Being they felt there must be this glorious com- 
 bination of strength and beauty. 
 
 ^ If it was Solomon's temple of which the Hebrew writer of 
 this psalm spoke, we can imagine some of the features which he 
 must have had in mind. The immense blocks of stone, of which 
 the foundation was composed, and the great Lebanon cedars which 
 were brought by Hiram, king of Tyre, explain the reference to the 
 strength of the building. Though not large, it was a solid, massive 
 structure, built to last through ages, while the foundations them- 
 selves rested on imperishable rock. And then the resources of 
 art were exhausted to make it beautiful as well as strong. The 
 interior was overlaid with pure gold, on which were carved figures 
 of cherubim and palm trees and flowers. All the utensils of 
 worship were of the same costly metal and elaborately orna- 
 mented ; while precious stones gleamed amid the gold and Tyrian 
 tapestries hung on every side. The wealthiest of kings lavished 
 his riches; the most sldlled artificers taxed their art; the ad- 
 venturous mariners laid tribute upon distant lands to make 
 beautiful the Temple of Jehovah. It thus seemed to combine the 
 two elements of architectural perfection — strength and beauty.^ 
 
 1. 
 
 Strength. 
 
 1. It is better that a building should be strong than that it 
 should be ornamental. And the same is true of character also. 
 Ornament, moreover, ought to accompany strength. It is not 
 good art to put into a building a useless feature merely because 
 it is beautiful. The true artist will beautify the useful. The 
 practical purpose will be first. So a character which aims only 
 to be beautiful is not to be admired. It merely becomes bric-^- 
 brac. It has the taint of cosmetics. The man who is absorbed in 
 the mere adornment of his character is not much beyond the man 
 who is absorbed in the adornment of his body. No, beauty must 
 be superimposed upon strength. The practical usefulness and 
 moral power of life are to be the first things sought. Then you 
 
 1 G. T. Purves, Faith and Life, 177. 
 
PSALM xcvi. 6 
 
 259 
 
 have something worth adorning. It is the hard stone that takes 
 the best polish. It is the strong, earnest character that may be 
 made the most beautiful. 
 
 ^ In the life of Archbishop Temple we read : " He stands out 
 from amongst the men of his day, a notable figure, unlike others, 
 cast in a larger mould, nobler than most, more self-reliant, 
 more absolutely incapable of doing anything mean or of acting 
 from self-interested motives; he worked harder and longer; he 
 was more unworldly; he grasped more firmly the substance 
 of life ; he was a greater man ; but a man nevertheless, working 
 with and for his fellows, compelling the admiration of all, but 
 winning most love from those who knew best the man's heart 
 within him. To the elders who are left he is a great memory, 
 and as they look back and realize to what extent they lived in 
 him they fancy that life now lies behind them. But it was a real 
 hfe which they shared, and it still remains ; for it belonged to the 
 eternal world, and is of those things ' which cannot be moved.' 
 Even its methods will last long; they had always about them 
 something of the enduring spirit of the man. And thus the life 
 points onward and has a meaning for those who are young. The 
 air of perpetual spring blows round the old man's grave: the 
 cnemory speaks reality and hope, and these are the memories 
 tvhich live." ^ Yet to those who knew him best his strength was 
 aot more notable than the depth and tenderness of his affections. 
 
 2. Some foolish people associate religion with weakness. 
 Perhaps some weak Christians are responsible for this. But 
 }here is nothing weak about true religion. The man who lays 
 lOld upon God is strong. " Strong in the Lord, and in the power 
 )f his might." There is nothing weak about faith. It can 
 -emove mountains ; it can carry men through fire and water, and 
 las inspired the noblest heroism that the world has ever seen. 
 Chere is nothing weak about truth or righteousness. Falseness is 
 veak ; unrighteousness is weak. But to be really good is to be 
 itrong. In the Bible weakness is not pitied but condemned, and 
 ihe watchword to believers over and over again is " Be strong ! " 
 Che great essential of Christian character is strength — strength 
 0 overcome evil and to labour for the good of others. 
 
 H In February, 1865, Dr. Punshon delivered in Exeter Hall 
 lis famous lecture on William Wilberforce, the thoroughness 
 »f whose religious decision was thus referred to: "With the 
 * Frederick Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, ii. 711. 
 
26o STRENGTH AND BEAUTY 
 
 accidents of birth and station in his favour, with youth upon 
 his side, fortune at his feet, and fame and jjower within the 
 grasp of his outstretched hand — when life was in its summer, 
 and he was compassed, so to speak, with its gladness, and music, 
 and flowers — with everything at hand which it is deemed the 
 most costly to surrender — he stepped forth in the sight of the 
 world, for which his name had already a charm, took the crown of 
 his manhood, and laid it humbly at the feet of Christ. I can see 
 in the act a courage of that sort which is the truest and rarest, 
 but which is, notwithstanding, within the reach of you all. The 
 true idea of power is not embodied in Hercules or Samson, brute 
 forces with brute appetites, takers of strong cities, but slaves to 
 their own passion. Nor is it in the brave soldier who can storm 
 a fortress at the point of the bayonet, but who yields his man- 
 hood to the enticements of sinners, and hides the faith which the 
 scoffer's sneer has made him frightened to avow. The real power 
 is there when a man has mastered himself, when he has trampled 
 upon the craven and the shameful in all their disguises, and when, 
 ready on all fit occasions to bear himself worthily among his 
 fellows and ' give the world assurance of a man,' he dares to say 
 to that world, the while it scorns and slanders him, ' I will not 
 serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set 
 up.'"i 
 
 3. A man who loves and trusts God cannot but be a strong 
 character. He will not be easily moved by any temptation. He 
 will not be unduly anxious about the future. He will be in no 
 hurry. He will have the calm assurance that, be the present 
 mysteries what they may, all is going well. And he will feel that 
 his life is inseparably linked with the Highest One Himself. 
 "Love is strong as death," says the old writer; and if we see 
 instances of the love of man to man in which this is true, much 
 more is it true that in proportion as a human soul loves God will 
 it be firm against evil and strong for all good. The mighty 
 granite masses out of which we quarry the material for our great 
 buildings were once in a fluid, molten state, but they have 
 crystallized into the hardest of rocks. So will belief in God and 
 Christ, and love to God in Christ, crystallize a soul into the 
 strongest of characters. 
 
 ^ Unwearied in their efforts to prevent Luther's appearance, 
 the papal ambassadors had at last succeeded in procuring an 
 * F. W. Macdonakl, Life of IF. Morley Funshon, 229. 
 
PSALM xcvi. 6 
 
 261 
 
 Imperial edict for the delivery and burning of Luther's books. 
 This was practically a condemnation in advance, and seemed to 
 render Luther's presence unnecessary; but the Emperor tried 
 to steer between the two parties by saying that Luther was 
 summoned only for the purpose of having him recant. At 
 Weimar this edict reached him, and its intention was immediately 
 seen. The Imperial herald, who was favourably disposed to 
 Luther, asked whether he would proceed. Only for a brief 
 moment did he tremble ; but quickly regaining his self-possession, 
 he answered: "Yes. I will proceed, and entrust myself to the 
 Emperor's protection," thus foiling the plan of his adversaries to 
 have him condemned for contumacy in disobeying the summons. 
 Worn out and sick, he wrote to Spalatin from Frankfort : " Christ 
 lives ; and we shall enter Worms, though all the gates of Hell and 
 powers of the air be unwilling." ^ 
 
 XL 
 
 Beauty. 
 
 i 1. The next thing is beauty. Some Christians are content 
 with the strength, and care little for the beautj'-, of the Christian 
 life. They are stern in their adhesion to principle, careless of the 
 lesser charities of life, apt to be harsh in their condemnation of 
 error and sin. Every one knows their worth, believes in their 
 I honesty, would trust implicitly to their integrity. But they do 
 not win love by their gracious bearing, their kind words, their 
 i charitable construction of men and things. In a word, they have 
 ' the strength, but they lack something of the beauty of the Christian 
 i character. We have always the practical, hard-headed people with 
 us (like Dickens' " Mr. Gradgrind "), who say, " Never mind about 
 the beautiful, give us the useful, the durable," and who would re- 
 gard all ornamentation as useless and extravagant. But God has 
 a ministry both for strength and for beauty. He made not only 
 things great but things beautiful. " 0, worship the Lord in the 
 beauty of holiness," says the Psalmist, and we must remember 
 tliere is also a holiness of beauty. In the fabric and services of 
 the sanctuary nothing is too beautiful or too good for God. 
 "Jerry-building" and cheap fittings are out of place here. God 
 
 * H. E. Jacobs, Martin Luther, 184. 
 
262 STRENGTH AND BEAUTY 
 
 should have the best of workmanship, the loveliest of music, and 
 
 the perfection of reverence and order. 
 
 ^ If you behold the sky with its peerless blue, the meadow 
 with its emerald green, the grain-field with its yellow gold, the 
 lake with its silver white, you will see that beauty has been 
 wrought into all the patterns of nature. What skilled artist can 
 put another touch upon the rainbow, or mix colours that will 
 heighten the beauty of the transfigured cloud-land ? The spring 
 in its fresh green, the winter in its robes of pearl, the cataract, 
 the crystal spray, the pearly dew, the ocean all aglow with 
 phosphorescence, every wavelet flashing and sparkling as it caps 
 and breaks, the towering mountains, with their ceaseless lights 
 and shadows, the jewelled sphere of night, the glorious trans- 
 parency of day, the sunset glories God has hidden beneath the 
 surface of the roughest shell — all these declare with a thousand 
 voices that God loves beauty as well as strength.^ 
 
 2. We must have the strength first, and -beauty afterward. 
 It is disaster to reverse this order — to try to get beauty and then 
 have strength. The magnificent Brooklyn Bridge, when viewed 
 at a distance, is a beautiful poem. But the beauty is dependent 
 on the strength of mighty abutments which reach down far below 
 the river bed and take hold of the foundations of the earth. In 
 everything, both artistic and moral, strength is the stalk ; beauty 
 is the flower that blooms on it. 
 
 If The great porch of Solomon's temple was upheld by two 
 famous pillars of bronze, cast and adorned by the most skilful 
 workmen of the day. Those massive pillars, called Jachin and 
 Boaz, have been described and discussed in a thousand books, and 
 have been the cause of endless speculation. The Biblical descrip- 
 tion closes with this suggestive sentence, "on the top of the 
 pillars was lily work." The columns that supported ended in 
 tracery that adorned. The strength that upheld blossomed out 
 into grace and beauty at the top. In our day there is a great 
 desire for the lily work without the pillars, a vain longing for the 
 graces of life and the beauties of character without the supporting 
 power of truth and duty. There are thousands of men who would 
 like the virtues of the fathers, but who do not want the faith 
 which made them virtuous. They would like to have reproduced 
 in their life the qualities of soul which marked the early 
 Christians, the Reformers, and the Puritans ; but not their sturdy 
 
 * F. L. Goodspeed. 
 
PSALM xcvi. 6 
 
 263 
 
 faith, not their tenacity of conviction, not their majestic con- 
 I science or their tremendous hold on things unseen. They want 
 I the simplicity and affection of the Waldenses, but not their faith 
 in God ; the audacity and fearlessness of John Knox and Oliver 
 Cromwell, without their vivid sense of the Divine Presence ; the 
 morality of John Eobinson and Miles Standish, without their 
 heroic creed ; the integrity of Washington and Lincoln, without 
 their trust in a sustaining and overruling God. Mothers are 
 anxious that their daughters should shine in every social 
 accomplishment; that their sons should be men of talent and 
 of skill; that their homes should be beautiful with music and 
 art and all kindly grace. But they are not so solicitous about 
 the solid foundations of character. 
 
 III. 
 
 Strength and Beauty. 
 
 " Know ye not," says the Apostle, " that ye are the temple 
 of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you ? " The 
 sanctuary of God is a human soul that is governed and moulded 
 by God. Such a soul is His temple. Of this it is true that 
 strength and beauty are in His sanctuary. In other words, a 
 true Christian character is the realization of the highest ideal of 
 what a man should be. 
 
 1. A noble character must contain in high degree, and in 
 right proportions, just those two elements of which the text 
 speaks — strength and beauty. There must be strength of 
 character. You cannot make a house out of sand, because the 
 particles do not cohere to one another. Neither can you make 
 a worthy character out of irresolution, vacillation, doubt, fear, 
 instability. A true man must have ruling convictions, con- 
 centration and constancy of purpose, firmness in the right as he 
 sees it, power to endure reverses, positive purposes and ideas. 
 These make a strong character. A true man must also have 
 these elements of strength adorned by gentler virtues. Manli- 
 ness is not mere strength. There must be refinement of feeling, 
 humanity, and benevolence, gentleness and patience. These 
 make character beautiful. And the two elements must combine 
 
264 STRENGTH AND BEAUTY 
 
 in right proportion. A merely strong character is as one-sided 
 and imperfect as a pugilist is an abnormal specimen of physical 
 manhood. A merely gentle, loving character is often pitiably 
 weak and unpractical. A true man is strong in his convictions, 
 but gentle in his judgments ; constant of purpose, but gentle to 
 the weak and mindful of others' rights; positive but humble; 
 energetic but meek. This is the ideal which Christianity has 
 taught the world. 
 
 ^ God has room in His Church for both strength and beauty. 
 Is there not a parable in the fact that Jubal, the inventor of 
 music, and Tubal-cain, the first blacksmith, were brothers ? 
 When Tubal-cain set up the first smithy he was starting an 
 industry which has been of great use in the world ; but when 
 Jubal struck chords of music from his first primitive harp, he laid 
 succeeding generations of men under no less obligation.^ 
 
 ^ The finest and most impressive effects are often produced 
 by the combination of things that are unlike each other. The 
 painter recognizes this principle when he brings his darkest 
 shadows to heighten the effect of his clearest lights, or contrasts 
 the jpeaceful life of some humble cottage home with the stately 
 magnificence of the stern mountains that surround it. The 
 architect appeals to the same principle when he crowns his 
 columns with beautiful capitals, and relieves the massive masonry 
 of his walls with delicate tracery. The massive wall and the 
 marble column suggest the thought of strength ; while the delicate 
 carvings and the sculptured friezes appeal to the sense of beauty. 
 The thought which lies deep in the artist's mind, and to which he 
 strives to give expression in his work, is that there is a natural 
 alliance between strength and beauty. He is not satisfied with 
 the stern severity of mere strength, nor does he allow the idea of 
 beauty to exclude all other thoughts. But he endeavours to 
 clothe and crown strong things with beauty, and to support 
 beautiful things by strength. 
 
 2. Strong characters are not rare, and beautiful characters are 
 not rare ; but characters that are both strong and beautiful are 
 rare. It is so difficult to be firm and not to be hard, to be 
 inflexibly just and not to be cold, to have the solid virtues that 
 make for strength, and with them the soft and gracious qualities 
 that command our love. Some men and women have the decor- 
 ative virtues — they are full of generosity, noble impulse, charity 
 * F. R. Wilwsou, TJie Supreme Service, 17, 
 
PSALM xcvi. 6 
 
 265 
 
 and magnanimity, and enthusiasm ; but they have not with these 
 the strength of mind and will that can resist the " taking " and 
 I popular tendency if it be forbidden by sound principles of justice 
 I and of practical common sense. Some people, on the other hand, 
 I have only the fundamental qualities — they are just, but they 
 cannot be generous ; honest, but never liberal ; truthful, but never 
 merciful. They have principle, but they have never yielded to 
 a wise enthusiasm, or been moved out of their slow, plodding habit 
 by some sacred zeal for a great and good cause. The world yields 
 to the strong men ; it admires them, it honours them ; but it does 
 not love them. They command its respect, but they do not 
 engage its affection. On the other hand, the world's heart is 
 drawn out to the beautiful lives, but it discovers to its pain that 
 it must not lean upon them. They cannot be trusted in our hours 
 of real trial and perplexity. What they gain in heart they seem 
 to lose in head ; and we grow conscious that they are tender and 
 generous and kind, but they are not wise. Of how few is it true 
 that they are not only strong but beautiful, not only beautiful 
 but strong ! 
 
 ^ All the strong things in nature are beautiful ; all the 
 beautiful things are exhibitions of strength. David speaks of the 
 " strength of the hills " which is " his also." We feel the power 
 and appropriateness of the words as we look up to the mountains. 
 But do we not speak with equal truth of the beauty of the hills, 
 clad in exquisite verdure, or flushed with the light that is " new 
 every morning " ; delicate flowers and tender ferns nestling in the 
 shelter of their crags, and purple rocks reflecting the sunsets of a 
 thousand years ? Take the strongest thing that nature yields, and 
 I we shall find that its strength is the cradle of an exquisite and 
 lunfathomable beauty. Take the most beautiful thing, and we 
 I shall find that its beauty is in closest alliance with immeasurable 
 strength. The dewdrop that glitters on the roseleaf — we all know 
 the perfection of its beauty ; but how little do we understand tlie 
 mystery of the strength by which its beauty is secured ! That 
 little drop of water is composed of elements which are held 
 together by electric forces sufficient to form a flash of lightning 
 that would rend the rocks of the mountain or blast the stoutest 
 oak of the forest. All that mighty thunder of power lies sleeping 
 in the crystal sphere of a tiny dewdrop. 
 
 ^ Florence Nightingale had that " excellent tiring in woman " — 
 a gentle voice. Lady Lovelace in her poem spoke of her friend's 
 
266 STRENGTH AND BEAUTY 
 
 " soft, silvery voice " ; but it could command, as well as charm, 
 unless indeed it were the charm that commanded. " She scolds 
 sergeants and orderlies all day long," wrote Mr. Bracebridge to 
 her parents (Nov. 20) ; " you would be astonished to see how 
 fierce she is grown." That was written, of course, in fun; but 
 there was always a note of calm authority in her voice. A 
 Crimean veteran recalled her passing his bed with some doctors, 
 who were saying, " It can't be done," and her replying quietly, 
 " It must be done." " I seem to hear her saying it," writes one 
 who knew her well ; " there seemed to be no appeal from her 
 quiet, conclusive manner." ^ 
 
 3. In Jesus Christ strength and beauty appear as nowhere 
 else among men. He is the ideal man. His character contains 
 every element of strength — profound knowledge, constant faith, 
 ability to suffer for the truth, composure in the face of an 
 assailing world. Yet His character contains also every element 
 of beauty. He is tender as a woman, devoted in His love of man, 
 humble and meek, gentle and patient too. Each quality exists 
 in . accurate proportion in Him ; so that we may say, without 
 hesitation and after the closest examination, that the architecture 
 of Christ's character is absolutely perfect. 
 
 ^ The mediaeval conception of our Saviour, as meek, and 
 suffering, and patient, and gentle above all others, is true though 
 incomplete. He was " strong Son of God " also. It was the 
 boldness of Peter and J ohn that reminded men of their courageous 
 Master. How constantly in His life do we see strength and 
 beauty, in perfect balance and poise, shining forth from His 
 acts and words ! In the garden of agony, faced by cruel and 
 murderous men. He stands erect, calmly repeating to His enemies, 
 " I have told you that I am he " — there is strength ; but mark 
 the tender beauty of what follows : " If ye seek me, let these go 
 their way " — solicitude for His faint-hearted followers mingling 
 with His fortitude. As one has truly said : " The eyes that wept 
 beside the grave of Lazarus were eyes that were like a flame 
 of fire."* By His strength and beauty, combined with perfect 
 symmetry in one holy character, Jesus endlessly attracts. His 
 charm is not like that of any other. " Thou hast conquered, 0 
 Galilean," for Thou art strong and Thou art fair. Thou art 
 chiefest among ten thousand. Captain of the Lord's hosts, and 
 Thou art altogether lovely, beautiful beyond compare.^ 
 
 * Sir Edward Cook, The Life of Florence Nightinyale, i. 186. 
 ■J. WaddeU. 
 
PSALM xcvi. 6 
 
 A rose, a lily, and the Face of Christ 
 
 Have all our hearts sufficed : 
 For He is Eose of Sharon nobly born, 
 
 Our Eose without a thorn ; 
 And He is Lily of the Valley, He 
 
 Most sweet in purity. 
 But when we come to name Him as He is, 
 
 Godhead, Perfection, Bliss, 
 All tongues fall silent, while pure hearts alone 
 
 Complete their orison.^ 
 
 * Christina G. Rossetti, Christ our All in All, 
 
Light and Gladness. 
 
 '..69 
 
Literature. 
 
 Carroll (B. H.), Sermons, 340. 
 Christopherson (H.), Sermons, 30. 
 Halsey (J.), in Jesus in the Cornfield, 143. 
 Jerdan (C), Gospel Milk and Honey, 311. 
 • Landels (W.), Until the Day Break, 125. 
 Lear mount (J,), Fifty -iivo Sundays with the Children, 92. 
 Miller (J. R.), A Help for Common Days, 91. 
 
 Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xiv. (1868), No. 836. 
 
 Stubbs (W.), in Oxford University Sermons, 318. 
 
 Voysey (C), Sermons, x. (1887), No. 20 ; xii. (1889), No. 22. 
 
 Wilson (S. L.), Helpful Words for Daily Life, 384. 
 
 Christian World Pulpit, Ixxviii. 33 (R. J. Campbell). 
 
 «70 
 
Light and Gladness. 
 
 Light is sown for the righteous, 
 
 And gladness for the upright in heart.— Ps. xcvii. ii. 
 
 The peculiar metaphor employed in this passage is somewhat 
 arrestive because of the form in which it is expressed. This way 
 of putting things is quite different from ordinary language ; we 
 do not commonly speak of sowing light and gladness in the same 
 fashion as we sow grain in the spring-time with the expectation 
 of an autumn harvest. The figure is so striking that we are at 
 once compelled to pause and ask what this writer has in mind. 
 To say the least of it, the suggestion is very beautiful. Imagine 
 a husbandman sowing rays of light in the ploughed fields instead 
 of the ordinary corn and flower seed ! Why, the very idea is 
 full of spiritual suggestion, and sets us on the track of high and 
 holy things. Perhaps it is for this reason that the Kevisers have 
 allowed it to stand, although, as has frequently been pointed out, 
 the translation is not literally correct. If we have a mind to be 
 pedantically accurate we might render the text thus : " Light has 
 arisen — or, is scattered — for the righteous, and gladness for the 
 upright in heart." It is almost identical in form with Ps. cxii. 4, 
 "Unto the upright there ariseth light in the darkness." This 
 reduces the sentiment to a much more commonplace category, 
 for, of course, it means no more than an allusion to the 
 phenomenon of sunrise, a figure in which there is nothing so 
 very remarkable or out of the common. But somehow one 
 thinks the Authorized translators have got nearer the original 
 meaning of this utterance than a mere prosaic literalism could 
 have done. It is true poetry to say that light is sown for the 
 righteous, and there is nothing fantastic about it. 
 
 ^ Milton, in Paradise Lost, wrote these words about the sun- 
 beams and the dew: "Morn advancing sowed the earth with 
 
 orient pearl." And when, with this thought in our minds, we 
 
 271 
 
272 LIGHT AND GLADNESS 
 
 look up on a winter night to the starry sky, does that not seem 
 like an immense concave field sown all over with light ? ^ 
 
 I. 
 
 Sown Light. 
 
 1. It is no merely fanciful use of the words, " light is sown," 
 to suggest that, in a literal sense, light has been sown for our 
 harvesting in those vast buried forests which constitute our coal- 
 fields, and are the source of nearly all our artificial light and heat. 
 The sunbeams that streamed through long millenniums upon our 
 planet were absorbed by those giant ferns and conifers that 
 flourished in what geologists call the Carboniferous period, and 
 were afterwards submerged and overlaid with other deposits ; and 
 after having been imprisoned in the depths and the darkness for 
 long ages, like seed in the soil, the light of those beams is now 
 breaking forth once more for the illumination and service of man. 
 
 ^ George Stephenson, the inventor of the locomotive engine, 
 was once standing with Dean Buckland, the famous geologist, 
 and others upon the terrace of Sir Eobert Peel's mansion at 
 Drayton Manor, when a railway train flashed along in the 
 distance, throwing behind it a long trail of white steam. " Now, 
 Dr. Buckland," said Stephenson, " can you tell me what is the 
 power that is driving that train ? " " Well," said the Dean, " I 
 suppose it is one of your big engines." "But what drives the 
 engine ? " " Oh, very likely a canny Newcastle driver." " What 
 do you say to the light of the sun ? " " How can that be ? " 
 asked the Dean. " It is nothing else," replied the engineer ; " it 
 is light bottled up in the earth for tens of thousands of years and 
 now, after being buried in the earth for long ages in the fields of 
 coal, the latent light is again brought forth and liberated; made 
 to work, as in that engine, for great motive purposes." That 
 answer was itself a flash of illumination to the mind of the man 
 of science, and there is more meaning in it than even Buckland 
 or Stephenson himself ever dreamed. For, since that day, not 
 only has light produced by the combustion of coal gas become the 
 chief means of artificial illumination to all civilized nations, but 
 mineral oils derived from the same source are also largely used, 
 and it is the pent-up force of the sunbeam locked up in the coal 
 
 * 0. Jerdan. 
 
 ,1 
 J 
 
PSALM xcvii. II 
 
 273 
 
 that drives our motor-cars, and, transformed into heat, generates 
 the power which we transmute again into light in the form of the 
 electric beam. Hundreds of thousands of years ago the light was 
 sown, and now the harvest is being reaped.^ 
 
 2. A seed is a germ. When, therefore, we say that God has 
 sown the light for us, we mean that He gives us our blessings in 
 germ, not in full form — that they come to us, not developed into 
 completeness of beauty, but as seeds which we must plant, wait- 
 ing, sometimes waiting long, for them to grow into loveliness. A 
 seed does not disclose all the beauty of the life that is folded up 
 within it. We see only a little brown and unsightly hull which 
 gives no prophecy of anything so beautiful as springs from it 
 when it has been planted. These facts in nature have their 
 analogies in the seeds of spiritual blessing which God sows for us. 
 The blessing does not appear : what does appear is often unlovely 
 in its form, giving in itself no promise of good. Yet it is a seed 
 carrying in it the potency of life and the possibilities of great 
 blessing. Every duty that comes to our hand in the common 
 days is a seed of light which God has sown for us. Some seeds 
 are dark and rough as we look upon them ; so there are duties 
 that have in them no promise of joy or pleasure as they first 
 present themselves to us. They look hard and repulsive, and we 
 shrink from doing them, but every one knows that there is in the 
 faithful doing of every duty a strange secret of joy; and the 
 harder the duty, the fuller and the richer is the sense of gladness 
 that follows its performance. 
 
 God's angels drop like grains of gold 
 
 Our duties 'midst life's shining sands, 
 And from them, one by one, we mould 
 
 Our own bright crown with patient hands. 
 From dust and dross we gather them; 
 We toil and stoop for love's sweet sake 
 To find each worthy act a gem 
 In glory's kingly diadem 
 Which we may daily richer make. 
 
 ^ It has been said that faith in God and belief in immortality 
 were Browning's sources of inspiration. It is not possible to say 
 that of all our poets — perhaps not of any in the same degree as oif 
 
 ^ J. Halaey. 
 
 PS. XXV.-CXIX. — 18 
 
274 LIGHT AND GLADNESS 
 
 him. One other great poet of the Victorian age, Tennyson, may 
 be very properly described as a religious poet. He, too, treats of 
 the eternal mysteries of God and the universe, and the awful 
 problems of life and death; but where Tennyson whispers, or 
 speaks with bated breath. Browning sends forth a clear, distinct, 
 ringing voice — where the former " faintly trusts," the latter avows 
 a confidence which nought can disturb, and which inspires faith 
 in the more timid and halting of his fellows around him. What 
 Browning makes the Pope say in " The King and the Book," he 
 might have said of himself with perfect truthfulness : 
 
 Never I miss footing in the maze, 
 
 No, — I have light nor fear the dark at all.^ 
 
 3. This figure of light sown implies something hidden and 
 long waited for, yet certain at last ; even as the seed is buried in 
 the soil, and " the husbandman hath long patience until he receive 
 the early and the latter rain," and finally, the assured fruition of 
 his labour. The sower does not doubt the harvest because he 
 has to wait weary months for it. He knows that in due season 
 he shall reap if he faint not. And so the Psalmist would 
 have us believe that the certainty of the coming light is as great 
 as that of the present darkness, and that if our calamities are 
 inevitable, our consolations are assured. " Weeping may endure 
 for a night, but joy cometh in the morning." 
 
 The seed which is cast into the soil does not immediately 
 yield the harvest. The waiting is the price we have to pay for 
 the hundredfold increase. It cannot be reaped yet. But it is 
 sown, and will yet grow and ripen. God's hand has prepared 
 the soil and cast the seed, and His care and culture secure an 
 abundant harvest. It is sown, and is growing under His eye. 
 Those dark clouds that overshadow sometimes drop down fatness 
 on it. Those storms that are so trying strengthen it. And God's 
 love, like genial sunshine, is promoting its continual growth. It 
 is sown, and will be reaped before long. Fear not ; rather look 
 beyond. 
 
 Lift up thine eyes beyond the night 
 
 Of life's dark setting; blossoms of to-day 
 
 Shall break in flower to-morrow. 
 
 This year's light sucked into every spray 
 
 Is food for summer blossoms yet to be, 
 * J. Flew, Studies im Sroimmg, 7. 
 
 i 
 
PSALM xcvii. II 
 
 275 
 
 ^ The rays of the sun are streaming across ninety-six million 
 miles of space every day in the year, and every hour in the day. 
 Some of them are turned into planetary energy at once ; others 
 pass down into darkness and silence in the earth and there 
 remain ; or they may spring up immediately in the form of vegeta- 
 tion, which by and by becomes a coal mine or a petroleum well. 
 After the lapse of ages, it may be, that stored-up light, scattered 
 so lavishly upon the earth's surface so long ago, is discovered and 
 brought into use once more. We drive our looms and illuminate 
 our houses with it. We call it by a variety of names, accord- 
 ing to the service we manage to draw from it. In the form 
 of electricity we make it flash our thoughts from continent to 
 continent across intervening oceans. In another form, it will 
 carry a floating city, like a modern mammoth Atlantic liner, 
 from the old world to the new. In others, it shines forth as 
 beauty and splendour in the complex and manifold achieve- 
 ments of art and science. What untold wonders are being 
 wrought every day by the bringing forth of the stored-up light 
 of the sun ! They constitute the harvest of that which was 
 sown long before we who profit by the blessing were born to 
 inherit it.^ 
 
 4. God has sown His holy light in the field of His Word. 
 The sacred writings are full of hidden light — the light of truth, 
 holiness, and joy ; and this light the Holy Spirit shows to the 
 ievout and diligent student. Every gospel promise is a star, 
 shining in the dark night of time ; and the Bible is a " book of 
 stars." Light is sown also in the field of Divine Providence. 
 Everything that God allows to happen to His people is right : this 
 8 so, even when darkness wraps them round for a season. " We 
 enow that all things work together for good to them that love 
 jrod." And light is sown especially in the field of human hearts. 
 Che Spirit of God scatters in this soil seeds of living light — 
 mowledge and purity and gladness. " The fruit of the Spirit is 
 ove, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meek- 
 less, temperance." 
 
 K I have been deep in my study of the ways of God in heathen 
 eligions. The past of mankind does not now seem a black ocean 
 overed with fog and storm, and wrecks drifting everywhere, but 
 , long wake of light crosses it coming from the light that lighteth 
 very man in the world, the Pharos of humanity — the Spirit of 
 » R. J. Campbell. 
 
276 LIGHT AND GLADNESS 
 
 God. In that gleam, the nations have steered their barks and 
 made towards haven. He hath not left Himself without a 
 witness.^ 
 
 •[I I have been thinking especially of those prayers which are 
 most legitimate and most surely answered — prayers for help to 
 resist temptation, for strength in the performance of duty, for the 
 lifting of despondency, and for all the way in which men are 
 raised above themselves and out of weakness are made strong. In 
 such cases as these it does not often happen that the supplicant is 
 conscious of any direct intervention of God. He will indeed rise 
 from his knees in a calmer frame of mind ; the habit of prayer, 
 and the trustfulness which goes with such a habit, cannot fail of 
 their effect in quieting for the time the troubled spirit. The 
 humble Christian does not look for more than this ; but he waits 
 awhile, and the crisis passes. He does not know what has hap- 
 pened ; but in some strange way the difficulties that seemed to 
 beset him have vanished ; the problem that seemed so unmanage- 
 able is solved ; the thing that seemed so impossible is done.^ 
 
 II. 
 
 Sown Gladness. 
 
 " Light and gladness " ! What a wonderful conception of the 
 future portion of the righteous does the Psalmist here give us! 
 The two words, as is customary in the parallelism of Hebrew 
 poetry, mean almost the same thing. The one is figurative, the 
 other literal. The word "gladness" itself teaches us most 
 emphatically that joy is the portion of tlie righteous — exuberant, 
 exultant joy — ^joy which beams in the eye, and lights up the 
 countenance, and gives buoyancy to the frame, and is heard in the 
 jubilant tones of the voice, and which yet has its seat deep among 
 the springs of feeling — in the very heart's core. Gladness ! It 
 is joy, full, deep, and placid, like a lake which knows no ebb, and 
 is sheltered from every agitating storm, and yet like a lake whose 
 calm waters ripple under the gentle breeze, and flash with bright 
 scintillations in the rays of tlie summer's sun, with singing birds 
 around pouring out their melody, and flowers shedding fragrance 
 
 ^ Life of Charles Loring Brace, 458. 
 
 2 W. Sanday, in The Expository Times, xxiv. (1913) 440. 
 
PSALM xcvii. II 
 
 277 
 
 on the air, and beautifying all the scene. Gladness ! It is the 
 laughter of the heart, when, full of enjoyment to overflowing, it 
 ripples over in spontaneous expression, more cheerful than the 
 laughter of childhood at play, serene as a summer evening sky. 
 Gladness ! Surprising revelations — expectation more than 
 realized; fears dispelled and dangers escaped; sorrows changed 
 into joys; all perils passed, all apprehensions hushed; satisfy- 
 ing bliss already possessed, higher bliss anticipated ! All this is 
 included in this portion of the righteous. 
 
 1. This gladness will be accompanied by, and no doubt partially 
 spring from, the revelation of things that are wrapped in darkness 
 now. It will be no small element in the joy of the righteous that 
 many of the mysteries which perplex them will be unravelled. 
 God's ways, which now seem to us mysterious, and which try the 
 faith and patience of His people, will not always be so unfathom- 
 able as they are now; they will present themselves in a very 
 different aspect when His chosen have reached the end of their 
 course, and begin to see as they are seen, and to know as they are 
 known. " Unto the upright there ariseth light in the darkness." 
 And we cannot but helieve that their hearts will be gladdened by 
 the surprisingly new light in which the most trying dispensations 
 appear, and by the lifting up of the veil from the great and 
 glorious purposes which they were designed to promote. There 
 may still be room for the exercise of faith. But, largely, faith 
 will give place to sight, and hope to realization. And in their 
 clearer understanding of the Divine method, and their better 
 acquaintance with its glorious issues, they will find no small 
 portion of their joy. The gladness of brighter and ever-increasing 
 light will be theirs for ever. 
 
 ^ The missing qualities in Wesley's religious state at tliis 
 time [before his conversion] are sufficiently obvious. It utterly 
 lacked the element of joy. Keligion is meant to have for the 
 spiritual landscape the office of sunshine, but in Wesley's spiritual 
 sky at this time there burned no Divine light, whether of certainty 
 or of hope. He imagined he could distil the rich wine of spiritual 
 gladness out of mechanical religious exercises ; but he found him- 
 self, to his own distress, and in his own words, "dull, flat, and 
 unaffected in the use of the most solemn ordinances." Fear, too, 
 like a shadow, haunted his mind : fear that he was not accepted 
 
278 LIGHT AND GLADNESS 
 
 before God ; fear that he might lose what grace he had ; fear both 
 of life and of death.^ 
 
 2. God is the God of gladness, as well as the God of terror. 
 And this needs special emphasizing for some who would limit His 
 interest to the graver things of life — sorrow, affliction, mourning. 
 It is true, beautifully true, that He is the Consolatio afflidorum, 
 the real, genuine Kefuge for thousands who are burdened and 
 heavy laden; but it is also true that He presides over the 
 pleasures of His people. Is not the average Englishman's con- 
 ception of God that of a stern, stiff Being, more or less confined to 
 certain times and places, associated chiefly with stiff-backed pews, 
 but having very little, if anything, to do with the pleasures or the 
 gladder side of daily life ? This — though it has its good side — is 
 a view we want to review and revise. We want to get back to 
 the old, happy conception of the Psalmist : " Thou art about my 
 path and about my being, and spies t out all my ways." And 
 worse still : some of us keep this gladsome view of God outside 
 even our religion. The Hundredth Psalm has a line which runs 
 in the old metrical version, 
 
 " Him serve with mirth, His praise forth tell," ^ 
 which is often sung as if the words were, 1 
 *'Him serve with fear.** \ 
 The change is a bad one. Fear has its part to play in life, but 
 here it spoils the whole idea of the hymn, and is out of harmony 
 with the verse in the Psalm from which the thought is borrowed : 
 " Serve the Lord with gladness, and come before his presence with 
 a song." Let us get back to the original as soon as we can in 
 thought, word, and deed. 
 
 ^ Froude reminds us how bright and happy and even humorous 
 were the great heroes of the Keformation — Luther, Calvin, and 
 Knox ; and yet they lived in times when there was far more to 
 lament and to be ashamed of even than in ours ; they fought a 
 battle for light and truth and liberty under far heavier discourage- 
 ments than we have to bear, and yet they were among the happiest 
 of men. And why ? Because they were doing something, they 
 were not idle and sentimental spectators of the foul state of things 
 around them, but every day and all day they were active in trying 
 to overthrow them ; they were for ever fighting against the lies 
 
 ^ W. H. Fitchett, Wesley and His Century y 82. 
 
PSALM xcvii. II 
 
 279 
 
 and baseness and follies and superstitions on every hand and 
 therefore, they were not morbid or melancholy ; they knew that 
 God was on their side and therefore their true hearts were glad. 
 Difficulties did not daunt them ; wounds did not disable them ; 
 reproaches, curses, mortal danger did not even damp their spirits 
 or lower the temperature of their joy. Amidst the Egyptian 
 darkness, the darkness which might be felt, as we are told, th© 
 children of Israel had light in their dwellings. True or not as 
 a matter of history, it is grandly true that wherever there is 
 righteous work for God there is light in the mind and soul, 
 wherever there is fidelity there is joyful gladness.^ 
 
 ^ Many a man gets little credit for his indomitable good cheer, 
 because it is supposed that this is but his natural inclination. 
 But a virtue is still a virtue, even though it be congenial ; and 
 those who have diligently kept their lamp of joy alight are not 
 the least worthy of God's faithful ones. As for Stevenson, he 
 deliberately drew upon and encouraged all the available sources 
 of gladness. He carried with him into manhood, not only the 
 glee that comes from physical vitality, and the sense of the 
 world's opulence, but also the spirit of the Lantern-bearer, who 
 carefully kept alive his inner light. His natural optimism is 
 unquestionable, but it should be remembered that he needed it all, 
 and that, if his strenuous choice of it had flagged, pessimism would 
 not have been far to seek. It is a great and potent secret, that 
 of fostering our own peculiar enthusiasm as a sacred flame. 
 Eegard yourself, as you face the simplest duty of to-morrow, as 
 tending within your soul's temple the fires of God, and you shall 
 find the bright parable true. Both these sources, the outward 
 and the inward, were largely drawn upon by Stevenson.^ 
 
 III. 
 
 The Eeapers of Light and Gladness. 
 
 God's light is sown for all mankind, but only " the righteous " 
 can find it ; His gladness waits at the door of every soul, but it 
 never enters save to " the upright in heart." But who are " the 
 righteous" who are thus favoured, and what does it mean to 
 be " upright in heart " ? What Jesus meant by righteousness 
 was substantially what the great prophets of the Old Testament 
 
 ^ C. Voysey. 
 
 ^ J. Kelmau, The Faith of Robert Louis Stevenson, 250. 
 
28o LIGHT AND GLADNESS 
 
 had meant before Him when they protested against idolatry. 
 He meant motive rather than deed ; He meant that equality of 
 mind and heart whereby a man loses sight of self-interest in the 
 desire to help and succour his fellow-creatures. From this stand- 
 point it is clear that the more righteous a man becomes the less 
 will he think about it ; he will cease to be self-conscious ; he will 
 just go on giving himself quietly and simply without asking 
 whether he is to be rewarded or not. 
 
 No sooner does a man become absorbed in some great 
 impersonal achievement, ceasing to care what may or may not 
 happen to himself in the process, than he begins to find that 
 life discloses new and vaster meaning ; and he knows more of 
 true blessedness than he ever knew before. He may be quite 
 willing to forgo everj^thing in the shape of reward, but it is part 
 of the very law of universal being that he cannot do so. The 
 less he thinks about reward the more certainly will the highest 
 kind of reward pour in upon him. He cannot be wretched ; life 
 forbids it. He may have to go down into the darkness for a brief 
 hour, but it is ordy to bring up the everlasting light ; he may 
 wrestle awhile in Gethsemane, but it is only a stage in the ascent 
 to the gladness beyond the cross. Who will gainsay the truth of 
 this ? It is the eternal paradox which faces every generation, 
 and challenges every individual experience as though it had never 
 been known before. It lies at the heart of all religion, and 
 reaches its highest expression in the life and death of our Lord 
 Jesus Christ Himself. 
 
 1. While it is true of all good men in every creed that light 
 springs up in their hearts, and joyful gladness is ever the sweet 
 handmaid of sincerity, yet it is especially true that God often 
 rewards an intense desire for righteousness with clearer views of 
 His own righteousness and more light to shine upon us from His 
 love. We have been faithful to some obligation or trust, and so 
 God in His mercy has revealed to us more light to shine on His 
 dealings with mankind, and has blessed us with the joy of knowing 
 more of His infinite fidelity and trustworthiness. Or we have 
 been more than usually kind, merciful, and generous in our 
 dealings with others, and then God has shown us more and more 
 of His inexhaustible kindness, mercy, and generosity unto all. Or 
 
PSALM xcvii. II 281 
 
 we have had to make some daring sacrifice of worldly advantage, 
 some loss of position or friends rather than be false to ourselves 
 and our convictions, and then God has revealed to us the delight 
 that He takes in a brave man and in moral courage, and He puts 
 a joy and liveliness into our whole nature which the chances of 
 fortune cannot steal and the frowns of the world cannot crush. 
 
 ^ I know but one way in which a man who craves the light 
 and cannot find it may come forth from his agony of doubt 
 scathless ; it is by holding fast to those things which are certain 
 still — the grand, simple landmarks of morality. In the darkest 
 hour through which a human soul can pass, whatever else is 
 doubtful, this at least is certain. If there be no God and no 
 future state, yet, even then, it is better to be generous than selfish, 
 better to be chaste than licentious, better to be true than false, 
 better to be brave than to be a coward. Blessed beyond all 
 earthly blessedness is the man who, in the tempestuous darkness 
 of the soul, has dared to hold fast to these venerable landmarks. 
 Thrice blessed is he who, when all is drear and cheerless within 
 and without, when his teachers terrify him, and his friends 
 shrink from him, has obstinately clung to moral good. Thrice 
 blessed, because his night shall pass into clear, bright day.^ 
 
 2. " Light is sown for the righteous," because only the right- 
 eous can perceive and rejoice in the light. There are certain 
 rays in the spectrum that are invisible to us, simply because our 
 optic nerve is not sufficiently sensitive to respond to the rapidity 
 of their vibrations. There are new colours awaiting those who 
 can bring new eyes to them. So much of the joy in our life 
 depends on our capacity to see the Divine purpose and meaning 
 in the things that befall us. The comfort is there, but we cannot 
 take it. We are like Hagar in the wilderness, wretched with 
 thirst, while the foimtain is there flashing back the sunlight 
 before our blinded eyes. 
 
 ^ There is a shining light ahead, and Evangelist points 
 Christian to that. Every soul of man can see at least some light 
 of hope ahead, shining in the direction of the God or Christ or 
 ideal which is as yet obscure. It may be but the light of some 
 possible duty, some sense of honour, some belief in life, some 
 vague trust in the future. The point is not that the light is full, 
 or even comprehensible. If it be clear enough to flee towards, 
 
 ^ F. W. Robertson, LecPures, Addresses, and Literary Remains, 49. 
 
282 LIGHT AND GLADNESS 
 
 that is enough. For, here as elsewhere, "solvitur ambulando." 
 What is wanted is directed motion towards the light; the rest 
 will follow. So it comes to pass that one may be on the road to 
 Christ when one cannot as yet see Him.^ 
 
 He that walks it only thirsting 
 
 For the right, and learns to deaden 
 
 Love of self, before his journey closes, 
 
 He shall find the stubborn thistle bursting 
 
 Into glossy purples, which outredden 
 
 All voluptuous garden-roses. . . . 
 
