MB IjALlJ.M.UAI.IJ.M.IJ.U.I.mAI.I.I.LIJJ.LIil.lAl.l.l.l.l.l.l.m.lJ.I.LI.I.I.LI.I.I.LI.nag YALE UNIVERSITY Xibrarg of the Btoinitg 3choo! GIFT OF | Douglas Qlgie Macintosh ( DWIGHT PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY : DWIGHT PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY AND f PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION f 1916-1942 .O. W and ruled their will. Theirs was a turbulent • world, not to be governed by soft sentiment, but . needing soundest moral sense. They pitied ^ weakness and tried to change it into strength, n? but pity was not allowed a place that was not its o >>h a 2 THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM. own. It was compelled to serve moral ends in a moral way. Men had to do right and to obey righteousness in order that they might end the reign of lawless might, and bring in sweeter manners, purer laws. And so they came to the Old Testament with the sympathy that gives understanding. Its God was one of mercy but also of justice, to whom man had to give com- pletest obedience. A more terrible thing than sin man could not know, or a higher and mt arduous thing than holiness he could not seek. And so here he learned to know and fear sin, to love holiness and to aspire after the holiness he loved. We have fallen on softer days. We are easily moved to pity, but a pity that is often more a luxury to the man that feels it than a help to the man for whom it is felt. We fear suffering, dis like to see it, or to think of it, but we suffer it to be all the same. Our pity is keen enough to feel, but not strong enough to heal and to help. And our mood is reflected in our spiritual affini ties and preferences. We feel in the New Testa ment a sweetness, as men love to phrase it, and a light that is attractive and is gracious. There we seem to have a congenial atmosphere, which THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM. 3 we can restfully breathe, and feel life more worth living. The sterner Old Testament is alien, and we cannot so well appreciate what it teaches and what it means. We forget that while the New is tender, it is the tenderness of moral majesty, not of emotional pity. If it is sweet, it is the sweetness of a spirit reconciled to law, and pene trated by the law to which it is reconciled ; not the sentiment that loves to weep, but does not ;jre to act and to bear. We forget that the New Testament is built on the Old, and apart from the Old could not be. The God that is Father in the New is Sovereign in the Old, and the new Fatherhood cannot be divorced from the old Sovereignty. The grace that came by Christ implied the law that came by Moses ; and if Christ redeemed from the law of Moses, it was that He might reconcile to the law of God. And so if we are to understand the New, it can only be by coming to it through the Old. It is as we find the Old in the New that we discover the New in the Old, and realise that all the mercy and the grace that appeared in Jesus Christ im plied and required all the holiness and all the righteousness that came by Moses and the prophets. 4 THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM. I. THE PSALTER AND THE PSALM. But when men feel estranged in spirit from the sterner and stronger elements of the Old Testament, they would do well to remember the riches of grace and truth it contains. In many ways the one cannot be compared with the other. There is no history in the Old Testament that can be placed beside the histories of the New. All the saints of the olden time, however bright they may be, are like the sun, "dashed with wandering isles of night." There is passion in them, and evil, strong tendencies to man's strong est sins. Only in the ideal picture of One who is the servant of God and the sufferer for man do we find the beautiful and the perfect character we love. But in the Gospels there stands in His imperishable loveliness, in His beautiful and perfect holiness, He who alone of men could, unanswered, give the challenge, "Which of you convinceth Me of sin ? " and He remains forever- more the holy, the harmless, the undented, the separate from sinners. Nor have we in the Old Testament any that can compare with Paul, the man so eagle of eye as to read the inmost mean ing of the law ; so strenuous of thought as to THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM. 5 carry us back into the very purpose of God, and seek through it to explain man and time; so inflexible of will, yet gracious of heart, as to live for the reconciliation of the world to God. Nor have we any writer in the Old Testament that can with John bear us from our turbulent time back into the heart of the Father, making us feel the love of the Eternal, and see the world, as it were, with the eyes of God, and God with eyes full of His own light. While these features of distinction and pre eminence compel us to feel the supremacy of the New Testament over the Old, there is one element in which the Old transcends the New. Think, were it not for the Old, we should be without those spiritual songs which supply us with the fittest speech in which to address the eternal God. Here we need higher speech than we ourselves can frame. Man, if he is to know the awed and reverent hour of worship, must have nobler words than his poor thought can make, expressions of higher emotions than his tame spirit can feel. There is wondrous power , in song to consecrate^ and ennoble. " Let me make the songs of a people, and I care not who makes their laws," said Fletcher of Saltoun, and 6 THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM. he said well. To make the songs is to shape those emotions, fancies, ideals, ends, that are the highest because the most nobly embodied law enhearted in the heart. The man that can give to the spirit of a people its highest tone, its deepest conviction, its loftiest expression, will determine its truest purpose and noblest en deavours. There are men who visit the land I best know and most love, and they admire its beauty — the silvery