 He, that ever following her commands 
 
 On with toil of heart and knees and hands. 
 
 Thro' the long gorge to the far light has won 
 
 His path upward, and prevail'd, 
 
 Shall find the toppling crags of Duty scaled 
 
 Are close upon the shining table-lands, 
 
 To which our God Himself is moon and sun.^ 
 
 3. If a man is to reap light, he must sow light. Every one of 
 us makes his own future. If we would have the capacity for 
 light hereafter, we must cultivate it now. There is a tendency 
 in light to beget light, just as there is a tendency in the seed to 
 bring forth thirty to a hundredfold. Believe and walk in the 
 light you have, and it shall grow from more to more unto noon- 
 day splendour. If in the darkness a man, loving the light, sow 
 the seeds of light, further illumination shall come to him here- 
 after. 
 
 ^ " Curses come home to roost," says the proverb. No less 
 do gentle speech and kindly acts come back to nestle softly in our 
 hearts. Faber, the Koman Catholic poet, sings how he caught up 
 a little child and kissed it and gave it new joy in the sense of 
 having made a new friend. And then he adds : 
 
 I am a happier and a richer man. 
 
 Since I have sown this new joy in the earth: 
 
 'Tis no small thing for us to reap stray mirth. 
 
 In every sunny wayside where we can. 
 
 It is a joy to me to be a joy. 
 
 Which may in the most lowly heart take root; 
 
 And it is gladness to that little boy 
 
 To look out for me at the mountain foot. 
 
 » J. Kelman, The Road, i. 9. 
 
 Tennyson. 
 
All His Benefits. 
 
 283 
 
Literature. 
 
 Brooke (S. A.), CJirist in Modern Life, 351. 
 
 „ „ The Gospel of Joy, 67. 
 
 „ „ The Ship of the Soul, 16. 
 
 Brown (A. G.), in The People's Pulpit, No. 20. 
 
 „ (C. G.), The Word of Life, 141. 
 Campbell (J. M.), Grow Old Along with Me, 19. 
 Cross (J.), Knight-Banneret, 292. 
 Drummond (H.), The Ideal Life, 145. 
 Hall (F. 0.), Soul and Body, 73. 
 Hutton (J. A.), The Soul's Triumphant Way, 23. 
 Iverach (J.), The Other Side of Greatness, 119. 
 Macmillan (H.), 2'he Ministry of Nature, 321, 
 Matheson (G.), Leaves for Quiet Hours, 213. 
 Miller (J.), Sermons Literary and Scientific, i. 270, 
 Morrison (G. H.), The Oldest Trade in the World, 103. 
 Myres (W. M.), Fragments that Remain, 89. 
 New (C), The Baptism of the Spirit, 278. 
 Owen (J.), The Renewal of Youth, 1. 
 Pearce (J.), The Alabaster Box, 141. 
 Price (A. C), Fifty Sermons, vii. 17. 
 Robinson (W. V.), Angel Voices, 137. 
 Selby (T. G.), The Unheeding God, 216. 
 
 Spurgeon (G. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xviii. (1872), No. 
 
 1078 ; XXV. (1879), No. 1492 ; xlix. (1903), No. 2860. 
 
 „ „ Evening by Evening, 152. 
 
 Voysey (C), Sermons^ xviii. (1895), No. 34 ; xxv. (1902), No. 44 ; xxvii. 
 
 (1904), No. 10. 
 
 Christian Woi-ld Pulpit, xxvii. 161 (M. G. Pearse) ; xxxvi. 218 (A. B. 
 
 Bruce) ; xlix. 72 (J. Stalker) ; Ixxv. 59 (J. Birch). 
 Contemporary Pulpit, 1st Ser., viii. 10 (A. Whyte) ; ix. 175 (A. Saphir). 
 Weekly Pulpit, i. 582 (1). Daiiii). 
 
 a84 
 
All His Benefits. 
 
 Bless the Lord, O my soul ; 
 
 And all that is within me, bless his holy name. 
 
 Bless the Lord, O my soul. 
 
 And forget not all his benefits : 
 
 Who forgiveth all thine iniquities ; 
 
 Who healeth all thy diseases ; 
 
 Who redeemeth thy life from destruction ; 
 
 Who crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercies: 
 
 Who satisfieth thy mouth with good things ; 
 
 So that thy youth is renewed like the eagle.— Ps. ciii. 1-5. 
 
 This psalm, with which we are all familiar from our childhood, 
 shines in the firmament of Scripture as a star of the first magni- 
 tude. It is a song of praise, yet not the praise of an angel, but 
 the praise of one who has been redeemed from sin and from 
 destruction, and who has experienced that grace which, although 
 sin abounds unto death, doth much more abound unto eternal 
 life. It is the song of a saint, yet not of a glorified saint, but of 
 one who is still working in the lowly valley of this our earthly 
 pilgrimage, and who has to contend with suffering, with sin, and 
 to experience the chastening hand of his Heavenly Father. And 
 therefore it is that this psalm, after beginning upon the lofty 
 mountain heights of God's greatness and goodness, in which all 
 is bright and strong and eternal, descends into the valley where 
 the path is always narrow and often full of darkness and danger 
 and sadness. But as the Psalmist lives by faith, and as he is 
 saved by faith, so he is also saved by hope; and after having 
 described all the sadness and all the afflictions and conflicts of 
 this our earthly pilgrimage, he shows that even at this present 
 time he is a member of that heavenly and everlasting Kingdom of 
 which the throne of God is the centre, and where the angels, who 
 are bright and strong, are his fellow-worshippers, and in which 
 
 all the works which God has made will finally be subservient to 
 
 285 
 
286 
 
 ALL HIS BENEFITS 
 
 His glory and be irradiated with His beauty. And thus he rises 
 again, praising and magnifying the Lord and knowing that his 
 own individual soul shall, in that vast and comprehensive 
 Kingdom, for evermore be conscious of the life and of the glory of 
 the Most High. 
 
 I. 
 
 Bless the Lord. 
 
 1. To praise God, to bless God, is only the response to the 
 blessing which God has given us. God speaks, and the echo 
 is praise. God blesses us and the response is that we bless 
 God. And those five verses of praise in Psalm ciii. are nothing 
 but the answer of the believing heart to the benediction of 
 Aaron, which God commanded should be continually laid upon 
 the people. The Lord who is the God of salvation ; the Lord, 
 who has revealed His Holy Name as Eedeemer ; the Lord who, 
 by His Spirit, imparts what the Father of love gives, what the 
 filial love reveals — this is the Lord who is the object of the 
 believer's praise. For to praise God means nothing else than to 
 behold God and to delight in Him as the God of our salvation. 
 Singing may be the expression of praise, may be the helpful 
 accompaniment of praise, but praise is in the spirit who dwells 
 upon God, who sees the wonderful manifestation of God in His 
 Son Jesus Christ, and the wonderful salvation and treasures of 
 good things stored up in His beloved Son. 
 
 If We commonly begin our prayers with a request that God 
 will bless us ; the Psalmist begins his prayer by calling on his soul 
 to bless God ! The eye of the heart is generally directed first to 
 its own desires ; the eye of the Psalmist's heart is directed first to 
 the desires of God ! It is a startling feature of prayer, a feature 
 seldom looked at. We think of prayer as a mount where man 
 stands to receive the Divine blessing. We do not often think of 
 it as also a mount where God stands to receive the human blessing. 
 Yet this latter is the thought here. Nay, is it not the thought of 
 our Lord Himself ? I have often meditated on these words of 
 Jesus, " Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness " ! 
 I take thorn to mean : Seek ye first the welfare of God, the 
 establishment of His Kingdom, the reign of His righteousness ! 
 
PSALM cm. 1-5 
 
 287 
 
 Before you yield to self-pity, before you count the number of the 
 things you want, consider what things are still wanting to Him ! 
 Consider the spheres of life to which His Kingdom has not yet 
 spread, consider the human hearts to which His righteousness has 
 not yet penetrated ! Let your spirit say, " Bless the Lord." Let 
 the blessing upon God be your morning wish. It is not your 
 power He asks, but your wish. Your benediction cannot sway the 
 forces of the Universe ; your Father can do that without prayer. 
 But it is the prayer itself that is dear to Him, the desire of your 
 heart for His heart's joy, the cry of your spirit for His crowning, 
 the longing of your soul for the triumph of His love. Evermore 
 give Him this bread ! ^ 
 
 ^ If we want to know what it is to praise God, let us re- 
 member such a chapter as the first chapter of the Epistle to the 
 Ephesians, where Paul blesses God who has blessed him with all 
 spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ, and where he sees 
 before him the whole counsel and purpose of the Divine election, 
 of the wonderful, perfect, and complete channel of the purposes 
 of God in the redemption which is in the blood of Jesus, and the 
 wonderful object and purpose of the Divine grace, that we, united 
 with Christ, should through all ages show forth the wonderful love 
 of God. That is to praise God, when we see God and when we 
 appropriate God as He has manifested Himself to us in Christ 
 Jesus. And it is only by the light which comes from above, and 
 by the wonderful operation of the Holy Ghost, that it is so 
 wrought in the heart of the Christian, although it may be in 
 silence, that his soul magnifieth the Lord and his spirit rejoiceth 
 in God his Saviour.^ 
 
 2. " Bless the Lord, 0 my soul ; and ail that is within me, 
 bless his holy name." The Psalmist desires to bless God with all 
 that is within him. He who succeeds in doing this offers to God 
 an eloquent worship. Eloquence means speaking out, letting the 
 whole soul find utterance. And the Psalm before us supplies us 
 with a choice sample of the kind of worship made by David. In 
 this Psalm, mind, heart, conscience, imagination, all come into 
 play. The whole inner man speaks rightfully, thoughtfully, 
 devoutly, musically, pathetically ; and, as was to be expected, God 
 is praised to some purpose. 
 
 \ The metrical version of the Psalm puts us in possession of 
 the ifuller meaning of this verse : 
 
 ^ G. Mathesoii, Leaves for Quiet Hours^ 213. * A. Saphir. 
 
288 
 
 ALL HIS BENEFITS 
 
 0 thou my soul, bless God the Lord; 
 
 And all that in me is 
 Be stirred up his holy name 
 
 To magnify and bless. 
 
 How truly and with what fine knowledge of the soul of every 
 spiritual man has this rendering caught the real point of that 
 verse ! And it is not this once only that the metrical psalm 
 selects and emphasizes some word which we did not quite realize 
 in the prose version. Here and there it may be that to our modish 
 and sophisticated ears the psalms in metre may fail as poetry ; 
 but they never fail in spiritual discernment. They always take 
 hold of the point, of the real business of the prose text. They 
 always recognize the matters which really concern our souls ; so 
 that again and again the metrical psalm serves as a kind of com- 
 mentary upon the prose, developing the finer sentiments, briuging 
 out of the text certain beauties which we might never have 
 become aware of, though we recognize them at once the moment 
 they are set out for us. You see wliat I mean in this particular 
 instance. The prose reads : " Bless the Lord, 0 my soul ; and all 
 that is within me, bless his holy name." We might read those 
 words again and again, feeling in each case that it is merely 
 a devout utterance of the soul, having nothing individual or 
 characteristic about it. But how the metrical version cuts down 
 to the root of the idea ! What a distinction, what a precise 
 meaning, the metrical form gives to the prayer ! 
 
 O thou my soul, bless God the Lord; 
 
 And all that in me is 
 Be stirred up his holy name 
 
 To magnify and bless. 
 
 It was pure spiritual genius to bring out that idea of " stirring 
 up " all that is within our souls.^ 
 
 IL 
 
 Forget Not. 
 
 If we would rightly praise God, we must keep ourselves from 
 forgetfulness. Moses warns against this vice when he says: 
 " Beware lest thou forget the Lord thy God, in not keeping his 
 commandments, and his judgments and his statutes, wliich I 
 
 * J. A. Ilutton, The Soul's Triumphant Way, 23. 
 
PSALM cm. 1-5 
 
 289 
 
 command thee this day, lest when thou hast eaten and art 
 full, and hast built goodly houses, and dwelt therein; and 
 when thy herds and thy flocks multiply, and thy silver and 
 thy gold is multiplied, and all that thou hast is multiplied; 
 then thine heart be lifted up, and thou forget the Lord thy 
 God, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, out 
 of the house of bondage." In the Prophets the sad complaint 
 re-echoes from the Lord's mouth: "Ye are they that forget 
 my holy mountain." 
 
 ^ One of the first stories I recall from my childhood was a 
 story of the evil of forgetting God. I remember the very spot on 
 which it was told to me. I feel the warm grasp of the hand 
 which had hold of mine at the time. I see once more the little 
 seaport town stretching up from the river mouth, with its 
 straggling " fisher town " at one extremity, and at the other its 
 rows of well-built streets and its town hall and academy. On 
 this occasion we were standing on a high bank looking down on 
 the beautiful shore at our feet. Across the tiny harbour, and 
 along the shore on the other side of the river, is a very different 
 scene. What one sees there is a dreary waste of sand. No grass 
 grows there, no trees shadow it, no house stands upon it. It is a 
 place forsaken and desolate. It has been a desolation longer than 
 the oldest inhabitant can remember. But it was not always 
 desolate. It was once a fair estate, rich in cornfields and orchards. 
 A stately mansion stood in the midst of it, and children played 
 in the orchards, and reapers reaped the corn. But the lords of 
 that fair estate were an evil race. They oppressed the poor, 
 they despised religion, they did not remember God. They loved 
 pleasure more than God, and the pleasures they loved were evil. 
 To make an open show of their evil ways they turned the day of 
 , the Lord into a day of rioting and drunkenness. And this evil 
 I went on a long while. It went on till the long-suffering of God 
 came to an end. And then upon a Sunday evening, and in the 
 harvest-time, when the corn was whitening for the reaper, the riot 
 and wickedness had come to a height. The evil lord and his evil 
 guests were feasting in the hall of the splendid house. And on 
 that very evening there came a sudden darkness and stillness into 
 [ the heavens, and out of the darkness a wind, and out of the wind 
 : a tempest ; and, as if that tempest had been a living creature, it 
 lifted the sand from the shore in great whirls and clouds and 
 filled the air with it, and dropped it down in blinding, suffocating 
 showers on all those fields of corn, and on that mansion, and on 
 the evil-doers within. And the fair estate, with all its beautiful 
 PS. xxv.-cxix. — 19 
 
290 ALL HIS BENEFITS 
 
 gardens and fields, became a widespread heap of sand and a 
 desolation, as it is to this daj.^ 
 
 III. 
 
 All His Benefits. 
 
 Of the benefits that David enumerates the first three are all 
 negative : He forgives our sin, He heals the consequences of our 
 sin, our diseases, He delivers us from destruction, the wages of 
 our sin. But in the forgiveness of sin and in the healing of our 
 diseases, in the deliverance from the devil and from everlasting hell, 
 God gives Himself, He gives the whole fulness of His love, He 
 elevates the soul into the very highest spiritual life ; and therefore, 
 the Psalmist continues, he who has been thus delivered out of 
 destruction is a king, he is crowned with lovingkindness and with 
 tender mercies, he is enriched and satisfied with good things ; and 
 not merely outwardly enriched, but there is a life given him which 
 is unfading, the youth of which is perennial, continually renewing 
 itself by the very strength of God. 
 
 1. The Psalmist sets himself to count up the benefits he has 
 received from God. He has not proceeded very far when he 
 finds himself to be engaged in an impossible task. He finds he 
 cannot count the blessings he has received in a single day, how 
 then can he number the blessings of a week, of a month, of a 
 year, of the years of his life ? He might as well try to count the 
 number of the stars or the grains of sand on the seashore. It 
 cannot be done. 
 
 ^ St. Francis, dining one day on broken bread, with a large 
 stone for table, cried out to his companion : " 0 brother Masseo, 
 we are not worthy so great a treasure." When he had repeated 
 these words several times, his companion answered : " Father, 
 how can you talk of treasure where there is so much poverty, and 
 indeed a lack of all things ? For we have neither cloth nor knife, 
 nor dish, nor table, nor house ; neither have we servant nor maid 
 to wait upon us." Then said St. Francis : " And this is why I 
 look upon it as a great treasure, because man has no hand in it, 
 but all has been given us by Divine Providence, as we clearly see 
 ^ Alexander MgLeod, 
 
PSALM cm. 1-5 
 
 291 
 
 in this bread of charity, in this beautiful table of stone, in this 
 clear fountain." ^ 
 
 ^ I was walking along one winter's night, hurrying towards 
 home, with my little maiden at my side. Said she, " Father, I 
 am going to count the stars." " Very well," I said ; " go on." 
 By and by I heard her counting — " Two hundred and twenty- 
 three, two hundred and twenty-four, two hundred and twenty- 
 five. Oh ! dear," she said, " I had no idea there were so many." 
 Ah ! dear friends, I sometimes say in my soul, " Now, Master, I 
 am going to count Thy benefits." I am like the little maiden. 
 Soon my heart sighs — sighs not with sorrow, but burdened with 
 such goodness, and I say within myself, " Ah ! I had no idea that 
 there were so many." ^ 
 
 2. But if he cannot remember them all, he may at least 
 try not to forget them all. He may try to remember some of 
 them. But this also is a hard task. For memory is weak, and 
 the blessings are many and manifold. How can he help himself 
 not to forget? How shall he help himself to remember those 
 benefits which he values most highly ? He sets himself to find 
 helps to memory, helps not to forget. So he falls upon a plan 
 which he finds to be most helpful, and which others ever since 
 have found to be so. He takes those benefits which he desires not 
 to forget, and he ties them up in bundles. And then, to make 
 I sure that he will not forget them, the Psalmist shapes the 
 bundles of God's benefits into a song. A song is the easiest thing 
 : of all to remember. So he shapes them into a song, which people 
 i can sing by the wayside as they journey, can carry with them 
 to their work, and brood over in their hours of leisure. 
 
 ^ By tying the benefits up in bundles, and by shaping them 
 into a song, the Psalmist earned for himself the undying gratitude 
 I of future generations. Specially has he earned for himself our 
 I gratitude, for he gave us a song which we sing in Scotland to-day, 
 i and have sung for more than three hundred years, when our 
 ( religious emotions are at their highest and their best. We sing 
 \ this song when the feeling of consecration has been renewed, 
 j widened, and deepened by communion with God at His table. 
 ^ I never was at a communion-time at which this song has not been 
 j sung, and no other song could do justice to the feelings of gratitude 
 
 ' ^ E. Meynell, The Life of Francis Thompson (1913), 283. 
 
 2 M. G. Pearse. 
 
 li 
 
292 ALL HIS BENEFITS 
 
 of the Lord's people. So we sing, " Bless the Lord, 0 my soul, 
 and forget not all his benefits : who forgiveth, who healeth, who 
 redeemeth, who crowneth, and who satisfieth." ^ 
 
 i. 
 
 Forgiveness. 
 
 "Who forgiveth all thine iniquities." 
 
 Note how the Psalmist begins. He begins with iniquity. 
 Where else could a sinful man begin ? The most needful of all 
 things for a sinful man is to get rid of his sin. So the Psalmist 
 begins here. This beginning is not peculiar to him, it is the 
 common note of the Bible. In fact, we here come across one of 
 the distinctive peculiarities of the Bible. We may read other 
 literatures and never come across the notion of sin in them. 
 Crimes, blunders, mistakes, miseries enough one may find, but sin 
 as estrangement from a holy personal God who loves man and 
 would serve him one never finds. But in the Bible we are face 
 to face with sin from first to last. One chapter and a bit of 
 another are given to the story of the making of the world and 
 the making of man, and then the story of the entrance of sin is 
 told, and the reader is kept face to face with sin in every part of 
 it. In the gospel story we read at the outset : " Thou shalt call 
 his name Jesus : for he shall save his people from their sins " ; 
 and in John almost the first word about Him is, " Behold the 
 Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world." It is 
 characteristic of the Bible to keep its reader face to face with sin 
 and its consequences, till he is stirred up to the effort to get 
 rid of it. 
 
 ^ Sometimes in business a man will say : " There is a limit to 
 everything. I have trusted such an one, and he has deceived me. 
 I have forgiven him much, but now he has crossed the score, and 
 I will have no more dealings with him." But it is only when 
 men, in their own estimation, have got over that score that the 
 heavenly business begins. Some minister comes from somewhere, 
 to preach some day, and preaches the forgiveness of sins, and that 
 is the beginning of the business; and at length the man finds 
 Heaven for himself, and can say: "He forgiveth all mine 
 iniquities." ^ 
 
 1 James Iverach, The Other Side of Greatness, 121. » A. Whyte. 
 
PSALM cm. 1-5 
 
 293 
 
 ii. 
 
 Healing-. 
 
 "Who healeth all thy diseases." 
 
 Once a prophet said, " From the sole of the foot even unto the 
 head there is no soundness in it ; but wounds, and bruises, and 
 putrefying sores." When we read these words, we are inclined to 
 say they are Oriental figures of speech, exaggerated metaphors. 
 If our spiritual vision were as keen as that of the prophet, we 
 should find that he was speaking what he knew. Sin then makes 
 disease, and God's relation to disease is described as that of 
 healing. In the Scriptures this relation is described so fully that 
 it gives a distinctive name for God — Jehovah the Healer. He 
 not only forgives sin. He also so deals with the results of sin that 
 He removes every trace of sin. He heals all our diseases. 
 
 ^ The nineteenth century produced three famous persons in 
 this country who contributed more than any of their contem- 
 poraries to the relief of human suffering in disease : Simpson, the 
 introducer of chloroform; Lister, the inventor of antiseptic 
 surgery; and Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern 
 nursing. The second of the great discoveries completed the 
 beneficent w^ork of the first. The third development — the 
 creation of nursing as a trained profession — has co-operated 
 powerfully with the other two, and would have been beneficent 
 even if the use of anaesthetics and antiseptics had not been 
 discovered. The contribution of Florence Nightingale to the 
 healing art was less than that of either Simpson or Lister ; but 
 perhaps, from its wider range, it has saved as many lives, and 
 relieved as much, if not so acute, suffering as either of the other 
 two.^ 
 
 iii. 
 
 Redemption. 
 
 "Who redeemeth thy life from destruction." 
 
 That is, God preserves the life that He saves. Here is first 
 a Hfe forfeited. That life is then saved by forgiveness. Then 
 there is a life imperilled by disease, and saved by God's healing. 
 But that life is in a thousand dangers. Many seek after the 
 ^ Sir Edward Cook, The Lift of Florence Nightingale, i. 439. 
 
294 
 
 ALL HIS BENEFITS 
 
 young child — the Christ within us — to destroy it. But God 
 "redeemeth thy life from destruction." How often God has 
 saved some of us from impending ruin, He alone knows. 
 
 ^ In my native town of Stirling workmen were blasting the 
 castle rock near where it abuts upon a wall that lies open to 
 the street. The train was laid and lit, and an explosion was 
 momentarily expected. Suddenly, trotting round the great wall 
 of cliff, came a little child going straight to where the match 
 burned. The men shouted. That was mercy. But by their very 
 shouting they alarmed and bewildered the poor little thing. By 
 this time the mother also had come round. In a moment she 
 saw the danger, opened wide her arms, and cried from her very 
 heart, " Come to me, my darling." That was tender mercy ; 
 and instantly, with eager, pattering feet, the little thing ran back 
 and away, and stopped not until she was clasped in her mother's 
 bosom. Not a moment too soon, as the roar of the shattered 
 rock told.^ 
 
 ^ I remember one who had been for a long time drifting 
 towards an evil act which was certain to do more harm to others 
 than ibo himself, but who had not as yet determined on flinging 
 friends, society, work, good repute, his past and future, and God 
 Himself, to the winds. The one thing that kept him back was a 
 remnant of belief in God, in One beyond humanity, beyond the 
 world's laws of convention and morality. Nothing else was left, 
 for he had, in the desire for this wrong thing, passed beyond 
 caring whether the whole world went against him, whether he 
 injured others or not. He was as ready to destroy all the use of 
 his own life as he was careless of the use of the lives of others. 
 But he felt a slow and steady pull against him. He said to 
 himself, "This is God, though I know Him not." At last, 
 however, he determined to have his way. One day the loneliness 
 and longing had been too great to be borne, and when night came he 
 went down his garden resolved on the evil thing. " This night," 
 he said, " I will take the plunge." But as he went he heard the 
 distant barking of a dog in the village ; the moon rose above a 
 dark yew tree at the end of the garden, and he was abruptly 
 stopped in the midst of the pathway. Something seemed to 
 touch him as with a finger, and to push him back. It was not 
 till afterwards that he analysed the feeling, and knew that the 
 rising of the moon over the yew tree and the barking of the dog 
 in the distance had brought back to him an hour in his childhood, 
 when in the dusk he had sat with his mother, after his father's 
 
 A. Grosart. 
 
PSALM cm. 1-5 
 
 295 
 
 death, in the same garden, and had heard her say — " When thou 
 passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through 
 the rivers, they shall not overflow thee." It was this slight 
 touch that saved him from wrong which would have broken 
 more lives than his own. It was God speaking; but it would 
 have been as nothing to him, had he not kept his little grain of 
 faith in God alive, the dim consciousness that there was One who 
 cared for him, who had interest that he should conquer righteous- 
 ness. Next day, he left his home, travelled and won his battle ; 
 and his action redeemed not only his own but another's 
 life.i 
 
 ^ There is an old poem which bears the curious title of 
 " Strife in Heaven," the idea of which is something like this. The 
 poet supposes himself to be walking in the streets of the New 
 Jerusalem, when he comes to a crowd of saints engaged in a very 
 earnest discussion. He draws near and listens. The question 
 they are discussing is which of them is the greatest monument of 
 God's saving grace. After a long debate, in which each states 
 his case separately, and each claims to have been by far the most 
 wonderful trophy of God's love in all the multitude of the re- 
 deemed, it is finally agreed to settle the matter by a vote. Vote 
 after vote is taken, and the list of competition is gradually 
 reduced until only two remain. These are allowed to state their 
 case again, and the company stand ready to join in the final vote. 
 The first to speak is a very old man. He begins by saying that 
 it is a mere waste of time to go any further; it is absolutely 
 impossible that God's grace could have done more for any man in 
 heaven than for him. He tells again how he had led a most 
 wicked and vicious life — a life filled up with every conceivable 
 indulgence, and marred with every crime. He has been a thief, a 
 liar, a blasphemer, a drunkard, and a murderer. On his death-bed, 
 at the eleventh hour, Christ came to him and he was forgiven. 
 The other is also an old man, who says, in a few words, that he 
 was brought to Christ when he was a boy. He had led a quiet 
 and uneventful life, and had looked forward to heaven as long as 
 he could remember. The vote is taken ; and, of course, you would 
 say it results in favour of the first. But no, the votes are all 
 given to the last. We might have thought, perhaps, that the one 
 who led the reckless, godless life — he who had lied, thieved, 
 blasphemed, murdered ; he who was saved by the skin of his teeth, 
 just a moment before it might have been too late — had the most 
 to thank God for. But the old poet knew the deeper truth. It 
 required great grace verily to pluck that withered brand from the 
 
 1 S. A. Brooke, The Shi^p of the Soul, 23. 
 
296 
 
 ALL HIS BENEFITS 
 
 burning. It required depths, absolutely fathomless depths, of 
 mercy to forgive that veteran in sin at the close of all those 
 guilty years. But it required more grace to keep that other life 
 from guilt through all those tempted years. It required more 
 grace to save him from the sins of his youth and keep his 
 Christian boyhood pure, to steer him scathless through the 
 tempted years of riper manhood, to crown his days with useful- 
 ness, and his old age with patience and hope. Both started in 
 life together ; to one grace came at the end, to the other at the 
 beginning. The first was saved from the guilt of sin, the second 
 from the power of sin as well. The first was saved from dying 
 in sin. But he who became a Christian in his boyhood was saved 
 from living in sin. The one required just one great act of love at 
 the close of life ; the other had a life full of love — it was a greater 
 salvation by far. His soul was forgiven like the other, but his 
 life was redeemed from destruction.^ 
 
 iv. 
 Crowningf. 
 
 " Who crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercies." 
 
 So far the Psalmist has been thinking of God's action as it 
 is defined in relation to sin. Now his thoughts take a grander 
 fliglit, and he thinks of the Divine action when sin is taken out 
 of the way, and no longer presents a barrier to the fellowship 
 between God and His people. His words take on a finer mean- 
 ing, and mould themselves into a more musical fotm. For he 
 tries to represent the intercourse between God and the children 
 of God, when sin is removed from between them. "Who 
 crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercies." These 
 words are about the most musical and pathetic in the whole 
 Bible, and they are as fine in meaning as they are in form. 
 
 IF God puts honour upon the brow of a forgiven man. He 
 does not merely forgive, and that in a formal way, but, when He 
 forgives, He crowns. He crowns me with the title of " son," and 
 He places the coronet of heirship upon my head, for " if children, 
 then heirs ; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Jesus Christ." Sweet 
 picture this. Observe that it is not a crown of merit, for " He 
 crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercies." This is 
 the only crown that I can consent to wear.^ 
 
 ^ H. Drummond, The Ideal Life, 149. ^ j^^ q Brown. 
 
PSALM cm. 1-5 
 
 297 
 
 1. ZovingJcindness. — Note how the translators of the Psalm 
 have been constrained to tie two English words together in order 
 to set forth the meaning of the original. These translators of the 
 Bible were poets as well as scholars. They took the two words 
 " love " and " kindness " and tied them together in order to shut 
 out the weaker meanings of both, and from the union of them set 
 forth a higher and better meaning than either alone could express. 
 Love has always been recognized to be the strongest and best 
 thing in the world of life, and in recent years it has come to 
 even larger recognition. It really holds society together, is at the 
 basis of family life, is the motive power of the highest activities 
 of mankind. But while love is so and acts so, it may partake of 
 the weakness or the selfishness of human nature. It may become 
 fierce, jealous, regardless of the interest of the person who is its 
 object. It may look at the person merely as belonging to itself, 
 and fiercely insist on exclusive possession. No doubt ideal love 
 would labour, toil, and spend itself for the good of the person 
 loved. But all love is not ideal, and it may have more ferocity 
 than kindness in it. So this fierce side of love is shut out, and 
 only the ideal side is kept, and kept by uniting it with kindness. 
 But kindness is apt to be weak, injudicious, and foolish. It is the 
 kindness, perhaps, of a fond young mother who gives the baby 
 whatever it desires, cloys it with sweets, or gives it unwholesome 
 food because the child likes it, or, as George MacDonald suggests, 
 gives the child a lighted candle because it cries for it. This 
 foolish side of kindness is shut out by tying it to the firmer, 
 wiser fact of love. So united, kindness becomes lovingkindness, 
 and the two become, in their union, something higher and better 
 than either of the two elements contained in it, when these are 
 taken by themselves. 
 
 H Another young friend writes : " From such an array of 
 beautiful characteristics as is called up by his name it is hard to 
 choose the greatest, but his ' loving-kindness ' is the outstanding 
 trait that not only those who knew him best, but those who came 
 only casually into contact with him, will remember with tender- 
 ness. How he loved every one, especially ' those who were of 
 the household of faith ' ! How eagerly would he seek out, even 
 when on holiday, the brother-minister, superannuated by affliction 
 from active work, to encourage and help him by his sympathy, to 
 cheer him with his humour and his jollity, to stimulate him with 
 
298 ALL HIS BENEFITS 
 
 his wide and varying interests ! And in what good stead that 
 wonderful fund of quiet humour stood him through the days of 
 pain and weakness and weariness through which God's veteran 
 passed, and from which he is now released ! One revered him as 
 a saint, but loved him as a man, a man who radiated such love as 
 compelled a willing love in return." ^ 
 
 If It is twenty-five years since I first had my attention drawn 
 to this clause. I went to college then, and one day a minister 
 gave me a tract, and told me, " Take that and read it, and when 
 you bring it back, tell me what you think of it." He said to me 
 — and he proved a sound prophet — " I may not live to see it, but 
 you will see it. The lad that spoke these words — his name will 
 be heard wherever the English language is spoken," — the name 
 was Charles Spurgeon. It was a discourse on this word — He 
 crowneth me with lovingkindness and tender mercies." He had 
 never been to college, and had taken none of your envied degrees 
 that seem to stamp a man as a Master of Divinity. My friend 
 said : " I may not live to see it, but you will." A young man in 
 his teens, not far up in the offices yet, Spurgeon was under 
 twenty-one when he preached a sermon that made my old friend 
 prophetic. " When God takes a man's head out of the dust " — 
 said this young fledgling Puritan preacher — " He crowns it with a 
 crown that is so heavy with His grace and goodness that he could 
 not wear it were it not lined with the sweet velvet of His loving- 
 kindness." Not a classic figure perhaps, but Spurgeon's figure 
 is graven on my memory while many a classic figure has faded 
 away. Many a costly gift, given carelessly with lavish abund- 
 ance, you have nearly forgotten : but one gift, given many years 
 ago, you remember still. It was only a cup of cold water, 
 perhaps, but given with a hand and with a look of lovingkindness. 
 And when God crowns us with such love as this, when He smiles 
 upon us, no wonder that it gladdens the heart so that a man 
 never forgets it.^ 
 
 2. Tender mercies. — Mercy in itself is one of the grandest 
 things in human nature. It is not mere feeling, it is feeling in 
 action. It is not mere sympathy or pity, it is sympathy made 
 alive and active. It is not pity, it is pity going forth into action, 
 to bind up the broken-hearted, to comfort the sorrowful, to make 
 the widow's heart to sing for joy. But tender mercy is even 
 more than mercy, great and good though the exercise be. It is 
 
 1 Love and Life : The Story of J. Denholm Brash (1913), 179. 
 ^ Alexander Whyte. 
 
 J 
 
PSALM cm. 1-5 
 
 299 
 
 mercy exercised in the most tender way. For mercy may be 
 exercised in such a way as to wound the feelings of the person to 
 whom you are merciful. You may intend to help your friend 
 who has fallen into misfortune. He may have been blameworthy, 
 his misfortune may have arisen from his want of thought, from 
 his recklessness, or even from wrong-doing. You intend to help 
 him, but you are annoyed with his conduct ; you insist on show- 
 ing him how foolish he was, how reckless was his conduct, how 
 unprincipled was his motive, until he almost feels that he would 
 be without the help if he could be free from the scolding. Or 
 you are merciful to the person who asks you for help, but you 
 fling the penny to him across the street. It is possible in this 
 way to undo all the effects of a merciful action by the ungracious 
 way in which it is done. Mercy according to our text is exercised 
 tenderly. You help your friend, or come to the assistance of 
 those who are in poverty and need, in such a way as to bind up 
 their wounds, to cheer them, and to give them courage to begin 
 the battle of life anew, though life heretofore has been all a 
 failure. For the mercy which man shows to man interprets for 
 man the tender mercies of God. After that interview with you, 
 during which you entered into the sorrow of your friend 
 sympathetically and tenderly, gave him of your wisdom, of your 
 experience, of your means, he goes forth to the work of life again 
 with a new outlook, with a firmer resolution to do well. He 
 says to himself, " It is a good, kind world after all, and there 
 are good, kind people in it. I must show myself worthy 
 to live in so good a world, and worthy of the help I have 
 received." So tender mercies help, but they help in such a way 
 as to bind up the broken-hearted, and to open a door of hope for 
 those who have failed, and to give them courage to lift them 
 above the feeling of despair. 
 
 ^ Stern and unflinching in his denunciation of drunkenness, 
 Ernest Wilberforce was tenderness itself in his dealings with the 
 individual sinner. Few cases are more distressing or more 
 difficult to deal with than those where a clergyman has fallen into 
 habits of intemperance. The Bishop's correspondence in one of 
 them is lying before me as I write, marked throughout by the 
 strong sense of justness and fairness which ever characterized him, 
 yet compassionate and considerate, so far as consideration was 
 
 ! 
 
300 
 
 ALL HIS BENEFITS 
 
 possible. The facts were clear, and the unfortunate gentleman 
 was induced to vacate his office without the scandal of judicial 
 proceedings. But there were features which induced the Bishop 
 to hope that, under happier auspices, he might yet do good and 
 useful work in his chosen calling. Without any effort at mini- 
 mizing the sad story, he succeeded in inducing an experienced 
 parish priest in another diocese to give the transgressor a fresh 
 start. The good Samaritan had no cause to regret his charity, 
 and in writing to the Bishop he congratulated the clergy of 
 Northumberland in having one set over them to whom they could 
 appeal with perfect confidence in the hour of need. " If ever," he 
 wrote, " I should be in a fix, I shall wish for such a friend as your 
 Lordship." ^ 
 
 V. 
 
 Satisfaction. 
 
 " Who satisfieth thy mouth with good things ; so that 
 thy youth is renewed like the eagle." 
 
 1. The word ^' crowneth " suggests something external, some- 
 thing coming to us from without, and after the crowning there may 
 conceivably be some wants unsupplied, some needs of man which 
 have not been met. But the note of Christianity is that no 
 human needs are left unsatisfied. " My God shall supply all your 
 need." Satisfied with good, so that every need shall be met — this 
 is the promise. 
 
 ^ The thirst of the mind for truth, the thirst of the will and 
 conscience for guidance, and the thirst of the heart for life are 
 satisfied through Him who is the Way, and the Truth, and the Life. 
 If there were needs which He could not or would not satisfy, He 
 would have told us of them.* 
 
 2. The Psalmist felt, as we often feel, that he had emerged 
 from the very gulf of destruction ; that he had been, as it were 
 against his will, rescued from moral suicide ; that all his life had 
 been redeemed by God. Therefore he burst out into joy and 
 thanksgiving! He who had been through grave sorrows; who 
 had known sin, disease, even destruction ; who might have cursed 
 life and shrieked at what men call Fate ; cries out in unfeigned 
 
 » J. B. Atlay, Bishop Ernest Wilherforce, 162. 
 * James Iveracli, The Other Hide of Greainess, 133. 
 
PSALM cm. 1-5 
 
 301 
 
 and mistakable rapture — it is a very outburst of song — " Bless the 
 Lord, 0 my soul ; and all that is within me, bless his holy name. 
 Bless the Lord, 0 my soul, and forget not all his benefits." And 
 in realizing this joyful victory of the moral and spiritual powers ; 
 in the resurrection of his spiritual being into strength; in the 
 leaving behind him in its own grave of all that was dead in his 
 past ; in the great cry of his heart as he looked back — " I am not 
 there, I am risen " — his youth was renewed like the eagle's ! It 
 was a great triumph ; for his best life came back in a higher and 
 a stronger way, with now but little chance of failure. He could 
 again, like the eagle, look upon the sun, and love the upper 
 ranges of the sky ; again soar, but with steadier beat of wing than 
 in youth ; again possess the freedom he loved before disease and 
 destruction had enslaved his plumes ; again breathe the breath of 
 immortal love ; again in conscious union with God hear the great 
 spheres " in measured motion draw after the heavenly tune." 
 And certainty was now with this victory, for he had known and 
 found the Father of his spirit. The waters of his new life arose 
 out of the fountain Life of God Himself, and he knew whence 
 they came. There was now a source as well as a goal for his 
 ideals, hopes, efforts, for the beauty he loved, and for universal joy. 
 It was the Almighty Love and Life of loveliness Himself who was 
 now in him — a personal friend, redeemer, strengthener, exalter ; 
 who crowned him with lovingkindness and tender mercies. This 
 is the true resurrection ; this is the triumph of life. 
 
 ^ The brilliant Princess Anastasia Malsoff (the Nancy 
 Malsoff of the Eussian Court) was one of those led to Christ by 
 the Mar^chale, with whom she kept up a close friendship during 
 the rest of her life. One of the Princess's letters is peculiarly 
 interesting : " I will see the Emperor in these days," she writes, 
 " and I will seek strength to speak to him. You see, my darling, 
 speaking is not enough, one must in such a case pour out one's 
 soul and feel that a superior force guides one and speaks for one." 
 It turned out as she hoped. One night she was at the Palace in 
 St. Petersburg. After dinner the Czar came and seated himself 
 beside her. Soon they were deep in intimate conversation. She 
 began telling him what her new-found friend in Paris had done 
 for her. She talked wisely as he listened attentively. At length 
 he said : " But, Nancy, you have always been good, always right." 
 " No," she answered ; " till now I have never known the Christ. 
 
ALL HIS BENEFITS 
 
 She has made Him real to me, brought Him near to me, and He 
 has become what He never was before — my personal Friend." ^ 
 
 *|| " I shall be sorry," says Eckhart, the German mystic, " if I 
 am not younger to-morrow than I am to-day — that is, a step 
 nearer to the source whence I came." And Swedenborg tells us 
 that when heaven was opened to him he found that the oldest 
 angels seemed to be the youngest. 
 
 'Tis said there is a fount in Flower Land, — 
 De Leon found it, — where Old Age away 
 Throws weary mind and heart, and fresh as day 
 Springs from the dark and joins Aurora's band : 
 This tale, transformed by some skilled trouvere's wand 
 From the old myth in a Greek poet's lay. 
 Rests on no truth. Change bodies as Time may, 
 Souls do not change, though heavy be his hand. 
 Who of us needs this fount ? What soul is old ? 
 Age is a mask, — in heart we grow more young, 
 For in our winters we talk most of spring; 
 And as we near, slow-tottering, God's safe fold, 
 . Youth's loved ones gather nearer: — though among 
 The seeming dead, youth's songs more clear they sing.^ 
 
 1 J. Strahan, The MarechaU (1913), 184. 
 
 2 Maurice Francis Egan. 
 
The Father's Pity. 
 
 303 
 
Literature. 
 
 Buckland (A. R.), Text St udies for a Year, 143 
 Clifford (J.), The Gospel of Gladness, 17. 
 Conn (J.), The Fulness of Time, 1. 
 Dykes (J. 0.), Sermons, 138. 
 Fleming (A. G.), Silver Wings, 26. 
 McLeod (M. J.), Heavenly Harmonies, 99. 
 Murray (W. H.), The Fruits of the Spirit, 397. 
 Pierce (C. C), The Hunger of the Heart for Faith, 59. 
 Selby (T. G.), The God of the Frail, 2. 
 
 Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xvi. (1870), No. 941. 
 Vaughan (J.), Sermoyis (Brighton Pulpit), vii. (1868), No. 678. 
 Walters (F.), in Sermons by Unitarian Ministers, 53. 
 Christian World Fulpit, xxx. 230 (J. Baillie) ; xxxii. 376 (F. Ferguson) ; 
 
 xxxviii. 188 (D. Hobbs) ; li. 376 (E. Griffith-Jones); Ixi. 251 
 
 (J. Ritson). 
 Church Pulpit Year Book, 1909, p. 153. 
 
 304 
 
The FATHER'S Pity. 
 
 Like as a father pitieth his children, 
 So the Lord pitieth them that fear him. 
 For he knoweth our frame ; 
 
 He remembereth that we are dust. — Ps. ciii. 13, 14. 
 
 1. " Like as a father." The history of religion shows that it has 
 not been easy for men to think of God in that extremely simple 
 and human fashion; and yet, to Christians, no other way of 
 thinking appears so obvious or so natural. It met us in our 
 childhood, grew into the thinking of our youth, and has swayed 
 the conceptions we have formed of that august and invincible 
 power that works for righteousness and peace for evermore. We 
 lisped it in our earliest hymns. It had a place in the first 
 prayers we offered at our mother's knee. It was set out in many 
 winsome forms in the Sunday school; and when we realized 
 something of the joy of the Divine pardon, we felt more deeply 
 than ever the entire appropriateness and unsurpassed charm of 
 the poet's words. God is like a father. It saturates the Christian 
 atmosphere. It is shaping the thought and the life of the world. 
 
 And yet it is a matter of historic fact that men were thinking 
 and inquiring for ages before they were able to interpret God in 
 the terms of human fatherhood. Groping after God, if haply 
 they might find Him, they sought their symbols first of all in the 
 many-leaved picture book of nature, and said, God is like the sun, 
 shining in its strength, and filling the world with its radiance. 
 The moon is His symbol as it casts its light on the path of the 
 pilgrim in the night. "God is like the rock," they exclaimed; 
 " His work is perfect." He abides amid the storms and stress of 
 life, stable as the everlasting hills. 
 
 Quite late in history did men come to the human in their 
 quest for the terms in which they might express God ; and when 
 they reached this point, they seized at first only upon the more 
 PS. xxv.-cxix. — 20 
 
3o6 THE FATHER'S PITY 
 
 arresting qualities of the animal in man, and said, " God is like 
 Hercules " in the invincible strength with which He crushes the 
 evils in the world, and makes an end of them. Later still, Plato 
 advanced to the suggestion that God was like a "geometer," a 
 thinker and fashioner, full of ideas and ideals ; and, latest of all, 
 in one of the youngest portions of the Old Testament, not in 
 Genesis, not in any part of the Pentateuch, but in this wonderful 
 and most gracious lyric, the 103rd Psalm, possibly one of the last 
 contributions of Hebrew Psalmody, the seer surpasses all the 
 great historical religions, and pictures God to us as a pitiful, 
 compassionate, sin-forgiving, and soul-healing Father, and thus 
 supplies the basis for the most true, most worthy, and most 
 inspiring conception of God. 
 
 ^ There was once a group of friends standing at the house 
 door, gazing in wonder at an eclipse. It was a cloudless night ; 
 and, as they saw the shadow of the earth gliding so punctually 
 over the face of the brilliant moon, a solemn emotion of awe fell 
 upon every mind, and in absolute silence they watched the 
 magnificent phenomenon. Everything connected with their daily 
 lives seemed for a season to be forgotten ; they were citizens of 
 infinitude; all their thoughts were swept into the regions of 
 immensity. But suddenly the silence was broken by a cry 
 from the nursery where a child had been laid to sleep. In that 
 company, how soon you could tell who was the mother; in a 
 moment she had left the scene, had rushed upstairs, and was 
 clasping the baby in her embrace ! What were the wonders of 
 nature compared to the needs of a suffering child ? More sacred 
 than the music of the spheres was that feeble appeal for pity ; 
 more powerful than the sweet influence of the Pleiades was the 
 attraction of love which at once absorbed that woman's soul. 
 Then was she most like God, not when she was exalted into 
 amazement at the marvels of the sky, but when she was soothing 
 pain and chasing fear by tenderness and pity.^ 
 
 2. In depicting the milder and kindlier aspect of God's 
 character the Old Testament writers make pity the ground 
 quality on which everything is based. With the Psalm writers 
 it is a standing description of God on this side of His nature that 
 He is " gracious and full of compassion." His compassion for the 
 perishable life and oppressed state of Israel is expressly assigned 
 
 1 F. Walters. 
 
PSALM cm. 13, 14 
 
 307 
 
 by the prophets as His reason for " redeeming " His people and 
 forgiving their rebellions with long-suffering mercy. When He 
 withdraws locusts from the wasted fields of Palestine, it is because 
 He pities His people's sufferings. The repentant city of Nineveh 
 is spared because its helpless myriads touched in God's great 
 heart such ruth as Jonah had for his withering gourd. And after 
 Jerusalem's fall, the patriot-poet who mourned so exquisitely 
 over its ruin finds the explanation of all disaster in these 
 plaintive, half-reproachful words, " Thou hast not pitied." It 
 reads as if the Almighty's long-suffering patience with men, His 
 gracious kindness to His people. His relenting, even His mercy 
 in pardoning sin, were all felt by these old Hebrews to root 
 themselves in that beautiful sentiment of compassion with which 
 a Being so immense and self-contained in blessedness must look 
 down on the fragile and sorrowful creatures whose origin, whose 
 habitation, and whose end are all of them in the dust. 
 
 ^ " Pity lies at the core of all the great religions." The 
 chapters of the Koran, all of them, begin with these words : " In 
 the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful." The vast 
 religion of Buddha numbers five hundred million votaries, and 
 pity is the keynote to it all.^ 
 
 3. The sense of God's fatherly compassion grows out of man's 
 deepest experience. The Psalmist is face to face with his own 
 life, and with the life of Israel. He looks back in his history, and 
 counts up the " benefits " he has received from the Lord : forgive- 
 ness and healing, solace and renewal, quickening and uplift. He 
 is swayed by the spirit of praise and adoration and love ; and out 
 of his own growing affection there leaps up irresistibly this 
 thought of God. It must be so. The God who meets his sin 
 with such pity and pardon, bears with his errors and guilty 
 ignorance so patiently, must have the heart of a father. These 
 are the gifts of love. They reveal wisdom, intelligence, adaptation 
 of means to an end, but chiefly they show the same sort of care 
 for the soul of man as a loving father shows for his child; 
 they disclose the Divine heart. God forgives as a father does the 
 mistakes and follies and sins of his son. He delivers from peril, 
 He crowns with loving-kindness and tenderness. He satisfies 
 
 ^ M. J. McLeod, Heavenly Harmonies for Earthly Living, 99. 
 
3o8 THE FATHER'S PITY 
 
 the soaring desires of the spirit ; He renews the springs of life. 
 " Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them 
 that fear him." 
 
 But the most vital element in the Psalmist's experience is the 
 forgiveness of his sins. It is to that he recurs again and again. 
 God forgives as only a father-heart in its fullest flow of pity and 
 compassion can forgive. For it is not easy to forgive. Brothers 
 have been known to pursue one another in a spirit of retaliation 
 for years, and some fathers and mothers have shown hardness of 
 heart towards their own offspring ; but God forgives with a gener- 
 osity and completeness which show that no father has a love so 
 large as His. 
 
 Who is a pardoning God like Thee, 
 Or who has grace so rich and free ! 
 
 It seems impossible to exaggerate in describing it. Listen to the 
 singer as, with soul bursting with thankfulness, he says, God does 
 chide — but not always; nor does He keep His anger for ever. 
 Take your measuring-glass and look up into the heavens. Let 
 your gaze reach out to the farthest depths of the infinite blue, 
 soar and still soar, and still you do not reach the boundaries of 
 His forgiving love : " He hath not dealt with us after our sins ; 
 nor rewarded us according to our iniquities. For as the heaven is 
 high above the earth, so great is his mercy toward them that fear 
 him." 
 
 ^ Years ago when death came to me first and took a child, 
 the anguish was great. Watching her while she lay dying, I 
 learnt for the first time what is meant by the words, " Like as a 
 father pitieth his children." Only so could I be taught the pity 
 of God. And I learnt too, at the same time, what God must feel 
 at the loss of His children. What are all these passionate 
 affections but parables of Divine things ? Shall God suffer and 
 not we ? ^ 
 
 My little Son, who look'd from thoughtful eyes 
 And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise, 
 Having my law the seventh time disobey 'd, 
 I struck him, and dismiss'd 
 With hard words and unkiss'd, 
 His Mother, who was patient, being dead. 
 
 * Life of R. W. Bale, of Birmingham, 621. 
 
PSALM cm. 13, 14 
 
 309 
 
 Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep, 
 
 I visited his bed, 
 
 But found him slumbering deep, 
 
 With darken'd eyelids, and their lashes yet 
 
 From his late sobbing wet. 
 
 And I, with moan. 
 
 Kissing away his tears, left others of my own; 
 
 For on a table drawn beside his head, 
 
 He had put, within his reach, 
 
 A box of counters, and a red-vein'd stone, 
 
 A piece of glass abraded by the beach 
 
 And six or seven shells, 
 
 A bottle with bluebells 
 
 And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art, 
 
 To comfort his sad heart. 
 
 So when that night I pray'd 
 
 To God, I wept, and said : 
 
 Ah, when at last we lie with tranced breath, 
 
 Not vexing Thee in death. 
 
 And Thou rememberest of what toys 
 
 We made our joys. 
 
 How weakly understood. 
 
 Thy great commanded good, 
 
 Then, fatherly not less 
 
 Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay, 
 
 Thoult leave Thy wrath, and say, 
 
 " I will be sorry for their childishness." ^ 
 
 4. The New Testament discloses the fact that the pity of God 
 is the sympathy of One who associates Himself with us and under- 
 takes for us. When we speak of the Incarnation we think of the 
 Divine in the human. But there is another side to that great 
 truth. There is the human in the Divine — what Eobertson of 
 Brighton used to call the humanity of Deity, and what the late 
 Principal Edwards of Bala called " the humanity of God." That 
 is something which makes Him one with us, so that He identifies 
 Himself with us, and, in a word, pities us. Now nobody resents 
 that kind of pity, the pity of a genuine sympathy, which makes a 
 man suffer because you suff'er and compels him so to identify 
 himself with you as to enter into your experience. That comes 
 to you like balm ; there is healing in it. It stands by your 
 
 ^ Coventry Patmore, The Unknown Eros. 
 
3IO THE FATHER'S PITY i 
 
 side ; it puts its arms around you, so to speak, and in quivering 
 tones says : " My brother, my sister, my child, this misfortune 
 touches us both, for you are bone of my bone, and flesh of my 
 flesh. Because you suffer I must suffer. In the name of our common 
 humanity, in the name of God, let us try to help each other." 
 That is pity. That is the pity of God ; for that is the pity of love. 
 
 What is the meaning of Gethsemane and the cross but this, 
 that the Son of God by virtue of His identification with us in His 
 humanity entered sympathetically into the sin and suffering of 
 the world ? Not that He shared our sin by actual transgression, 
 for He knew no sin ; but as a father shares the sin and shame and 
 suffering of his child, so the Lord J esus shared our sin and shame 
 and suffering. " Himself bare our sins in his own body on the 
 tree." " He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised 
 for our iniquities." He who knew no sin " was made sin for us." 
 How otherwise could He have made atonement for us ? And 
 what is the teaching of the parable of the Prodigal Son in this 
 regard ? How did the father pity his wandering boy ? He 
 yearned for him when he was away in the far country ; he knew 
 well what it all meant — the degradation, the undying stain, the 
 suffering. And for every pang in the heart of the son there was 
 an answering pang in the heart of the father. And how did the 
 pity express itself ? While the son was yet a great way off the 
 father saw him, and had compassion on him, and ran to meet him. 
 Ah ! pity does not think of its dignity. The pity of some people 
 could never get beyond a walk; it is too often on stilts. The 
 father's pity made him run ; he ran and fell on his neck and kissed 
 him. And that is the pity of God ; that is how it is unfolded in 
 the story of redemption. 
 
 ^ A chord which has been once set in unison with another 
 vibrates (they say) when its fellow is sharply struck. God has set 
 His heart through human suffering into perpetual concord with 
 human hearts. Strike them, and the heart of God quivers for 
 fellowship. If this is compassion, it is so in a more literal sense 
 than when we use the word as a mere synonym for pity. It is 
 sympathy, in the Greek and New Testament sense ; it is, as our ver- 
 sion has it, being " touched" with the same feeling. It is the remem- 
 brance of His own human past which stirs within the soul of Christ, 
 when, now, from His high seat, He sees what mortal men endure.^ 
 
 » J. 0. Dykes. 
 
PSALM cm. 13, 14 
 
 311 
 
 5. The Psalmist says that man's weakness makes a sure 
 appeal to the Father's heart. " For he knoweth our frame ; he 
 remembereth that we are dust." Dust is a synonym for frailty. 
 While the mountains stand fast for generations, the dust into 
 which they are slowly worn has no abiding place. The winds 
 toss it, carrying its unresisting particles whithersoever they will. 
 And the stuff out of which we are fashioned is just as unstable 
 and never at one stay. Our lives are of slenderer fibre than 
 unspun silk, brittle as threads of fine-drawn glass, breath-break- 
 able as the texture that holds together only in a vacuum. The 
 Psalmist goes on to speak of death, reminding us that man is like 
 a flower of the field which, untended by human care, unscreened 
 by human device, unwarmed by human art, shrivels at the first 
 sign of change and the first moan of desert wind, and dies 
 neglected and forlorn. Through the entire round of his days 
 he is ever matching and measuring his puny capacities against 
 the strong. Death, which draws the curtain over his cold, inert, 
 baffled clay, is but the last phase in that ever-recurring spectacle 
 of impotence. And yet man draws the Almighty God down to 
 his help ; and, marvellous to say, man draws God by reason of his 
 very frailty. Of the sum of that human life over which He bends 
 I am but a thousand-millionth part, and yet " the Lord thinketh 
 upon me," who " am poor and needy " — thinketh of me the more 
 closely for that very reason. 
 
 ^ In his essay on " The Sublime and Beautiful," Burke points 
 out the fact that we always associate physical smallness with the 
 idea of beauty, and he supports his rule by reminding us Miat in 
 every known language terms of endearment are diminutives. Is 
 not the reason for this common note in the taste and speech of 
 mankind that the hearts of the strong and the chivalrous are 
 captured by the very weakness which solicits defence ? When we 
 are called upon to play the part of providence to the helpless we 
 experience a mysterious satisfaction which influences our aesthetic 
 judgment, and the helpless grow beautiful in our eyes. And does 
 not this peculiarity in human nature give us the clue to a mystery 
 in the heart of God ? When He made man He put Divine qualities 
 into a slender framework, filled up with delicate clay, because 
 to such beings the deepest secret of His tenderness could be 
 spoken.^ 
 
 1 T. G. Selby, 
 
312 
 
 THE FATHER'S PITY 
 
 ^ Will you say to a mother, Why do you waste such love on 
 that poor child ? Do you not see that he is a cripple, has 
 curvature of the spine, always will be a cripple ? See the little 
 fellow creeping on his hands and knees ! The doctor says that 
 he can never be strong; always will be a source of anxiety to 
 you ; most likely never will be able to walk. Why worry so over 
 him ? What good will he ever be ? Ah, if you spoke thus, she 
 would give you a look that would shrivel you. 
 
 My silent boy, I hold thee to my breast, 
 
 Just as I did when thou wast newly born. 
 It may be sinful, but I love thee best, 
 
 And kiss thy lips the longest night and morn. 
 Oh, thou art dear to me beyond all others, 
 
 And when I breathe my trust and bend my knee 
 For blessing on thy sisters and thy brothers, 
 
 God seems the nighest when I pray for thee.^ 
 
 6. God's intimate knowledge of our weakness is the sure 
 pledge of tender parental treatment. It is certain that a very 
 great part of the harshness of judgment which passes among men 
 is the result of imperfect knowledge. You do not know the man 
 you are speaking about ; you do not know the natural infirmities, 
 the bodily hindrances, the constitutional causes which affect the 
 person whom you are blaming. You cannot take into your 
 calculation all the circumstances, all the pressure, all the tempta- 
 tion. You cannot read his motives, you cannot dip into the secret 
 processes going on in that man's mind. If you could see all this, 
 your feelings would be very different, and your sentiments would 
 be reversed. 
 
 Now, of all upon earth, a parent can best estimate these 
 things in his own child. Has he not watched him from the first 
 passages of his dawning life ? Has he not seen the moulding of 
 his frame ? Has he not become intimate with the secret frame- 
 work of his being ? Can he not take a more comprehensive view 
 of him than any other man can ? And this pity flowing from 
 parental knowledge is the shadow of that love of God. He sees 
 what no other eye sees, and His calculations include all the 
 extenuating circumstances — the health, the position, the conflict, 
 the effort, the struggle, the sorrow, the penitence. " He knows " 
 
 * M. J. McLeod, Heavenly Harmonies for Earthly Living, 110. 
 
PSALM cm. 13, 14 
 
 313 
 
 and — blessed be God for the kind word, a word very rarely 
 known to us — " He remembers." And so pity is the child of 
 knowledge. " Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord 
 pitieth them that fear him. For he knoweth our frame ; he 
 remembereth that we are dust." 
 
 Not as one blind and deaf to our beseeching, 
 
 Neither forgetful that we are but dust, 
 Not as from heavens too high for our upreaching. 
 
 Coldly sublime, intolerably just : — 
 
 Nay but Thou knewest us, Lord Christ Thou knowest, 
 Well Thou rememberest our feeble frame. 
 
 Thou canst conceive our highest and our lowest, 
 Pulses of nobleness and aches of shame. 
 
 Therefore have pity! — not that we accuse Thee, 
 
 Curse Thee and die and charge Thee with our woe; 
 
 Not thro' Thy fault, 0 Holy One, we lose Thee, 
 Nay, but our own, — yet hast Thou made us so! 
 
 Then tho' our foul and limitless transgression 
 Grows with our growing, with our breath began, 
 
 Eaise Thou the arms of endless intercession. 
 Jesus, divinest when Thou most art man ! ^ 
 
 7, The Psalmist based the pity of our Heavenly Father on His 
 special knowledge of our frame — such knowledge as only the 
 Framer of it can possess. But to know man's frame, to know 
 what is in man, even to search and try with Divine inspection the 
 heart and spirit of a man, is after all something less intimate and 
 perfect than to be a man. To learn a child's lessons, feel a youth's 
 passions, think a man's thoughts ; to be actually tempted to evil 
 as men are tempted, and find out by trial how hard it is for them 
 to be good ; to undergo the moral probation and discipline peculiar 
 to a human creature, impossible to the Creator ; this must give — 
 or, if we are to think about the subject at all, it must be supposed 
 by us to have given — to the Son of God a fresh acquaintance with 
 human experience, of quite another sort from the omniscience of 
 the creating Father. At all events, who can help feeling this, 
 
 1 F. W. H. Myers, Saint Paul. 
 
314 THE FATHER'S PITY 
 
 that, if it is possible for any one to know us, understand us, and 
 do us justice, J esus Christ is that One ; since, as our Maker, He 
 both knows what He made us fit to be and to do and, as our 
 Fellow-Man, has learned through what hindrances and temptations 
 we have become what we are ? 
 
 ^ An obelisk, originally brought from Egypt, stands in the 
 piazza of St. Peter's at Eome. It was put into its present 
 position in the sixteenth century. It weighs a little short of a 
 million pounds, and required the strength of eight hundred men, 
 one hundred and fifty horses, and forty-six cranes, to lift it on to 
 its pedestal. The crowds who witnessed the feat were forbidden 
 to speak under pain of death. As the ropes were tugged by hosts 
 of workmen, and the huge obelisk slowly reared itself like a 
 waking giant, the movement suddenly stopped and the ropes 
 threatened to give way. The huge mass was about to fall 
 crashing upon the pavement. An old sailor in the crowd, familiar 
 with the humours of ropes and the methods of treating them, 
 broke the silence and cried, " Pour water on the ropes ! " The 
 advice was quickly followed, the ropes tightened, and the obelisk 
 slowly rose again and settled securely upon its base. In our 
 past life how often have strain, tension, and peril come to us ! 
 The ties by which we were knit to goodness, to truth, to purity, 
 to faith, were sorely tested, and seemed ready to snap and plunge 
 us into ruin. Some temptation arose out of all proportion to 
 the staying power of our trust in God, some shock fraught with 
 impending disaster to the character, some partial alienation from 
 right paths threatening to strand our lives in uselessness. But 
 the eye of infinite wisdom was watching, and God remembered 
 the weakness of the flesh. From within the unseen there came 
 a voice that saved us, and the peril was overpast. The strain 
 eased off, character strengthened itself to the emergency, and we 
 were kept in the plane of our providential lot. And through 
 this wise, watchful pity of our infirmities we come to find our- 
 selves with a place in the living temple, monuments of the 
 gentleness, the sympathy, and the upholding power of the God 
 who pities the frail. In the moments which show most our 
 weakness the Lord remembers that we are but dust, and fortifies 
 us against the strains and hazards which belong to our earthly 
 course.^ 
 
 8. Who are they that experience this pity of God ? What 
 does the text say ? " Like as a father pitieth his children, so the 
 1 T. G. Selby, The God of the Frail, 14. 
 
 i 
 
PSALM cm. 13, 14 
 
 315 
 
 Lord pitieth them that fear him." The same expression occurs 
 in the eleventh verse : " As the heaven is high above the earth, 
 so great is his mercy toward them that fear him." And again 
 in the seventeenth verse : " The mercy of the Lord is from 
 everlasting to everlasting upon them that fear him." Now, let 
 us not imagine for a moment that God does not yearn with 
 compassion over men who are utterly reckless, men who are 
 breaking through God's law, and treading the path that leadeth 
 to destruction. God pities them; but, then, observe, they are 
 indifferent to Him ; and if we are indifferent to any one, we do 
 not care for that one's pity, we have no wish for his compassion. 
 God's compassion goes forth upon all men, but all men cannot 
 receive it, and do not receive it. It is not the idea of terror 
 that is conveyed by this word " fear." We do not crave mercy 
 from a tyrant; we demand justice from him. If one might 
 translate this word " fear " one should do so by two words — 
 "reverential love." We can receive real sympathy only from 
 those we love with reverence. When we are bearing a great 
 trial, when we are going through our testing time, when we are 
 bowing under a heavy sorrow, who are the men and women from 
 whom we seek sympathy or pity ? It may be we seek for the 
 companionship of but one — only one — for whom our love is deep 
 and reverent. 
 
 ^ Bunyan in his long treatise On the Fear of God deals 
 with the matter of "right fear" very fully. "Take heed," he 
 says in that treatise, " of hardening thy heart at any time against 
 convictions of judgments. I bid you before to beware of a hard 
 heart, now I bid you beware of hardening your soft heart. The 
 fear of the Lord is the pulse of the soul. Pulses that beat are 
 the best signs of life; but the worst show that life is present. 
 Intermitting pulses are dangerous. David and Peter had an 
 intermitting pulse in reference to this fear." Christian is no 
 coward, and the adjective right is emphatic when he speaks of 
 right fear. The word fear has two senses, according as it relates 
 to dangerous or to sublime things. In the one connexion it is a 
 sense of danger ; in the other it is the faculty of reverence, the 
 habit of wonder, the continued power of awe and admiration. 
 Christian's analysis of it includes both these senses. (1) It rises 
 in the conviction of sin — not (it will be observed) in the approach 
 of punishment, but in the horror of sin itself, as a thing to be 
 abhorred apart from its consequences. (2) It leads to a laying 
 
3i6 THE FATHER'S PITY 
 
 hold on Christ for salvation — in which the sense of danger and 
 the faculty of reverence are combined. (3) It begets in the soul a 
 great reverence for God.^ 
 
 •|f Among the children of God, while there is always that 
 fearful and bowed apprehension of His majesty, and that sacred 
 dread of all offence to Him, which is called the Fear of God, yet 
 of real and essential fear there is not any, but clinging of con- 
 fidence to Him as their Kock, Fortress, and Deliverer; and 
 perfect love, and casting out of fear ; so that it is not possible 
 that, while the mind is rightly bent on Him, there should be 
 dread of anything either earthly or supernatural ; and the more 
 dreadful seems the height of His majesty, the less fear they feel 
 that dwell in the shadow of it (" Of whom shall I be afraid "), 
 so that they are as David was, devoted to His fear " ; whereas, 
 on the other hand, those who, if they may help it, never conceive 
 of God, but thrust away all thought and memory of Him, and in 
 His real terribleness and omnipresence fear Him not nor know 
 Him, yet are by real, acute, piercing, and ignoble fear, haunted 
 for evermore.2 
 
 1 John Kelman, The Road, ii. 162. 
 
 2 Kuskin, Modern Painters j ii. ch. xiv. ( Works, iv. 199). 
 
The Day's Work. 
 
 / 
 
 317 
 
Literature. 
 
 Bain (J. A. K.), For Heart and Life, 357. 
 
 BoA'd (A. K. H.), TJie Graver Thoughts of a Country Parson, ii, 144. 
 
 Brooks (P.), Seeking Life, 331. 
 
 Brown (J. B.), The Christian Policy of Life, 108. 
 
 Clarke (J. E.), Common-Life Sermons, 94, 
 
 Dewhurst (F. E.), The Investment of Truth, 157. 
 
 Dix (M.), Christ at the Door of the Heart, 65. 
 
 Hood (P.)j Bark Sayings on a Harp, 69. 
 
 Hunter (J.), De Profundis Clamavi, 227. 
 
 Lambert (J. C), The Christian Workman, 1. 
 
 Newman (J. H.), Sermons on Subjects of the Day, 395. 
 
 Prothero (R. E.), The Psalms in Human Life, 315. 
 
 Smith (G. A.), The Forgiveness of Sins, 89. 
 
 Christian World Pulpit, xli. 56 (G. A. Smith) ; xlii. 8 (T. Young) ; Ixx. 
 
 139 (H. M'Gahie) ; Ixxvii. 309 (H. S. Holland). 
 Church of England Pulpit, xlix. 309 (J. White); lix. 197 (B. S. 
 
 Tupholme). 
 Church Times, May 6, 1910 (II. S. Holland). 
 Literary Churchman, xxxii. 316 (J. L. Spencer). 
 
 3i8 
 
The DAY'S Work. 
 
 Man goeth forth unto his work 
 
 And to his labour until the evening.— Ps. civ. 23. 
 
 The psalm from which the text is taken is one of the most com- 
 plete and impressive pictures of the universe to be found in 
 ancient literature, and it breathes the very spirit of the Hebrew 
 race. It has been called the Psalm of the Cosmos. It moves 
 through all creation, and begins and ends with praise. Like all 
 the highest reaches of the human imagination, it lays hold of the 
 inner and deeper truth of things, and suggests much more than 
 literary description can convey. He was not a man of knowledge 
 in the modern sense, this Hebrew poet, although the wide sweep 
 of his thought seems to speak of some contact with foreign 
 culture ; but he was at home in that knowledge of God which is 
 Eternal Life. No careful reader of the psalm will fail to see that 
 it follows mainly the order and sequence of the story of the 
 beginnings of things with which our Bible opens — a story which 
 in its groupings of the creative action into progressive stages 
 dimly anticipates our modern idea of development : yet the psalm 
 is no mere copy of that story. The story of Genesis is the record 
 of a past and finished creation : the psalm is a picture of a con- 
 tinuous, ever-proceeding creation — a kind of prophecy of the 
 genesis of science. All the work of the ancient record we see 
 going on before our eyes : the wondrous week of Divine activity 
 is every week, and its six great days are repeated in all the days. 
 In the psalm, as in the Book of Genesis, we see life moving on in 
 the same ordered and stately way to the same goal ; rising up in 
 slow and steady grandeur to man, and in man reaching its summit 
 and crown. The going forth of man is the highest point in the 
 vast, ascending movement — the end or goal of life on its material 
 side. In this psalm, until we reach this verse, God is represented 
 
 as working alone, causing the grass to grow and giving to the 
 
 319 
 
320 
 
 THE DAY'S WORK 
 
 wild beasts their food ; but man goeth forth — goeth forth a self- 
 conscious, self-acting being, a distinct person, a sovereign soul 
 with power to shape the course of his own life and activity. 
 And this going forth of man is not only the summing-up and end 
 of a creation, but the beginning of a new creation. However 
 closely he may be allied to what is beneath him, he belongs to 
 another order. Because he thinks and wills and loves, he is 
 kindred to the Infinite Mind and Will and Heart — kindred to 
 God ; not only a creature formed and sustained by the Creator's 
 power, but a son of God, and therefore more to God than vast 
 worlds and blazing suns. 
 
 ^ In the Psalms, Alexander von Humboldt recognized an 
 epitome of scientific progress, a summary of the laws which 
 govern the universe. "A single Psalm, the 104th," he writes, 
 " may be said to present a picture of the entire Cosmos. We are 
 astonished to see, within the compass of a poem of such small 
 dimension, the universe, the heavens and the earth, thus drawn 
 with a few grand strokes." ^ 
 
 . ^ In the 104th Psalm the inspired poet gives us a magnificent 
 picture of the movement and march of a living world. The 
 clouds roll on like the swift chariots of God; the winds are 
 winged creatures ; the springs of water run among the hills ; the 
 grass is growing, the sap circling through the cedars, the birds 
 building their nests among the branches; the moon keeps her 
 seasons; the sun rises and sets, the beasts of the forest creep 
 forth in search of their food ; the ships are sailing upon the great 
 and wide sea. And of man, set in the midst of this vast, busy 
 scene, the Psalmist says, " Man goeth forth unto his work and to 
 his labour until the evening." There is a beauty and pathos in 
 these words which makes them smite upon the heart like the 
 fingers of a skilled player upon his instrument, a beauty and 
 pathos which is due essentially to their truthfulness to human 
 experience, turning them, all simple as they are, into the solemn 
 refrain of the Psalm of Life.^ 
 
 ^ R. E. Prothero, The Psalms in Human Life, 315. 
 J. C. Lambert, The Christian Workma^i, 18. 
 
PSALM CIV. 23 
 
 321 
 
 I. 
 
 Work as a Law of Man's Life. 
 
 1. To the vast majority of men and women work is a law, first 
 of all, in the sense that it is a positive necessity of their daily 
 existence. We must eat to live, and we must work to eat ; that 
 is what the law comes to in its ultimate physical form. 
 
 ^ In one of his poems Arthur Hugh Clough gives us a realistic 
 picture of morning in the city : — 
 
 Labourers settling 
 Slowly to work, in their limbs the lingering sweetness of 
 slumber ; 
 
 Humble market-carts coming in, bringing in not only 
 Flowers, fruit, farm-store, but sounds and sights of the country 
 Dwelling yet on the sense of the dreamy drivers; soon after, 
 Half-awake servant-maids unfastening drowsy shutters 
 Up at the windows, or down letting in the air by the doorway. 
 
 No early stroller through the streets has failed to observe with 
 interest this awaking of a great city from its slumbers, this re- 
 application of itself to all its manifold tasks and toils. And if he 
 seeks an explanation of it all, the reason at bottom undoubtedly 
 is that in no other way than by arising and working can human 
 beings earn their daily bread. A little further on in Clough's 
 poem, we get a glimpse of the secret spring which drives the huge 
 machine, as we read of the 
 
 Little child bringing breakfast to "father," that sits on the 
 timber 
 
 ! There by the scafifolding; see, she waits for the can beside 
 him.^ 
 
 2. But it is not merely in this lower sense that work must be 
 conceived of as the universal law of human life, a sense determined 
 by the relations in which we stand to the forces of Nature on the 
 one hand, and the social order on the other. Work is the proof 
 that man offers of his manhood. This is his law of relationship 
 to the complex universe. He works. He creates a world for 
 himself. He makes his own environment. He does not merely 
 accept from Nature his range of opportunity. He does not merely 
 
 ^ J. C. Lambert. 
 
 PS. XXV.-CXIX. — 21 
 
322 
 
 THE DAY'S WORK 
 
 find her useful for his purposes, and rest satisfied with the food he 
 can capture from her, or the shelter that she suggests. He sets 
 to work to bring about what he will require. He takes up what 
 she gives him, and out of its materials he contrives, fashions, 
 invents, improves, thinks, reasons, imagines, and toils until he has 
 brought into existence a whole creation of things that were not 
 there before. His life is his own in the sense that his head and 
 hands and heart have produced it. It could not come into ex- 
 istence but by the sweat of his brow. And as he began, so he 
 continues. He is ever at work. He is ever bettering, correcting, 
 enlarging. Ever a worker! Ever a creator! Ever a builder! 
 Ever labouring to win a fuller result ! Ever sowing in tears that 
 he may reap in joy ! Ever hoping to wring a richer spoil out of 
 the rugged soil ! Ever dreaming of a finer reward, ever foreseeing 
 a better day ; ever spending and being spent ; ever giving himself 
 away for a vision still denied him, of a hope still deferred 1 Ever 
 on his pilgrim way, with his eyes set on far horizons ! Ever war- 
 ring with a stubborn earth which must be purged of thorn or 
 thistle in order to correspond with his strong desire ! So man down 
 all the ages, amid the awful silence of a nature that waits around 
 him in expectation, " goeth forth to his work and to his labour." 
 
 ^ It has been well said — said by a poet — that labour is at once 
 the symbol of man's punishment and the secret of man's happiness. 
 And it has been well said too that the gospel does not abolish 
 labour, but gives it a new and nobler aspect. "The gospel 
 abolishes labour much in the same way as it abolished death : it 
 leaves the thing, but it changes its nature." ^ 
 
 ^ There are three things to which a man is born — labour, and 
 sorrow, and joy. Each of these three things has its baseness and 
 its nobleness. There is base labour, and noble labour. There is 
 base sorrow, and noble sorrow. There is base joy, and noble joy. 
 But you must not think to avoid the corruption of these things 
 by doing without the things themselves. Nor can any life be 
 right that has not all three. Labour without joy is base. Labour 
 without sorrow is base. Sorrow without labour is base. Joy 
 without labour is base.^ 
 
 ^ When Charles Lamb was released for life from his daily 
 drudgery of desk-work at the India Office, he felt himself the 
 
 * A. K. H. Boyd, The Gfraver Thoughts of a Country Parson^ ii. 148. 
 
 * Ruskin, Time and Tide, v. § 21. 
 
PSALM CIV. 23 
 
 323 
 
 happiest of men. " I would not go back to my prison," he said to 
 a friend, " ten years longer, for ten thousand pounds." He also 
 wrote in the same ecstatic mood to Bernard Barton : " I have 
 scarce steadiness of head to compose a letter," he said; "I am 
 free ! free as air ! I will live another fifty years. Would I could 
 sell you some of my leisure ! Positively the best thing a man can 
 do is— nothing; and next to that, perhaps good works." Two 
 years — two long and tedious years — passed ; aud Charles Lamb's 
 feelings had undergone an entire change. He now discovered that 
 ; official, even humdrum work — "the daily round, the common 
 . task " — had been good for him, though he knew it not. Time had 
 formerly been his friend ; it had now become his enemy. To 
 Bernard Barton he again wrote : " I assure you, no work is worse 
 than overwork ; the mind preys on itself — the most unwholesome 
 I of food. I have ceased to care for almost anything. . . . Never 
 did the waters of heaven pour down upon a forlorner head. What 
 I can do, and overdo, is to walk. I am a sanguinary murderer of 
 time. But the oracle is silent." ^ 
 
 3. Work, then, is the significance of our manhood. We are 
 I those who present themselves to the earth in the eye of God as 
 i workers. We create a world of our own — the world of human 
 1 society. We build a city, we organize a fellowship, we produce a 
 wealth, which were not there until we called them into existence 
 out of the resources and materials supplied us by God in nature. 
 And every one contributes to this work, every one is a worker, 
 who spends a continuous and rational effort in creating, or sus- 
 taining, or fulfilling, or enriching, the social fabric that man has 
 fashioned for himself. All who contribute by head, or hand, or 
 heart, to the common endeavour have found and verified their 
 manhood; they have justified themselves as members of that 
 humanity which for ever goes forth to its work and to its labour. 
 And, reversely, those who play no such part at all, who have no 
 intelligible function to fulfil, who bring no contribution, who have 
 discovered no rational purpose for which to labour, and no special 
 use for their heads or their hands, and no end that they can serve, 
 and can see no reason why they should not be idle if they choose, 
 and leisured when they like, and live to please themselves — such, 
 the workless, have failed their manhood; they have betrayed 
 humanity. 
 
 1 S. Smiles, Character, 98. 
 
324 
 
 THE DAY'S WORK 
 
 ^ On a passenger ship the officers and crew keep the 
 watches day and night, and busy themselves continually with 
 the working and the safety of the vessel ; while the passengers, 
 looking upon the voyage as a mere holiday, amuse themselves on 
 deck by day, and lie down in their berths at night, without any 
 sense of responsibility. But on board ship every one knows that 
 the positions and relations of passengers and crew are of a special 
 and temporary kind, due to the specialization of social function 
 through the division of labour, and that they justify themselves 
 by that very fact. When Jack gets ashore, it is his turn for a 
 holiday ; while yonder lounging passenger in the deck-chair will 
 have to put on his harness again as soon as the vessel reaches 
 port, and work all the harder because of the respite he is now 
 enjoying. What is natural and proper, for the time being, on 
 board of an ocean liner is neither natural nor tolerable on the 
 voyage of life. Here all are sharers in a common duty and 
 responsibility. No one has any prescriptive right to enter him- 
 self in the ship's books as a mere cabin-passenger. In some 
 capacity or other every one is morally bound to take a part in the 
 working of the vessel; and, from the point of view of social 
 obligation, those who refuse to do so are no better than maling- 
 erers or mutineers.^ 
 
 ^ Indolence is one name of many for the abstraction of 
 Francis's mind and the inactivities of his body. He was not of 
 the stuff to " break ice in his basin by candle-light," and no doves 
 fluttered against his lodging window to wake him in summer, but 
 he was not indolent in the struggle against indolence. Not a 
 lifetime of mornings spent in bed killed the desire to be up and 
 doing. In the trembling hand of his last months he wrote out in 
 big capitals on pages torn from exercise-books such texts as were 
 calculated to frighten him into his clothes. " Thou wilt not lie 
 a-bed when the last trump blows " ; " Thy sleep with the worms 
 will be long enough," and so on. They were ineffectual. His 
 was a long series of broken trysts — trysts with the sunrise, 
 trysts with Sunday Mass, obligatory but impossible ; trysts with 
 friends. Whether it was indolence or, as he explained it, an 
 unsurmountable series of detaining accidents, it is certain that he, 
 captain of his soul, was not captain of his hours. They played 
 him false at every stroke of the clock, mutinied with such 
 cunning that he would keep an appointment in all good faith six 
 hours after it was past. Dismayed, he would emerge from his 
 room upon a household preparing for dinner, when he had lain 
 listening to sounds he thought betokened breakfast. He was 
 
 * J. C. Lambert. 
 
PSALM CIV. 23 325 
 
 always behindhand with punctual eve, and in trouble with strict 
 noon.^ 
 
 11. 
 
 Work as a High Calling of God. 
 
 1. We ought to think of our work as an expression of our 
 personal life — to think of it as the means granted to us to give 
 body and coherence and aim to the great universe-forces. And 
 then, if in our imagination we can identify these universe-forces 
 with the wisdom and love of God, the One who with us lives and 
 works, we shall be able to rise to the point of view which Christ 
 took — that point of view which becomes both light and inspira- 
 tion : " My Father worketh continuously, and so do I." That is 
 the highest reach of the human spirit — to conceive of one's work 
 as a part of the Divine activity itself. The daily life, with its 
 tasks and occupations, its duties and its cares, its problems to 
 solve, its burdens to carry, its beauty to appreciate and enjoy — all 
 these become an echo and reflection of what the infinite activity 
 itself is. Viewed in this light 
 
 The trivial round, the common task, 
 Would furnish all we ought to ask — 
 Eoom to deny ourselves; a road 
 To bring us daily nearer God. 
 
 ^ " Ask me," she wrote, " to do something for your sake, 
 something difficult, and you will see that I shall do it regularly, 
 which is for me the most difficult thing of all." Let those who 
 reproach themselves for a desultoriness, seemingly incurable, take 
 heart again from the example of Florence Nightingale ! No self- 
 reproach recurs more often in her private outpourings at this 
 time than that of irregularity and even sloth. She found it 
 difficult to rise early in the morning; she prayed and wrestled 
 to be delivered from desultory thoughts, from idle dreaming, 
 from scrappiness in unselfish work. She wrestled and she won. 
 When her capacities had found full scope in congenial work, 
 nothing was more fixed and noteworthy in her life and work than 
 regularity, precision, and persistence.^ 
 
 ^ No author of modern times has striven more earnestly or 
 impressively than George Eliot to inculcate a law of duty which 
 
 1 E. Meynell, The Life of Francis Thompson (1913), 32. 
 * Sir Edward Cook, The Life of Florence Nightingale, i. 40. 
 
 t 
 
326 
 
 THE DAY'S WORK 
 
 rests simply upon our human and social relations, and is inde- 
 pendent of the great spiritual sanctions of the Christian faith. 
 The late Mr. F. W. H. Myers, in one of his essays, tells how at 
 Cambridge he walked with her once in the Fellows' Garden of 
 Trinity, and how she, " taking as her text the three words which 
 have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls of man — 
 the words God, Immortality, Duty — pronounced, with terrible 
 earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the 
 second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third. Never, 
 perhaps, had sterner accents afi&rmed the sovereignty of im- 
 personal and unrecompensing law. I listened, and night fell ; her 
 grave majestic countenance turned towards me like a Sibyl's in the 
 gloom ; it was as though she withdrew from my grasp, one by 
 one, the two scrolls of promise, and left me the third scroll only, 
 awful with inevitable fate. And when we stood at length and 
 parted, amid that columnar circuit of the forest trees, beneath the 
 last twilight of starless skies, I seemed to be gazing, like Titus at 
 Jerusalem, on vacant seats and empty halls — on a sanctuary with 
 no Presence to hallow it, and heaven left lonely of a God." ^ 
 
 Carlyle preached the gospel of work as the panacea for 
 human ills. But he did so with the air of a parent who is mixing 
 a disagreeable medicine for a child, and is insisting on its whole- 
 some effects in order to take away attention from its nauseousness. 
 To Morris work was a sheer joy. It has been said that he picked 
 out only those forms of work that were attractive. It would be 
 truer to say that whatever work he undertook he made attractive. 
 It was a joy to him, because he imported beauty into it. When 
 his spirits flagged, it meant, not that he was tired, but that his 
 insatiable energies cried out for even more.^ 
 
 2. Work and labour have changed indeed since the Psalmist 
 pictured man in the fields, on the hillside, rising with the sun, to 
 go out to his work on the soil until the fading twilight sent him 
 peacefully home again. Now labour stays not with the dying day. 
 No evening sets in its quiet limit. On and on through the night 
 its vast mechanism clangs and roars. On and on through the 
 night the loaded trains groan and shriek ; the furnaces blaze on 
 in the deep holds of the liners that press on untiringly through 
 the black waters. Labour means no longer the slow pacing of 
 ploughing oxen, the long watch of the creeping sheep along the 
 folds. It means now the storm and stress of tumultuous cities, 
 
 ^ J. C. Lambert. ' A. G. Rickett, William Mon-is, 24. 
 
PSALM CIV. 23 
 
 327 
 
 the haste of quivering looms, the heat of rushing wheels, the shout 
 of hurrying multitudes, and the rush of crowded streets. Yes ! 
 But all this is still humanity at work. It is man achieving his 
 purpose. It is man fulfilling his Divine prerogative. It is man 
 building himself a city. By his labour, tremendous in its volume 
 and energy and force, he comes to himself. He discloses his 
 powers. He reveals his elemental character. He creates a new 
 world. He proclaims himself a man, he discharges his obligations 
 to God. He fulfils his high calling. 
 
 T[ Woe to us if we let our work lose the inspiration that comes 
 from knowing that we do it for our Heavenly Father and not for 
 ourselves ! We stand in danger of letting that knowledge go, 
 because work so absorbs us and enchains us by its own sheer 
 power ; but yet we know that that slavery to work which we are 
 aware is growing in ourselves is not the highest or most noble 
 type of life as we behold it in other men. We know that the 
 man to whom work is really sanctifying and helpful is the man 
 who has God behind his work ; who is able to retire out of the 
 fret and hurry of his work into the calmness and peace of Deity, 
 and come out again into his labour full of the exalted certainties 
 of the redemption of Christ and the love of God : to make work 
 sweet and fresh and interesting and spiritual by doing it not 
 for himself, not for itself, but for the Saviour in whom he 
 lives.^ 
 
 ^ In Millet's " Angelus " we see the toil-worn peasants, who 
 have been bending over the ground through the long afternoon, 
 standing up from their work to think reverently and prayerfully 
 of God, as the notes of the evening bell come floating over the 
 fields from the dim church tower. The pious men of Israel con- 
 tinually heard a Divine monition, as clear and sweet as the sound 
 of the Angelus-bell, reminding them that life's labours were part 
 of a godly service, and that the eyes of the Lord were upon them 
 in the midst of the common occupations of each returning day.* 
 
 III. 
 
 Work as Fellowship with God. 
 
 1. St. Paul more than once in his Epistles describes himself 
 and his companions in service and sacrifice as fellow- workers with 
 ^ Phillips Brooks, Seeking Life, 347. 2 c. Lambert. 
 
328 
 
 THE DAY'S WORK 
 
 God. The words speak of conscious and voluntary co-operation, 
 of willing and intelligent oneness of purpose and effort, with 
 the will and work of God. In creating and perfecting His world, 
 in getting His will done on earth as it is in heaven, God has 
 made Himself dependent upon the help and fidelity of His human 
 children. And the more we understand of the nature of God and 
 the range of His working, the more shall we realize the extent to 
 which it is possible for man to have a share in doing God's work. 
 Our Lord's teaching about the Fatherhood of God and His 
 personal care for every detail of every life has thrown a new 
 light both on the nature of human work and on the spirit in 
 which it may be done. Since all the trivialities of life and the 
 petty drudgeries are steps in the progress towards one end, there 
 is no sphere of human activity wliich is excluded from contribut- 
 ing towards the realization of the Divine purpose for the comfort 
 and good of man. 
 
 An-d there is no labourer, however humble, who may not be 
 inspired at his toil by the child's proud consciousness that he 
 is helping his Father. Under all circumstances he is called to 
 co-operate with God in the service of man. 
 
 ^ Her devotion and her power of work were prodigious. " I 
 work in the wards all day," she said, " and write all night " ; and 
 this was hardly exaggeration. Miss Nightingale has been known, 
 said General Bentinck, to pass eight hours on her knees dressing 
 wounds and administering comfort. There were times when she 
 stood for twenty hours at a stretch, apportioning quarters, distribut- 
 ing stores, directing the labours of her staff, or assisting at the pain- 
 ful operations where her presence might soothe or support. She 
 had, said Mr, Osborne, " an utter disregard of contagion. I have 
 known her spend hours over men dying of cholera or fever. The 
 more awful to every sense, any particular case, especially if it 
 was that of a dying man, the more certainly might her slight 
 form be seen bending over him, administering to his ease by 
 every means in her power, and seldom quitting his side till death 
 released him." ^ 
 
 ^ You remember George Eliot's fine poem on the famous 
 violin-maker of Cremona and its lesson : j 
 
 All service ranks the same with God. 
 
 * Sir Edward Cook, The Life of Florence NigJUi7igale, i. 284. 
 
PSALM CIV. 23 
 
 329 
 
 . . . Not God Himself can make man's best 
 Without best men to help Him. . . . 
 
 'Tis God gives skill, 
 But not without men's hands: He could not make 
 Antonio Stradivari's violins 
 Without Antonio. 
 
 It is a bold saying, but true. We have a work to do in the world 
 which God cannot do, which we must do, or it will be left un- 
 done. Only as we co-operate with Him, can His will be done on 
 earth as in heaven.^ 
 
 2. The Divine power in the world is not an abstract, im- 
 personal energy. God is in the world creating and perfecting, His 
 power and spirit dwelling in and working through industrious, 
 righteous, faithful, beneficent lives. The unit of power in the 
 world is not God isolated from man, and not man isolated from 
 God ; but God and man united, working purposely and continu- 
 ously together; God quickening and inspiring man, and man 
 opening his life to be a part of the Divine life of the world. The 
 religion of Jesus Christ represents this union of man and God in 
 purpose and work. Man works with God : God inspires man. 
 " My Father," said Jesus, " works continuously and I work. The 
 works I do are not Mine, but the Father's who sent Me. I do 
 what I see My Father doing. And as the Father sent Me so 
 send I you. The glory He has given to Me I give to you — that 
 we may all be one, doing the same thing, working the same 
 work." 
 
 11 We have all been tired in our time, one may presume ; we 
 have toiled in business, or in some ambitious course, or in the 
 perfecting of some accomplishment, or even in the mastery of 
 some game or the pursuit of some amusement, till we were utterly 
 wearied : how many of us have so toiled in love ? How many of 
 us have been wearied and worn with some labour to which we 
 set ourselves for God's sake ? This is what the Apostle has in 
 view in his phrase " labour of love," and, strange as it may appear, 
 it is one of the things for which he gives God thanks. But is he 
 not right ? Is it not a thing to evoke gratitude and joy, that God 
 counts us worthy to be fellow-labourers with Him in the manifold 
 works which love imposes ? ^ 
 
 ^ John Hunter, Be Profundis Clamavi, 2Z8. 
 
 ^ J. Denney, The Epistles to the Thessalonians, 29. 
 
330 
 
 THE DAY'S WORK 
 
 Ah ! brothers, let us work our work, for love 
 
 Of what the God in us prevails to do ! 
 
 And if, when all is done, the unanswering void 
 
 And silence weigh upon our souls, remember 
 
 The music of a lonely heart may help 
 
 How many lonely hearts unknown to him ! 
 
 The seeming void and silence are aware 
 
 With audience august, invisible, 
 
 Who yield thank-offering, encouragement, 
 
 And strong co-operation; the dim deep 
 
 Is awful with the God in whom we move, 
 
 Who moulds to consummation where we fail. 
 
 And saith, "Well done!" to every faithful deed, 
 
 Who in Himself will full accomplish all.^ 
 
 3. If work is ever to win its honour, it will be from out of 
 the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. He was Himself the ideal 
 worker. He lived in the spirit of work, aware of the task set 
 Him — lived to do the will of Him that sent Him ; conscious of 
 the strain of the allotted limit — the twelve hours of the working 
 day into which all the work must be crowded before the night 
 fall, in which no man can work ; living ever among men as one 
 that worketh; straining under the yoke as He felt the terrible 
 pressure of His task; straitened until it was accomplished; 
 consecrated to the work of glorifying the Father by doing the 
 work which He gave Him to do; yielding Himself to death as 
 soon as He could pronounce that work to have been done faith- 
 fully and could say over it, " It is finished." 
 
 1[ The highest soul this world has seen was a mechanic by 
 trade. Behind His year and a half as a teacher lay long years in 
 which He toiled in wood, " making ploughs and yokes," as one of 
 the earliest Fathers says. And that was a preaching mightier 
 perhaps than His mightiest word. It was the inauguration of 
 labour's day. It was the shifting of the basis of esteem. In the 
 age into which He came, work of that kind was under taboo. 
 The Greek, the Eoman, thought it an occupation for slaves. And 
 for long ages after, that continued the current view. It was 
 endorsed by official Christianity. The Pope in the splendour of 
 his Court forgot the tradition of the Carpenter. To-day we are 
 beginning once more to remember it. The Redeemer of our soul 
 
 * Roden Noel, Collected Poems, 364. 
 
PSALM CIV. 23 
 
 331 
 
 is becoming the Eedeemer of our economics, of our social state. 
 The age-long blindness is passing away.^ 
 
 Lord of the breeze, the rolling tide, 
 
 The rivers rushing to the sea, 
 The clouds that through the azure glide, — 
 
 Well works the hand that works with Thee. 
 
 How finely toil, from morn till eve, 
 Thy ministers of light and shade; 
 
 How fair a web the sunbeams weave 
 Of waving grass and blossoms made! 
 
 O Thou that madest earth and man 
 
 That man should make an earth more fair, 
 
 Give us to see Thy larger plan 
 And Thy creative joy to share. 
 
 Had we but eyes, and hands of skill, 
 Had we but love, our work would be 
 
 Wisely begun, and bettered still. 
 Till all were perfected by Thee. 
 
 Work Thou with us, that what is wrought 
 
 May bring to earth diviner days. 
 While in the higher realms of thought 
 
 A temple glorious we raise.^ 
 
 IV. 
 
 WOKK AND EeST. 
 
 The strangest thing about work is the way in which all men 
 praise it, and yet all men try to get away from it. There is no 
 subject so popular as the blessedness of work. There is no theory 
 so universal as that of the wretchedness of not being compelled to 
 work. There is no man who does not feel a certain excited sense 
 of admiration, a certain satisfaction, a certain comfort that things 
 are right, when he stands where men are working their hardest, 
 where trade is roaring or the great hammers are deafening you 
 
 * J. Brierley, Life, and the Ideal, 24. 
 » W. G. Tarrant, Songs Devout, 48. 
 
332 
 
 THE DAY'S WORK 
 
 as they clang upon the iron. Everywhere work and the ap- 
 proval of work ! and yet everywhere the desire to get away from 
 work! Everywhere what all these men we see are toiling for 
 is to make such an accumulation of money that they shall not 
 have to toil any longer. Now, this double sense, this value of 
 work and impatience with work as they exist together, seems to 
 be the crude expression in men's minds of the conviction that 
 work is good, that men degenerate and rust without it, and yet 
 that work is at its best and brings its best results, is most 
 honourable and most useful, only when it is aiming at something 
 beyond itself. Everybody will bear witness that this is the 
 healthiest feeling about any work that we have to do ; satisfaction 
 and pleasure in doing it, but expectation of having it done some 
 day and graduating from it into some higher state which we 
 think of as rest. 
 
 1. If we look to the arrangements of nature for indications 
 of what man's life is meant to be, we see at once that, bravely as 
 she has provided for his work, she has not thought of him only as 
 a working being. She has set her morning sun in the sky to 
 tempt — nay, to summon — him forth to his work and to his labour, 
 to make him ashamed of himself if he loiters and shirks at home ; 
 but she has limited her daylight, she has given her sun only his 
 appointed hours, and the labour and work are always to be only 
 "until the evening." Eest as truly as work is written in her 
 constitution. Eest, then, as much as work is an element of life. 
 
 ^ After a very hard day's work, — during which he had con- 
 firmed candidates, preached at the re-opening of a church, spoken 
 two or three times, and done much beside in a manner which 
 perhaps no person but himself could have accomplished, — Bishop 
 Wilberforce returned in the evening to Turvey, where he was 
 staying. A small party had been invited to meet him at dinner, and 
 there was some bright and pleasant conversation. When the time 
 came for retiring into the drawing-room, the Bishop, who looked 
 a little fatigued, said to me : *' There is nothing which makes me 
 more absolutely disgusted with myself than feeling tired when 
 evening comes. What business have I to be tired ? nothing gives 
 me any comfort at all but that verse in the Psalms, — * Man 
 goeth forth to his work and to his labour until the evening'; 
 and so, I suppose that, when evening comes, he may rest." ^ 
 
 * J. W. Burgon, Lives of Twelve Good Men, ii. 39. 
 
PSALM CIV. 23 
 
 333 
 
 2. Man goes out to his work, to his labour, only with one 
 softening clause in the agreement — " until the evening." There 
 are limits set; there are reliefs permitted and contrived; there 
 are moments for slackening, for recreation, for repose. Not 
 unbroken this labour; not monotonously blind this work. No, 
 fixed times, ordered signals, ordained closes ! 
 
 Sunset and evening star. 
 And one clear call for me. 
 
 Man knows the signs. He is not left forgotten or unconsidered. 
 He can calculate when the strain will be off. 
 
 Twilight and evening bell, 
 And after that the dark. 
 
 So, in kindly, successive periods, he turns to the rest that he has 
 earned. " He goeth forth to his work " with the friendly sense 
 in his heart that it will not last for ever. It will end in the quiet 
 hour when the sun goes down. 
 
 ^ When in the beginning God said : Let there be Light, and 
 there was Light, Light did not spring into undivided empire, but 
 was ordained to rule alternately with darkness. Day and night 
 abide for ever. What was the reason, so far as man is concerned, 
 for this curbing and restriction of so free an element as Light ? 
 The readiest reason seems to be — for our relief and rest. But that 
 is not half the reason. Our light is broken up and shortened, not 
 only in order to afford us intervals of rest, but also to bestow upon 
 us intensity ; not only to relieve our faculties from the strain of 
 life, but also to strain and stimulate them ever more keenly. 
 According to Christ Himself the night cometh when no man can 
 work, not merely that man may hope for release beneath its 
 shelter, but that he may work while it is called to-day. Had 
 there been no interval, since first upon the tones of God's word 
 Light rippled across the face of the deep — had the Sun been 
 created to stand still in the midst of the heavens, then indeed one 
 might say there would have been no progress for man. Let your 
 imagination strike Night out of the world, and you need not begin 
 to speculate on the iron frames men should have required to bear 
 the unrelieved strain, for it is tolerably certain that, without the 
 urgency and discipline which a limited day brings upon our life, 
 we should never have been stimulated to enough of toil to make 
 us weary. Night, which has been called the Liberator of the 
 Slave, is far more the task-mistress of the free — a task-mistress 
 who does not scourge nor drive us in panic, but who startles our 
 
334 
 
 THE DAY'S WORK 
 
 sluggishness, rallies our wandering thoughts, develops our instincts 
 of order, reduces our impulsiveness to methods, incites us to our 
 very best, and only then crowns her beneficence by rewarding 
 our obedience with rest. In short, Night, while she is nature's 
 mercy on our weakness, is nature's purest discipline for our 
 strength.^ 
 
 3. The daily drawing of the curtain between man and his 
 active labours represents and continually reminds us of the need 
 of the internal as well as the external in our lives. It brings 
 up to us our need, by bringing up to us our opportunity, of 
 meditation, of contemplation. For active life is always tending 
 to become shallow. It is always forgetting its motives, forgetting its 
 principles, forgetting what it is so busy for, and settling itself into 
 superficial habits. So God shuts us out from our work and bids 
 us daily think what the heart of our work is, what we are doing 
 it for. If this is the meaning of the evening — and no man 
 sees the daylight sink away and the shadows gather without 
 sensitively feeling some such meaning in it — then surely we 
 need it. 
 
 ^ It is hard to see how, were it not for the continually 
 repeated, daily stoppages of work, we could remember, as we 
 need to remember, the great close of work which is coming to 
 every one of us and may be very near. I picture to myself a 
 world without an evening, a world with an unsetting daylight, 
 and with men who never tired at their tasks ; and it seems as if 
 death in a world like that would be so much more terrible and 
 mysterious than it is now ; when once a day, for many years, we 
 have learned that work was not meant to last always, and have 
 had to drop our tools as if in practice and rehearsal for the great 
 darkness when we are to let them go for ever.^ 
 
 ** And is the twilight closing fast ? 
 
 (I hear the night-breeze wild) ; 
 And is the long week's work all done ? " 
 
 "Thy work is done, my child." 
 
 ** Must I not rise at dawn of day ? 
 
 (The night-breeze swells so wild); 
 And must I not resume my toil ? " 
 
 " No ! nevermore, my child." 
 
 * George Adam Smith, The Forgiveness of Sins, 92. 
 
 * Phillips Brooks, Seeking Life, 348. 
 
PSALM CIV. 23 
 
 *' And may I sleep through all the dark ? 
 
 (The wind to-night is wild) ; 
 And may I rest tired head and feet ? " 
 
 "Thou mayest rest, my child." 
 
 " And may I fold my feeble hands ? 
 
 (Hush ! breezes sad and wild) ; 
 And may I close these wearied lids ? " 
 
 "Yes, close thine eyes, my child." 
 
 "Oh, passing sweet these closing hours! 
 
 And sweet the night-breeze mild, 
 And the Sabbath-day that cometh fast ! " 
 
 " The Eternal Day, my child." 
 
 "The night is gone, clear breaks the dawn, 
 
 It rises soft and mild; 
 Dear Lord ! I see Thee face to face ! 
 
 "Yes! face to face, my child." 
 
Leanness of Soul. 
 
 PS. XXV.-CXIX. — 2 2 
 
Literature. 
 
 Banks (L. A.), David and his Friends^ 212. 
 
 Dinwoodie (J.), Outline Studies, 157. 
 
 Eyton (R.), The Search for God, 88. 
 
 Holden (J. S.), Life's Flood-Tide, 35. 
 
 Jeffs (H.), The Art of Exposition, 133. 
 
 Jellett (H.), Sermons on Special and Festival Occasions, 115. 
 
 Maclaren (A.), The Book of Psalms (Expositor's Bible), iii. 139. 
 
 Murphy (J. B. C), The Service of the Master, 160. 
 
 Parker (J.), The City Temple, i. 147. 
 
 Perowne (J. J. S.), The Book of Psalms, ii. 223. 
 
 Spurgeon (C. H.), The Treasury of David, v. 77, 97. 
 
 Voysey (C), Sermons, ix. (1886), No. 47. 
 
 Wordsworth (C), Christian Boyhood at a Public School, ii. 189. 
 
 338 
 
Leanness of Soul. 
 
 And he gave them their request; 
 
 But sent leanness into their soul.— Ps. cvi. 15. 
 
 1. The history of God's past is a record of continuous mercies, 
 the history of man's is one of as continuous sin. The memory 
 of the former quickened the Psalmist into his sunny song of 
 thankfulness in the previous psalm; that of the latter moves 
 him to the confessions in this one. The two psalms are comple- 
 ments of each other, and are connected not only as being both 
 retrospective, but by the identity of their beginnings and the 
 difference of their points of view. The parts of the early history 
 dealt with in the one are lightly touched or altogether omitted in 
 the other. The key-note of Psalm cv. is, " Eemember his mighty 
 deeds " ; that of Psalm cvi. is, " They forgot his mighty deeds." 
 
 2. After an introduction in some measure like that in Psalm cv., 
 
 the Psalmist plunges into his theme, and draws out the long, sad 
 
 story of Israel's faithlessness, of which he recounts seven instances 
 
 during the wilderness sojourn. One is the lusting for flesh food 
 
 — an evil traced to forgetfulness of God's doings, to which is 
 
 idded impatient disinclination to wait the unfolding of His counsel 
 
 3r plan. These evils cropped up with strange celerity. The 
 
 memory of benefits was transient, as if they had been written on 
 
 the blown sands of the desert. " They hasted ; they forgot his 
 
 iYorks." Of how many of us that has to be said ! We remember 
 
 pain and sorrow longer than joy and pleasure. It is always difficult 
 
 :o bridle desires and be still until God discloses His purposes. 
 
 We are all apt to try to force His hand open, and to impose our 
 
 ivishes on Him, rather than to let His will mould us. So, on 
 
 'orgetfulness and impatience there followed then, as there follow 
 
 jtill, eager longings after material good and a tempting of God, 
 
 ^ho is " tempted " when unbelief demands proofs of His power, 
 
 339 
 
340 LEANNESS OF SOUL 
 
 instead of waiting patiently for Him. In Num. xi. 33 J ehovah is 
 said to have smitten the people " with a very great plague." The 
 psalm specifies more particularly the nature of the stroke by 
 calling it " leanness " or " wasting sickness," which invaded the 
 life of the sinners. The words are true in a deeper sense, though \ 
 not so meant. For whoever sets his hot desires in self-willed \ 
 fashion on material good, and succeeds in securing their gratifica- 
 tion, gains with the satiety of his lower sense the loss of a shrivelled 
 spiritual nature. Full-fed flesh makes starved souls. 
 
 L 
 
 Desire and its Gratification. 
 
 1. The words of the text have a wider scope than as a 
 reference to an incident in Israelitish history. They tell a sad 
 story indeed, written in the annals of God's ancient people, but 
 they call up stories innumerable in the lives of men for whose 
 •example the story was written, but who have failed to profit by 
 it, and to whose lives there may be appended the same legend, 
 " He gave them their request ; but sent leanness into their soul." 
 And if we are like the Israelites, if we forget all that God has 
 done for the promotion of our happiness here, all that He has 
 done to fit us for a higher state of being hereafter ; if we will not 
 wait for His counsel, wait for a time when we shall no longer see 
 His dealings darkly reflected to us in an imperfect mirror, but 
 clear before us in the pure atmosphere of heaven ; and if, instead 
 of patiently bearing with the conditions of our "pilgrim life, we 
 murmur because we cannot have all our wishes gratified, and are 
 dissatisfied with the restraints under which we may be placed, 
 is it incredible that God should punish us, as He did them, by 
 granting us the things upon which we have set our hearts ? 
 
 2. It is certain that God does not always interfere to keep us 
 from sin, for that would frustrate His purpose in wishing us to 
 grow good by experience, to grow good by first hating evil and 
 then loving the good so that we may follow and do the good from 
 a free choice. He will help us if we earnestly desire it, but not 
 otherwise; for that would be forcing instead of drawing and 
 
PSALM cvi. 15 
 
 341 
 
 winning our wills to His. By the discipline of experience God 
 often lets us have our own way, permits us to gain what we 
 desire, sometimes honourably, at other times dishonourably, 
 through the mazes of meanness and even of crime. Some desires 
 are in themselves perfectly innocent and lawful, others vicious 
 and unlawful. But under the discipline of God the gratification 
 of desires quite lawful in themselves sometimes leads to our 
 moral and spiritual injury. 
 
 ^ God recognizes and respects, at all times. His gift to man 
 of freewill. God does not, for example, force grace upon the soul. 
 He does not even, in some cases, reveal Himself except to those 
 who seek Him. He points out to us indeed the right way. 
 " Walk in this way," He says, " and it shall be your glory and 
 your joy." But He does not say, "Walk in it, you shall and 
 must." And, in like manner, if God sees that our hearts are set 
 upon something which we have said we must have, at all costs, 
 He says, " You shall have it — but the consequences of your choice 
 be upon your own head ! " There is much insight and teaching in 
 the old fable of Midas, King of Phrygia, who prayed that every- 
 thing he touched might turn to gold. But his wish, when it was 
 granted, proved a fatal one, for his very food turned into gold also, 
 and soon he was starving.^ 
 
 ^ It is well to pray that God should put into our minds good 
 desires, and that we should use our wills to keep ourselves from 
 dwelling too much upon small and pitiful desires, for the fear is 
 that they will be abundantly gratified. And thus when the time 
 comes for recollection, it is a very wonderful thing to look back 
 over life, and see how eagerly gracious God has been to us. He 
 knows very well that we cannot learn the paltry value of the 
 things we desire, if they are withheld from us, but only if they 
 are granted to us; and thus we have no reason to doubt His 
 fatherly intention, because He does so much dispose life to please 
 us. And we need not take it for granted that He will lead us by 
 harsh and provocative discipline, though when He grants our 
 desire, He sometimes sends leanness withal into our soul.^ 
 
 3. It does not follow that all pleasure or attainment of desire 
 is highly dangerous, if not pernicious, and that the welfare of the 
 soul is incompatible with physical enjoyment. All these con- 
 clusions are false. The mischief arising from gratification is 
 
 ^ J. B. C. Murphy, The Service of the Master, 165. 
 2 A. C. Benson, Joyous Gard (1913), 91. 
 
1 
 
 342 LEANNESS OF SOUL 
 
 caused only by the undue importance which is attached to it, and 
 not by the gratification itself, so long as it is lawful. The 
 righteous and loving God, we may be sure, does not grudge us any 
 one of our pleasures, is not moved with malignity or envy, that 
 He should seek to revenge Himself for our pleasure by smiting 
 our souls with the curse of leanness. But He knows the infinite 
 value of the soul and the necessity for its being properly 
 nourished and in full vigour, and He must teach us by experience 
 how immensely more valuable the soul is and how far more 
 needful it is for us to have our souls in health than to have any 
 earthly desires satisfied. He did so teach those poets of old 
 who said " The law of thy mouth is better unto me than thousands 
 of gold and silver." " I have esteemed the words of his mouth l 
 more than my necessary food." "Thou art my God, my bliss, y 
 My welfare is nothing without thee." It is to bring us into this 
 state that, whenever we set our hearts too much upon our own 
 gratification, our souls are made to suffer for it. 
 
 A man may have before him only the attainment of a 
 perfectly honourable and legitimate ambition. Let such an one, 
 in the Name of God, go on, and prosper. But if it so be that God 
 is banished from that man's life because of his ambition — if he 
 begin to say that he has " no time " for prayer, for the reading of 
 God's Word, for meditation upon holy things, no time for prepara- 
 tion for Holy Communion — then let him tremble also. He will 
 get his desire, it may be, but what will that avail him if, when he 
 has won the prize, it suddenly lose all its value in his eyes and 
 bring him no real satisfaction ; if there shall spring up within him 
 the consciousness of a never-dying, ever-increasing hunger — a 
 hunger of the soul — a gnawing, a restlessness, a craving, which 
 God, and God alone, can satisfy and soothe? And what is all 
 this but fulness of body and leanness of soul ? ^ 
 
 4. Mark where the judgment of God falls. It falls on the i 
 highest nature — it falls on the soul ! The man on whom God's i 
 disapprobation rests, withers at his very root. His mental power 
 declines, his moral nature shrivels ; he goes down in the volume 
 and quality of his being. Think of a lean soul ! No compass, 
 no grandeur, no tenderness of manhood! A lean soul, narrow, 
 stunted, withered, sapless, blind, deaf, idiotic! The man would 
 have his prize ; he would set up his own wisdom ; he would be as 
 
 1 J. B. C. Murphy, The Service of the Master, 167. 
 
PSALM cvi. 15 
 
 343 
 
 God unto himself ; and now look at him, and see how hunger- 
 bitten and ghastly is his dishonoured soul. We know the horror, 
 the ghastliness, of external emaciation brought about by illness, 
 when man or woman becomes literally skin and bone. What 
 a suggestion such a sight conveys of the possibilities of inward 
 emaciation ! Beneath the sleek, prosperous, well-fed, comfortable 
 appearance, what if there be, hidden from men but open before 
 God, a horrible emaciation in a man's real self-leanness of soul ! 
 
 ^ You have heard of the white ant that commits such terrible 
 devastations in wooden buildings in some portions of the globe. 
 That little insect will insert itself into the largest wooden 
 structure that men can put up, and in course of time it will eat 
 away the whole of it, leaving nothing but the thinnest outer shell ; 
 the building will look as if nothing had befallen it ; the shape 
 will be unaltered ; but put your finger upon it, or bring the 
 slightest pressure to bear upon it, and you will find that it is no 
 longer solid, but a hollow and useless outline. Is there not a 
 more terrible power that enters into the inner nature of man, and 
 utterly consumes all that is strong and noble and beautiful in his 
 soul?i 
 
 II, 
 
 The Lower Satisfaction. 
 
 1. Of how many is it true that the attainment of wealth and 
 the gratification of ambition have not satisfied an ever-increasing 
 longing for more, and that the happiness which they were expected 
 to secure is ever marred by a leanness that enters into the soul. 
 Moral and spiritual decline often follows the too eager pursuit of 
 earthly things. " They that will be rich," says the Apostle, " fall 
 into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful 
 lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition." How must 
 it be in this money-loving age with the many whose whole souls 
 are filled with this fatal desire, and how terrible is the spiritual 
 leanness of a soul from which the love of money has wholly 
 driven out the love of God ! So far as our outward circumstances 
 are concerned, our fullest request may have been granted. We 
 may have estates, titles, honours; men may wait for our word, 
 and follow our guidance in all secular speculations and engage- 
 
 ^ Joseph Parker. 
 
344 LEANNESS OF SOUL 
 
 ments; and yet it may be said of us, "In thy lifetime thou 
 receivedst thy good things" — so, with the request on the one 
 hand answered to the utmost, we have on the other a soul that 
 has been dwarfed almost up to the point of extinction. 
 
 ^ There is a deep lesson to be read in a strange picture by 
 Burne Jones, called The Depths of the Sea." A mermaid, beauti- 
 ful in face, but hideously repellent in her scaly train, has flung 
 her arms around a youth, and is dragging him down through the 
 green waters to her cave. In her face is the intense malignity 
 of cruel triumph and cruel scorn ; in the youth's face is the agony 
 of frustration and of death. And the motto below is, "Habes 
 tota quod mente petisti, Infelix ! " — " Thou hast what thou sought- 
 est with all thy soul, unhappy one." Oh that it were in my 
 power to preach to all young men a sermon of meaning so intense 
 as that picture ! The mermaid, like the Siren of mythology, like 
 the strange woman of the Proverbs, is the harlot Sense. She is 
 the type of carnal temptation, ending in disillusion, shame, anguish, 
 death. It is the meaning of the saying of the rabbis, " The demons 
 come to us smiling and beautiful: when they have done their 
 work, they drop their mask." It is the meaning of Solomon : 
 " But he knoweth not that the dead are there, and that her guests 
 are in the depths of hell." God has granted to that youth his 
 heart's desire, and sent leanness withal into his bones. He has 
 got what he passionately longed for, and it is — death !^ 
 
 ^ " But sent leanness into their soul." Ah, that " but " ! It 
 embittered all. The meat was poison to them when it came 
 without a blessing : whatever it might do in fattening the body, 
 it was poor stuff when it made the soul lean. If we must know 
 scantiness, may God grant it may not be scantiness of soul: yet 
 this is a common attendant upon worldly prosperity. When 
 wealth grows with many a man his worldly estate is fatter, but 
 his soul's state is leaner. To gain silver and lose gold is a poor 
 increase ; but to win for the body and lose for the soul is far 
 worse. How earnestly miglit Israel have unprayed lier prayers 
 had she known what would come with their answer ! The prayers 
 of lust will have to be wept over. We fret and fume till we have 
 our desire, and then we have to fret still more because the attain- 
 ment of it ends in bitter disappointment.^ 
 
 2. We must guard against the mistake — into which we may' 
 so easily fall — of applying the text and the lessons to be drawn] 
 
 * F. W. Farrar, Social and Present Day Questions, 174. 
 a C. H. Spurgeon. 
 
PSALM cvi. 15 
 
 345 
 
 from it only to the rich and prosperous, whereas it applies to them 
 in exactly the same sense as it applies to every one, whether he 
 be rich or poor, who is in the state of earnest desire for some 
 earthly good or who is in the state of satisfied desire, a content- 
 ment wholly derived from possession or gratification. And this 
 experience is to be met with in all classes, among all sorts and 
 conditions of men. The Israelites, of whom the words of the 
 text were spoken, were certainly not among the rich, but at 
 the time were poor and afflicted — or thought themselves so — 
 and were therefore all the more in danger of the ill effects of full 
 gratification. 
 
 ^ There are business men in our city to-day who have schemed 
 for a future which, if analysed, would disclose nothing but a care- 
 ful regard for personal and domestic comfort. I can give you 
 the brief programme of such men: it runs after this fashion — 
 country, garden, quietness, out-door amusements. They are at 
 perfect liberty to leave the city, to abandon the poor, to get away 
 from all that is foetid, noisome, and otherwise offensive ; but let 
 them beware lest, in reaching this supposed heaven, they find 
 that they have gone in the wrong direction, and that where they 
 expected heaven to begin they find that they have only reached 
 the outward edge of earth.^ 
 
 ^ There is a German folk story of a very poor charcoal burner 
 who had a kind heart and was always doing good turns to people. 
 He often wished that he were rich that he might help still more. 
 One day in the forest a wicked-looking gnome appeared and told 
 him he would make him rich on one condition. He must exchange 
 his heart of flesh for a wonderful mechanical stone heart that the 
 gnome had made and kept in his workshop in a cave underneath 
 the forest. The poor man did not like the condition, but was 
 tempted and consented to the bargain. He was cast into a deep 
 sleep and when he awoke the exchange had been effected and he 
 felt the stone heart working within him with perfect regularity, 
 but it was cold, very cold. When he got back to the village 
 everybody noticed the change. He was harsh, overbearing, a 
 changed man ; riches came to him ; everything he touched turned 
 to gold, but the richer he grew, the colder seemed the heart, 
 and when old age crept upon him he longed to be poor again 
 and have back his warm human heart. That is a modern way of 
 saying that the man got his request, but leanness came to 
 his soul.2 
 
 Joseph Parker. 
 
 2 H. Jeffs. 
 
346 LEANNESS OF SOUL 
 
 III. 
 
 The Higher Satisfaction. 
 
 1. How are we to avoid the creeping over us of this insidious 
 disease — leanness of soul ? The Apostle shall answer : — " Set your 
 affections on things above." We conquer by the force and direc- 
 tion of desire. Desire is, in the moral world, like the law of 
 gravitation in the natural world — it determines man's relations 
 to beings and objects around him. Desire is the raw material of 
 goodness or wickedness, and thus it has everything to do with the 
 formation of character. There is no power like it. Hence the 
 importance attached in the Bible to strong wishes : " Ask, and 
 ye shall have " ; " Seek, and ye shall find " ; " Knock, and it 
 shall be opened unto you." Wishes are in truth prayers. We 
 do not pray only when we utter conscious prayers. Every time 
 we wish for anything, our Father understands our wishes. 
 
 2. The great lesson, then, which we have to learn from this 
 text is to say from the heart, with trembling yet earnest love, 
 " Not my will but thine be done." That is the lesson ; but where 
 is the school in which it can be learned ? The school is called 
 Calvary. There is no other school in which this lesson is taught. 
 Men may try to reason themselves into it ; men may try by fine 
 philosophy to come to a point of resignation that shall yield them 
 high advantages ; but all their labour will be in vain. We must 
 be slain on the Saviour's cross ; we must enter fully into the pain 
 which our Saviour endured ; our hands and our feet must be nailed 
 to the accursed yet blessed tree ; the very last desire of our selfish- 
 ness must be extinguished, and then shall we come into the joy 
 and the infinite peace of walking with God. Whither are our 
 desires tending ? In which direction are they bearing us, upwards 
 or downwards ? Are we letting ourselves drift towards some 
 crisis which is the culmination of a gradual deterioration, and 
 which may leave us with what we want (or think that we want), 
 at the cost of everything which makes life worth living ? Is desire 
 more and more concentrated on the material, the sensuous ? Is 
 some accomplishment or some passing interest utterly possessing 
 us, and are we becoming lean within — without faith, without 
 
PSALM cvi. 15 
 
 347 
 
 sympathy, without self-respect, without generosity, letting others 
 minister to us without giving aught in return ? If so, it may be 
 well to look on to the end. A day and hour will come when desire 
 will be manifested ; when the true, deep-seated desire of each soul 
 will be seen. Now there are restraints that hinder its manifesta- 
 tion ; there are all sorts of considerations and motives which are 
 keeping us back and causing us to hide our real desires. Then 
 every man's true aim and object, as well as every man's work, will 
 be manifested ; each one, freed from constraint, will turn to his 
 own way. The lips of the Judge need not open to pronounce any 
 sentence. He but lifts off each constraining law, each limiting 
 infirmity, each instrument of education, and the result speaks for 
 itself. Each soul, by its own inner tendency, seeks its own place. 
 Father and son, brother and brother, sister and sister, wife and 
 husband, each with the old habitual restraints lifted off them, 
 turn to their own place — the one goes by an inner power to the 
 right, the other to the left. It needs no angel to guide or urge 
 them on. Each one turns to his own desire, to fulness or leanness, 
 to heaven or hell. 
 
 " He will fulfil the desire of them that fear him." " Delight 
 thyself also in the Lord ; and he shall give thee the desires of 
 thine heart." " 0 rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for him ; 
 and he will give thee thine heart's desire." It is true we have to 
 wait ; it is true that we have to find our way to rest often through 
 many very humbling disappointments ; but because the mouth of 
 the Lord hath spoken, we may be sure that the denial of our 
 prayers is one of the Divine blessings which fall to our lot, and 
 that when we perish in the outward man the inward man is 
 blessed with the renewal which will be consummated in the 
 imperishable and unmingled bliss of heaven. Let us dare to 
 desire, to wish, to ask for as our chief good, to be like Christ ; to 
 have reproduced within us that loveliness of character, that 
 tenderness of sympathy, that strength of endurance, that calm- 
 ness under suffering, that patient self-possession which character- 
 ized Him. We cannot see in His life anything but beauty. Let 
 us dare to wish, to long, to pray, to struggle to be like Him, 
 and He will give us our desire, and send fulness undreamt of — 
 the fulness of love, and faith, and strength, and patience — into our 
 inmost soul. 
 
348 LEANNESS OF SOUL 
 
 ^ Goodness and happiness are not one yet ; and their conflict 
 oscillates through the centuries from asceticism on the one side to 
 riot on the other, and from Puritanism to Stuart licence. This 
 ever-recurring oscillation indicates a beautiful truth laid bare by 
 our Lord. James Hinton devoted almost all his books to this 
 conflict of goodness and happiness, and pointed out that our Lord 
 had solved their conflict. The human heart desires happiness, and, 
 at the same time, righteousness. A most wholesome thing it is 
 to desire happiness. A heart that does not desire happiness is one 
 with which I should be very sorry to have much to do. Happi- 
 ness is a legitimate and a God-implanted desire, of which men and 
 women need never be ashamed provided they link it to goodness. 
 But the linking of it to goodness is only to be done by using self 
 for others' good. That is what Hinton points out as the sum of 
 our Lord's teaching for this life, and the conditions which are 
 to be perfect conditions here we may assume to be entrance 
 conditions of the life which is to come.^ 
 
 The awakening swan grows tired at last 
 Of weltering pastures where he feeds; 
 
 With wings and feet behind him cast, 
 He cleaves the labyrinth of the reeds. 
 
 He arches out his sparkling plumes, 
 He wades and plunges, till he finds 
 
 Beneath his breast the azure glooms 
 Where the great river brims and winds. 
 
 Then, with white sails set to the breeze, 
 The current cold about his feet, 
 
 He fares to those Hesperides 
 
 Where morning and his comrades meet. 
 
 Nor — since within his kindling veins 
 A livelier ichor stirs at last — 
 
 Regrets the gross and juicy stains, 
 The saps and savours of the past; 
 
 But through the august and solemn void 
 Of misty waters holds his way, 
 
 By some ecstatic thirst decoyed 
 
 Towards raptures of the radiant day. 
 
 1 The Lift of WiLliom. Denny, 319. 
 
PSALM cvi. 15 
 
 So sails the soul, and cannot rest, 
 
 Inglorious, in the marsh of peace, 
 But leaves the good, to seek the best, 
 
 Though all its calms and comforts cease, — 
 
 Though what it seems to hold be lost. 
 
 Though that grow far which once was nigh, — 
 
 By torturing hope in anguish tossed. 
 The awakened soul must sail or die.^ 
 
 ^ Edmund Gosse, In Eusset and Silver, 
 
\ 
 
A Volunteer Army. 
 
 3P 
 
Literature. 
 
 Ball (C. J.), Testimonies to Christ, 209. 
 
 Critchley (G.), IFhen the Angels have gone Away, 163. 
 
 Dufle (R. S.), Pleasant Places, 120. 
 
 Henderson (A.), Sermons, 9. 
 
 Macgregor (W. M.), Jesus Christ the Son of God, 52. 
 
 Maclaren (A.), Sermons Preached in Manchester, iii. 321. 
 
 Meyer (F. B.), Christian Living, 62. 
 
 Morrison (G. H.), Flood- Tide, 282. 
 
 Price (A. C), Fifty Sermons, vii. 129. 
 
 Spurgeon (C. H.), New Park Street Pulpit, ii. No. 74. 
 
 „ „ Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xlvii. (1901), No. 2724. 
 
 Tipple (S. A.), Days of Old, 200. 
 Vaughan (J.), Sermons to Children, i. 132. 
 
 „ „ Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), xxv. (1884), No. 1291. 
 
 3Si 
 
A Volunteer Army. 
 
 Thy people offer themselves willingly in the day of thy power : 
 In the beauties of holiness, from the womb of the morning, 
 Thou hast the dew of thy youth.— Ps. ex. 3. 
 
 1. This psalm was composed by some patriotic Hebrew poet on 
 the sallying forth of the king to war, to whom he hears Jehovah 
 promising support and success in the coming campaign, and sees 
 in imagination Jehovah Himself accompanying the king as his 
 chariot rolled away, driving with him, seated by his side, to the 
 battle. Fired by this vision, he pictures him triumphantly 
 victorious over his foes, their power shattered, and the field 
 heaped with their dead bodies ; while he describes the enthusiasm 
 of the people for the sovereign and his cause, the readiness with 
 which they flock to follow him on his march to the frontier, the 
 great multitude eager to put themselves at his disposal for the 
 fray ; and the splendid appearance of the troops, in their glittering 
 armour, like priests clad in sacred vestments, or victims decked 
 for the sacrifice, innumerable and brilliant as dew-drops from the 
 womb of morning, and fresh as dew in comprising all the fine 
 youth, all the young blood and vigour of the land. 
 
 But in the course of time the psalm came to be read as a 
 prophetic description of what should be achieved by the future 
 Messiah of whom the nation dreamt ; to whom, indeed, would be 
 the gathering of the people ; who would prove the champion of 
 Israel's redemption, and of whose Kingdom and dominion there 
 would be no end. His name enduring for ever. His name continu- 
 ing as long as the sun throughout all generations. 
 
 ^ This was a favourite psalm of Luther's. "The 110th," he 
 says, " is very fine. It describes the kingdom and priesthood of 
 Jesus Christ, and declares Him to be the King of all things and 
 the intercessor for all men ; to whom all things have been remitted 
 PS. xxv.-cxix. — 23 
 
354 A VOLUNTEER ARMY 
 
 by His Father, and who has compassion on us all. 'Tis a noble 
 psalm ; if I were well, I would endeavour to make a Commentary 
 upon it." ^ 
 
 2. In accordance with the warlike tone of the whole psalm, 
 the subjects of the monarch are described as an army. The 
 military metaphor comes out more clearly when we attach the 
 true meaning to the words, " in the day of thy power " : Calvin 
 translates, " at the time of the assembling of their army " — " au 
 jour des montres," " in the day of the review." And the meaning 
 is, " Thy subjects shall be ready in the day when thou dost muster 
 thy forces, and set them in array for the war." 
 
 L 
 
 Patriots. 
 
 " Thy people offer themselves willingly in the day of thy power." 
 
 1. The subjects of the King are true patriots. There are no 
 mercenaries in these ranks, no pressed men. The soldiers are all 
 volunteers. 
 
 There are two kinds of submission and service. There is sub- 
 mission because you cannot help it, and there is submission be- 
 cause you like it. There is a sullen bowing down beneath the 
 weight of a hand which you are too feeble to resist, and there is a 
 glad surrender to a love which it would be a pain not to obey. 
 Some of us feel that we are shut in by immense and sovereign 
 power which we cannot oppose. And yet, like some raging rebel 
 in a dungeon, or some fluttering bird in a cage, we beat ourselves 
 all bruised and bloody against the bars in vain attempts at 
 liberty, alternating with fits of cowed apathy as we slink into a 
 corner of our cell. Some of us, however, feel that we are en- 
 closed on every side by that mighty hand which none can resist, 
 and from which we would not stray if we could ; and we joyfully 
 hide beneath its shelter, and gladly obey when it points. Con- 
 strained obedience is no obedience. Unless there be the glad 
 surrender of the will and heart, there is no surrender at all 
 
 * R. E. Protboro, The Psalms in Human Life, 122, 
 
PSALM ex. 3 
 
 355 
 
 God does not want compulsory submission. He does not care to 
 rule over people who are only crushed down by greater power. 
 He does not count that those serve who sullenly acquiesce be- 
 cause they dare not oppose. Christ seeks for no pressed men in 
 His ranks. Whosoever does not enlist joyfully is not reckoned as 
 His. 
 
 ^ An ironic historian sets side by side Frederick the Great's 
 account of the performance of his troops in one battle and a home 
 letter of a recruit engaged in it. " Never," says Frederick, " have 
 my troops done such marvels in point of gallantry, never since it 
 has been my honour to lead them." And the soldier tells his 
 squalid story, of men driven into battle with blows from sergeants' 
 canes, skulking, when they could, behind walls, and taking the 
 opportunity of passing through a vineyard to desert in scores. 
 Frederick won many battles, but he won them in spite of a 
 detestable system, and this poet finds a promise of triumph for 
 his King in the glad loyalty with which He inspires His soldiers.^ 
 
 2. The soldiers are not only volunteers ; they are animated by 
 a spirit of self-surrender and sacrifice. The word here rendered 
 " willing " is employed throughout the Levitical law for freewill 
 offerings." It is a striking word in the Hebrew. We have a 
 similar idea in Ps. Ixviii. 9, where we are told that God has poured 
 forth a refreshing rain for His inheritance because it is weary. 
 And as we receive the refreshing rain of God's Holy Spirit from 
 heaven, in order that we may become a river pouring out His 
 riches, so the real meaning of the Hebrew is this, " Thy people 
 shall become a freewill offering in the day of thy power." It is 
 in that host as it was in the army whose heroic self-devotion was 
 chanted by Deborah under her palm tree — " The people willingly 
 offered themselves." Hence came courage, devotion, victory. 
 With their lives in their hands they flung themselves on the foe, 
 and nothiug could stand against the onset of men who recked not 
 of themselves. 
 
 For there is this one grand thing even about the devilry of 
 war — the transcendent self-abnegation with which, however poor 
 and unworthy may be the cause, a man casts himself away, " what 
 time the foeman's line is broke." The poorest, most vulgar, most 
 animal natures rise for a moment into something like nobility, as 
 
 ^ W. M. Macgregor, Jesus Christ the Son of God, 59. 
 
! 
 
 356 A VOLUNTEER ARMY 
 
 the surge of the strong emotion lifts them to that height of 
 heroism. Life is then most glorious when it is given away for a 
 great cause. That sacrifice is the one noble and chivalrous 
 element which gives interest to war, the one thing that can be ! 
 disentangled from its hideous associations, and can be transferred | 
 to higher regions of life. That spirit of lofty consecration and j 
 utter self-forgetfulness must be ours, if we would be Christ's | 
 soldiers. Our obedience will then be glad when we feel the force I 
 of, and yield to, that gentle persuasive entreaty, " I beseech you 
 therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your 
 bodies a living sacrifice." 
 
 1 " I raised such men," said Cromwell, " as had the fear of 
 God before them, as made some conscience of what they did ; and 
 from that day forward, I must say they were never beaten." 
 
 ^ To be true to himself, to renounce nothing which he knew 
 to be good and yet bring all things captive to the obedience of 
 Christ, was the problem before him. He hesitated long before he 
 could believe that such a solution was possible. His heart was 
 with this rich, attractive world of human life, in the multiplicity 
 and wealth of its illustrations, until it was revealed to him that it 
 assumed a richer but a holier aspect when seen in the light of 
 God. But to this end, he must submit his will to the Divine will | 
 in the spirit of absolute obedience. Here the struggle was deep 
 and prolonged. It was a moral struggle mainly, not primarily 
 intellectual or emotional. He feared that he should lose some- 
 thing in sacrificing his own will to God's will. How the gulf was 
 bridged he could not tell. He wrote down as one of the first of 
 the texts on which he should preach, " Thy people shall be willing 
 in the day of thy power," with the comment that " willingness is 
 the first Christian step." Thus the conversion of Phillips Brooks 
 becomes a representative process of his age. So far as the age 
 has been great, through science or through literature, its greatness 
 passed into his soul. The weakness of his age, its sentimentalism, 
 its fatalism, he overcame in himself when he made the absolute 
 surrender of his will to God. All that he had hitherto loved and 
 cherished as the highest, instead of being lost, was given back to 
 him in fuller measure. To the standard he had now raised there 
 rallied great convictions and blessed experiences, the sense of the 
 unity of life, the harmony of the whole creation, the consciousness 
 of joy in being alive, the conviction that heaven is the goal of 
 earth.^ 
 
 * Phillips Brooks : Memories of his Life, by A. V. G. Allen, 82. 
 
PSALM ex. 3 
 
 357 
 
 II. 
 
 Patriot-Pkiests. 
 
 *' In the beauties of holiness." 
 
 The phrase "in the beauty of holiness " is frequently used for 
 ;he sacerdotal garments, the holy festal attire of the priests of the 
 Lord. So the soldiers are priests as well as patriots. 
 
 1. The King and Leader is Himself a Priest of God's making, 
 mother Melchizedek. In different ages of the world there have 
 )een men in whom a certain native priestliness has been apparent, 
 nen born to bring others into the secrets of God, and seeming to 
 leed no introduction or furtherance themselves ; men who, in the 
 Scots phrase, are " far ben," for they always, with unveiled face, 
 ;ee God. It is their task to make the hidden things apprehensible 
 ;o those who belong to the rough world outside. And God's King, 
 ivhen He comes, will be a priest of that kind, whose priesthood is 
 I matter of native endowment and not of human ordination. 
 
 The mediaeval emperor was a deacon in the Eoman Church, 
 ust as the pope, on his side, was a great secular prince. In 
 [srael, too, the king had something of priestly rank. But here is 
 10 such fictitious dignity. " Thou art a priest of my making," 
 5ays God, " another Melchizedek." Professor Davidson comments 
 m the picture which is given us of Melchizedek — without father, 
 »vithout mother, without descent. " He passes over the stage a 
 dng, a priest, living ; that sight of him is all we ever get. He is 
 ike a portrait having always the same qualities, presenting 
 ilways the same aspect, looking down on us always with the same 
 jyes, which turn and follow us wherever we may stand — always 
 :oyal, always priestly, always individual, and neither receiving nor 
 mparting what he is, but being all in virtue of himself." 
 
 The conquering King whom the psalm hymns is a Priest for 
 iver ; and He is followed by an army of priests. The soldiers are 
 gathered in the day of the muster, with high courage and willing 
 levotion, ready to fling away their lives ; but they are clad not in 
 nail, but in priestly robes, like those who wait before the altar rather 
 -ban like those who plunge into the fight, like those who compassed 
 
353 A VOLUNTEER ARMY 
 
 Jericho with the ark for their standard and the trumpets for all 
 their weapons. We can scarcely fail to remember the words which 
 echo these and interpret them. The armies which were in heaven 
 followed Him on white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean. 
 
 Christina Eossetti comments on the strangeness of such 
 armour against cut of sword and thrust of spear. But the 
 suggestion is that the soldiers have one heart with their Leader, 
 and are great in consecration like Himself. They go out after 
 Him where hard blows are struck, where there is turmoil and 
 shouting and the burden of the weary day, but they go as priests. 
 That warfare which belongs to the extension of the Kingdom of 
 God calls for services which may often be sordid and ugly and 
 painful ; but when they are rightly rendered they are as sacred 
 and as acceptable as any incense offering in the dim seclusion of a 
 temple. The one priestly sacrifice worth speaking of which men 
 can render is the offering of a heart given willingly to the Divine 
 service: and the cause is sure to prevail which can count on 
 volunteers of that complexion. 
 
 ^ Dr. Butler, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, writing 
 of Keith-Falconer, who had been one of his pupils at Harrow, 
 says: "I do not think our dear friend and I had any further 
 communication with each other till the end of last year (1886), 
 when I received from him at Davos-Platz a most kind letter of 
 congratulation on my appointment to the Mastership of Trinity. 
 He told me also of the plan which he had formed for going to 
 Aden, and there employing his knowledge of Arabic for missionary 
 purposes. The result of this generous enterprise we know but 
 too well. The work was scarcely begun before it reached its 
 earthly end. To those who believe in the abiding results of 
 devotion to the cause and the Person of Christ, his short life will 
 not seem a failure. His image will remain fresh in the hearts of 
 many as of a man exceptionally noble and exceptionally winning, 
 recalling to them their own highest visions of unselfish service to 
 God and man, and helping them to hold fast the truth that in the 
 spiritual world nothing but self-sacrifice is permanently fruitful, 
 and that the seed of a truly Christian life is never quickened 
 except it die." ^ 
 
 2. The priestly attire suggests that the great power which we 
 are to wield in our Christian warfare is character. Purity of 
 
 * R. Sinker, Memorials of the Hon. Ion Keith- Falconer, 28. -M 
 
PSALM ex. 3 
 
 359 
 
 heart and life, transparent simple goodness, manifest in men's 
 sight — these will arm us against dangers, and these will bring our 
 brethren glad captives to our Lord. We serve Him best, and 
 advance His Kingdom most, when the habit of our souls is that 
 righteousness with which He invests our nakedness. Be like your 
 Lord, and as His soldiers you will conquer, and as His priests you 
 will win some to His love and fear. Nothing else will avail 
 without that. Without that dress no man finds a place in the 
 ranks. 
 
 ^ " I have known many a man," says Thoreau, " who pretended 
 to be a Christian ; but it was ridiculous, for he had no genius for 
 it." This poet was persuaded that his King would go far because 
 of the temper of the people. " They offer themselves willingly ; 
 in holy, beautiful garments they come, fresh, young, countless like 
 dew at the dawn." ^ 
 
 ^ Turn your energies towards your moral cultivation. In doing 
 so you will accumulate imperishable riches. All that your worldly 
 care can bring will be the doubtful possession of riches of doubtful 
 value. In the possession of the moral wealth of a noble and 
 disciplined character, you possess that which can neither wither 
 nor be stolen. What we have we must leave at the threshold of 
 the grave. What we are goes with us into the other world. 
 Eiches will drop from our dying hand into the grasp of others. 
 Character passes with us into the presence of God. Character is 
 everything. This, rather than worldly riches, is the true end of 
 life. The perfecting of this is the true purpose of God in life.^ 
 
 ^ Few things tell on character more surely and precisely than 
 the goal on which the heart is set and the temper in which that 
 goal is sought. And certainly the Christian character, as it 
 appears in Christ-like lives, does not look at all as though it had 
 been formed and fostered and determined by a mercenary attention 
 to a selfish aim. For the faculties and the capacity that grow in 
 those who try to be true to Christ in daily life are strikingly ill- 
 suited for the opportunities of enjoyment which might be imagined 
 in a heaven of selfishness. Christians do not grow in the capacity 
 for selfish pleasure, nor attain an exceptional power of relishing to 
 the utmost a separate and individual gratification. The faculty 
 which they develop is the faculty of self-denial; of glad, un- 
 hindered self-forgetf ulness for others' sake ; of delighting in good- 
 ness and eliciting what is best in others ; of simple, cheerful, 
 unclouded self-surrender. These, and such as these, are the 
 
 W. M. Macgregor. 
 
 ' Bishop Boyd Carpenter. 
 
36o A VOLUNTEER ARMY 
 
 powers that accrue to those who choose the Christian life ; and it 
 is strange if the way along which they are acquired is a way of 
 self-seeking ; strange if, in striving towards a paradise of selfish 
 pleasure, there is formed a character which would be as wretched 
 there as a selfish character in the heaven of the saints. Surely it 
 is a very different sort of aim and quest that is betrayed in the 
 development of the Christian character and in the lines on which 
 it presses forward ; its preparation through the discipline of this 
 life is for something else than what is here called pleasure or 
 success ; the faculties that are strengthened with its strength must 
 have a work surpassing all our thoughts, and the capacity it 
 brings can never be satisfied with aught that is created. For, in 
 truth, the Christian character prophesies of this — that God has 
 made us for Himself ; and that there is neither rest, nor goal, nor 
 joy for man, save in His love.^ 
 
 III. 
 
 Patriot-Priests in Perpetual Youth. 
 
 " From the womb of the morning, thou hast the dew of thy youth." 
 
 Alexander Henderson, expounding this passage, says : " The 
 words are somewhat obscure even to the learned ear, but look to 
 the 133rd Psalm, and there ye will see a place to help to clear 
 them. Always (however) observe here, * from the womb of the 
 morning, thou hast the dew of thy youth,' that as in a May 
 morning, when there is no extremity of heat, the dew falls so thick 
 that all the fields are covered with it, and it falls in such a secret 
 manner that none sees it fall, so the Lord, in the day of His 
 power, He shall multiply His people, and He shall multiply them 
 in a secret manner ; so that it is marvellous to the world, that 
 once there should seem to be so few or none of them, and then 
 incontinent He should make them to be through all estates." 
 
 1. The " dew of thy youth " has often been understood to 
 mean the fresh youthful energy attributed by the psalm to the 
 Priest-King. It has been suggested that the historical setting 
 of the psalm is to be found in the Maccabean period. The heroic 
 Judas had fallen in battle. Only one Maccabee remained, an 
 
 * Francis Paget, Studies in the Cliristian Character. 
 
PSALM ex. 3 
 
 361 
 
 elder brother, Simon, who had been passed over till this time — 
 a great man and a wise one, it would seem, who had deliberately 
 and unselfishly stood aside while his younger brethren had been 
 doing their mighty work. He had been their lieutenant, counsellor, 
 helper in every way. " The father of them all " was the affection- 
 ate title which he bore among them ; the organizer and statesman 
 of the valiant band ; one of those strong, keen, silent souls who 
 are content to work in obscurity, so that the grand object is 
 obtained, but who often have more real power than those who 
 stand glittering in the front. But now his time was come — come 
 when he was apparently more than sixty years of age. He rose 
 to the occasion; he took the critical and dangerous place. He 
 went up to Jerusalem, stood among the excited and trembling 
 multitude, and said : " Ye yourselves know what great things I 
 and my brethren and my father's house have done for the laws 
 and the sanctuary. You know the battles and troubles we have 
 seen, by reason whereof all my brethren are slain for Israel's sake, 
 and I am left alone. Now therefore, be it far from me that I 
 should spare mine own life in any time of trouble, for I am no 
 better than my brethren. I will defend my nation and the 
 sanctuary, and our wives and our children, though all the heathen 
 be gathered together to destroy us for very malice." 
 
 The people gazed upon the grand old man. They watched his 
 kindling eye, his martial bearing; they saw the fires of a still 
 youthful spirit burning in the aged frame, and they answered with 
 a loud voice, " Thou shalt be our leader. Fight thou our battles, 
 and whatsoever thou commandest us, we will do." Then they 
 brought him into the temple, clothed him in the sacred robes, 
 placed the tiara upon his head, and saluted him as the great 
 Priest-King of Israel: and it may be that this 110th Psalm 
 preserves the memory of the coronation anthem sung at that 
 service in the temple when the old man with the brave young 
 heart inside him stood before the awestruck multitudes and took 
 the perilous honour of the lofty place. A joy-shout of the people 
 finds its echo in the text, " From the breaking of the morning, 
 thou hast the dew of thy youth " ; that is to say, " Though aged, it 
 is upon thee still." 
 
 ^ Certain leaders in their young days have led their troops to 
 battle, and, by the loudness of their voice, and the strength of 
 
362 A VOLUNTEER ARMY 
 
 their bodies, have inspired their men with courage ; but the old 
 warrior hath his hair sown with grey; he begins to be decrepit, 
 and no longer can lead men to battle. It is not so with Jesus 
 Christ. He has still the dew of His youth. The same Christ 
 who led His troops to battle in His early youth leads them now. 
 The arm which smote the sinner with His word smites now ; it is 
 as unpalsied as it was before. The eye which looked upon His 
 friends with gladness, and upon His foemen with a glance most 
 stern and high — that same eye is regarding us now, undimmed, 
 like that of Moses. He has the dew of His youth.^ 
 
 If As I witness the energies of nature, I feel that the heart 
 that fashioned it was young. There is no sign of age about crea- 
 tion. There is no trace of the weariness of years. It is inspired 
 with an abounding energy that tells me of a fresh and youthful 
 mind. Christ may have lived from everlasting ages before the 
 moment of creation came ; but the eternal morning was still upon 
 His brow when He conceived and bodied out the world. There 
 are the powers of youth in it. There are the energies of opening 
 life. " Thou hast the dew of thy youth." 2 
 
 2. We may however take " youth " to be a collective noun, 
 equivalent to young men. In that case the army is described as 
 a host of young warriors, led forth in their fresh strength and 
 countless numbers and gleaming beauty, like the dew of the 
 morning. Did you never see the dew-drops glistening on the 
 earth ? and did you never ask, " Whence came these ? How came 
 they here so infinite in number, so lavishly scattered everywhere, 
 so pure and brilliant ? " Nature whispered the answer, " They 
 came from the womb of the morning." So God's people will come 
 forth as noiselessly, as mysteriously, as divinely, as if they came 
 "from the womb of the morning," like the dew-drops. Science 
 has laboured to discover the origin of dew, and perhaps has 
 guessed it ; but to the Eastern, one of the greatest riddles was, 
 Out of whose womb came the dew ? Who is the mother of those 
 pearly drops ? Now, so will God's people come mysteriously. 
 Again, the dew-drops — who made them ? Do kings and princes 
 rise up and hold their sceptres, and bid the clouds shed tears, or 
 affright them to weeping by the beating of the drum ? Do armies 
 march to the battle to force the sky to give up its treasure, and 
 scatter its diamonds lavishly ? No ; God speaks ; He whispers in 
 
 » C. H. Spurgeon. ^ G. H. Morrison, Flood-Tide, 286. 
 
 i 
 
PSALM ex. 3 
 
 363 
 
 the ears of nature, and it weeps for joy at the glad news that the 
 morning is coming. God does it; there is no apparent agency 
 employed, no thunder, no lightning; God has done it. That is 
 how God's people shall be saved; they come forth from the 
 "womb of the morning"; divinely called, divinely brought, divinely 
 blessed, divinely numbered, divinely scattered over the entire 
 surface of the globe, divinely refreshing to the world, they proceed 
 from the " womb of the morning." 
 
 ^ When you go out, delighted, into the dew of the morning, 
 have you ever considered why it is so rich upon the grass ; — why 
 it is not upon the trees ? It is partly on the trees, but yet your 
 memory of it will be always chiefly of its gleam upon the lawn. 
 On many trees you will find there is none at all. I cannot follow 
 out here the many inquiries connected with this subject, but, 
 broadly remember the branched trees are fed chiefly by rain, — the 
 unbranched ones by dew, visible or invisible ; that is to say, at all 
 events by moisture which they can gather for themselves out of 
 the air ; or else by streams and springs. Hence the division of 
 the verse of the song of Moses : " My doctrine shall drop as the 
 rain ; my speech shall distil as the dew : as the small rain upon 
 the tender herb, and as the showers upon the grass." ^ 
 
 ^ Until I heard from my friend Mr. Tyrwhitt of the cold felt 
 at night in camping on Sinai, I could not understand how deep 
 the feeling of the Arab, no less than the Greek, must have been 
 respecting the Divine gift of the dew, — nor with what sense of 
 thankfulness for miraculous blessing the question of J ob would be 
 uttered, " The hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it ? " 
 Then compare the first words of the blessing of Isaac : " God give 
 thee of the dew of heaven, and of the fatness of earth " ; and, 
 again, the first words of the song of Moses: "Give ear, oh ye 
 heavens, — for my speech shall distil as the dew " ; and you will 
 see at once why this heavenly food (manna) was made to shine 
 clear in the desert, like an enduring of its dew ; — Divine remaining 
 for continual need. Frozen, as the Alpine snow — pure for ever.^ 
 
 3. The soldiers of this King retain their youth. He who has 
 fellowship with God, and lives in the constant reception of the 
 supernatural life and grace which come from Jesus Christ, 
 possesses the secret of perpetual youth. The world ages us, time 
 and physical changes tell on us all, and the strength which belongs 
 
 * Ruskin, Proser2nna, i. oliap. iii. § 22. 
 ' Ruskin, Deucalion, i. chap. vii. § 12. 
 
364 A VOLUNTEER ARMY 
 
 to the life of nature ebbs away ; but the life eternal is subject to 
 no laws of decay and owes nothing to the external world. So we 
 may be ever young in heart and spirit. It is possible for a man 
 to carry the freshness, the buoyancy, the elastic cheerfulness, the 
 joyful hope of his earliest days, right on through the monotony of 
 middle-aged maturity, and even into old age shadowed by the long 
 reflection of the tombs which the setting sun casts over the path. 
 It is possible for us to grow younger as we grow older, because we 
 drink more full draughts of the fountain of life, and so to have 
 to say at the last, " Thou hast kept the good wine until now." 
 " Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men 
 shall utterly fall. But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew 
 their strength." If we live near Christ, and draw our life from 
 Him, then we may blend the hopes of youth with the experience 
 and memory of age ; be at once calm and joyous, wise and strong, 
 preserving the blessedness of each stage of life into that which 
 follows, and thus at last possessing the sweetness and the good of 
 all at once. We may not only bear fruit in old age, but have 
 buds, blossoms, and fruit — the varying product and adornment 
 of every stage of life united in our characters. 
 
 A man is not old, however hoary and bent, who is conversing, 
 as Emerson says, with what is above him, with the religious eye ' 
 looking upward, and abandoned the while with delight to the 
 inspirations flowing in from all sides. A man is not old in 
 whom the faculty of imagination is undecayed, who throbs with 
 sympathy as eager and strong as ever for whatsoever is just and 
 lovely and pure and true ; whose mind, still responsive and aspir- 
 ing, is fully open to new thoughts and new ideas, and cherishes 
 dreams of the ideal ; upon whom no weight of custom or of habit 
 lies so heavily that he cannot move out of grooves under the 
 direction of some felt better way, or who carries with him the 
 optimism which, without hiding its face from the dark and ugly 
 facts of existence, can front them smilingly, and sing its song in 
 defiance of them, because of faith in humanity and trust in the 
 divine purpose of the Universe. A man is not old, who is at one 
 with Michael Angelo when, just before he died on the verge of 
 ninety, he carved an allegorical figure, and inscribed on it in large 
 letters, " Still learning," or whose heart echoes Kobert Browning, 
 when he sang : 
 
 J 
 
PSALM ex. 3 
 
 365 
 
 Grow old along with me ! 
 
 The best is yet to be, 
 The last of life, for which the first was made: 
 
 Our times are in His hand 
 
 Who saith "A whole I planned, 
 Youth shows but half ; trust God : see all nor be afraid ! " 
 
 ^ 1st December 1895. A pleasant party at York House. The 
 conversation straying to Watts, Miss Lawless, who was sitting on 
 one side of me, mentioned that he had said to her : " I think I am 
 quite accurate in telling you that I saw the sun rise every day 
 last summer," and Mrs. Tyrrell, who was sitting on my other side, 
 told us that he had said to her : " I am seventy-eight, and I hope 
 still to do my best work." ^ 
 
 4. The soldier of the cross should exercise in the world a 
 gracious refreshing influence, like the dew. The dew, formed in 
 the silence of the darkness while men sleep, falling as willingly 
 on a bit of dead wood as anywhere, hanging its pearls on every 
 poor spike of grass, and dressing everything on which it lies with 
 strange beauty, each separate globule tiny and evanescent, but each 
 flashing back the light, and each a perfect sphere, feeble one by 
 one, but united mighty to make the pastures of the wilderness 
 rejoice — so, created in silence by an unseen influence, feeble when 
 taken in detail but strong in their myriads, glad to occupy the 
 lowliest place, and each " bright with something of celestial light," 
 Christian men and women are to be in the midst of many people 
 as dew from the Lord. 
 
 ^ The personal influence of Henry Bradshaw (the librarian at 
 Cambridge University) was extraordinary. It was not gained by 
 any arts, nor did he ever manifest the slightest wish to interfere or to 
 exercise influence. One just knew him to be a man of guileless life, 
 laborious, high-principled, incapable of any sort of meanness or 
 malice. To love is to understand everything, says the French 
 proverb. It is not easy really to improve people by scolding 
 them or lecturing them, but if one knows that a generous, un- 
 suspicious, high-minded man has a real affection for one, it is 
 impossible not to be restrained by the thought from acting in a 
 way that he would disapprove. Bradshaw's influence over the 
 men he knew was stronger than the influence of any other man 
 at Cambridge. But his affection was sisterly — if one can use the 
 
 1 M. E, Grant Duff, Notes from a Diary, 1892-95, ii. 290. 
 
366 A VOLUNTEER ARMY 
 
 word — rather than paternal. He was fond of little demonstra- 
 tions of affection, would pat and stroke one's hand as he talked, 
 and yet there was never the least shadow of sentimentality about 
 it. I have never heard any one suggest that there was anything 
 weak or unmanly about his tenderness. It was preserved from 
 that by his critical judgment, his excellent sense, his power of 
 saying the most incisive things, and the irony which, however 
 lambent, had got a very clear cutting edge, and which he was 
 always ready to use if there was occasion. If any one traded on 
 the affection of Bradshaw or counted on indulgence, he was sure 
 to be instantly and kindly snubbed. It was more that there was 
 an atmosphere of intimacy and confidence in one's relations with 
 him, which pervaded the time spent in his company as with 
 fragrant summer air.^ 
 
 ^ When love has made the most of the man himself it over- 
 flows to bless others. Christ's disciples are not here to be 
 ministered unto, but to minister. Eeligion, says Christ, is love, 
 and love is gentle toward those with hollow eyes and famine- 
 stricken faces. Love is kindly toward those who have a tragedy 
 written in the sharpened countenance. Love is patient toward 
 those who have lost fidelity as a man loses a golden coin ; who 
 have lost morality as one who flounders in the Alpine drifts. 
 And this religion of love takes on a thousand modern forms. If 
 it is not rowing out against the darkness and storm, as did Grace 
 Darling, to save the shipwrecked, it is going forth to those tossed 
 upon life's billows, to succour and to save. For love is making 
 the individual life beautiful, making the home beautiful, and 
 will at last make the Church and State beautiful. Men will not 
 bow down to crowned power nor philosophic power nor aesthetic 
 power ; but in the presence of a great soul, filled with vigour of 
 inspiration and glowing with love, man will do obeisance. There 
 is no force upon earth like Divine love in the heart of man, and 
 at last that force will sweeten and regenerate society 
 
 ^ A. C. Benson, The Leaves of the Tree, 225. 
 2 N. D. HDlis, The Investment of Infiv^nce, 274. 
 
The Brook in the Way. 
 
 367 
 
Literature. 
 
 Chadwick (G. A.), Pilate's Gift, 266. 
 Hanks (W. P.), The Eternal Witness, 81. 
 Hunter (J.), The Angels of God, 27. 
 Jerdan (C), Gospel Milk and Honey, 245. 
 Jones (J. D.), The Unfettered Word, 145. 
 Norton (J. N.), Old Paths, 231. 
 Piggott (W. C), The Imperishable Word, 190. 
 Smellie (A.), Service and Inspiration^ 49. 
 
 3^8 
 
The Brook in the Way. 
 
 He shall drink of the brook in the way : 
 Therefore shall he lift up the head.— Ps. ex. 7. 
 
 1. This jubilant and magnificent psalm opens with a passage which 
 was taken possession of by the Apostles, in the name of their Lord, 
 so long ago that it has lost any suggestion of foreignness; and 
 just as some of our older colonies have acquired a look of England 
 overseas, so do we welcome these verses when we come upon 
 them, as if they were an outlying tract of the New Testament. 
 They give a description of the King, set at God's right hand, a 
 Priest for ever, which in itself is great ; and yet, in the writer's 
 view, it was only a preparation for something else. These things 
 were spoken of Him that faith might have a chance ; for what 
 possessed the poet was not that his King was great and highly 
 favoured, but that a King so great would go far and that of His 
 conquests there would be no end. It is through getting big 
 thoughts of the King that men are prepared to cherish worthier 
 expectations with regard to the Kingdom. 
 
 2. The poet first shows the kingship at rest, as it is in its 
 dignity, created and secured by God, and when his heart is full 
 of that he goes on to show the kingship in action. A royalty 
 based upon the will of God, which, indeed, is nothing else than 
 an instrument of that will, cannot but make way ; present and 
 future have nothing in them to withstand it, and thus it will go 
 farther and farther, passing out at last beyond the imagination of 
 men. That is the poet's idea, which a rhetorician would have 
 expressed in some resounding phrase ; but as an artist this man 
 had no liking for vague words without any picture in them. He 
 wanted men to feel that the King beyond their sight was pushing 
 His conquests still, and he manages that by a quaint touch of 
 imagination. The King, urging on His enemies in their flight, 
 PS. xxv.-cxix. — 24 
 
370 THE BROOK IN THE WAY 
 
 stops for a moment to drink, and then He passes off the scene with 
 head uplifted, fresh as when the battle-day began. There He is — 
 the true King, God's gift to men, travelling out beyond our sight, 
 on always vaster enterprises, and without a sign of flagging 
 strength. That fired the poet's soul, and it should live with us 
 as the scope and outlook of the psalm. 
 
 I. 
 
 The Ideal King. 
 
 1. Who is this King and Captain that the poet celebrates ? 
 The answer must be that we have here not a portrait but an 
 ideal, which embodies the dream of those who trusted that God 
 would give them one day a ruler who should be all that a king 
 can be to men. The poet follows this warrior priest, this priestly 
 king, to the war ; he sees him winning victory after victory, until 
 the earth seems filled with the slaughtered bodies of his foes. 
 But he grows weary and tired in the conflict ; his tongue cleaves 
 to his mouth for thirst ; his sword well-nigh drops from his hand 
 for sheer weariness as he toils on beneath the fierce glare of the 
 Eastern sun. And it seems as if he must faint and fall before 
 the full fruits of victory are reaped, when suddenly a little brook 
 of cool and limpid water presents itself to his gaze, and the faint 
 and tired warrior stoops and drinks a long, deep draught, and the 
 clear, cool water brings refreshing and new strength to his ex- 
 hausted frame, so that, with new vigour and determination, he 
 resumes the pursuit, and makes the victory final and complete. 
 " He shall drink of the brook in the way : therefore shall he lift 
 up the head." 
 
 2. This ideal King overthrows all His enemies and wins a 
 lasting dominion because He is God's own partner. He knows 
 how to conquer. He is content that His battles should be taken 
 out of His hands, and that the victory when it comes should be 
 God's victory and not His own. In Him there is no self-assertion 
 or display; He accepts what God allows and asks no more. 
 Inferior men may be restless, as they take on themselves the 
 burden of the world and its future, striking hotly in defence 
 
PSALM ex. 7 
 
 371 
 
 of their view of truth, and growing troubled and dejected when 
 that view does not make way. But in the true Master of men 
 there is a superlative trust in God ; He suffers His own effort and 
 His own message to pass into the sum of God's providential 
 forces, which are working for new heavens and a new earth. He 
 does not bear the burden of the world anxiously, but leaves it in 
 the strong hands of Him who can sustain it all. Peter speaks of 
 Jesus " sitting at the right hand of God, expecting," which is a 
 word of admonition for all unquiet minds so ludicrously solicitous 
 about the interests and the work of God. But whilst He was 
 still on earth, Jesus suffered God to fight His battles for Him. 
 He tarried for the Lord's leisure. He believed in powers which 
 work slowly and without noise, and He knew the rest of heart of 
 those who wait for God and are content that He should work. 
 
 3. " What is to hinder this man from governing ? " says 
 Carlyle of the Abbot Samson. " There is in him what far 
 transcends all apprenticeships; in the man himself there exists 
 a model of governing, something to govern by. He has the 
 living ideal of a governor in him." In like fashion the poet 
 sweeps aside the whole mob of kings so called, David and 
 Solomon and their posterity, who in turn had claimed to sit on 
 the throne of Jehovah. He did not mean that kind of thing 
 at all — a merely titular kingship, which had no promise in it. 
 One day there will be born a King, possessing every gift of rule, 
 born to command the wavering hearts of men; and when He 
 comes the first to acknowledge Him will be God, who will make 
 a place in His universe for Him, and raise Him not to where 
 these spectral majesties have sat, these uneasy phantasms which 
 have flitted across the scene, but to where none ever sat before. 
 " Sit at my right hand." 
 
 Thus Christ alone answers fully to the description of the 
 conquering King, who is also " a priest for ever after the order of 
 Melchizedek." It is He alone who goes forth at the head of 
 an army numberless as the dewdrops of a summer morn, every 
 soldier in it clothed in holy garments, sweeping His enemies 
 before Him, gaining one victory after another until they are 
 all beneath His feet, and His Kingdom stretches from the river 
 unto the ends of the earth. 
 
372 THE BROOK IN THE WAY 
 
 4. This King not only sits as partner with the King of 
 kings, but is content to share the lot of the common soldier. 
 The Psalmist writes of " his Lord " at the right hand of Jehovah, 
 that He shall be refreshed along His conquering march, not with 
 the rich wines of Helbon cooled in the snows of Lebanon, but, 
 like any private soldier, from the wayside brook. And He shall 
 need refreshment, having taken His full share of toil. This 
 contrast between a splendid destiny and the simplest life was 
 never so true of any as of Jesus Christ. It is this contrast that 
 moves St. Paul to astonishment in the words, " God sent forth 
 his Son, born of a woman, born under the law." We have not 
 a High Priest who cannot be touched with the feeling of our infir- 
 mity, but One who was tempted in all points like as we are — weary, 
 athirst, and faint. For thirty years Jesus lived the frugal and 
 simple life of a carpenter's son in a quiet village among the hills 
 of Galilee. His first recorded temptation was to break His 
 fellowship with us by claiming miraculous supplies, at least of 
 bread ; but this help, which He gave to others, He would not 
 Himself employ. Never once did Jesus use His special powers 
 for Himself to make a difference between His life and ours, or 
 drink of other streams but such as ran by the wayside for all. 
 His first miracle was to make large supplies of wine for a 
 marriage feast ; but, for His own part. He would sit by the 
 wayside fountain, waiting, and would ask a lost woman to bestow 
 on Him a cup of cold water. The fever of His cruel death was 
 alleviated by the vinegar, the sour wine, of the private soldiers 
 beneath His cross. Even after His resurrection, when He had 
 already entered upon that sublime and mysterious life which it 
 is our highest hope to share, He did not scorn to take of the fish 
 which they had drawn from the Lake of Galilee, and, again, even 
 of the cold fish which remained from a former meal. 
 
 ^ The troops of Charles the Twelfth, in sore distress and 
 half inclined to mutiny, brought him a specimen of their bread, j 
 which was hard and sour and black. To their astonishment, ! 
 the king ate it with a relish, and quietly answered : " It is not ' 
 good bread, but it can be eaten." There was no more thought 
 of mutiny in that camp ; nor will such a leader ever lack men 
 to follow, to suffer, and to die with him.^ M 
 
 1 G. A. Chadwick, Pilate's Gift, 269. ■ 
 
PSALM ex. 7 
 
 373 
 
 (1) The Son of God became one with us in taking our nature. 
 He did not come to the world robed in cloud and fire and 
 storm, and attended by an army of angels. Eather, He did 
 much to conceal His majesty during the time that He lived on 
 earth. He was born a Jew; and the Hebrew nation was "the 
 fewest of all peoples" — not one of the great broad streams of 
 mankind, but as a " brook in the way " ; yet the Lord Jesus 
 drank of that brook. " He took not on him the nature of angels ; 
 but he took on him the seed of Abraham." Without for a 
 moment ceasing to be God, He stooped to become a babe in the 
 manger, a humble and inquiring boy growing up a working 
 carpenter in a country town, then a homeless wayfarer, a 
 rejected religious teacher, and at last a crucified slave. 
 
 (2) Our Great Captain at length bowed His head to drink 
 our cup of suffering and sorrow. That bitter cup was put into 
 His hand in the garden of Gethsemane, and He did not refuse 
 to drink it. He did not, as He might have done, use His 
 almighty power to deliver Himself from His enemies. He gave 
 Himself up, a weary and unarmed man, to their wicked will. 
 Out of love for us, and with a view to our redemption, He 
 allowed Himself to be nailed to the cross. And there He was 
 " made a curse for us," bearing our sin and shame and doom. 
 
 ^ Nothing can have a more tranquillizing effect upon us in 
 this world than the frequent consideration of the afflictions, 
 necessities, contempt, calumnies, insults, and humiliations which 
 our Lord suffered from His birth to His most painful death. 
 When we contemplate such a weight of bitterness as this, are 
 we not wrong in giving to the trifling misfortunes which befall 
 us even the names of adversities and injuries ? Are we not 
 ashamed to ask a share of His Divine patience to help us to 
 bear such trifles as these, seeing that the smallest modicum of 
 moderation and humility would suffice to make us bear calmly 
 the insults offered to us ? ^ 
 
 ^ Before the apotheosis of the cross, suffering was a curse 
 from which man fled ; now it becomes a purification of the soul, 
 a sacred trial sent by Eternal Love, a Divine dispensation meant 
 to sanctify and ennoble us, an acceptable aid to faith, a strange 
 initiation into happiness. 0 power of belief ! — All remains the 
 same, and yet all is changed. A new certitude arises to deny 
 
 * The Sjpiritof St. Francis de Sales, 172. 
 
374 THE BROOK IN THE WAY 
 
 the apparent and the tangible ; it pierces through the mystery 
 of things, it places an invisible Father behind visible nature, it 
 shows us joy shining through tears, and makes of pain the 
 beginning of joy. And so, for those who have believed, the tomb 
 becomes heaven, and on the funeral pyre of life they sing the 
 hosanna of immortality ; a sacred madness has renewed the face 
 of the world for them, and when they wish to explain what they 
 feel, their ecstasy makes them incomprehensible ; they speak 
 with tongues. A wild intoxication of self-sacrifice, contempt 
 for death, the thirst for eternity, the delirium of love — these 
 are what the unalterable gentleness of the Crucified has had 
 power to bring forth. By His pardon of His executioners, and 
 by that unconquerable sense in Him of an indissoluble union 
 with God, Jesus, on His cross, kindled an inextinguishable fire 
 and revolutionized the world.^ 
 
 Christ's Heart was wrung for me, if mine is sore ; 
 
 And if my feet are weary, His have bled; 
 
 He had no place wherein to lay His Head; 
 If I am burdened. He was burdened more. 
 The cup I drink, He drank of long before; 
 
 He felt the unuttered anguish which I dread; 
 
 He hungered who the hungry thousands fed, 
 And thirsted who the world's refreshment bore. 
 If grief be such a looking-glass as shows 
 
 Christ's Face and man's in some sort made alike, 
 Then grief is pleasure with a subtle taste : 
 Wherefore should any fret or faint or haste ? 
 Grief is not grievous to a soul that knows 
 
 Christ comes, — and listens for that hour to strike.^ 
 
 II. 
 
 The Common Brook. 
 
 " He shall drink of the brook in the way." It is wonderful to 
 think of the spiritual life of Jesus nourished by the same means 
 of grace as are available for us all. At every point in Christ's 
 experience there was a sense of obstacle and resistance. Salvation 
 for Him was every day a task entailing agony. But always He 
 bore down the resistance, and, welcoming the reliefs that were 
 
 1 AmieVs Journal (trans, by Mrs. Humphry Ward), 168. 
 * Christina G. Rossetti, Verses, 37. 
 
PSALM ex. 7 
 
 375 
 
 given Him by God, He passed on with lifted head to the burden 
 and the battle of the new day, sure of Himself, sure of His cause, 
 very sure of God and victory. " True souls always are hilarious." 
 Think of Him when the disciples came back from their first 
 excursion, elated, as small men will be, by their minute successes ; 
 their ministry, one may suppose, had scarcely drawn attention in 
 the single province of Galilee, and He had taken on Himself the 
 redemption of the world. But hear His comment, " When you 
 were away I was watching Satan and he was fallen " (an imperfect 
 tense followed by an aorist). The most meagre encourage- 
 ment, the first faint effort of a soul to free itself, spoke home 
 to His heart, and He drew water with joy out of the wells of 
 salvation. 
 
 We do not find that one innocent pleasure which came " in 
 the way " to J esus was sourly or wilfully refused by Him. He 
 would leave a feast at once, if called by Jairus to a sick-bed ; but 
 He would not refuse the feast of His friends in Bethany, though 
 He knew that He was reproached for eating and drinking, and 
 though He felt His death to be so near that the ointment then 
 poured upon Him would go with Him to His burial. How does 
 His example affect us ? We may have to refuse pleasures because 
 we are weak, because temptations must be avoided, because we 
 have no longer any choice except to cripple our life, or, having two 
 feet, to be cast into hell fire ; but this is not a thing to boast of. 
 Or, like St. Paul, we may deny ourselves for our weak brother's 
 sake, which is an honour, and a Christ-like thing ; but the rule, 
 apart from special cases, is that the best and truest life is such as 
 welcomes and is refreshed by all simple pleasures which sparkle 
 and sing by our life's path, which do not require us to leave the 
 road of duty that we may drink of them. 
 
 If Eastern people have a very skilful way of drinking from a 
 flowing stream without stopping in their running. They throw 
 the water up into the mouth. An Eastern traveller writes : " In 
 an excursion across an Arabian desert, some of the Arabs, on 
 coming to water, rushed to it, and, stooping sufficiently to allow 
 the right hand to reach the water, they threw it up into their 
 mouths so dexterously, that I never observed any of the water 
 to fall upon the breast. I often tried to do it, but never 
 succeeded." 
 
376 THE BROOK IN THE WAY 
 
 1. Jesus found refreshment in quiet communion with nature. 
 In one of his letters Nathaniel Hawthorne speaks about bathing 
 himself in " the refreshing waters of solitude and open-air nature," 
 and there is no season of the year in which we may not find this 
 source of rest and refreshment for the mind and heart. The 
 creation may always be our recreation. To be in love with this 
 beautiful world is to be at the secret source of many a noble 
 pleasure. To have a mind and heart open to the highest 
 impressions of the natural universe, to be able to enter into the 
 life of a summer or a winter day, to enjoy a night of stars, to feel 
 the beauty of a flower, the grandeur of a storm, the spell of the 
 wide waters or the high mountains, is to have abundant means of 
 recovery and renewal always nigh at hand whenever we feel the 
 need of calling ourselves off for a time from the excitement and 
 strain of the daily conflict. It is true that nature does not 
 yield the sympathy which the passionate human heart requires, 
 but insensibly she helps her lovers to bear their burdens and to 
 find rest in God. We are quickened and comforted by outward 
 things more than we know. The sun and moon and stars, 
 unaffected by our little controversies, rebuke and soothe us as we 
 gaze on their tranquil glory. The mountains bring peace, and our 
 fretfulness is carried away by the rushing river at our feet. Not 
 only in the synagogue did Jesus find refreshment, but in the lilies 
 of the field, in the sunset sky, among the hills, and by the Lake of 
 Galilee. 
 
 ^ In his suggestive journal, Amiel, describing a country walk 
 taken when a dark and troubled mood was upon him, thus writes : 
 " The sunlight, the green leaves, the sky, all whispered to me, ' Be 
 of good cheer and courage, poor wounded one ! ' " We are all at 
 times poor wounded ones, needing all the refreshment and healing 
 we can find. And, 
 
 What simple joys from simple sources spring ! ^ 
 
 By the avenue, on to the mansion, 
 
 There runs a clear stream all the way, 
 Pursuing my path, I can see it, 
 And list to its roundelay ; 
 Still gleaming and glancing, 
 Still laughing and dancing. 
 It carols along all day. 
 
 1 J. Hunter, The Angels of Ood, 32. 
 
PSALM ex. 7 
 
 377 
 
 In summer its rippling music, 
 
 Delight and refreshing instils, 
 In winter, by torrent-notes swollen, 
 Its songs all the dreariness fills ; 
 Still leaping and bounding. 
 Its echoes resounding, 
 With rapture my soul it thrills. 
 
 And precious my " Brook by the way " is, 
 
 As Homewards I journey along, 
 New life in His depths I discover, 
 New courage I take from His song; 
 In gloom and in gladness, 
 In sunshine and sadness, 
 He is my Salvation strong 
 
 2. One of the richest streams that water the desert of life is 
 that of social sympathy and helpfulness, whereby we give and 
 take of the rich solace of brotherly love. To feel that the world 
 is a little better for our being, that, when the little light of our 
 life goes out, it will not have altogether failed to light some other 
 fire of warmth and helpfulness ; that some lives will go onward 
 a little stronger, and more hopeful, for something we have been, 
 or said, or even tried to be, this is a brook of consolation which 
 becomes the more precious the nearer we draw to the isolation of 
 death. Wretched is the man who has missed this brook of gentle 
 human ministry in life's way, and recognized too late how much 
 of his soul's life he has lost in saving it. 
 
 Nor, that time, 
 When nature had subdued him to herself. 
 Would he forget those Beings to whose minds 
 Warm from the labours of benevolence 
 The world, and human life, appeared a scene 
 Of kindred loveliness : then he would sigh, 
 Inly disturbed, to think that others felt 
 What he must never feel. 
 
 George MacDonald says : " To know a man who can be 
 trusted will do more for one's moral nature than all the books 
 of divinity that were ever written." The beauty of the outward 
 world is full of Divine help, but there is more beauty and more 
 
 * T. Crawford, Horae Serenae^ 71. 
 
378 THE BROOK IN THE WAY 
 
 inspiration in living excellence than in the fairest natural scenes. 
 Wonderfully refreshing is the heart's speech of the truly wise and 
 good, but more beneficent is the brave thought when it becomes 
 the brave deed, and more life-giving the Divine Word when it is 
 made flesh and dwells among us. How rich the quickening and 
 renewing influences which come from the presence and example 
 of men who lift clearly before us the nobler ideals of life ; from 
 the memory of the faithful dead ; and from the biographic page — 
 
 Bright affluent spirits, breathing but to bless, 
 
 Whose presence cheers men's eyes and warms their hearts, 
 
 Whose lavish goodness this old world renews, 
 
 Like the free sunshine and the liberal air.^ 
 
 ^ There is a mysterious power in sympathy, and I thank 
 God that the stream of sympathy is ever "in the way" of 
 sorrowing souls. I see much sorrow, much pain, much heart- 
 break, but I see also, and I thank God for it, much sympathy. 
 Indeed, I am persuaded we never know what a wealth of sym- 
 pathy and love there dwells in many a heart until sorrow calls 
 it forth. And how a little sympathy comforts, and cheers, and 
 refreshes the soul. " She did help me," said a poor soul about one 
 who was a veritable angel of mercy. " I felt so much better for 
 her visit." " Well, what did she say to you ? " I asked. " Well, she 
 didn't say much, but she sat with me and held my hand." That 
 good woman's sympathy, silent sympathy, was a veritable " brook 
 in the way" to that poor bereaved and lonely soul, and she 
 drank of it and lifted up her head. 
 
 3. Another brook may be found in the appointed means of 
 grace. Christ frequently drank of it. "There is a river, the 
 streams whereof shall make glad the city of God, the holy place 
 of the tabernacles of the Most High." We must seek, as our 
 fathers did, the perennial springs of refreshment that are to be 
 found in the private and public ordinances of religion. The ex- 
 citements and exhaustions of modern life make this duty even 
 more imperative. Industry and enterprise are good ; but life is 
 not only action, it is thought and feeling also. We do ourselves 
 the greatest wrong if we allow our activities to crowd meditation 
 and prayer out of our days and to rob us of the secret of rest in 
 God. To have depth and elevation and tranquillity in life, and the 
 aim kept high, and the impulse true and steady, it is absolutely 
 
 1 J. Hunter, The Angels of God, 36. 
 
 I 
 
PSALM ex. 7 
 
 379 
 
 necessary for mind and heart to have constant access to the 
 Source of inspiration. It is a moral calamity to lose the medi- 
 tative and worshipful spirit. Eeverence, faith, and aspiration 
 are the springs of noble and fruitful living. Sunday and the 
 Church stand for our highest life. They invite us to drink of 
 waters that rise from cool and unpolluted depths. They offer an 
 opportunity of finding that truest rest and recreation which 
 come through mental and spiritual quickening and uplifting, and 
 of verifying the word of prophecy, " They that wait upon the Lord 
 shall renew their strength." 
 
 ^ I know a little chapel in my own native land, away out in 
 the country, far from village and town. But every Sabbath from 
 miles around the farmers and farm labourers gather in the little 
 building to hear the gospel preached. Their lives are hard and 
 monotonous enough ; but they find peace, joy, love, in the little 
 chapel, and because of what it has been to them they have called 
 it " Elim." There the name stands graven over the door — Elim, 
 the place of springing water and shady palm trees. And that 
 is what the sanctuary always is to the humble worshipper. 
 Whether it is called by the name or not, it is an Elim to him. I 
 read in the old Book of one who was sore distressed by the diffi- 
 culties and troubles of life. They harassed him and well-nigh 
 drove him to distraction. And it seemed as if the trouble would 
 crush and overv/helm him, until — notice that — until he went into 
 the sanctuary, and then the trouble all disappeared and his heart 
 was filled with the peace of God. " I came to church tired," 
 wrote one to me only last week. " I came to church tired, and 
 not a little soul weary ; I left rested, refreshed, strengthened ; I 
 met my Lord there." ^ 
 
 4. The brook that truly quenches our thirst issues from the 
 throne of God. All merely ethical and philanthropic systems lack 
 power to slake man's thirst, apart from the love of Him who was 
 Love Incarnate. He, and He alone, it is who makes human life 
 glad with the rivers of God ; who gives us to drink not only of 
 the " still waters " of His peace, but of the rich renewing wine of 
 His blood. 
 
 Faith that looks up to Him finds " streams in the desert," and 
 many a brook of consolation and refreshment in the way of life's 
 sternest conflicts. Of such a faith it is true — 
 
 1 J. D. Jones, The Elims of Life, 182. 
 
38o THE BROOK IN THE WAY 
 
 The stars of midnight shall be dear 
 To her; and she shall lean her ear 
 
 In many a secret place 
 Where rivulets dance their wayward round, 
 And beauty born of murmuring sound 
 
 Shall pass into her face. 
 
 ^ I remember an incident in the biography of a prince in 
 learning, who, alas, was not a little child in the family of God. 
 Once, in a time of depression, John Stuart Mill found comfort in 
 music, until the thought came to him that, the octave having no 
 more than eight tones in it, there must be limitations to the 
 possibilities of melody. Even this spiritual octave of ours, 
 various and marvellous as its messages are, has its limitations. 
 Let us quench our thirst at the Fountainhead.^ 
 
 ^ Augustine tried the broken cisterns and he was thirsty 
 still. " Turned from Thee, the One Good, I lost myself among a 
 multiplicity of things, I wandered into fruitless seed-beds of 
 sorrow, with a proud dejectedness and a restless weariness. I 
 bore about a shattered and bleeding soul, impatient of being borne 
 by me, yet where to repose it I found not." So the eager and 
 often disappointed quest went on, until, under the fig-tree in the 
 garden at Milan, in the year of our Saviour 386, he put on the 
 Lord Jesus Christ, and made no provision for the flesh. Then 
 his lips were opened, and he could sing : " This is the happy life, 
 to rejoice to Thee and of Thee and for Thee ; this is it, and there 
 is no other. Too late I learned to know Thee, 0 Thou Beauty of 
 ancient days, too late I learned to love Thee ! Many and great 
 are my infirmities ; but Thy medicine is mightier." 
 
 5. The use of the brook is to give refreshment and strength 
 to continue the battle. Each age has its own impulse which 
 carries it a little way, but then there is the temptation to relax 
 and to rest in what has been attained, as if that were the 
 measure of the thought of God. But with another age a new 
 call has come and courage to deal with it. Men have not come 
 to the end of the warfare to which Christ has committed them. 
 The gospel has a promise for every creature under heaven ; it has 
 an application to every variety of condition ; it proves its power 
 in men of every age. "It starts each epoch and each century 
 with renewed ardour and redoubled vigour." The things that 
 have been are the pale shadows of things which are to be. Bub 
 
 ^ A. Smell ie, Service and Inspiration, 70. 
 
PSALM ex. 7 
 
 381 
 
 every victory over sin in the present or in the future has its 
 explanation in the greatness of the heart of the Eedeemer, who 
 still passes undiscouraged on His way. 
 
 At the extreme limit of his vision this poet saw not rest and 
 quiescence, but the King setting forth upon yet greater conquests. 
 We are a laggard race, ever anxious and unready, afraid of 
 what may come, doubtful if righteousness can really win the 
 day ; and our chief need is to kindle faith for the world afresh by 
 a better study of the world's King. " He shall not fail nor be 
 discouraged, till he have set judgment in the earth ; and the isles 
 shall wait for his law." 
 
 ^ I think I have sometimes noticed in you an impatience of 
 mind which you should guard against carefully. Pin this maxim 
 up in your memory — that Nature abhors the credit system, and 
 that we never get anything in life till we have paid for it. Any- 
 thing good, I mean; evil things we always pay for afterwards, 
 and always when we find it hardest to do it. By paying for 
 them, of course, I mean labouring for them. Tell me how much 
 good solid work a young man has in him, and I will erect a horo- 
 scope for him as accurate as Guy Mannering's for young Bertram. 
 Talents are absolutely nothing to a man except he have the 
 faculty of work along with them. They, in fact, turn upon him 
 and worry him, as Actseon's dogs did — you remember the story ? 
 Patience and perseverance — these are the sails and the rudder 
 even of genius, without which it is only a wretched hulk upon the 
 waters.^ 
 
 ^ The husbandman sows his seed and toils on, and persistence 
 reaps the harvest. The scholar opens his books and toils on, and 
 persistence reaps fame. The reformer attacks the evil and toils 
 on, and persistence destroys the evil. The force that is constant 
 will always overcome the force that is less constant. Indeed, 
 there never lived a man that came to anything who lacked this 
 quality of pertinacity and adherence. How is it that the 
 mountain-climber reached that summit of 23,000 feet ? Plainly 
 by going on and on until his foot was on the last stone and the 
 whole earth was under his feet. The motto of David Livingstone 
 was in these words : " I determined never to stop until I had 
 come to the end and achieved my purpose." When Livingstone's 
 work in Africa was done, the Dark Continent was mapped out 
 and spread fully before the merchants of the world. He crossed 
 Africa four times, and marched for days up to his armpits in 
 
 * Letters of James Russell Lowell, i. 183. 
 
382 THE BROOK IN THE WAY 
 
 water, endured twenty-seven attacks of fever, was surrounded 
 with enemies on every side, faced mutiny, poisoned arrows, wild 
 beasts, the bite of serpents, but never gave up. By sheer, dogged 
 persistence and faith in God he conquered, acting as if he thought 
 his body was as immortal as his spirit.^ 
 
 ^ By his zeal, constancy, and wisdom, by his mechanical 
 genius and his gift of languages, Mackay had made himself a 
 household word and a power in the whole region of Uganda. His 
 hopefulness and courage never failed him. The misfortunes which 
 overtook the Uganda mission at various times were regarded by 
 timid and fearful souls at home as indications from God that the 
 work there should be abandoned. When Mackay heard of these 
 proposals, he wrote : " Are you joking ? If you tell me in earnest 
 that such a suggestion has been made, I only answer, Never! 
 Tell me, ye faint hearts, to whom ye mean to give up the mission ? 
 Is it to murderous raiders like Mwanga, or to slave-traders from 
 Zanzibar, or to English and Belgian dealers in rifles and gun- 
 powder, or to German spirit-sellers ? All are in the field, and 
 they make no talk of * giving up ' their respective missions ! " 
 That was the spirit which burnt in the heart of Mackay to the 
 end of his brief life.^ 
 
 1 N. D. Hillis, The Contagion of CJiarader, 228. 
 * W. G. Berry, Bishop Hannington, 180. 
 
What shall I Render? 
 
 383 
 
Literature. 
 
 Burrows (H. W.), Parochial Sermons^ iii. 154. 
 Ketcham (W. E.), Thanksgiviv/j Sermons, 245. 
 Kirkpatrick (A. F.), The Book of Psalms (Cambridge Bible), 690. 
 Maclaren (A.), Expositions : Psalms li.-cxlv., 273. 
 
 „ „ The Book of Psalms (Expositor's Bible), liL 226. 
 Martin (S.), Eain upon the Mown Grass, 273. 
 Price (A. C), Fifty Sermons, vii. 73. 
 Rowlands (D.), in Jesus in the Cornfield, 173. 
 
 Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xvi. (1870), No. 910. 
 Stevens (H.), Sermon Outlines, 307. 
 
 Tyndall (C. H.), Object Sermons in Outline, 162. ^ 
 Waters ton (R.), Thoughts on the Lord^s Supper, 129. 
 Watkinson (W. L.), The Education of the Heart, 253. 
 Wilkinson (J. B.), Mission Sermons, i. 222. 
 Christian World Pulpit, xxxii. 394 (R. H. Hadden) ; xxxvi. 396 (?.' 
 
 Mearns) ; Ivi. 229 (J. Percival). 
 Church of England Pulpit, xlviii. 195 (J. Percival). 
 Examiner, Oct. 5, 1905 (J. H. Jowett). 
 Homiletic Review, New Ser., xxxix. 29 (T. H. Stockton). 
 Literary Churchman^ xxxviii. (1892) 334 (F. St. J. Corbett). 
 
 384 
 
What shall I Render? 
 
 What shall I render unto the Lord 
 
 For all his benefits toward me? 
 
 I will take the cup of salvation, 
 
 And call upon the name of the Lord. 
 
 I will pay my vows unto the Lord, 
 
 Yea, in the presence of all his people.— Ps. cxvi. 12-14. 
 
 1. The psalm from which this text is taken is a psalm of thanks- 
 giving. It is one of six called the Great Hallel, extending from 
 the 113th to the 118th, which were sung by the Jews at their 
 great festivals, especially at the Passover. It was probably one of 
 these psalms that was sung by our Saviour and His eleven 
 disciples when He instituted His own supper, at the close of His 
 last Passover with them ; as we are told in the evangelic story, 
 " When they had sung a hymn, they went out unto the mount of 
 Olives." 
 
 I 2. It appears that the Psalmist, when he wrote this psalm, 
 had been delivered by God out of some mighty trouble. How 
 great that trouble was may be gathered from the telling language 
 In which he describes it. " The sorrows of death compassed me, 
 md the pains of hell gat hold upon me: I found trouble and 
 sorrow." But while in this terrible situation he directed his 
 iiihoughts heavenward, and looked for help where he had often 
 found help before. Nor did he look in vain ; for he says, " Thou 
 hast delivered my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my 
 :eet from falling." And in the text he communes with his own 
 30ul, and considers how he may most effectually prove his 
 gratitude for this timely deliverance. " What shall I render unto 
 )he Lord for all his benefits toward me ? " 
 
 PS. xxv.-cxix. — 25 
 
386 
 
 WHAT SHALL I RENDER? 
 
 I. 
 
 A Bountiful Giver. 
 
 1. The Psalmist was not one of those thoughtless and in- 
 different men who pass through life receiving all, enjoying all, 
 expecting all, without ever bestowing a thought on the bountiful 
 Giver. On the contrary, he seems to have been so overwhelmed 
 by the magnitude and multiplicity of God's benefits that he 
 scarcely knew how to express his gratitude. The language he 
 employs is that of a man perplexed, bewildered, overcome, hardly 
 knowing what to say or how to act. " For all his benefits toward 
 me" — benefits great, benefits small, benefits temporal, benefits 
 spiritual; but all benefits unmerited and free. "For all his 
 benefits;" as they rose before his view, a vast, countless host, 
 they laid him under a debt of obligation which he could never 
 hope to discharge. 
 
 H My father's gift of appreciation was of a most charming 
 type. The constant repetitions of a blessing never dulled the fine 
 edge of his gratitude. He had a sunlit bedroom, and every 
 morning, so my mother tells me, he said, "What a beautiful 
 bedroom ! We must thank God ! " ^ 
 
 2. Few of us are adequately thankful for the commonplace 
 blessings which surround us ; we take them as a matter of course. 
 We do not know what it is to be without them; we see no 
 prospect of being deprived of them. If the world has not gone 
 very well with us, it has not gone very badly ; because we might 
 have more to complain of, we forget for how much we ought to 
 be grateful. Let us contemplate, as in the presence of God, all 
 the proofs that we have experienced of His mercy; the pure 
 affection that He has inspired, the sins that have been forgiven 
 us, the snares which we have escaped, the protection we have 
 received. Let our hearts be touched with the remembrance of all 
 the precious proofs of His goodness. Add to this the sorrows 
 that He has sent to sanctify our hearts ; for we should look upon 
 these also as proofs of His love for us. Let gratitude for the 
 past inspire us with confidence in the future. Let us never 
 
 1 Love and Life : The Story of J. Denholm Brash (1913), 156. 
 
PSALM cxvi. 12-14 
 
 387 
 
 distrust Him ; let us fear only ourselves and remember that He 
 is the Father of mercies, and the God of all consolation. He 
 sometimes takes away His consolations from us, but His mercy 
 ever remains. 
 
 ^ 0 God, for my existence, my life, my reason ; for nurture, 
 protection, guidance, education, civil rights, religion ; for Thy gifts 
 to me of grace, nature, worldly good; for redemption, regenera- 
 tion, instruction in the truth ; for my call, recall, yea, many calls 
 all through life; for Thy forbearance, longsuffering, long long- 
 suffering, toward me, even until now ; for all good things received, 
 for all successes granted to me, for all good deeds I have been 
 enabled to do ; for my parents honest and good, for teachers kind, 
 for benefactors never to be forgotten, for religious intimates so 
 congenial and so helpful, for hearers thoughtful, friends true and 
 sincere, servants faithful ; for all who have helped me by their 
 writings, sermons, conversations, prayers, examples, rebukes, and 
 even injuries ; for all these, and for all others which I know, and 
 which I know not, open, hidden, remembered, forgotten ; — " What 
 shall I render unto the Lord for all his benefits ? " ^ 
 
 3. Our share of God's benefits may not be as complete as we 
 desire, but perhaps it is much more than we deserve. If we lack 
 this or that benefit, so copiously showered on another, shall we 
 venture to suggest that a greater measure of it would be for our 
 eternal good ? His wealth might be my curse ; my health might 
 rob him of the necessary discipline of suffering. This man's 
 loneliness is meant to make him introspective and spiritual ; that 
 man's adversity will teach him humility and compassion. The 
 Lord knows what is best. And, realizing that, let none of us 
 question or complain. Let us see in the distribution of the 
 icommonplace benefits of life, not an erratic or partial bestowal, 
 ibut a Divine assignment of mercies and blessings. Let gratitude 
 and thankfulness and faith possess our hearts and minds. There 
 are indeed moments in life when we awake to the fact of God's 
 boundless, multitudinous, all-encompassing love, and when we are 
 lalmost overwhelmed by the thought of it. A devout soul in 
 habitual worship acknowledges much, and even then feels more 
 than is expressed, and finally sees more than is felt. Yet, alas ! 
 the goodness of God recognized by us is by far the least part of it. 
 
 * Bishop Andrewes, Preces Privatce. 
 
 ! 
 
 \ 
 
388 WHAT SHALL I RENDER? 
 
 There is the goodness we overlook. God's gifts are multiplied 
 like the dewdrops or the snowflakes, and, gliding into life just as 
 silently, are easily undiscerned by careless eyes like ours. 
 
 ^ One day in the town of Sonora, in the southern mines of 
 California, after a very heavy rain and freshet, a man was leading 
 his mule-cart up the steep principal street, when his foot struck 
 upon a large stone ; he stooped down to remove it, and found it 
 was a solid lump of gold, about twenty-five pounds' weight, which 
 had been exposed by the storm, and many hundreds of people had 
 passed over it daily. So do we daily blindly trample on blessings 
 richer than all the wealth of California. There is the goodness 
 we misconstrue. We count sublime things commonplace, and 
 reckon as losses and disappointments the discipline which brings 
 incorruptible treasure. The " benefits " of God are not the 
 pleasant things merely, but all the things of pain and tears.^ 
 
 4. To perceive and appreciate our benefits necessitates a very 
 refined soul. That is so upon the merely human plane. There 
 are some men who cannot appreciate kindness. They either 
 never see their benefits or they misconstrue them. They are the 
 victims either of dulness or of pride, and both these foul spirits 
 make this kind of appreciation impossible. But this spiritual 
 numbness is even more apparent in our relationship to God. We 
 receive multitudes of benefits, but we do not see the Divine mark 
 upon their foreheads. We take them in, but they are not 
 revealed to us as the King's bounty. It is amazing how fine is 
 the perception of other souls ! They never open their eyes without 
 seeing the presence of the hosts of God. " The mountains are full of 
 horses and chariots." Having nothing, they yet possess all things. 
 
 ^ It has been my lot to pay frequent visits to a man who had 
 cancer in the throat. I have watched the awful advances of the 
 insidious and inevitable disease. I have heard the manly voice 
 sink into whispers, and then entirely cease. And yet when 
 speech was silenced there was a light in the face like the radiant 
 noon. He would take his pen in hand, and write a catalogue of 
 the mercies by which he was beset, and in the contemplation of 
 the multitude he almost forgot his calamity and pain. What an 
 eye he had for the benefits of the Lord ! I went into another 
 house which had been suddenly plunged in the darkness of 
 bereavement. The hale and genial father was taken away in 
 
 * W. L. Watkinson, The Education of the Heart, 268. 
 
PSALM cxvi. 12-14 
 
 389 
 
 a day, and the happy united family rudely broken up. And yet 
 as soon as I opened the door, and met the sorrowing widow, these 
 were the first words that leapt to her lips : " How good God has 
 been ! " Even in the night-time she had been counting the stars, 
 and in the awful pangs of bereavement she had felt the amazing 
 consolations of Christ. What an eye she had for the benefits of 
 the Lordli 
 
 IL 
 
 A Gkateful Eecifient. 
 
 1. As his grateful heart thinks of all God's benefits to him, the 
 Psalmist feels at once the impulse to requite and the impossibility 
 of doing so. With a kind of glad despair he asks the question 
 that ever springs to thankful lips, and, having nothing to give, 
 recognizes the only possible return to God to be the acceptance of 
 the brimming chalice which His goodness commends to his thirst. 
 The great thought, then, which lies here is that we best requite 
 God by thankfully taking what He gives. The Psalmist asks 
 what he can render, and he answers that he will further take ! 
 And this is the very essence of true gratitude. The best return 
 we can make for a gift of God is to take a higher gift. Have we 
 thanked Him for our daily bread ? Then the best return we can 
 make is to take the bread of life. Have we thanked Him for our 
 sleep ? Then the best return we can make is to take His gift of 
 rest and peace. Have we thanked Him for our health? Then 
 the best return we can make is to seek His gift of holiness. " I 
 will take the finest thing upon the Lord's table ! He has given 
 me this gift, now I will take a bigger gift ! " We do an ill thing 
 to our Lord if we are profuse about His secondary gifts and leave 
 His best upon the table. " My joy I give unto you." Have we 
 taken that yet ? " My peace I give unto you." Have we taken 
 that yet ? " Glories upon glories hath our God prepared." And 
 the first element in all praise and worship is to take the richer 
 gifts the Lord is offering unto us. 
 
 2. Do we not feel that all the beauty and bloom of a gift is 
 gone if the giver hopes to receive as much again ? Do we not 
 feel that it is all gone if the receiver thinks of repaying it in any 
 
 1 J. H. Jowett. 
 
390 WHAT SHALL I RENDER? 
 
 coin but that of the heart? Love gives because it delights in 
 giving. It gives that it may express itself and may bless the 
 recipient. If there be any thought of return, it is only the return 
 of love. That is how God gives ; and we requite Him by taking 
 rather than by giving, not merely because He needs nothing, and 
 we have nothing which is not His. If that were all, it might be 
 as true of an almighty tyrant, and might be so used as to forbid 
 all worship before the gloomy presence, to give reverence and 
 love to whom were as impertinent as the grossest offerings of 
 savage idolaters. But the motive of His giving to us is the 
 deepest reason why our best recompense to Him is our thankful 
 reception of His mercies. 
 
 3. The key-note of the highest and happiest life is thankful- 
 ness. Thankfulness means personal communion with God ; a 
 perpetual longing to do His will, an absorbing anxiety not to 
 offend Him. Thankfulness involves a passionate love for the 
 human race, a deep sense of responsibility for our brothers and 
 sisters in God's royal family, active endeavours to allay the ills 
 around us. Thankfulness necessitates the strengthening and 
 refreshing of our immortal souls by every grace and every agency 
 we can command. So be thankful ! The years that we are here 
 are few and fitful. It is worth taking some trouble to make them 
 fragrant and interesting. They may be so if we will. Life is full 
 of opportunities ; it is for us prayerfully, profitably, thankfully, to 
 use them. They may not lead us to all that we hope for ; they 
 may not open upon realities we have long sighed after ; they may 
 not help us to gratify material aspirations ; but they will always 
 point us to avenues of gratitude and thankfulness, to possibilities 
 of effort and goodness. And though there be vouchsafed to us 
 nothing more glorious — as men count glory — than the elementary 
 endowments, the ordinary mercies, the commonplace benefits of 
 life ; though fame and wealth and honour never cluster round our 
 names, none the less — nay, all the more — may we lie down at last j 
 in peace and quietly commend our souls to Him who gave them, | 
 to do for them and with them what He thinks wisest and best in 
 the harvest of the hereafter. 
 
 ^ There was an expression which Samuel Rutherford con- 
 stantly used — a "drowned debtor to God's mercy." He meant 
 
PSALM cxvi. 12-14 
 
 391 
 
 that he was over head and ears in debt to God : he could not tell 
 how deep his obligations were, so he just called himself "a 
 drowned debtor " to the lovingkindness and the mercy of his God. 
 
 ^ The question in the text recalls a well-known incident in 
 the life of a famous soldier, who also became a famous Christian — 
 Colonel James Gardiner. One night, when he was little thinking 
 of Divine things, but on the contrary had made an appointment 
 of the most vicious kind, he was waiting for the appointed hour, 
 when he saw, or thought he saw, before him in the room wherein 
 he sat alone, a visible representation of the Lord Jesus Christ 
 upon the cross, and he was impressed, as if a voice had said to 
 him to this effect — " 0 sinner, I did all this for thee ; what hast 
 thou done for Me ? " The vision and the words he heard were 
 the means of Colonel Gardiner's conversion. The words quoted, 
 it may be added, suggested Frances Kidley HavergaFs well-known 
 hymn beginning : — 
 
 I gave My life for thee, 
 My precious blood I shed, 
 
 That thou might'st ransom'd be, 
 And quicken'd from the dead. 
 
 I gave My life for thee; 
 What hast thou given for Me? 
 
 Miss Havergal was staying with a German divine, in whose study 
 was a picture of our crucified Saviour, beneath which was placed 
 the motto : " I did this for thee ; what hast thou done for Me ? " 
 She had come in weary, and, sitting down in front of the picture, 
 the Saviour's eyes seemed to rest upon her. She read the motto, 
 and the lines of her hymn flashed upon her, and she at once wrote 
 them in pencil on a scrap of paper. Looking them over she 
 thought them so poor that she tossed them on the fire, but they 
 fell out untouched. Some months afterwards she showed them to 
 her father, who encouraged her to preserve them, and he wrote 
 the tune " Baca " specially for them. The hymn was published in 
 Good Words, and becoming a favourite soon found its way into 
 the hymn-books of the Christian Church.^ 
 
 IIL 
 
 A Consecrated Life. 
 
 1. God bestows so many blessings upon us that we can in one 
 sense of the word return absolutely nothing to Him for His gifts. 
 * Canon J. Duncan, Popular Hymns, 215. 
 
392 
 
 WHAT SHALL I RENDER? 
 
 The Psalmist's words imply this : I can bring Thee no great gift, 
 I can lay no priceless offering at Thy feet, I have nothing that 
 is not already Thine own, for all has come from Thee. I will 
 take the cup of salvation. I will accept Thy bounteous mercy 
 with a thankful heart. I will seek to link all my life to Thee. 
 This thought helps us to meet a very common temptation. A 
 man may realize something of the goodness of God. He may 
 say to himself : " If I had very large means like some men, how 
 much I would try to do in return ! I would build a stately 
 cathedral for the service of God, a noble house of prayer for all 
 time. I would endow a hospital to minister to human suffering. 
 I would put the highest education within the reach of the poorest 
 man. But I have so little income, it scarcely overlaps my own 
 pressing wants." Then, because he cannot do great things, he 
 sinks back and does nothing at all. He would reform an 
 empire, but does not order his own house. He dreams of cleans- 
 ing a city, but never sweeps before his own door. The Psalmist 
 teaches us the true lesson, and shows us what we may all do. 
 We may give ourselves first of all, and then the avenues of service 
 will open out before us according to His will. 
 
 ^ Any dreams which she may have harboured of literary dis- 
 tinction, she had put resolutely away from her. " Oh God," she 
 had written in her diary at Cairo, " Thou puttest into my heart 
 this great desire to devote myself to the sick and sorrowful. 1 
 offer it to Thee. Do with it what is for Thy service." ^ 
 
 2. Taking the cup of salvation, in its simple, full meaning, 
 expresses the pledging of our personality to God, the consecra- 
 tion of ourselves to His service. We recognize Him as Redeemer, 
 Deliverer, and Friend, and acknowledge ourselves His in life and 
 death. Our trustful heart, our acquiescent will, our obedient life, 
 our whole personality must be surrendered in the power of love. 
 Christ Himself gave us not only the ritual of an ordinance, but 
 the pattern for our lives, when He " took the cup and gave thanks." 
 And now for us common joys become sacraments, enjoyment 
 becomes worship, and the cup which holds the bitter or the sweet 
 skilfully mingled for our lives becomes the cup of blessing and 
 salvation drunk in remembrance of Him. If we carried that spirit 
 
 * Sir Ed wind Cook, The Life of Florence Nightingale^ i. 95. 
 
PSALM cxvi. 12-14 
 
 393 
 
 with us into all our small duties, sorrows, and gladnesses, how 
 different they would all seem ! 
 
 ^ " Salvation " can scarcely be taken in its highest meaning 
 in our text, both because the whole tone of the psalm fixes its 
 reference to lower blessings, and because the word is in the plural 
 in the Hebrew. "The cup of salvations" expresses, by that 
 plural form, the fulness and variety of the manifold and multi- 
 form deliverances which God had wrought and was working for 
 the Psalmist. His whole lot in life appears to him as a cup full 
 of tender goodness, loving faithfulness, delivering grace. It runs 
 over with Divine acts of help and sustenance.^ 
 
 3. Many cups may be offered us as we go through life. We 
 may for the moment be dazzled by the gemmed and sparkling 
 cup of earthly pleasure, or the cup of worldly aims and ambitions. 
 Let us put them aside. Let each one say, " I will take the cup 
 of salvation." I will accept and use all God's offered mercy. The 
 chalice of redeeming love shall be my chiefest treasure. I will 
 take it — I will seek to be God's true child, the grateful son of so 
 loving a Father. I will endeavour in all things to do His will, 
 hoping to be guided ever by His grace and shielded ever by His 
 protecting care. 
 
 •|I There is an old legend of an enchanted cup filled with poison, 
 and put treacherously into a king's hand. He made the sign of 
 the Cross and named the name of God over it, and it shivered in 
 his grasp. Do you take that name of the Lord as a test ? Name 
 Him over many a cup of which you are eager to drink, and the 
 glittering fragments will lie at your feet, and the poison be spilled 
 on the ground. What you cannot lift before His pure eyes and 
 think of Him while you enjoy is not for you. Friendships, schemes, 
 plans, ambitions, amusements, speculations, studies, loves, busi- 
 nesses — can you call on the name of the Lord while you put these 
 cups to your lips ? If not, fling them behind you, for they are 
 full of poison which, for all its sugared sweetness, at the last will 
 " bite like a serpent and sting like an adder." 2 
 
 * A. Maclaren. * Ibid. 
 
394 WHAT SHALL I RENDER? 
 
 IV. 
 
 A Vow AND ITS Fulfilment. 
 
 When the cords of death compassed the Psalmist (ver. 3), he 
 had made a strong and secret vow. He said to himself, " If I get 
 over this I will live a more pronounced life unto the Lord." " If 
 I get my strength back, I will use it for the King." " If I get out 
 of this darkness, I will take a lamp and light the feet of other 
 men." And now he is better again, and he sets about redeeming 
 his vow. The midnight vow was redeemed in the morning. As 
 soon as he was out of the peril he remembered his covenant. 
 " Now ! " There must be no delay. In this sphere delays are 
 attended with infinite peril. We may trifle with anything rather 
 than with a fresh and tender vow. Well begun is half done. And 
 he will also surround the redemption of his vow with publicity. 
 He will do something publicly which will strongly proclaim him 
 on God's side, and tell to all men that he has given his devotion 
 to Him. And that must be our way. The vow we made in 
 secret must be performed openly. We must do something to 
 indicate that we have passed through a great experience, and that 
 we are remembering the benefits of the Lord. We can speak His 
 name to another. We can write some gracious letter to a friend. 
 We can attach ourselves publicly to the Master's Church. We 
 can commit ourselves openly and outwardly as professed followers 
 of the King. And wherever we are, throughout all our life, 
 we must continue to pay our vows. In joy, in sorrow, in the 
 valley, on the mount, the vow must perpetually be redeemed. 
 And if that be our part, fervent and unbroken, the Lord's part 
 will also endure. He will continually be pouring His benefits 
 upon us, and we shall grow in riches with every passing day. 
 
 ^ Hugh Miller, in his letters, gives an interesting account 
 his experience. He thought he was falling into consumption 
 that stone-cutter's tuberculosis was settling upon his lungs 
 and, realizing that death might not be far away, he thought 
 living a new and better life. He had always piqued himself 
 being true to his word. If he passed his word to a fellow- workraa 
 no man could ever say that he had broken it, even if it was 
 promise given to an idiot boy that passed his time around t 
 
PSALM cxvi. 12-14 
 
 395 
 
 shed. To him the promise was sacred and most honourably kept. 
 Well, why not pass his word to God, why not give a promise to 
 the Almighty, and then in his native honesty begin a life of 
 holiness and love ? Fascinated with the idea, he gave his solemn 
 vow, — alas ! only to break it and befool himself, and clothe his 
 soul with shame. He, so honest before men, so staunch and 
 upright and true, found out he was little better than a bankrupt 
 and a liar in the presence of the living God. This led to a 
 humbling exercise of soul, and a truer knowledge of grace. The 
 lesson is a valuable one, and we are slow to learn it. Our cold 
 dead vows, apart from God, are nothing.^ 
 
 * R. Waterston, Thoughts on the Lord's Supjper, 136. 
 
The Day which the Lord made. 
 
 397 
 
Literature. 
 
 Beveridge (W.), Theological Works, iii. 418. 
 
 Blackley (T.), Practical Sermons, i. 82. 
 
 Church (R. W.), Village Sermons, ii. 142. 
 
 Cottam (S. E.), New Sermons for a New Century, 117. 
 
 Frank (M.), Sermons, ii. 112. 
 
 Fuller (M.), The Lord's Day, 109. 
 
 Hall (R.), Works, v. 380. 
 
 Hutton (R. E.), The Crown of Ch/rist, ii. 7. 
 
 Kuegele (F.), Country Sermons, New Ser., v. 1. 
 
 Liddon (H. P.), Easter in St. PauVs, 169. 
 
 ■ Maclaren (A.), The Book of Psalms (Expositor's Bible), iii. 232. 
 Mills (B. R. v.), The Marks of the Church, 224. 
 Newman (J. H.), Parochial and Plain Sermons, vi. 94. 
 Simcox (W. H.), The Cessation of Prophecy, 310. 
 
 Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxiv. (1878), No. 1420. 
 Strong (A. H.), Miscellanies, ii. 219. 
 
 Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), New Ser., xi. (1875), No. 948. 
 Wilkinson (J. B.), Mission Sermons, i. 176. 
 
 Christian World Pulpit, xi. 314 (R. Glover); xxxv. 276 (Canon 
 Rowsell). 
 
 398 
 
The Day which the Lord made. 
 
 This is the day which the Lord hath made; 
 
 We will rejoice and be glad in it. — Ps. cxviii. 24. 
 
 This is unmistakably a psalm for use in the Temple worship, and 
 was probably meant to be sung antiphonally, on some day of 
 national rejoicing indicated in the text. A general concurrence 
 of opinion points to the period of the restoration from Babylon 
 as its date, but different events connected with that restoration 
 have been selected. The psalm implies the completion of the 
 Temple, and therefore shuts out any point prior to that. Delitzsch 
 fixes on the dedication of the Temple as the occasion; but the 
 view is still more probable which supposes that it was sung on 
 the great celebration of the Feast of Tabernacles, recorded in 
 Neh. viii. 14-18. In later times ver. 25 was the festal cry raised 
 while the altar of burnt-offering was solemnly compassed, once on 
 each of the first six days of the Feast of Tabernacles, and seven 
 times on the seventh. 
 
 1. Apparently the psalm falls into two halves, of which the 
 former half (w. 1-16) seems to have been sung as a processional 
 hymn while approaching the sanctuary, and the latter (vv. 17-29), 
 partly at the Temple gates, partly by a chorus of priests within, 
 and partly by the procession when it had entered. Verses 22, 23, 
 24 probably belong to the priestly chorus. They set forth the 
 great truth made manifest by restored Israel's presence in the 
 rebuilt Temple. The metaphor is suggested by the incidents con- 
 nected with the rebuilding. The "stone" is obviously Israel, 
 weak, contemptible, but now once more laid as the very founda- 
 tion stone of God's house in the world. The broad truth taught 
 by its history is that God lays as the basis of His building, i.e., 
 uses for the execution of His purposes, that which the wisdom of 
 man despises and tosses aside. 
 
 399 
 
400 THE DAY WHICH THE LORD MADE 
 
 2. The general truth contained here is that of St. Paul's great 
 saying, " God chose the weak things of the world, that he might 
 put to shame the things that are strong." It is a law which finds 
 its highest exemplification in the foundation for God's true temple, 
 other than which can no man lay. Israel is not only a figure of 
 Christ ; there is an organic unity between Him and them. What- 
 ever, therefore, is true of Israel in a lower sense is true in its 
 highest sense of Christ. If Israel is the rejected stone made the 
 head of the corner, this is far truer of Him who was indeed 
 rejected of men, but chosen of God and precious, the corner stone 
 of the one great living temple of the redeemed. 
 
 The text is best regarded as the continuation of the choral 
 praise in vv. 22, 23. " The day " is that of the festival now in pro- 
 gress, the joyful culmination of God's manifold deliverances. It is 
 a day in which joy is duty, and no heart has a right to be too 
 heavy to leap for gladness. Private sorrows enough many of the 
 jubilant worshippers no doubt had, but the sight of the Stone laid 
 as the head of the corner should bring joy even to such. If sad- 
 ness was ingratitude and almost treason then, what sorrow should 
 now be so dense that it cannot be pierced by the Light which 
 lighteth every man ? 
 
 3. In our Lord's time the whole of this psalm was applied to 
 the Messiah by the Jewish interpreters. Christ was the Stone, 
 refused by the builders of Israel, but afterwards made the Head 
 of the corner. His was the welcome, " Blessed is he that cometh 
 in the name of the Lord"; to Him was addressed the prayer, 
 "Hosanna, save, I pray," as on Palm Sunday, by the Jewish 
 multitude. Thus it was very natural for the Christian Church to 
 find in the words, " This is the day which the Lord hath made ; 
 we will rejoice and be glad in it," an application to our Lord 
 Jesus Christ. What was the day in Christ's life which He made 
 His own, beyond all others ? Not His birthday ; for that meant 
 His entrance on a life of sorrows. Not His ascension day ; for 
 that was the closing scene of a triumph already achieved. Not 
 His transfiguration day; it was a momentary flash of glory 
 in a career of pain. Not the day of His crucifixion; it was a 
 great day for a ruined world, but for Him it marked the lowest 
 stage of humiliation and of woe. The day of days in the life of 
 
PSALM cxviii. 24 
 
 401 
 
 Christ was the day of His resurrection. It reflected a new glory 
 on the day of His birth. It witnessed a triumph of which the 
 ascension was but a completion. It was to the transfiguration 
 what the sunrise is to the earliest dawn. It poured a flood of 
 light and meaning on Calvary itself ; and showed that what took 
 place there was not simply the death-scene of an innocent Sufferer, 
 but a sacrifice which would have power with God to the end of time. 
 
 Something of this kind is what was felt by the early Christians 
 about Easter Day ; and as it was the greatest day in the life of 
 Jesus Christ, so for them it was the greatest day in the whole 
 year. It was the day of days; it was the Lord's Own Day. 
 Every Lord's Day in the year was a weekly feast of Christ's rising 
 from the dead ; on Easter Day, the force and meaning of all these 
 Lord's Days were gathered into one consummate expression of joy 
 and praise. "This is the day which the Lord hath made; we 
 will rejoice and be glad in it." 
 
 The song of the angels, the voice at the baptism, the agony 
 in the garden, the sublime anguish of Calvary, would have been 
 inexplicable without the light which was reflected back upon them 
 by the angels at the open tomb on the morning of the resurrec- 
 tion.^ Such a nature and such a life were not formed and fashioned 
 within the narrow limits of time and space ; they brought infinity 
 and immortality within the confines of the world. Alone among 
 men, Christ has visibly put on immortality; but that sublime 
 truth does not rest on the resurrection; it rests on the very 
 structure of man's nature and life. Neither is comprehensible 
 without it; neither is ever complete in itself; both affirm its 
 reality and predict its fuller disclosure. The risen Christ does 
 not stand solitary in a vast circle of unopened graves ; He is the 
 visible witness to the sublime truth that the grave has no victory 
 and death no sting; for life and immortality are one and the 
 same.i 
 
 Oh, had I lived in that great day, 
 
 How had its glory new 
 Fill'd earth and heaven, and caught away 
 
 My ravish'd spirit too! 
 
 No thoughts that to the world belong 
 
 Had stood against the wave 
 Of love v/hich set so deep and strong 
 From Christ's then open grave. 
 > H. W. Mabie, The Life of the Spirit, 360. 
 PS. xxv.-cxix. — 26 
 
402 THE DAY WHICH THE LORD MADE 
 
 No cloister-floor of humid stone 
 
 Had been too cold for me; 
 For me no Eastern desert lone 
 
 Had been too far to flee.^ 
 
 I. 
 
 A Day of Victory. 
 
 The joy of Easter is inspired by the hope which the day of our 
 Lord's resurrection warrants and quickens. What is this hope, 
 and how does it spring from our Saviour's rising again from the 
 dead ? The great hope which the resurrection sets before us is 
 the completeness of our life after death. 
 
 1. The difficulty of believing in a future life is due, not to 
 the reason, but to the imagination as controlled by the senses. 
 Who of us has not made this discovery, in some one of those dark 
 hours which sooner or later visit every human life ? Who of us 
 has not stood by the open coffin, and felt himself, or marked how 
 others feel, the terrific empire of sense in the presence of death ? 
 The form which was once full of life, quivering with expressive- 
 ness, with thought, with feeling, now lies before us cold and 
 motionless, like a plaster cast of its former self. Perhaps the 
 traces of what must follow are already discernible ; and forthwith 
 the imagination surrenders itself, like a docile pupil, to the 
 guidance of the senses, and ends by proclaiming the victory of 
 death ; a victory too clear, too complete, too unquestionable, to 
 allow reason or revelation to raise their voices in favour of any 
 sort of life that can possibly survive it. 
 
 2. Now it was to deal with this specific difficulty that our 
 Lord willed to die, and then, by a literal bodily resurrection, to 
 rise from the grave. He would grapple with the imperious 
 urgency of the senses and the imagination on their own ground. 
 He would beat down by an act, palpable to the senses, and attested 
 by evidence which should warrant its reality for all time, the 
 tyrant power which sought to shut out from man the hope of an 
 
 ^ Matthew Arnold, Elegiac Poems. 
 
PSALM cxviii. 24 
 
 403 
 
 immortal life. When the disciples saw that the Eisen Being 
 before them was their Lord ; when they noted His pierced hands, 
 His feet, His side ; when they conversed with Him, ate with Him, 
 listened to Him, followed Him much as of old ; then they knew 
 that the Master who had been killed upon the cross by a pro- 
 tracted agony, and committed to the grave as a bleeding and 
 mangled corpse, had really risen from death, and had opened 
 a new era of hope for the human race. And for us, in a distant 
 age, this fact that Christ rose from death is not less full of 
 precious hope and joy than for our first forefathers in the faith. 
 For the early Christians the resurrection was practically Christi- 
 anity, nay, the whole of Christianity, in so far as Christianity as 
 a whole rested on it as the proof-fact of its having come from 
 heaven. This is what the first Christians felt: of the truth of 
 their faith " God had given an assurance unto all men, in that he 
 had raised Jesus from the dead." Therefore did the resurrection 
 inspire them with such fervent joy. 
 
 ^ If it belong to man to rejoice when some great General has 
 fought his country's enemies, and beaten them and led their chiefs 
 captives ; if on such occasions our bells ring, and our cities are 
 decked with garlands, and flags wave, and there are feastings and 
 banquetings, 
 
 And the tumult of their acclaim is rolled 
 
 Through the open gates of the city afar, 
 
 To the shepherd who watcheth the evening star, 
 
 if a nation joys in the return of the triumphant General, and 
 hearts are warmed all through the length and breadth of the land 
 at the news, as by electric sympathy, and all agree to make 
 holiday, because now the yoke of the invader has been broken, 
 and they feel themselves free — and hearth, and home, and wife, 
 and child, and all that they hold dear is rescued out of peril, and 
 the possession secured to them — how much more surely ought 
 the Christian to be glad and rejoice on each recurrence of Easter ? 
 For it is the anniversary of the Lord's Victory. He comes to us 
 as the Captain of our Salvation, comes amongst us fresh from 
 combat, "with dyed garments from Bozrah," "treading in the 
 greatness of his strength"; He comes, leading the Invader a 
 prisoner, leading captivity captive.^ 
 
 1 R. D. B. Rawnsley. 
 
404 THE DAY WHICH THE LORD MADE 
 
 IL 
 
 A Day of Rejoicing. 
 
 1. The joy of Easter is the joy of a great certainty. The 
 resurrection of our Saviour is the fact which makes an intelligent 
 Christian certain of the truth of his creed. The Apostles entered 
 on their work with one conviction, prominent beyond all others. 
 It was that the truth of Christianity, and its claim upon the 
 minds and hearts of men, depended mainly upon the fact of the 
 resurrection of Christ from the dead. Within a few weeks of 
 the occurrence, and amidst a population passionately interested in 
 denying the truth of what they said, they took every opportunity 
 of virtually saying, " Christianity is true ; it is true because 
 Christ has risen from death." They could not have ventured to 
 do this unless they had been sure of the fact upon which they 
 were so ready to risk everything, even life itself ; sure, with that 
 sort of certainty which comes from actual experience. 
 
 ^ To my mind, the spiritual miracle of the Crucifixion was 
 an infinitely greater miracle than the physical miracle of the 
 Resurrection — a much more impressive evidence of the actual 
 mingling of the Divine with the human. It is strange that a 
 world which can accept heartily the one should find it so difficult, 
 and in some cases so impossible, to accept the other. This implies, 
 I think, that what it does accept it accepts without any true 
 insight into the wonder and majesty of the personal manifestation 
 the reality of which it professes to recognize. Certainly ours is a 
 superstitious age, though superstitious rather in the excess of its 
 respect for the physical energies of the universe, than in the 
 excess of its respect for the spiritual.^ 
 
 2. It is always very difficult to realize any great joy or great 
 sorrow. We cannot realize it by wishing to do so. What brings 
 joys and sorrows of this world home to us is their circumstances 
 and accompaniments. When a friend dies, we cannot at first | 
 believe him taken from us ; we cannot believe ourselves to be in any 
 new place when we are just come to it. When we are told a thing, 
 we assent to it, we do not doubt it, but we do not feel it to be true, 
 we do not understand it as a fact which must take up a position 
 
 * R. H. Hut ton, Asjiects of Rdigiom and Scientific Thought, 163. 
 
PSALM cxviii. 24 
 
 405 
 
 or station in our thoughts, and must be acted from and acted 
 towards, must be dealt with as existing : that is, we do not realize 
 it. It cannot be denied that we have much to do, very much, 
 before we rise to the understanding of our new nature and its 
 privileges, and learn to rejoice and be glad in the day which the 
 Lord hath made; "the eyes of your understanding being enlightened 
 that ye may know what is the hope of his calling, and what the 
 riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints, and what is 
 the exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe, 
 according to the working of his mighty power, which he wrought 
 in Christ, when he raised him from the dead, and set him at his 
 own right hand in the heavenly places." 
 
 ^ Unbelief once wrote at the entrance of a cemetery the word 
 " Fuerunt," " They have been." Faith always writes over the gate 
 of a churchyard, " I am the Eesurrection and the Life." To 
 unbelief the dead are but memories ; memories of beings who have 
 ceased to be. To faith the dead are living, working, praying 
 friends, whom nothing but the dulness of sense hides from sight.^ 
 
 3. The joy of Easter is the joy of a great reaction : a reaction 
 from anxiety and sorrow. So it was at the time of Christ's 
 resurrection. The Apostles had been crushed by the sufferings 
 and death of Jesus Christ. They had trusted that it was "he 
 which should have redeemed Israel." Their disappointment, their 
 despondency, their anguish were exactly proportioned to their 
 earlier hopes. When He was in His grave, all seemed over ; and 
 when He appeared, first to one, and then to another, on the day 
 of His resurrection, they could not keep their feelings of welcome 
 and delight — traversed though these were by a sense of wondering 
 awe — within anything like bounds. It was a change from dark- 
 ness to light, from fear to hope, from death to endless life, for the 
 world at large. Those who first felt it, and rejoiced, are long 
 since gathered to their rest ; but others came after them, to whom 
 it was just as really a cause of joy as to the women who were 
 early at the tomb ; and to us at this present time, separated by 
 nineteen hundred years from the Apostles and followers of the 
 risen Son of God, His rising again is quite as much a matter to 
 encourage us to triumphant faith, to comfort us in trouble and in 
 death, as it was to them. 
 
 » H. P. Liddon, EasUr in St. Faults, 178 
 
4o6 THE DAY WHICH THE LORD MADE 
 
 ^ Finding that one of his children had been greatly shocked 
 and overcome by the first sight of death, he tenderly endeavoured 
 to remove the feeling which had been awakened, and opening a 
 Bible, pointed to the words, " Then cometh Simon Peter following 
 him, and went into the sepulchre, and seeth the linen clothes lie, 
 and the napkin, that was about his head, not lying with the linen 
 clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself." Nothing, he 
 said, to his mind, afforded us such comfort when shrinking from 
 the outward accompaniments of death, — the grave, the grave- 
 clothes, the loneliness, — as the thought that all these had been 
 around our Lord Himself, round Him who died, and is now alive 
 for evermore.^ 
 
 4. The joy of Easter is the holy joy of quiet triumph, of hymns 
 of victory and exulting faith. The Lord is risen ! What more 
 can the glad Church of the redeemed say ? She can only repeat 
 it again and again with multiplied Alleluias. Words seem out of 
 place, for the joy of the Church is too deep to express itself in the 
 ordinary language of the world — and yet it is to the world that 
 she brings the glad tidings of the victory of her Lord. No wonder 
 then that the earth is glad and beautiful in this foregleam of the 
 coming day, when He shall fulfil His promise, " Behold, I make all 
 things new." Even in the order of nature there is nothing but 
 joy and the coming of new life in the spring-time of the world. 
 The very air is full of the songs of the birds, and fragrant with 
 the first fresh scents of the forests and meadows, as they clothe 
 themselves again with foliage and verdure after the long days of 
 wintry gloom, decay and death. 
 
 See the world's beauty budding forth anew, 
 Shows with the Lord His gifts returning too ! 
 The earth with flowers is deck'd, the sky serene; 
 The heavenly portals glow with brighter sheen. 
 The greenwood-leaves, the flowering meadows tell 
 Of Christ, triumphant over gloomy hell. 
 Hail! Festal Day! for evermore ador'd, 
 Wherein God conquer'd hell, and upward soar'd. 
 
 ^ Be sure there is a unity of Law in the universe, and if in 
 that which we call the natural world there is one consisten 
 thought producing one consistent fact, the same thought hoi 
 
 * A. P. Stanley, Life of Thomas Arnold^ D.B.y i. 219. 
 
PSALM cxviii. 24 
 
 407 
 
 good in the world of Man ; and the life which we possess when we 
 die — the life which is in thought, feeling, will, and the rest — will 
 frame for itself, as quickly, as individually, as eagerly, a new form 
 as the seed in spring has done when we see its twofold arrow 
 cleave the ground. This will be the resurrection, and of the great 
 law of which this is the outcome, the result of which we see in 
 Nature, in all things — the result of which we do not see in Man — 
 for its result in us is wrought after death — the resurrection of 
 Christ is the only known result in humanity. The life in 
 Christ took new form when His earthly body died, and the fact 
 that it had done so was revealed to His disciples. They knew 
 He was alive again, and had a new and living form — that on the 
 death of His mortal body, an immortal form became His own. 
 He was not unclothed, but clothed upon. Properly speaking, that 
 is no miracle, if miracle be defined as the violation or transcending 
 of law. It is, in my mind, that which always takes place in the 
 other world when we die; shown to us in this world for once, that 
 we might know it. It is not a reversion, it is a revelation, of law ; 
 it is not apart from our knowledge, it is the declarations that the 
 same idea that rules the growth of life in the world of Nature 
 rules its growth in the world of Man. The resurrection of the 
 body is the renewing of form.^ 
 
 The yearly miracle of spring, 
 
 Of budding tree and blooming flower, 
 
 Which Nature's feathered laureates sing 
 In my cold ear from hour to hour, 
 
 Spreads all its wonders round my feet; 
 
 And every wakeful sense is fed 
 On thoughts that o'er and o'er repeat, 
 
 " The Eesurrection of the Dead ! " 
 
 If these half vital things have force 
 
 To break the spell which winter weaves, 
 
 To wake, and clothe the wrinkled corse 
 In the full life of shining leaves; 
 
 Shall I sit down in vague despair, 
 
 And marvel if the nobler soul 
 We laid in earth shall ever dare 
 
 To wake to life, and backward roll 
 ^ Stopford A. Brooke. 
 
4o8 THE DAY WHICH THE LORD MADE 
 
 The sealing stone, and striding out, 
 
 Claim its eternity, and head 
 Creation once again, and shout, 
 
 "The Eesurrection of the Dead"?i 
 
 IIL 
 
 A Day of Eemembrance. 
 
 1. Christ's resurrection has not become less important by the 
 passage of years ; its virtue is not diminished, its grace and power 
 are not worn out. If Christ had indeed risen this very morning. 
 His resurrection would not be in reality of more concern to us 
 than it is now. Christ is risen — risen never to die again, to be 
 for ever that which He was the first moment when He conquered 
 death. He is there above, the Saviour who could not be kept in 
 captivity by the grave ; the very same who spoke to Mary 
 Magdalene, and reproved the doubting Thomas, and talked on the 
 way to Emmaus, and broke bread on the sea-shore. And what 
 was true of Him then is true now ; what could be said of Him then 
 can be said now ; what He did then for those who loved Him and 
 believed Him, He can do now ; what they felt towards Him — the 
 rejoicing and the glorying trust, and the conquering comfort and 
 strength — it is ours to choose whether we shall not feel it too. 
 The Light which broke on men on that third day, shines as 
 brightly on all believing hearts now as it did on St. Peter and 
 St. John, not a mere remembrance of past glory and gladness, but 
 an unfailing and uninterrupted spring of present hope and 
 strength. And it will shine long after we are gone, to cheer the 
 hearts and raise the joy of our children, and of all the unborn 
 generations to the end of the world. 
 
 ^ It is the one inspiring element of Christianity that it throws 
 us in boundless hope upon the future, and forbids us to dwell in 
 the poisonous shadows of the past. A new and better growth is 
 before us, a fresher, a diviner, a more enthusiastic life awaits us. 
 "We are to wake up satisfied in the likeness of Christ, the ever 
 young Humanity. Therefore, " forgetting those things which are 
 behind," let us "press forward to the mark of the prize of our 
 high calling in Christ Jesus." ^ 
 1 George Henry Boker, The Book of the Dead, 147. * Stopford A. Brooke. 
 
PSALM cxviii. 24 
 
 409 
 
 The women sought the tomb at dawn of day, 
 
 And as they went they wept and made their moan: 
 
 " His sepulchre is guarded by a stone, 
 And who for us shall roll the stone away ? " 
 But lo ! — an Angel, robed in white array, 
 
 Had rent the rock and sat thereon alone. 
 
 " Fear not," said he ; " the Lord hath overthrown 
 The power of Death : I show you where He lay." 
 We echo oftentimes that cry of old: 
 
 Huge stumbling-blocks confront us whilst we wait 
 And wonder, weeping, who will help afford : 
 But as we question sorrowing, behold ! 
 
 The stone is rolled away, though it is great, 
 And on it sits the Angel of the Lord.^ 
 
 2. The resurrection of Christ was to His early followers a call, 
 a call louder than that of the trumpet on Mount Sinai, to newness 
 of life and newness of hope. It called men of old when it was 
 first preached ; it calls men still, now that its remembrance never 
 ceases among us. It calls aloud to newness of life, it calls on the 
 sinner and the careless to arise from the death of sin to the life of 
 righteousness ; it cries aloud, " Awake thou that sleepest, and 
 arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light." We know 
 how it made St. Paul cry out, " If ye then be risen with Christ, 
 seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the 
 right hand of God." " In that he died, he died unto sin once : 
 but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God. Likewise reckon ye 
 also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God 
 through Jesus Christ our Lord." These were the feelings, these 
 were the thoughts, which came into the minds of the first 
 believers in Christ. They felt how much they had to do with the 
 resurrection. It had weaned them from sin; it strengthened 
 them, day by day, in all holiness and love. The resurrection had 
 changed everything to them, and they lived as men to whom this 
 world had become nothing except a place to live in holily, where 
 they might love and serve their brethren, and wait patiently God's 
 will, till their call came to that world and home which was to be 
 for ever. Christ's resurrection calls us also not only to begin a 
 new life, but to go on with it, with renewed zeal and carefulness, 
 if by His grace we have begun it. It reminds us once more how 
 
 * Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler, Verses, Wise or Otherwise, 197. 
 
4IO THE DAY WHICH THE LORD MADE 
 
 mighty to save, how unwearied to uphold and help, is He whom 
 we have for our Leader and Guide through life. He, if we are 
 trusting Him, is One who has broken the bands of death, who is 
 in truth the Watcher of our way, and the Director of our steps ; 
 He is One who has endured and conquered — endured all and 
 conquered all — to lend us of His strength, to feed our faintness 
 with His renewed life, to show us of that truth and light which 
 He has won for men. We have only to go to Him for it. We 
 have only to go straight forward in the way of obedience and 
 holiness, and we need not fear that we shall fail. 
 
 3. There may still be for each of us many anxieties, many 
 sorrows, many bitter disappointments and griefs in life ; for God 
 does not promise tranquillity, but quite the opposite. Yet in spite 
 of all this there will be joy in God, and peace, and rest, through 
 the abiding union with Him who is " our peace." As we conquer 
 sin we grow in likeness to Jesus Christ ; and as we become like 
 Him we share, through an ever-growing closeness of union, the 
 joy, the peace, and the brightness of the resurrection life. " I will 
 see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man 
 taketh from you." As children say to themselves, " This is the 
 spring," or " This is the sea," trying to grasp the thought and not 
 let it go ; as travellers in a foreign land say, " This is that great 
 city," or " This is that famous building," knowing it has a long 
 history through centuries, and vexed with themselves that they 
 know so little about it ; so let us say. This is the Day of Days, 
 the Royal Day, the Lord's Day. This is the day on which Christ 
 rose from the dead ; the day which brought us salvation. It is 
 a day which has made us greater than we know. It is our Day 
 of Eest, the true Sabbath. We have had enough of weariness, 
 and dreariness, and listlessness, and sorrow, and remorse. We 
 have had enough of this troublesome world. We have had 
 enough of its noise and din. Noise is its best music. But now 
 there is a stillness that speaks. We know how strange the 
 feeling is of perfect silence after continued sound. Such is our 
 blessedness now. Calm and serene days have begun ; and Christ 
 is heard in them, and His still small voice, because the world 
 speaks not. Let us only put off the world, and we put on 
 Christ. The receding from one is an approach to the other. 
 
PSALM cxviii. 24 
 
 411 
 
 May we grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and 
 Saviour, season after season, year after year, till He takes to 
 Himself, first one, then another, in the order He thinks fit, to be 
 separated from each other for a little while, to be united together 
 for ever, in the Kingdom of His Father and our Father, His God 
 and our God. 
 
 ^ When one says, " Lord, I believe," in Jesus' sense, he 
 means that he trusts — a very different thing. Jesus' physical 
 Eesurrection, in the same way, is a question that can be decided 
 only by evidence, and is within the province of reason. His 
 spiritual Eesurrection is a drama of the soul, and a matter of 
 faith. When I declare my belief that on the third day Jesus 
 rose, I am really yielding to evidence. When I am crucified 
 with Christ, buried with Christ, and rise to newness of life 
 in Christ, I am believing after the very sense of Jesus.^ 
 
 * John Watson, The Mind of the Master. 
 
\ 
 
The Clean Path. 
 
 4*3 
 
Literature. 
 
 Cox (S.), The Bird's Nest, 131. 
 
 Gumming (J. E.), in Convention Addresses delivered at Bridge of Allan, 
 1895, p. 59. 
 
 Griffin (E. D.), Plain Practical Sermons, ii. 465. 
 Hopps (J. P.), Sermons of Love and Life, 65. 
 Leitch (R.), The Light of the Gentiles, 157. 
 Maclaren (A.), Expositions : Psalms li.-cxlv., 281. 
 Murphy (J. B. C), The Service of the Master, 9. 
 Norton (J. N.), Warning and Teaching, 140. 
 .Simeon (C), Works, vi. 302. 
 Smith (W. C), Sermons, 146. 
 Voysey (C), Sermons, xxi. (1898), No. 22. 
 Wiseman (N.), Children's Sermons, 205. 
 
 Christian World Pulpit, xii. 198 (A. P. Peabody) ; xxiv. 90 (H. W. 
 
 Beechcr) ; xxix. 315 (H, W. Beecher). 
 Church Pulpit Year Book, 1911, p. 271. 
 Preacher's Magazine^ iv. 272 (J. Feather). 
 
 4T4 
 
The Clean Path. 
 
 Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? 
 
 By taking heed thereto according to thy word. — Ps. cxix. 9. 
 
 1. It is a great matter to know what is the right question to 
 put, and how to put it rightly. The secrets of nature disclose 
 themselves to the man who knows how to question her properly ; 
 for he is already on the line of its solution when he sees clearly 
 what the exact problem is. So also in any discussion, he who 
 can lay aside all extraneous and irrelevant matter, and put his 
 finger on the real point at issue, has already half won the battle ; 
 for our errors mainly arise from our mixing up of what is essential 
 with subordinate points, the settlement of which is of no vital 
 consequence. It is the same in the affairs of practical life. 
 There, too, it is all-important to put clearly before our minds 
 what is the supreme question we have to deal with as moral and 
 responsible beings. Our character will depend on the answer 
 to that, but the answer will not be difficult if we put the question 
 rightly. Here we are, for a few short years, in a world of 
 struggle and conflict, having duties to ourselves and to each 
 other and to God, having also various endowments and various 
 temptations. What is the line of thought which should press 
 on each of us as the supreme matter for our most serious 
 consideration ? What is the question which every young man 
 should put to himself as he looks out on the troubled sea of life 
 with which he has to battle, and where he may make shipwreck 
 if he take not heed ? 
 
 2. The question of our text, "Wherewithal shall a young 
 
 man cleanse his way ? " if not absolutely the foremost, is yet 
 
 among the weightiest thoughts which we should be laying to 
 
 heart. There are, no doubt, still graver questions which we 
 
 will do well to put to ourselves. What is the chief end of 
 
 415 
 
4i6 
 
 THE CLEAN PATH 
 
 man? What is that by failing to achieve which we shall lose 
 the very object of our existence ? Or, again, What shall a man 
 do to be saved ? or yet further, Wherewithal shall a young man 
 cleanse his heart? These are points of still greater moment, 
 and carry deeper results than the question of the Psalmist here. 
 At bottom, no doubt, he had in view the cleansing of the heart 
 as well as of the way ; for his was no shallow spirit, that cared 
 only for mere outside behaviour. The Psalmist knew that we 
 must begin by purifying the fountain if the stream is to be 
 made pure. But the question, as he formally puts it, points 
 to our actions rather than our desires and affections, and so far 
 it is defective. Still, any young man who shall put before him 
 the cleansing of his way as the aim which he must specially 
 strive to reach, will surely make a very much worthier life for 
 himself than they do who start in the race careless whether 
 the way they take be miry or clean. 
 
 I. 
 
 An Anxious Question. 
 
 Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way?" 
 
 There are many questions about the future with which it is 
 natural for young people to occupy themselves ; and it is to be 
 feared that the most of them ask more anxiously " How shall I 
 make my way ? " than " How shall I cleanse my way ? " It is 
 needful carefully to ponder the questions : " How shall I get on 
 in the world — be happy, fortunate ? " and the like. But there is 
 another and more important question : " How shall I cleanse my 
 way ? " For purity is the best thing ; and to be good is a wiser 
 as well as a nobler object of ambition than any other. 
 
 1. The question of the Psalmist broadly stated is this. Can a 
 man live, in all respects and in all his paths, a pure and beautiful 
 life ? and can all his ways be clean ? We know well how much 
 the question involves; we know also what the answer means; 
 but we can answer without hesitation — as an ideal, Yes. A 
 man can go into the world, and take his part in all natural and 
 
PSALM cxix. 9 
 
 417 
 
 necessary engagements, and yet have, all through, a cleansed way. 
 He may go into business, become a politician, enjoy pleasure, and 
 build up a home, without inevitable stain, without wading to his 
 object through dishonour ; and is not this just what we want, to 
 make all life what it ought to be ? If the way of business were 
 clean, if the ways of pleasure were clean, if the sanctities of 
 domestic life were all kept unsullied, what a world it would be ! 
 What would become of fraud, and over-reaching, and plotting, and 
 treachery, and strife, and the sickening suspicions of one another 
 that now half choke human love and threaten to starve or poison 
 the charities of life ? We all know what would become of these 
 things. They would die away as naturally as the mists before 
 the advance of day. And why should it not be ? Why should 
 not a man begin life with the deep conviction that his may be a 
 cleansed way ? 
 
 2. But when the Psalmist speaks of cleansing our way, he 
 implies that, at some points at least, our way has led us through 
 the mire. The picture in his mind was of this sort. There stood 
 before him a young man who had not long set out on the journey 
 of life and who yet, to his own deep surprise and disgust, found 
 many stains of travel already upon him. He had not meant to go 
 wrong ; as yet, perhaps, he has not gone very far wrong. And yet, 
 where did all this filth come from ? And how is it to be got rid 
 of ? And if, at the very outset of the journey, he has wandered 
 into by-paths which have left these ugly stains upon him, what will 
 he be like when he reaches the end of his journey ? How can he 
 hope to keep a right course, and to present himself, without spot, 
 before God at the last ? In short, how is he to make his way 
 clean, and to keep it clean ? 
 
 3. There are in our lives no isolated acts, but only ways. The 
 wrong of which we say, " Only this once, and it shall never be 
 repeated," provokes its own repetition, starts us in its own 
 direction. The violation of truth or integrity, with the expecta- 
 tion and purpose of retrieving it speedily, involves us in a 
 labyrinth, in which we lose our way, and may never find our way 
 back. The laws of sobriety or purity once transgressed, we have 
 not the power which we previously thought we had to retrace our 
 
 PS. xxv.-cxix. — 27 
 
4i8 
 
 THE CLEAN PATH 
 
 steps. We meant an act ; we have found a way — a precipitous 
 way, too, on which we gain momentum with every step. A way 
 has a direction, and leads some whither. A way is continuous ; 
 and, if we are in it, we are advancing in it. A way differs in its 
 direction from other ways, and diverges more and more from them 
 the farther one travels upon it. There is hardly any error so 
 perilous as that of imagining that there can be isolated acts or 
 states of mind. Every present has its closely affiliated future. 
 Every deed, every reverie, every thought, is a cause. We are 
 moving on in character, as in years. We are not to-day what 
 we were a week ago. We are advancing either in holiness or 
 in unholiness. 
 
 ^ Nature moves physically towards perfection, and morally 
 there must be the same unseen but necessary motion. For if the 
 Darwinian theory be true, the law of natural selection applies to 
 all the moral history of mankind, as well as to the physical. 
 Evil must die ultimately as the weaker element in the struggle 
 with the good. The slow consent of the world's history is in 
 the direction of moral goodness, as its physical development is 
 ever toward higher forms. This progress, of course, does not 
 necessarily embrace any particular form of life or especial race. 
 A given race may die, or may remain stagnant. The development 
 goes on with some new variety or form of life. Such a " current 
 of things towards righteousness," or towards physical perfection, is 
 slow, almost imperceptible. It is like the silent motion of the 
 stars of heaven through eternity towards one centre of the 
 universe. But if once the theory of development be accepted and 
 this fact be admitted, what higlier evidence can be demanded of a 
 benevolent and perfect Creator than a current of all things 
 towards the best, a drift towards perfection, a silent, august, 
 secular movement of all beings and forms of life, all thought and 
 morals, all history and events towards the completely good and 
 perfect ? ^ 
 
 ^ Perhaps the present generation has heard more than enough 
 about progress. Talk of that kind is an affectation that was 
 always unprofitable, and has now become stale. Keal progress 
 needs no trumpeting. It announces itself like the flowing stream, 
 which brawls only among the barren rocks, and is most felt as a 
 beneficent agency that is penetrating and vitalizing in those parts 
 where friction and noise are reduced to a minimum. True 
 advancement is humble, earnest, practical. It is single-mindedj 
 
 * The Life of Charles Loring Brace, 302. I 
 
PSALM cxix. 9 
 
 419 
 
 simple-hearted devotion, ever growing in intelligence, to those 
 grand objects which are dear to Christ and the angels, and the 
 over-shadowing grandeur of which makes obtruding self-conscious- 
 ness impossible. The Apostles advanced by forsaking the 
 tradition of men and cleaving unto the word of the Lord, that 
 they might do for the world what could be done in no other way. 
 Luther advanced by bringing men up to the simple record of the 
 New Testament, that they might find a firm footing as they 
 passed into eternity and faced the awful facts of life and destiny. 
 We can advance in the present day only as we come nearer to 
 J esus Christ, and bring others with us.^ 
 
 The poet sings — 
 
 Our lives must climb from hope to hope, 
 
 And realize our longing, 
 but it is not often that the record of a man's progress towards 
 a pronounced condition of spiritual exaltation is one of uninter- 
 rupted climbing. There are usually some prominent milestones 
 that mark momentous crises in the journey, frequently some 
 definite boundary to which one can point and say. This is where 
 such a one first dedicated himself to the service of God and 
 of his fellows. But with Quintin Hogg one can trace the ever- 
 mountmg path back to his earliest days until it is lost in the pure 
 mnocence that is God's birth-gift to every little child. There is 
 no apparent genesis of conviction, of dedication. From a child 
 upward he seems to have been imbued with a sense of service 
 owed to a Wonderful Benefactor, and though of course there must 
 have been times of struggle and of darkness, they were principally 
 of a mental rather than of a spiritual character, causing no 
 mterruption of his self-appointed labours and leaving no con- 
 temporary external indications of their presence.^ 
 
 IL 
 
 A Simple Answee. 
 
 ** By taking heed." 
 
 1. The answer, like the question of the text, is not perhaps the 
 supremely best, but it is nevertheless very true, and needful to be 
 borne in mind. We should begin by asking, " Wherewithal shall 
 I cleanse my heart ? " and the reply to that is, " If any man be in 
 
 * James Stark, John Murker of Banff, 54. 
 
 * E. M. Hogg, Quintin Hogg, 35. 
 
420 
 
 THE CLEAN PATH 
 
 Christ he is a new creature " — renewed in the spirit of his mind 
 after the likeness of Christ. But, allowing that, for the practical 
 uses of life, nothing better could be said to one than this. Take 
 heed to your ways, and direct them according to the Word of God 
 For not a little of the evil of this world arises from the heed- 
 lessness of youth. We did not mean to do wrong. Very few do, 
 at least in the beginning. There may be some who have from the 
 first perverse and evil natures, wholly indisposed to go the right 
 way. But on the whole these are not the common staple of 
 human creatures. Most youths are not wishful to do wrong, but 
 would rather, if it did not cost very much trouble, do right in the 
 main. But they do not think as strenuously about it as they 
 should. They are not very watchful of their conduct, or careful 
 to guide it aright ; and so they fall into a snare. It is this heed- 
 lessness, this inconsiderateness, which does not weigh seriously the 
 step we are going to take, and the consequences it may involve — 
 this is the beginning of many a downward course. " Oh," we say, 
 " I did not think ; I did not mean any wrong," and we are fain to 
 consider that a sufficient excuse. But it is not a sufficient excuse. 
 We ought to think. God has given us a power of "seeing 
 before and after" that we may direct our steps aright; and it 
 will not serve our purpose that we did not use that power, but 
 blundered into the mire which we should clearly have avoided. 
 The foremost duty of a man is to think what he is about. 
 
 ^ The best made road wants looking after if it is to be kept in 
 repair. What would become of a railway that had no surfacemen 
 and platelayers going along the line and noticing whether any- 
 thing was amiss ? I remember once seeing a bit of an old Koman 
 road; the lava rocks were there, but for want of care, here a 
 young sapling had grown up between two of them and had driven 
 them apart, there were many split by the frost ; here was a great 
 ugly gap full of mud, and the whole thing ended in a jungle. 
 How shall a man keep his road in repair ? " By taking heed 
 thereto." Things that are left to go anyhow in this world have a 
 strange knack of going one how. You do not need anything else 
 than negligence to ensure that things will come to grief.^ 
 
 ^ One of the greatest of living Englishmen sums up the whole 
 teaching of Goethe, the wisest German of the nineteenth century, 
 in the brief citation : " Gedenke, zu leben," which means literally, 
 
 ^ A. Maclaren. 
 
PSALM cxix. 9 
 
 421 
 
 "Think, to live." Carlyle translates, "Think of living." But 
 you will all get hold of its meaning if I say that what it comes to 
 is this : If you would live rightly and well, you must think — 
 think how it is best to live." So that, you see, two of the 
 wisest men of our own time are of one mind with the Psalmist 
 who lived between two and three thousand years before them. 
 He says, " If you would walk in pure and noble ways of life, think 
 of your ways." ^ • 
 
 2. If we examine our self-consciousness, we shall find that it is 
 never as to the qualities of actions that we feel doubt or hesita- 
 tion. The questions which perplex us, and which it is unspeak- 
 ably dangerous for a young person to begin to ask, are such as 
 these : How far may I go in a wrong direction, and yet be sure to 
 go no farther? Is there any harm in a slight compromise of 
 principle? Can I not with ultimate safety trespass once, or a 
 little way, on forbidden ground ? Can I not try the first pleasant, 
 attractive steps on a way which I am determined on no account to 
 pursue farther ? May I not go as far in the wrong as others are 
 going, without reproach and without fear ? Is there not some 
 redeeming grace in companionship, so that I may venture with 
 others a little farther than I would be willing to go alone ? May 
 not my conscience, under careful home-training and choice home- 
 examples, have become more rigid and scrupulous than is befitting 
 or manly in one who has emerged into comparative freedom ? 
 In these questions are the beginnings of evil — the first, it may be, 
 fatal steps in miry ways. 
 
 ^ If you once allow yourself to fall into a habit of evil of 
 whatever kind, the idea that you are helpless, that you are made 
 so, that it is your nature, will very speedily creep in and try to 
 lay hold of your mind. Whether it be a sin of passion or of 
 temper, which comes only at times, leaving you free to live a right 
 and perhaps even a religious life in the intervals, and returning 
 with a sort of easy victory in the hour of temptation, making your 
 falls all the more miserable by their contrast with your happier 
 and better moments ; or some of those palsies of the soul which 
 seem to benumb the will — sloth for instance, or selfishness ; or 
 again, a petty fault which mars all your life without seeming ever 
 to stain it deeply, making you ashamed, and justly ashamed, 
 that you should find a difficulty in overcoming such a trifle ; in 
 
 1 S. Cox, The Bird's Nest, 136., 
 
422 
 
 THE CLEAN PATH 
 
 such cases, over and above the temptation to the sin i'^elf, there 
 Boon comes the added temptation to treat it as hopeless, to give 
 up in despair, to reconcile yourself to your enemy, and say that 
 you are made so, and cannot do otherwise. And this is indeed no 
 trifling addition. The one chance of escape from habitual sin is 
 never to intermit the struggle : do that, and you are quite sure to 
 conquer; some better opportunity for getting power over the 
 temptation presents itself ; or the temptation seems to go away 
 of itself, you do not know how; or it returns less and less 
 frequently, till it returns no more ; its going may be in one way 
 or in another ; but persevere in the battle, and go it surely will. 
 Thus ere now have Christians overcome bodily temptations, to 
 some men the severest trials of all ; thus have Christians tamed 
 down unruly temper ; thus have they conquered pride and 
 vanity ; thus have they taught themselves to be true.^ 
 
 3. But it is not in man to direct his steps aright. Therefore 
 God has bestowed on us what should be " a lamp unto our feet, 
 and a light unto our path." It is something to be heedful and to 
 walk warily, for we are beset on all hands by snares and tempta- 
 tions. But that is not enough. For besides these dangers that 
 encompass us without, we have other perils to face in the shape 
 of false ideals, mistaken views of what a man should be and do. 
 Therefore the Psalmist reminds us that we can cleanse our ways 
 only by taking heed to them according to God's Word. He 
 meant, of course, the Law of the Lord as it had been made known 
 to Israel of old. That was to be their practical guide in the 
 path of duty in his day. It was not merely a doctrine they were 
 to believe, but a commandment they must obey. And a noble 
 law it was, of brave and manly and self-denying virtue, leading 
 them up the steep heights of arduous duty to the fellowship of 
 Israel's God. Yet, good and precious though it was, quickening 
 the soul to a higher life than the rest of the world dreamt of, we 
 have now a surer word and a fairer example to direct us, a more 
 potent inspiration also urging us to higher and holier attainments. 
 Think of the Perfect Man, the model of holy beauty, who is in 
 all things our example, who teaches how to be rich in poverty, how 
 to be wise though unlearned, how to bear wrong meekly, how to be 
 true and faithful and brave with all the world against Him, and 
 how to forget Himself in the love He bore to all. 
 
 * Archbishop Temple, 
 
PSALM cxix. 9 
 
 423 
 
 In St. Peter the love of God is shown in Christian example. 
 A plain and simple mind, fixed on plain duties, finding in the 
 great law of right a supreme satisfaction, St. Peter seems to think 
 of our Lord chiefly as showing us what we ought to be and do, 
 and sent by the infinite love of God for that purpose. Do 
 Christians find their duty hard ? " Even hereunto were ye called : 
 because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye 
 should follow his steps : who did no sin, neither was guile found 
 in his mouth : who, when he was reviled, reviled not again ; when 
 he suffered, he threatened not; but committed himself to him 
 that judgeth righteously : who his own self bare our sins in his 
 own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live 
 unto righteousness : by whose stripes ye were healed." Or, again, 
 are Christians persecuted ? They are reminded that " Christ also 
 hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust." And so 
 throughout his writings St. Peter ever seems to think of God's 
 love as upholding a man in doing what it is right to do, in bearing 
 what it is right to bear, and of Christ's life as the assurance of that 
 love.^ 
 
 4. In Christ, who is the Incarnate Word, we have an all- 
 sufficient Guide on our way through life. A guide of conduct 
 must be plain — and whatever doubts and difficulties there may 
 be about the doctrines of Christianity there is none about its 
 morality. A guide of conduct must be decisive — and there is no 
 faltering in the utterance of the Book as to right and wrong. A 
 guide of conduct must be capable of application to the wide 
 diversities of character, age, circumstance — and the morality of 
 the New Testament especially, and of the Old in a measure, 
 secures that, because it does not trouble itself about minute details, 
 but deals with large principles. A guide for morals must be far 
 in advance of the followers, and it has taken generations and 
 centuries to work into men's consciences, and to work out in 
 men's practice, a 'portion of the morality of that Book. If the 
 world kept the commandments of the New Testament, the world 
 would be in the millennium; and all the sin and crime, and 
 ninety-nine-hundredths of all the sorrow, of earth would have 
 vanished like an ugly dream. 
 
 ■[1 I never saw a useful Christian who was not a student of 
 the Bible. If a man neglect his Bible, he may pray and ask God 
 
 ^ Archbishop Temple. 
 
424 
 
 THE CLEAN PATH 
 
 to use him in His work, but God cannot make use of him, for 
 there is not much for the Holy Ghost to work upon. We 
 cannot overcome Satan with our feelings. The reason why some 
 people have such bitter experience is that they try to overcome 
 the devil by their feelings and experiences. Christ overcame 
 Satan by the Word} 
 
 5. The fatal defect of all attempts at keeping our heart by our 
 own watchfulness is that keeper and kept are one and the same, 
 and so there may be mutiny in the garrison, and the very forces 
 that ought to subdue the rebellion may have gone over to the 
 rebels. We want a power outside of us to steady us. We 
 want another motive to be brought to bear upon our conduct, 
 and upon our convictions and our will, mightier than any that 
 now influence them ; and we get that if we will yield ourselves to 
 the love that has come down from heaven to save us, and says to 
 us, " If ye love me, keep my commandments." We want, for keeping 
 ourselves and cleansing our way, reinforcements to our own inward 
 vigour, and we shall get these if we will trust to Jesus Christ, 
 who will breathe into us the spirit of His own life, which will 
 make us " free from the law of sin and death." We want, if our 
 path is to be cleansed, forgiveness for a past path, which is in 
 some measure stained and foul, as well as strength for the future, 
 to deliver us from the dreadful influence of the habit of evil. 
 And we get all these in the blood of Jesus Christ which cleanses 
 from all sin. 
 
 ^ How are we to be made holy ? God has made full provision 
 for it. There is wonderful provision laid down in the Word for 
 our sanctiflcation. First of all there is the blood of Jesus Christ 
 which clean seth from all sin. There is power in it to cleanse 
 even the young man's heart. Secondly, there is the washing with 
 the Word. You remember the Lord said to His disciples, " Now, 
 ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you." 
 Thirdly, there is the keeping power of Christ Himself. " I know 
 whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep 
 that which I have committed unto him against that day." The 
 power of Christ to keep is another part of the provision that God 
 has made to keep us holy. Then there is the Holy Spirit of God, 
 whose special otlice on earth is to do tliis work of sanctiticatioii 
 through Christ. The blood of Jesus Christ; the Word of the 
 
 ^ D. L. Moody. 
 
PSALM cxix. 9 
 
 425 
 
 living God ; the keeping power of Christ ; the sanctifying power 
 of the Holy Ghost. What a provision is this ! ^ 
 
 Four letters that a child may trace ! 
 
 Yet men who read may feel a thrill 
 From powers that know not time nor space, 
 
 Vibrations of the eternal will — 
 With body and mind and soul respond 
 To "Love" and all that lies beyond. 
 
 On truth's wide sea, thought's tiny skiff 
 Goes dancing far beyond our speech, 
 
 Yet thought is but a hieroglyph 
 
 Of boundless worlds it cannot reach : 
 
 We label our poor idols "God," 
 
 And map with logic heavens untrod. 
 
 Music and beauty, life and art — 
 
 Eegalia of the Presence hid — 
 Command our worship, move our heart, 
 
 Write " Love " on every coffin-lid : 
 But infinite — beyond, above — 
 The hope within that one word " Love." ^ 
 
 ^ J. Elder Gumming. 
 
 ^ Annie Matlieson, Mayiime Songs, 59. 
 
The Wondrous Law. 
 
 4*7 
 
Literature. 
 
 Flint (R), Sermons and Addresses^ 133. 
 
 Harper (F.), Nine SermonSy 31. 
 
 Ker (J.), Sermons, i. 29. 
 
 Matheson (Q.), Messages of Hope, 241. 
 
 Salmond (C. A.), For Days of Youth, 346. 
 
 Voysey (C), Sermons, vi. (1883), No. 44 ; xix. (1896), No. 16 ; xxvi. 
 
 (1903), No. 22. 
 Whincup (D. W.), The Training of Life, 21. 
 British Weekly Pulpit, iii. 401 (W. Sanday). 
 Treasury (New York), xx. 722. 
 
 438 
 
The Wondrous Law. 
 
 Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold 
 Wondrous things out of thy law. — Ps. cxix. i8. 
 
 This is a very uncommon idea — that wonder should be the result 
 of intellectual development or the " opening of the eyes." The 
 prevailing notion is the reverse — that wonder belongs to the 
 primitive age alike of the individual and of the race. We say 
 colloquially, " I opened my eyes in astonishment " ; the Psalmist's 
 expression is the converse, " I became astonished by opening my 
 eyes." What the Psalmist says is that the marvels of life escape 
 us by reason of our ignorance. His prayer is just the contrary of 
 the common prayer. The common prayer is, " Make me a simple 
 child again that I may feel the mystery of all things and bow 
 with reverence before them." But the Psalmist says, " Emancipate 
 me from the ignorance of childhood, for it is only when I shall 
 see with the eyes of a man that I shall behold the mystery, the 
 marvel, the unfathomable depth, of that ocean on whose bosom 
 I live and move and have my being." 
 
 ^ Do we find that the sense of wonder belongs to children ? 
 Not so. The sense of mystery is precisely what a child does not 
 feel. He asks many questions; but he will accept the crudest 
 answers as quite adequate explanations. He has not a conscious- 
 ness of limitation. He has a feeling of power beyond his strength ; 
 he will put out his hand to catch the moon. He does not at an 
 early date inquire where he came from. He does not ask who 
 made a watch or who made the sun. To him the watch and the 
 sun are both alive — moving by their own strength, upheld by 
 their own power. His eyes are not opened, and therefore his 
 wonder is not awake. To wake his wonder you must unbar the 
 door of his mind. The mystery comes with his experience — not 
 with the want of it. I do not read that man marvelled in Eden; 
 I do that they marvelled in Galilee. Eden was as wonderful as 
 Galilee ; but the eyes were not opened. Knowledge is the parent 
 
 of mystery. Experience is the forerunner of reverence. Only 
 
 429 
 
430 THE WONDROUS LAW 
 
 they who have let down the pitcher can utter the cry, " The well 
 is deep." ^ 
 
 If Mr. Morley, in his Life of Gladstone, speaking of his entrance 
 into college life at Oxford, says : " It was from Gladstone's intro- 
 duction into this enchanted and inspiring world that we recognize 
 the beginning of the wonderful course which was to show how 
 great a thing the life of a man may be made." So with Christian. 
 Here, in the Interpreter's House, his spiritual experiences really 
 begin. He is no longer in the outer circle of the world's empty 
 life ; he has come within the circle of God's direct purposes and 
 protecting power. Dangers he will have to meet, trials of faith 
 and courage ; the Hill of Difficulty, the Valley of Humiliation, the 
 Castle of Giant Despair, the struggle with Apollyon — all this is 
 before him. But he is on the pilgrim-road to Zion. There is the 
 sweet companionship; there are the wonders by the way — the 
 Interpreter's House, the Cross where the burden is removed, the 
 Palace Beautiful, the sight of the Delectable Mountains, the Eiver 
 of the Water of Life. So whatever might be the difficulties, 
 Christian was on enchanted ground. He was near to God. He 
 was on the path whose end was heaven. The wicket gate admits 
 him to the rich field of Christian experience : the only experience 
 that has any lasting value.^ 
 
 I. 
 
 1. The sense of wonder is one of our most useful emotions. 
 The mind cannot remain long in a state of monotony without 
 something like pain, or if it does, it is a sign of the low level to 
 which it has sunk. It has a craving after what is fresh, and God 
 has provided for this in the form of the world. He has made the 
 works of nature pass before us with a perpetually diversified face. 
 He has created summer and winter, and so ordered the sun that it 
 has probably never set with the same look since man first saw it. 
 Those works of nature are constantly turning up new subjects of 
 thought and study, and will do so, during the world's existence; 
 while, at the same time, the world itself is weaving an ever- 
 shifting and many-coloured web of history. In all this there is 
 a stimulus to man to lead him to look and think. 
 
 ^ Not by " mathesis," not by deduction, or construction, not by 
 measuring, or searching, canst thou find out God, but only by the 
 
 * G. Matheson, Messages of H&pe, 242. 
 
 » D. W. Whincup, The Training of Life, 21. 
 
PSALM cxix. 1 8 
 
 431 
 
 faithful cry from the roadside of the world as He passes — " Open 
 thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy 
 law." In that prayer you have literally expressed to you, not in 
 any wise as we too carelessly assume metaphorically, the two 
 functions of the exercised senses, of which you have so often, I 
 fear incredulously, heard me affirm the necessary connexion — the 
 discerning of what is beautiful and of what is right. " Wondrous 
 things out of thy law." Wondrous, not as to the uneducated 
 senses they are in terror, but wondrous to the educated senses in 
 gentleness and delight ; so that while to the modern demonstrator 
 of the laws of Nature they become mysterious as dreadful in their 
 tyranny, to the ancient perceiver of the laws of Heaven they be- 
 came lovely no less than wondrous: in the tenderness and the 
 voice of the Borgo Allegri, at the feet of the Mother of Christ, 
 was joy no less of allegiance than wonder — " Oh, how love I thy 
 law/'i 
 
 2. Wonder rises into admiration as we contemplate things 
 that are grand and beautiful. There is a chord in the human 
 heart to which the beautiful and sublime respond, whether these 
 appear in the material or in the spiritual world. If we could only 
 take men away for a little out of the dull, dead round, and from 
 the corroding and often debasing things that draw them down in 
 their common life, there are objects such as these appealing to 
 them daily and hourly, and asking them if they have not a soul. 
 Rich sunsets and moonlit skies are there, only requiring eyes to 
 see them, and acts of self-devotion and heroism are being per- 
 formed, and lives of patient suffering led, under our sight, which 
 are as capable of thrilling us as anything recorded in history. 
 
 ^ At a later time the Mar^chale delivered addresses in other 
 cities of France — such as Nimes, Marseilles, Havre, Eouen, Lyons 
 — and she was everywhere astonished to find that the French, 
 who seem the most thoughtless, are yet among the most thought- 
 ful people in the world. The result of such Conferences as these 
 cannot be tabulated. For one thing, they made the Mar^chale 
 more than ever a mother-confessor and spiritual director. The 
 thoughts of many hearts were revealed to her at private inter- 
 views of which no record was kept, and in letters, one of which 
 may be given : — 
 
 " Your marvellous faith, your simple and powerful eloquence 
 so deeply moved me that I cannot but thank you. I thank you 
 * UuskiHj Schools of Art in Florence, § 90 {Works, xxiii. 250). 
 
THE WONDROUS LAW 
 
 as an artist, as a sincere admirer of beautiful work, of great char- 
 acters; I thank you as a man blas(^, sceptical, benumbed and 
 deadened. As a child I adored Jesus, and now, after having 
 thought much and suffered infinite pains which you cannot 
 understand, I have said adieu to faith and also adieu to hope! 
 I have become one of those you call sceptics. Ah ! do not say 
 ' terrible ' sceptic, but unfortunate, pitiable, unhappy sceptic. 
 You are, Madame, a great, beautiful, generous heart, and if ever 
 earnest good wishes have been worth anything, I have cherished 
 them for you, your work, and those who fight by your side. You 
 will believe me, an unbeliever, who envies you, admires you, and 
 ideally loves you." ^ 
 
 3. Wonder and admiration deepen into awe as we realize tho 
 mystery of life. A reflective mind can take but a very few steps 
 in thinking till it comes upon this. It is not so much that there 
 are things unknown around us as that there are things unknoivahle, 
 that there is an infinite and a mystery in the universe which we ^ 
 cannot now penetrate, and which may for ever stretch beyond us. ' 
 The tokens of man's highest nature lie not in his being able to - 
 comprehend but in his ability to feel that there are things which 
 he cannot comprehend, and which he yet feels to be true and 
 real, before which he is compelled to fall down in reverent awe. 
 It is here, above all, that man comes into contact with religion, 
 with a God, with an eternity ; and he in whom there is little 
 sense of wonder, or in whom it has been blunted and degraded, 
 will have a proportionately feeble impression of these grand 
 subjects which the soul can feel to be real but can never fully 
 grasp. 
 
 ^ I can call my Father a brave man (ein Tapferer). Man's 
 face he did not fear; God he always feared: his Keverence, I 
 think, was considerably mixed with Fear. Yet not slavish Fear ; 
 rather Awe, as of unutterable Depths of Silence, through which 
 flickered a trembling Hope. How he used to speak of Death 
 (especially in late years) or ratlicr to bo silent, and look of it ! 
 There was no feeling in him here that he cared to hide : he 
 trembled at the really terrible ; the mock-terrible he cared nought 
 for. — That last act of his Life ; when in the last agony, with the 
 thick ghastly vapours of Death rising round him to choke him, 
 he burst through and called with a man's voice on the great God 
 to have mercy on him : that was like the epitome and concluding 
 
 1 James Strahan, The Mar6chale (1913), 123. 
 
PSALM cxix. i8 
 
 433 
 
 summary of his whole Life. God gave him strength to wrestle 
 with the King of Terrors, as it were even then to prevail. All his 
 strength came from God, and ever sought new nourishment there. 
 God be thanked for it.^ 
 
 IL 
 
 1. There is nothing so wonderful as God's law; indeed, it 
 may justly be said to include in itself all that is most wonderful — 
 all that truly merits our admiration — all that will really reward 
 our curiosity. For what is it? The Psalmist here was not 
 thinking merely of the law given to Moses or of the words written 
 in any book, however sacred. He was not thinking of spoken 
 words or written characters, but of eternal realities. He was an 
 earnest man, and his mind sought to be in contact with truth 
 itself ; he was a pious man, and his heart longed for nothing less 
 or lower than communion with the living God. He felt himself 
 in the Divine presence, and he felt that the Divine law was 
 within and around him. The Bible tells us much about the law 
 of God, but it is only by a figure of speech that we call it the law 
 of God or even that it contains the law of God. In the Bible and 
 other books we have the statements of God's laws, but these laws 
 themselves are far too real to be in any book. 
 
 2. It is the law of God that keeps the stars in their courses, 
 regulates the movements of the seas and the revolutions of the 
 aarth, develops the plant and organizes the animal, works in our 
 instincts and guides our reason, marks out the path of humanity 
 ind determines the rise and fall, the weal and woe, of nations, and 
 neasures out to virtue and vice their due rewards in time and 
 eternity. It is not truly separable from God Himself, but is the 
 ;vhole of the modes in which He manifests His power, and wisdom, 
 ind goodness in the universe, — the whole of the ways in which 
 3e operates through matter and spirit, in creation, providence, and 
 'edemption, as Father and King and J udge. Hence it is that we 
 lay it is not only most wonderful but includes in itself all that is 
 vonderful. The wonders of physical nature, of the human soul 
 .nd human history, and of redeeming love and grace, are all 
 venders of that law of God which the Psalmist longed and prayed 
 
 ^ Carlyle, Reminiscences, i. 10. 
 PS. xxv.-cxix. — 28 
 
THE WONDROUS LAW 
 
 to behold— that law which ruleth alike in what is least and 
 m what is greatest, to which all things in heaven and earth do 
 homage, the seat of which is the bosom of the Eternal, the voice 
 of which is the harmony of the universe. 
 
 H I read in the Bible that God has " set his glory in the 
 heavens," but in merely reading this I do not see that glory ; it 
 is only to be seen by " considering the heavens, which are the work 
 of God's fingers ; the moon and the stars, which he has ordained." 
 This terrible law—" the wages of sin is death "—has been published 
 in the Bible, but it does not exist and work in the Bible ; it exists 
 and works in the lives of sinful beings like you and me, and if 
 we do not see it in ourselves we shall never see it at all, although 
 we read a thousand times the words which announce it. So with 
 its gracious counterpart—" the gift of God is eternal life through 
 Jesus Christ." These blessed words point us to the most consolmg 
 law in all the universe, but they point us away from themselves; 
 and only by our souls coming into communion with a hvmg God 
 through a living Saviour can they behold the wonders of mercy 
 and truth which are in that law.^ 
 
 ^ Really, so far as spiritual vision is concerned, the angels 
 must look upon this earth as a big blind asylum. We see close 
 to us, but not afar off; we see the surface, and miss the depths; 
 we see not as wide awake, but as those who rub their eyes hardly 
 knowincr whether they wake or sleep. Have I seen the " wondrous 
 things "''out of God's law— the things which accompany salva- 
 tion Many feel the intellectual interest of God's Word, enjoy 
 its eloquence, extol its moral worth, or they appreciate its pru- 
 dential wisdom, like Napoleon, who put it in the political section of 
 his library ; but they do not grasp its spiritual, saving message. 
 They gather shining pebbles and painted shells, and overlook the 
 pearl of great price. Oh ! to see the wondrous depths of redeem- 
 mg love ! Whilst I study systems of theology and search the com- 
 mentaries of exegetes do I sufficiently remember the promised 
 Revealer and wait His illumination ? " Ye have an unction from 
 the Holy One, and know all things."* 
 
 III. 
 
 1. The most wonderful of all laws are God's moral and spiritua: 
 laws. They are the laws of God in a far higher sense than otliei 
 laws. The laws of the physical world might have been qmt< 
 
 I Robert Flint. " W. L. Watkinson. 
 
 I 
 
PSALM cxix. i8 
 
 435 
 
 different from what they are. God made them to be what they are 
 by making the physical world itself what it is. If He had made quite 
 a different material world with quite other laws, He would have 
 been none the less God, the true object of our worship. But He 
 did not make the fundamental laws of moral life to be what they 
 are by any mere forthputting of His will. They are eternal and 
 unchangeable. That God should alter them would be for Him 
 to cease to be wise and righteous and holy and loving. It would 
 be for Him to cease to be God. The wonders of these laws are 
 thus the wonders of the Divine nature, and far greater, therefore, 
 than any wonders of created nature. At the same time, these 
 laws are the laws of our natures, of our spirits, of what is much 
 higher and much more wonderful than anything else to be beheld in 
 nature. " On earth," it has been said, " there is nothing great but 
 man, and in man there is nothing great but mind." And certainly 
 a soul is a far more wonderful thing than even a star, a spiritual 
 being than a material world, and its laws are far more wonderful. It 
 is spiritual law that determines men's relations to their God and to 
 one another, and it is on obedience or disobedience to it that the 
 weal or woe of individuals or societies chiefly depends, so that all 
 jthe marvels and mysteries of human nature and destiny gather 
 round it. 
 
 ^ I am not quite sure that the sole, or even chief, end of 
 punishment is the reformation of the offender. I think a great 
 deal of law. Law rules Deity; and its awful majesty is above 
 individual happiness. That is what Kant calls " the categorical 
 imperative," that is, a sense of duty which commands categorically 
 or absolutely — not saying " it is better," but " thou shalt." Why ? 
 Because " thou shalt," that is all. It is not best to do right — 
 thou must do right ; and the conscience that feels that, and in that 
 way, is the nearest to Divine humanity. Not that law was made, 
 like the Sabbath, for man, but man was made for it. He is beneath 
 it, a grain of dust before it ; it moves on, and if he will not move 
 before it, it crushes him ; that is all, and that is punishment. I 
 fancy that grand notion of law is what we have lost, what we 
 require to get, before we are in a position to discuss the question 
 pf punishment at all, or to understand what it is.'^ 
 
 2. To behold fully how wonderful the law is — how sacred God 
 {regards it to be — how terrible disobedience to it is — it is to the 
 
 ^ Life and Letters of the Rev. F. W. JRobertson, 236. 
 
436 THE WONDROUS LAW 
 
 cross we must look ; to the cross, towering high above all other 
 subjects, in the midst of the ages, in the presence of the nations, 
 to show sin in all its hideousness and righteousness in all its per- 
 fections. If we can see no wonders in the law which Christ died- 
 to satisfy and glorify, if we do not see it to be unspeakably more 
 wonderful than all the other laws, assuredly our blindness is great 
 indeed, and we cannot too earnestly cry to a merciful God, " Opeiij 
 Thou mine eyes." 
 
 In a letter to her father Miss Nightingale says : 
 " What I dislike in Renan is not that it is fine writing, but 
 that it is all fine writing. His Christ is the hero of a novel ; he 
 himself, a successful novel-writer. I am revolted by such expres- 
 sions as charmant, delicieux, religion du pur sentiment, in such a 
 subject. ... As for the 'religion of sentiment,' I really don't 
 know what he means. It is an expression of Balzac's. If hf 
 means the * religion of love,' I agree and do not agree. We uiust 
 love something loveable. And a religion of love must certainl) 
 include the explaining of God's character to be something loveabl( 
 
 of God's * providence,' which is the self-same thing as God'; 
 
 Laws, as something loving and loveable. On the other hand I g( 
 along with Christ, not with Eenan's Christ, far more than mos 
 Christians do. I do not think that ' Christ on the Cross ' is thi 
 highest expression hitherto of God— not in the vulgar meaning o 
 the Atonement— but God does hang on the Cross every day ii 
 every one of us ; the whole meaning of God's * providence,' it 
 His laws, is the Cross. When Christ preaches the Crosi 
 when all mystical theology preaches the Cross, I go along wit:, 
 them entirely. It is the self-same thing as what I mean whe:j 
 I say that God educates the world by His laws, i.e. by si 
 
 that man must create mankind — that all this evil, i.e. th 
 
 Cross, is the proof of God's goodness, is the only way by whic 
 God could work out man's salvation without a contradiction. Yo 
 say, but there is too much evil. I say, there is just enough (n( 
 a millionth part of a grain more than is necessary) to teach ma 
 by his own mistakes,— by his sins, if you will— to show man tl 
 way to perfection in eternity — to perfection which is the oul 
 happiness." ^ 
 
 Man's eyes are veiled, so that he sees but a little way in I 
 God's law. Our intellectual perception of law is one thing ai 
 » Sir Edward Cook, The Life of Florence Nightingale, i, 486, 
 
 1 
 
PSALM cxix. i8 
 
 437 
 
 our spiritual perception of God in law is a very different thing. 
 To see law itself we need only a clear and disciplined under- 
 standing. To see God in law we need spiritual discernment. 
 The eye sees only what it brings with it the power of seeing. 
 And neither mere bodily vision nor mere intellectual vision will 
 enable us to behold spiritual reality. The things of the spirit 
 must be spiritually discerned. 
 
 If When on a serene night millions of stars sparkle in the 
 depths of the sky, any man who has bodily eyes, although he may 
 have no talent and culture, has only to raise them upwards to 
 embrace at a glance all the splendours of the firmament, and 
 thereby to receive into his soul, at least in some measure, the 
 impressions which so sublime a spectacle is fitted to produce. 
 But there may stand beside him one whose intellectual ability is 
 [far greater, and who has improved that ability to the utmost by 
 'diligent and carefully directed exercise, yet if Providence have 
 denied to him the blessing of sight, in vain for him will there be 
 all magnificence. There is another sky, and one far grander than 
 the azure vault which is stretched over our heads, and this mystic 
 sky is filled with the stars of Divine truth, the wonders of 
 creative power, the mysteries of infinite wisdom, the bounties of 
 I'Divine beneficence, the beauties of absolute holiness, the marvels 
 of redeeming love, the riches of the Godhead, the glories of 
 Father, Son, and Spirit, shining far more bright and pure than 
 the sun at noonday. And yet to great men, to the wise of this 
 world, to the most scholarly and the most scientific of men, they 
 may be quite invisible, although they are lighting up with their 
 Divine radiance the path of the simple peasant and causing his 
 heart to leap and sing with joy as he beholds them.i 
 
 j If I remember very well when Sir Eedvers Buller came home 
 [from South Africa, in almost the first speech he made after 
 landing at Southampton, he drew attention to the immense 
 superiority of the Boer over the Briton in the matter of vision. 
 Accustomed to the clear atmosphere and vast distances of South 
 Africa, the Boer had brought his sight faculty to such a pitch of 
 perfection that he could see a moving object a mile or two farther 
 off than the average Englishman could, with the result that he 
 was aware of the approach of the English soldier long before the 
 Englishman became aware of his nearness. And Sir Redvers did 
 not hesitate to set down some of our calamities and disasters and 
 defeats to this cause.^ 
 
 Robert Flint. 
 
 ^ J. D. Jones, Elims of Life, 126. 
 
438 THE WOxNDROUS LAW 
 
 1. One cause of this blindness is a hereditary defect in the 
 unbelieving heart, a natural congenital blindness, which the lapse 
 of years has not cured. We are all born blind, and remain blind 
 to moral and spiritual truth long after birth. Discernment 
 between right and wrong, a sense of duty, a sense of failure and 
 secret shame in consequence, is a state or faculty into which we 
 can grow only after we have lived as mere animals about four or 
 five years. It takes some years longer before we grow into 
 knowledge of the ideas of character, of trustworthiness in parents, 
 of their unselfish love, and of the intense kindness of that 
 discipline which at first we resisted and resented. Before that 
 development we were blind, we could not discern spiritual things; i 
 we could not know what true love is, for love is the most spiritual 
 of all human faculties. It crowns the climax of all strictly human 
 qualities. But, though it seems incredible, it is true that some 
 men and women have grown up without any moral sense being 
 developed, and also without any knowledge or sense of true love. 
 
 ^ I came across a man well advanced in years who confided 
 to me that he believed neither in God nor in a future life. I at 
 once asked him: "Did you ever really love any one in the 
 world ? " After some days' reflection, he replied to me : " No, I 
 don't think I ever did love anybody — at least, not as you define 
 true love." Now, if you cannot get as far as love in human 
 development, you must, of course, be blind to God. You cannot 
 see Him, cannot take any pleasure in the thought of Him, but 
 must be practically dead towards Him.^ 
 
 2. Another cause of blindness is to be found in the conditions 
 of life which are either forced upon u^ or have been chosen by our- 
 selves. The worst and most widespread of these conditions is 
 absorption in the concerns and pleasures of this life. Kich and 
 poor alike suffer from this absorption, yet the rich suffer from it 
 far more than the poor. Want and distress may open our eyes to 
 God, fulness and luxury never. So long as our hearts are fixed 
 wholly on worldly good and animal indulgence, our souls are 
 utterly blind to God and to all spiritual things. 
 
 ^ Christian saw in Interpreter's House two boys. Passion and 
 Patience. Passion had a bag of gold in his hand, but Patience 
 was willing to take his Governor's advice and wait for his good 
 
 * Oharles Voysey. 
 
PSALM cxix. i8 
 
 439 
 
 things till the next year. And these two boys, says John Bunyan, 
 are typical of the worldly man and the true Christian. The 
 worldly man, with his favourite proverb of " A bird in the hand 
 is worth two in the bush," wants his good things at once; he 
 wants his bag of gold in the hand, not seeming to realize that his 
 money must perish with him ; but the Christian is willing to do 
 without this world's wealth, because he looks not at the things 
 which are seen, but at the things which are not seen.^ 
 
 ^ A scientist delivered a lecture a little time ago in which he 
 maintained, on the basis of studies started by the observation 
 of the eye of a wounded bird, that all diseases of the body 
 register themselves in the eye, that it was even possible to judge 
 the location of the disease by the part of the pupil affected. 
 Whether this can be demonstrated or not, there is no doubt that 
 the eye has its connexion with organs of the body that are less 
 honourably placed, and is affected by their accidents and dis- 
 quietudes. Diseases of the blood and of the digestive functions 
 cloud and vex the sight. You shall not be careless of your 
 eating and drinking and maintain clear vision. The mists and 
 the filmy globes which float before the eye are the indices of 
 things wrong in parts of the system that are remote from the eye 
 itself, and to be remedied by neither eye-lotions nor glasses. So 
 neglect of the spiritual life results in blurred spiritual vision.* 
 
 3. Above and beyond these things which naturally darken 
 our souls, there lie the conditions which we may create for 
 ourselves. Not knowing anything about the soul and the 
 spiritual life, some steep themselves in studies and occupations 
 which prevent all entrance of light into their minds concerning 
 God and His ways. They keep the company of irreligious and 
 unbelieving men like themselves. They pore over essays and 
 volumes which not only throw not a gleam of light upon the 
 spiritual world, but are purposely written to shut it out, to 
 make it more and more difficult to see God, to deepen the 
 darkness in which they started on their search for what they 
 call " Truth." Thus, blind at the beginning, they take for their 
 guides men and books still more blind than themselves, and 
 flounder on with ever less and less power to recover their 
 sight. And all the while they studiously neglect those meani 
 by which their eyes may be opened. They never lift up their 
 
 * J. D. Jones, Elims of Life, 134. 
 
 « W. C. Piggott, The Imperishable Word, 68. 
 
THE WONDROUS LAW 
 
 hearts to God. They avoid all thoughts of religion unless only 
 to sneer at it, or to look down upon it with supercilious curiosity. 
 They never attend public worship or put themselves in the way 
 of hearing what they never have heard. "What is the use," 
 cry the more intelligent among them — "what is the use of 
 praying to a God who is absolutely unknowable ? " But they 
 forget that God is unknowable only to those who think Him 
 to be so, to those who never pray. If they did but confer with 
 those who have lifted up their hearts to God and have found 
 Him, they might be brought to go down upon their knees to 
 pray, " Lord, open Thou mine eyes that I may see." 
 
 ^ A little steam vessel in which I was sailing round the 
 coast of Arran, emitted such a thick pall of smoke as to blot 
 out the vision of Goat Fell. And sometimes our souls create 
 those obscuring clouds and hide the glory of God. It may be the 
 vapour of pride. It may be the steam of unclean passion. It 
 may be the smoke of timidity and fear. 
 
 0 may no earth-born cloud arise 
 
 To hide Thee from Thy servant's eyes.^ 
 
 Night comes ; soon alone shall fancy follow sadly in her flight 
 Where the fiery dust of evening, shaken from the feet of light. 
 Thrusts its monstrous barriers between the pure, the good, 
 the true. 
 
 That our weeping eyes may strain for, but shall never after view. 
 Only yester eve I watched with heart at rest the nebulae 
 Looming far within the shadowy shining of the Milky Way ; 
 Finding in the stillness joy and hope for all the sons of men ; 
 Now what silent anguish fills a night more beautiful than then : 
 For earth's age of pain has come, and all her sister planets 
 weep. 
 
 Thinking of her fires of morning passing into dreamless sleep. 
 In this cycle of great sorrow for the moments that we last 
 We too shall be linked by weeping to the greatness of her 
 past : 
 
 But the coming race shall know not, and the fount of tears 
 shall dry, 
 
 And the arid heart of man shall be arid as the desert sky. 
 So within my mind the darkness dawned, and round me 
 everywhere 
 
 Hope departed with the twilight, leaving only dumb despair.^ 
 
 1 J. H. Jowett. * A. E., Collected Poems (1918), 25. 
 
PSALM cxix. i8 
 
 441 
 
 V. 
 
 The Psalmist does not ask for a new faculty, but for clearer 
 vision. The eyes are there already ; they need only to be opened. 
 It is not the bestowal of a new and supernatural power that 
 enables a man to read the Bible to profit, but the quickening 
 of a power he already possesses. A man will never grow into 
 the knowledge of God's Word by idly waiting for some new 
 gift of discernment, but by diligently using that which God has 
 already bestowed upon him, and using at the same time all 
 other helps that lie within his reach. There are men and books 
 that seem, beyond others, to have the power of aiding insight. 
 All of us have felt it in the contact of some affinity of nature 
 which makes them our best helpers ; the kindred clay upon the 
 eyes by which the great Enlightener removes our blindness 
 (John ix. 6). Let us seek for such, and if we find them let us 
 employ them without leaning on them. Above all, let us give 
 our whole mind in patient, loving study to the book itself, and 
 where we fail, at any essential part, God will either send His 
 evangelist Philip to our aid (Acts viii.) or instruct us Himself. 
 But it is only to patient, loving study that help is given. God 
 could have poured all knowledge into us by easy inspiration, but it 
 is by earnest search alone that it can become the treasure of the soul. 
 
 1. If we are to get spiritual sight our prayer must be 
 sincere. The old Hebrew poet, speaking with a true insight 
 confirmed by experience, says: "If thou seek him, he will be 
 found of thee ; yea, if thou seek him diligently with thy whole 
 heart." That is the secret. It will not do to be seeking God 
 with a heart looking back to the idol which had taken His place. 
 It will not do to be wanting to have God and the idol at one 
 and the same time. God has made that to be impossible for 
 the soul of man. One God or idol at a time, or not God at all. 
 And while any lingering love for the idol remains, there is no 
 room for God to enter in. It is not His fault, or His unwilling- 
 ness, or His jealousy. But it is our own Divine incapacity to 
 trifle or dissemble with Him; it is our own Divine necessity 
 for wholeness, for uprightness and sincerity, that makes any 
 attempt at double-mindedness futile. 
 
442 THE WONDROUS LAW 
 
 ^ An old colleague and friend of Denholm Brash writes : — 
 " Chief among my impressions of his excellences is that of his 
 utter sincerity. It was so invariable that it bewildered the 
 average man. He never troubled about maintaining any 
 position he might have taken up yesterday. He told you 
 what he thought to-day ; every passing mood was faithfully 
 reflected in his words; the fleeting opinion or feeling was not 
 concealed. You were allowed to trace processes in his thought 
 which most men hide from view. ... I have seen him confound 
 an old fox of a man by sheer candour. He left the enemy 
 breathless with surprise at a simplicity he had thought faded 
 out of the world with Eden. The man's arts would have been 
 a match for any arts they encountered, but artlessness dumb- 
 founded him. The armour of light not only defended the wearer, 
 but dismayed the assailant. Never was this servant of truth * off 
 duty,' and with the audacious simplicity of love he would attack 
 an apparently impregnable fortress, and with one well-planted 
 shot would bring a whole pile of hypocrisies toppling down. He 
 had a short method with some of these Goliaths which worked 
 wonders." ^ 
 
 2. We must bring our hearts into harmony with the law. 
 At South Kensington there is a clock made above 500 years 
 ago under the hammer of a Glastonbury monk. It has measured 
 out the moments of fifteen generations of men. That piece of 
 mechanism has done and is still doing its maker's will. It has 
 served its maker's purpose. It fulfils his praiseworthy intention 
 and so praises him. Every stroke of its pendulum is to the glory 
 of the Glastonbury smith. The thing has done good and done 
 right. It keeps (so to say) its maker's commandment. What 
 he meant it to do it has done well and truly. Perhaps it may 
 seem a little strained to apply such phraseology to a piece of 
 inanimate mechanism, but it will surely aid us in seeing what 
 the moralist means by telling men to live as they were meant 
 to live. Think of this clockwork of the brain, this delicate 
 mechanism of thought and feeling. Year in, year out, the restless 
 wheels of desire and feeling, of thought and passion, play into 
 one another and mark results on the solemn dial of life. Matters 
 may be bo mismanaged as to put the machinery into a whirl 
 of wild confusion. It is, on the other hand, possible to secure 
 
 * L&ve and Life : TJie Story of J. Denholm Brash, 168. 
 
PSALM cxix. i8 
 
 443 
 
 such inward adjustment, such balance, such regulative control, 
 such true impulse, as to make the soul a splendid harmony 
 and the life a utility which men acknowledge with reverence 
 and benediction. With God's works as with man's the essential 
 thing is to be true to the Maker's purpose. There is a command- 
 ment, a Divine intention, to which every one must be true. " Thy 
 hands have made me, and fashioned me ; give me understanding 
 that I may learn thy commandment." 
 
 ^ The Lord will draw us and securely lead us to Himself, 
 in a way contrary to all our natural will, until He have divested 
 us thereof, and consumed it and made it thoroughly subject unto 
 the Divine will. For this is His will : that we should cease to 
 regard our own wishes or dislikes ; that it should become a 
 light matter to us whether He give or take away, whether 
 we have abundance or suffer want, and let all things go, if only 
 we may receive and apprehend God Himself ; that, whether 
 things please or displease us, we may leave all things to take 
 their course and cleave to Him alone. Then first do we attain 
 to the fulness of God's love as His children, when it is no 
 longer happiness or misery, prosperity or adversity, that draws 
 us to Him, or keeps us back from Him. What we should then 
 experience none can utter ; but it would be something far better 
 than when w^e were burning with the first flame of love, and had 
 great emotion but less true submission ; for here, though there 
 may be less show of zeal, and less vehemence of feeling, there 
 is more true faithfulness to God. That we may attain thereunto, 
 may God help us with His grace. Amen ! ^ 
 
 3. In proportion as we love and obey the law, its wonders 
 unfold themselves to our cleansed vision. Emerson says in his 
 essay on Nature, " The health of the eye seems to demand a 
 horizon. We are never tired so long as we can see far enough," 
 It is quite true that wide vision is refreshing. We have all been 
 more depressingly tired in our own houses than on the broad 
 upland and under the open sky. The mountaineer in his loftiest 
 adventure knows no such oppressive weariness as the woman 
 who sits "in unwomanly rags plying her needle and thread." 
 The man with the widest and furthest vision is the man with 
 the most exuberant energy. Jesus, even with Getbsemane and 
 Calvary before Him, is not so weary of life as Judas. St. Paul in 
 
 ^ Tauler's Life and Sermons (trans, by Susanna Winkworth), 297. 
 
444 THE WONDROUS LAW 
 
 labours more abundant is never so jaded as Nero. The 
 early Christian martyrs, with their vision of the Name, amid 
 all the unspeakable horror of their torture, were not so weary 
 of their sufferings as their persecutors were weary of their 
 persecution. They might still sing, as Chesterton splendidly 
 puts it in the " Ballad of the White Horse," 
 
 That on you is fallen the shadow, 
 
 And not upon the Name; 
 That though we scatter and though we fly 
 And you hang over us like the sky. 
 You are more tired of victory 
 
 Than we are tired of shame. 
 
 That though you hunt the Christian man 
 
 Like a hare on the hill side. 
 The hare has still more heart to run 
 
 Than you have heart to ride. 
 That though all lances split on you, 
 
 All swords be heaved in vain. 
 We have more lust again to lose 
 
 Than you to win again. 
 
Liberty in God's Law. 
 
 44 s 
 
Literature. 
 
 Bramston (J. T.), Fratribus, 125. 
 Campbell (L.), The Christian Ideal, 109. 
 Farrar (F. W.), The Voice from Sinai, 85. 
 Ferguson (F.), in Sermons on the Paalms, 115. 
 King (E.), The Love aiid Wisdom of God, 294. 
 Knight (W.), Thiyigs New and Old, 172. 
 Roberts (A.), Miscellaneous Sermons, 295. 
 Selbj (T. G.), The Strenuous Gospel, 380. 
 Stanley (A. P.), Sermons in the East, 123. 
 Thomas (J.), Myrtle Street Pulpit, iii. 19. 
 
 Christian World Pulpit, xxivii. 355 (M. Bryce) ; 1. 121 (E. King). 
 PreacJi^r's Magazine, ii. 220 (W. Hawkins). 
 Sunday Magazine, 1891, p. 171 (S. A. Tipple). 
 Treasury (New York), xxi. 675 (H. C. Swentzel). 
 
 446 
 
Liberty in God's Law. 
 
 I have seen an end of all perfection ; 
 
 But thy commandment is exceeding broad.— Ps. cxix. 96. 
 
 This psalm throbs throughout with true religion, and is evidently 
 the production of some venerable father in Israel who had 
 endured greatly and had not fainted; who had been divinely 
 taught and chastened by the toils, the troubles, and the tempta- 
 
 |tions of life ; who had striven to live in loyalty to the law revealed 
 to him, and was left at once ardent about right doing, and devoted 
 to meditation ; at once sadly conscious of infirmity and weakness, 
 and joyfully trustful in God's goodness and mercy. Nevertheless, 
 though thus confident, the writer of the psalm confesses, " I have 
 seen an end of all perfection." There is a sound of weariness and 
 depression in the words ; we can hear speaking in them a man 
 who had suffered disenchantments and disappointments, who had 
 tried things that looked inviting to find them less charming than 
 
 I they looked, void of what they had promised ; a man who had 
 
 ' aimed sanguinely in vain, and had sorrowfully learned that it must 
 always be in vain ; who had nursed bright expectations that had 
 not been fulfilled, although again and again he had felt sure that 
 
 . they were going to be, and who knew now they never could be. 
 
 ^ This was the favourite text of Dean Stanley, a choice 
 characteristic alike of the man and of his work : " I see that all 
 things come to an end ; but Thy commandment is exceeding 
 broad." [Prayer-Book Version.] These words are inscribed on 
 his own and his wife's tomb in Henry vii.'s chapel in Westminster 
 Abbey. 
 
 L 
 
 The Unsatisfactoriness of Our Expeeience. 
 
 1. It was no young man who spoke the words of the text; 
 
 young people have not seen " an end of all perfection," have not 
 
 447 
 
448 LIBERTY IN GOD'S LAW 
 
 arrived at the conclusion that every radiance is stained by the 
 shadow of defect, that the fullest is not full, the most complete 
 incomplete. On the contrary, they are setting out to climb to 
 the top of delectable mountains descried in the distance, where 
 they shall build their tabernacle and stay. They have visions of 
 the perfect, and count on realizing them — would infallibly realize 
 them, they say to themselves, if only such or such circumstances 
 were granted them; and what is there to which they may not 
 attain with all the world before them ? No ; he who uttered the 
 exclamation of the text must have been a comparatively old man 
 — a man, at all events, who had lived much, who had passed 
 through many vicissitudes ; who had found out with oft-repeated 
 trial how much he could not do of what he once thought him- 
 self capable of doing, the delusiveness of many an apparent 
 possibility. 
 
 ^ There was much in 1850 to sadden Watts ; the want of 
 response, except amongst his own personal friends, to all the 
 enthusiasm with which he had returned to England, full of faith 
 in a revival of great art, was making itself felt with chilling 
 effect year by year. In a moment of depression he writes : " I do 
 not expect at most to have the opportunity of doing more than 
 prepare the way for better men — and not that always; more 
 often I sit among the ruins of my aspirations, watching the tide of 
 time." No wonder that in such a mood he once signed " Finis " in 
 the corner of one of his pictures. But the challenge to despair 
 was given by Mr. Euskin, who, on reading the word, took up the 
 charcoal and added beneath, " et initium." If the end, then a 
 beginning ; and so it proved to be.^ 
 
 2. Perhaps the disillusion which depressed the Psalmist, and 
 for which he had found an antidote in the permanence and 
 magnitude of the Divine law, was not limited to the religious 
 aspect of life only. By his own simple pathway he had reached 
 the conclusion, familiar to modern thinkers, that the present 
 world is not of unimpeachable perfection, but a chaos of knotted 
 problems, amazing anomalies, clashing interests, contending 
 principles. He set out with other views, but he reminds himself 
 that moral processes go on working themselves out upon a scale 
 of immeasurable greatness, when the secular movements which 
 
 * Oeorge Frederic Watts, i. 126. 
 
PSALM cxix. 96 449 
 
 once promised amelioration are threatened with arrest and defeat. 
 God's inward law, larger than the designs appearing in the 
 history of contemporary nations, forms the centre round which 
 his baffled and faltering faith rallies. Spiritual ends are con- 
 tinued in that larger kingdom of the unseen. God's changeless 
 and ever-enlarging law of right satisfies that sense of moral 
 greatness which the course of secular events so often seems to 
 mock. 
 
 H I am old enough to be done with work, only that I feel that 
 my best words have not been said after all, that what has been 
 said is not its full expression. All is incomplete, and I must 
 wait for the fresh, strong life of immortality, in the hope that 
 through the mercy of Him who " knoweth our frame " and our 
 weaknesses, I may be enabled to do better with the talent He has 
 given me than I have done.^ 
 
 ^ The longer we live the less we are inclined to be hero- 
 worshippers, seeing more failings in the men and things we 
 revered in the enthusiasm of youth. " I have seen an end of all 
 perfection " ; but it is well if we can add, " thy commandment is 
 exceeding broad." The more, however, we get to know the 
 temptations and trials of men, and feel how our own accomplish- 
 ment falls short of our ideal, the more charitable we become.^ 
 
 One day I grieved because our greatest gain 
 
 Grows pale beside the smallest loss we feel; 
 
 One hour of wrong can years of right repeal; 
 One faulty link can spoil the strongest chain; 
 One little thorn can cause a cruel pain 
 
 That twice ten thousand roses cannot heal; 
 
 One harsh discordant note can straightway steal 
 All harmony from e'en the sweetest strain. 
 To these my doubts there came an answer sure — 
 
 " God's laws are right if rightly understood ! 
 
 Man's patent of perfection lies in this. 
 That nought imperfect can his soul endure: 
 
 The highest natures seek the highest good 
 
 Till they are perfect as their Father is."^ 
 
 * Life and Letters of J. G. Whittier, ii. 657. 
 
 2 John Ker, Thoughts for Heart and Life, 13. 
 
 ^ Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler, Verses^ Wise or Otherunse, 189. 
 
 PS. xxv.-cxix. — 29 
 
450 
 
 LIBERTY IN GOD'S LAW 
 
 II. 
 
 The Satisfactoriness of GtOd's Law. 
 
 I 1. Everything earthly is only partial; it covers only a part 
 
 1 of life. Whether it be wealth, fame, knowledge, power, it has 
 a limit ; its territory is not commensurate with the whole life of 
 man. Though I have all knowledge, said the Apostle, and under- 
 stand all mysteries, and have not love, it profiteth me nothing. 
 Knowledge is measurable. There are heights and depths of spirit 
 which it cannot fill. There is a limit to it. The only thing 
 ' ; immeasurable is love, for love is the Infinite Himself. Nothing 
 
 \ can endure for ever except that which touches the deeps of life, 
 for that which is only fragmentary and partial must pass away. 
 So there is an end to it also in the sense of termination because 
 the limited must terminate ; and, because there is an end to it, it 
 
 ■ will not satisfy us. We must have something without an end, 
 because the spirit of man is larger than time, larger than any 
 
 , finite period ; and, however man may have sometimes tried in the 
 perverseness of his heart to deny it, he is still a child of 
 
 I immortality, and nothing less than immortality filled to the 
 brim with possession will ever satisfy the yearning of man. 
 " Broad is thy command exceedingly." That is, it is immeasur- 
 able, it has no limit. This must be the Psalmist's meaning, 
 otherwise the contrast fails, and the command of God, being 
 limited, must be declared inadequate like all other perfections. 
 But the word of God has no limit whatsoever. Immeasurable \ 
 As soon as we touch the command of God with our heart and 
 soul and spirit, at once we know that we are at the centre of 
 immeasurableness. It reveals to us straight away the infinite 
 God, the soul, and immortality. 
 
 ! ^ There are two things," said Kant, " that fill me with 
 amazement, the starry heaven above me, and the moral law 
 within me." Both of them immeasurable, stretching away into 
 infinity, with man at the centre of them ; yet God's word is 
 higher than the heavens, and when the moral law has touched 
 the life of man he knows that he belongs to the infinite vast, and 
 cannot be satisfied without it.^ 
 
 ^ J. Thomas. 
 
 \ 
 
PSALM cxix. 96 
 
 451 
 
 ^ Man feels capacities within him that ask an eternity for 
 bloom and fruitage. There is in nature something that sends him 
 in yearning search beyond and above nature. 
 
 That type of perfect in his mind 
 In nature can he nowhere find. 
 He sows himself on every wind. 
 
 In the entire universe, as revealed to man by his senses, there 
 is nothing perfect ; and the central impulse in all man's noblest 
 striving is derived from the aspiration of his spirit towards a 
 perfect truth, a perfect beauty, a perfect happiness, which are 
 exemplified nowhere in the world. Art, religion, and the im- 
 petuous career of the race towards a higher grade of civilization, 
 depend alike upon universal imperfection of the material world 
 and the impossibility that a God-related spirit, which man is, 
 should be contented therewith.^ 
 
 2. Our advance is towards this infinite. It is in an unbroken 
 advance towards it that human excellence consists. The standard 
 of perfection lifts itself on new heights with the march of each 
 new day and month. The perfection of yesterday ceases to be 
 the perfection of to-day, because the commandment is ever adding 
 increments to the demands it makes upon us, and binding the 
 conscience with fresh sanctions. As men are emancipated from 
 the senses and ushered into more delicate spheres of perception 
 and experience, they find themselves face to face with new laws 
 that have to be kept, new decalogues that must be reverently 
 obeyed, new obligations that must be strenuously fulfilled. 
 
 If The law which the God of righteousness, and the Father of 
 all the families of the earth, may impose upon the children of 
 men is obviously larger in its range of applications than the law 
 congruous to the sovereignty of one known chiefly as the Lord of 
 Hosts, and the Defender of an isolated group of clans. The 
 precepts breathed into the conscience by One who has come into 
 immediate converse with His worshippers exceed in scope and 
 /surpass in fine discriminations the precepts enjoined by a Divine 
 ' King who dwells apart and is adored from afar by a people smitten 
 vwith fear because of His majesty. To know the length and 
 I breadth, the depth and height of the love which surpasseth know- 
 i ledge means that the soul is brought face to face with ranges of 
 the commandment hitherto unexplored by human thought. The 
 
 ^ P. Bayne, Lessons from My Masters, 284. 
 
LIBERTY IN GOD'S LAW 
 
 law cannot possibly be the same for an Israelite who stands before 
 the flame-girt Horeb and the believer who bows wondering before 
 the Cross where the Man of Sorrows bears the burdens of man- 
 kind. The commandment is broad before the vision of the man, 
 to whom all life is becoming a theophany.^ 
 
 Christ is the personification not of one part only, but of the 
 whole of the law of God. His character has not the littleness of 
 a mere teacher, nor the narrowness of a hermit or a saint, nor the 
 eccentricity of genius. "His shoulder," as the Prophet says, is 
 broad enough to bear the government " and the sins of the whole 
 world. His mind is wide enough to sympathize with all our 
 infirmities, as well as with all our efforts after good in every 
 J direction. No griefs of life are more trying than those which 
 \ arise from the half-goodness or the half -wisdom of those whom 
 we wish to love and respect. It is when we think of these things 
 that the Perfect Law and the Perfect Mind of Christ is so in- 
 expressibly consoling.2 
 
 3. Unlike that story of the iron shroud or room, which 
 enclosed its prisoner, day by day, within a narrower and narrower 
 circle, the chamber of duty and of God's commandment widens, 
 and opens, and expands with new interests, new enjoyments, new 
 affections, new hopes, at every successive step we take, till we find 
 ourselves at last in that Presence, where there is indeed " fulness 
 of joy and pleasures for evermore." 
 
 Our earthly life, the earthly life of those whom we have 
 known and loved, is cut short by that dark abyss into which we 
 cannot penetrate, and over which our thoughts can hardly pass. 
 But God's commandment — and the fulfilment of God's command- 
 ment — is "exceeding broad"; it is broad enough to span even 
 that wide and deep river which parts this life and the next. 
 For it is this that makes this life and the next life one. Know- 
 ledge, prophecies, gifts of all kinds pass away, but the love of God 
 and the love of man never fail. They continue into the unseen 
 world beyond the grave ; the remembrance of these things, as we 
 have known them here, enables us still to think of them there ; 
 the unselfish purpose, the generous sympathy, the deep affection, 
 the transparent sincerity, the long self-control, the simple humility, 
 of those to whom the commandment of God has been precious— 
 
 1 T. G. Selby, The Strenums Gospel, 394. 
 ^ A. P. Stanley, Serrnons in the Fast, 129. 
 
 J 
 
PSALM cxix. 96 
 
 453 
 
 these are the arches of that bridge on which our thoughts and 
 hopes cross and re-cross the widest and most mysterious of all the 
 chasms which divide us ; the gulf which divides the dead and the 
 living, the gulf which divides God and man. 
 
 ^ In Stark's Life of Murker of Banfif we have this portrait of 
 a church member : The last day on which her pastor saw Elspeth 
 alive he asked, " Have you no fears at all in crossing the Jordan ? " 
 " No," was the reply, " what should I be fear'd for, when I see 
 Him who is the life an' the resurrection on the ither side. His 
 word drives awa' a' the mists. I'm just like a bairn that's been 
 awa' on the fields pu'in' flowers, an' I maun confess whyles chasin' 
 butterflies, and noo when the sun's fa'en I'm gaun toddlin' hame. 
 I've a wee bit burnie to cross ; but, man, there's the stappin'-stanes 
 o' His promises, an' wi' my feet firm on them, I've nae cause tae 
 fear." After awhile she again opened her lips, and was heard to 
 say, " He is wi' me in the swellings of Jordan." ^ 
 
 III. 
 
 The Value of Dissatisfaction. 
 
 i 1. The Psalmist had desired and purposed to keep God's law, 
 to be and to do the best according to his light, and had never been 
 able to accomplish his object, had been always falling short of it ; 
 the perfection he craved and sought had always evaded him ; he 
 had striven worthily, and had more or less done worthily too ; but 
 it did not satisfy him — there was an excellence to be reached that 
 was not reached. Or he had had conceptions of duty that had 
 seemed to him all-comprehending, embracing all that could be 
 required of him. Here, he had thought, was the whole duty of 
 man ; but in acting out, or endeavouring to act out, these concep- 
 tions, others, larger and loftier, had risen upon him. In follow- 
 ing his standard of right, the standard rose, leaving him far 
 behind when he fancied himself nigh ; in yielding to the demands 
 of conscience', the demands increased ; the more he did, the more 
 his obligation grew ; so that he would have said with a modern 
 poet — 
 
 I see the wider but I sigh the more. 
 Most progress is most failure. 
 
 1 J. Stark, John Murker of Banff, 188. 
 
454 
 
 LIBERTY IN GOD'S LAW 
 
 Nothing satisfied the Psalmist; the present discredited the 
 past, only to be in its turn discredited; every seeming fulness 
 proved shortly an illusion, and why ? Because a Divine command- 
 ment had been revealed to him which continually transcended all, 
 which was continually showing something more and greater to 
 be done, and continually urging him on when any height was 
 gained. The more he looked into it, the more it enlarged for 
 him the field of duty. When he fancied he had fulfilled all, it 
 would straightway be whispering in his ear some fresh claim; 
 when he meditated repose, it would still be disturbing him. Had 
 he not known this commandment, he might have known the peace 
 of satisfaction ; it was its presence with, and pressure on, him that 
 made an end of perfection, and kept him always discontented with 
 the best that had been wrought. Yet our Psalmist would not 
 have been without the commandment. " Oh, how I love thy law ! " 
 he cries, in the very next verse. This, in fact, was his distinction, 
 his dignity, and blessedness — that he had it to his perpetual rest- 
 lessness and dissatisfaction, and could not be as careless and 
 happy as the heathen, though he should propose to be; that 
 he had a vision of the right and of the good which robbed 
 him of ease, and before which every highest attainment paled 
 to poorness. 
 
 ( Here is the beautiful Divine secret of our troubled dissatisfac- 
 ? tion with things ; that we bear within us a commandment greater 
 than ourselves, and are more than we are or can be. Our ever- 
 lasting sense of limitation means that our illimitableness, our 
 unappeasable hunger is due to our self-transcending capacity; 
 nothing contents us because we are more than everything, because 
 we are not a mere part of the visible system, but include, so to 
 speak, something supernatural; capabilities, susceptibilities, not ■ 
 adjusted like the powers of other creatures to the scope and / 
 conditions of this mortal life, but overshooting them. And here, / 
 in the grander than ourselves, or the world — for the world is j 
 ' always insufficient for it, and we are always inferior to it — here 
 in the grander than ourselves or the world which, possessing us, 
 , keeps us ever insatiable, ever unable to find perfection, let the 
 ; world yield us what it will, or let us grow to what we may — here 
 is the God of whom we dream and never hear or see, and whom 
 men seek in vain to prove. 
 
PSALM cxix. 96 
 
 455 
 
 We feel, do we not ? that we are capable of developments in 
 knowledge and virtue which are never reached, that we are 
 always imperfect at our best and greatest, and yet that there is 
 no goodness or greatness to which we may not aspire ; that there 
 are no limits to our possible progress. We are burdened with an 
 ideal which, strive and attain as we may, is always reproaching, 
 depreciating, condemning us, always looking down on us with eyes 
 of disdain. There is that in us which declares continually that 
 we might be and ought to be what we cannot be, what with all 
 our wistfulness and effort we are perpetually hindered from being. 
 And what does it signify but that we are invaded by the Infinite 
 — that God is in us ? Our weary unrest, our successive disen- 
 chantments and disappointments, our scorn of what we have 
 gained or wrought, our sighs, as we " look before and after, and 
 pine for what is not " — these are the hints and tokens of God. 
 
 If Inward distaste — emptiness — discontent. Is it trouble of 
 conscience, or sorrow of heart ? or the soul preying upon itself ? 
 or merely a sense of strength decaying and time running to waste ? 
 Is sadness — or regret — or fear — at the root of it ? I do not know : 
 but this dull sense of misery has danger in it ; it leads to rash 
 efforts and mad decisions. 0 for escape from self, for something 
 to stifle the importunate voice of want and yearning ! Discontent 
 is the father of temptation. How can we gorge the invisible 
 serpent hidden at the bottom of our well, — gorge it so that it may 
 sleep ? At the heart of all this rage and vain rebellion there lies 
 — what ? Aspiration, yearning ! We are athirst for the infinite 
 — for love — for I know not what. It is the instinct of happiness, 
 which like some wild animal is restless for its prey. It is God 
 calling — God avenging Himself.^ 
 
 2. It would not answer even for the Christian who has meant 
 to surrender his will, and really wants to be perfected in the will 
 of God, to be made safe in his plans and kept in continual train 
 of successes. He wants a reminder every hour — some defeat, 
 surprise, adversity, peril ; to be agitated, mortified, beaten out of 
 his courses, so that all that remains of self-will in him may be sifted 
 out of him, and the very scent of his old perversity cleared. If 
 we could be excused from all these changes and somersets, and go 
 on securely in our projects, it would ruin the best of us. Life 
 
 ^ AmieVs Journal (trans, by Mrs. Humphry Ward), 271. 
 
456 LIBERTY IN GOD'S LAW 
 
 needs to have an element of danger and agitation, — perilous, 
 changeful, eventful ; we need to have our evil will met by 
 the stronger will of God, in order to be kept advised, by our 
 experience, of the impossibility of that which our sin has under- 
 taken. It would not do for us to be uniformly successful even in 
 our best meant and holiest works, our prayers, our acts of 
 sacrifice, our sacred enjoyments; for we should very soon fall 
 back into the subtle power of our self-will, and begin to imagine, 
 in our vanity, that we are doing something ourselves. Even here 
 we need to be defeated and baffled now and then, that we may 
 be shaken out of our self-reliance and sufficiency, else the taste of 
 our evil habits remains in us, and our scent is not changed. 
 
 We trust and fear, we question and believe, 
 From life's dark threads a trembling faith to weave, 
 Frail as the web that misty night has spun, 
 Whose dew-gemmed awnings glitter in the sun. 
 
 While the calm centuries spell their lessons out. 
 Each truth we conquer spreads the realm of doubt; 
 When Sinai's summit was Jehovah's throne, 
 The chosen Prophet knew His voice alone; 
 When Pilate's hall that awful question heard. 
 The heavenly Captive answered not a word. 
 
 Eternal Truth ! beyond our hopes and fears 
 Sweep the vast orbits of thy myriad spheres! 
 From age to age, while history carves sublime 
 On her waste rock the flaming curves of time. 
 How the wild swayings of our planet show 
 That worlds unseen surround the world we know.^ 
 
 ^ Oliver Wendell Holmes. 
 
 Printed by Morrison & Gtbb L™itki), Ttdinhwrcfh