Tweed flowing between its storied banks, past its mouldering monasteries, and through fields where almost every footstep wakes echoes of feud and foray, love and death ; they admire, too, its mountains clothed with the purple heather, and its streams where the mottled trout invite the angler to come and ply his gentle craft, and they think its stately lochs and rivers beautiful to the eye and to the imagination, as they sleep or dance in their radiant summer beauty. But for a man to know and feel the meaning of the land he must know its songs, and how they consecrate its streams and make its lone glens and cairns significant of days that are past, and deeds of heroism that were not achieved in vain. Only as the living imagina tion quickened by the living heart transfigures THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM. 7 nature, does the nature become significant. And if the poetry that idealises be so necessary to the interpretation and revelation of a land, then ere man can feel the full meaning that even for himself alone lives in the name of God, he must see Him, as it were, steeped in poetry, pene trated and transfigured by song, translated into speech higher than the speech of common day, full of the mystic passion that seeks the Eternal, and loves to lose our temporal being in Him. And this is the function which the Psalter fulfils. It is the book of song which gives to the dumb spirit speech fit for the presence of God. It is the poetry which idealises God for the spirit. And what it does for our sense of God it also does for our feeling of man in relation to Him. These psalms come to us steeped in loved memo ries. The words that tell us of God as our Shep herd raise the tender image of the mother who first taught us so to think and speak of Him ; and they make us feel in the direct succession of the holy spirits from whom we received our being and our faith. Think how wondrous has been the life of a psalm like this, and how impossible it were to write its history! Men who learned 8 THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM. to use it in childhood have found it in age change the " shadow feared of man " into the translucent veil of a gracious immortality. By its words penitents have been lifted out of despondency and despair into joyous peace. Thousands of years have passed since it first rose from the heart of the man who made it. For centuries it was sung in old Judea by Hebrew tongues. Captives who sat by the rivers of Babel, and wept as they remembered Zion, dried their tears and became hopeful as they sang the Lord's song in the strange land, though their joy turned to sadness when their captors demanded that the voice of piety be changed into the sounds of mirth. Men in the Maccabean wars, who trusted their heroic leaders and so became heroes themselves, as they watched by the river of Zion that made glad the city of their God, came to feel that they could meet the might of the world by a greater might, and so took comfort in disaster and grew strong for victory as they sang of Jehovah who guided and gave rest. Shepherds abiding in the fields and keeping watch over their flocks by night, as they heard sweet and rhythmic speech -of promise and good-will fall THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM. 9 from heaven, may well have broken into far- sounding and ascending song in praise of Him who fed Joseph like a flock, gathered the lambs with His arm, carried them in His bosom, and gently led those who were with young. Men who had seen the Good Shepherd lay down His life for the sheep, and who loved to meet in Roman catacombs, or crowded cities, or still and desert places, that they might remember Him, grew happy and cheerful and holy as they sang to "the Lord our Shepherd." And since then, who can tell the thousands who, while seeking in dark ages the clearer light, or in days of stress and trouble and persecu tion, such as our fathers knew, when faithful men were hunted on moors, and had to hide in wild glens and caves of the earth, or to endure the dungeon, have taken courage and grown peaceful by the help of this sweet song ? And now we, met here apart from the crowd and turmoil of the city, men and women with the sin, and the passion, and the pity, and the need, and the doubt of to-day, may yet clasp hands with the innumerable multitude behind us, and journey with them in thought and spirit, chanting to Him who binds past and IO THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM. present into one, the song : " The Lord is our Shepherd ; we shall not want." These Psalms, then, have had a very high and holy function alike for our individual and collec tive life ; and as the years advance we feel this function grow higher and holier. We need speech that shall make us feel the awfulness and the majesty of God. I am sick of the loathsome lusciousness of those modern hymns we use of God — the language of sensuous sentiment or amorous devotion. They teach us to sing of " dear Jesus," or the " sweet Saviour ; " or the Church forlorn and distressed ; or in praise of " Paradise, O Paradise," and they tell us that only to think of it is to " long for rest." These things emasculate faith and impoverish piety. What we need is to feel awed and obedient in the presence of the God who made us that we might serve Him, and who claims our service. We dare not long for rest while He asks of us work. We dare not think of the Church as for lorn which He has made militant. We dare not use the sweet terms of the callow lover of One whose very condescension is an act of majesty. It is the majesty of God rather than the asstheti- cism of man that ought to inspire our worship. THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM. II These luscious hymns, with all their meanly gorgeous accompaniments, are teaching us to feel as if religion were more a form of sensuous luxury than a strenuous exercise and discipline of the spirit ; and they are tending to throw the J emphasis on man's part in it to the suppression of God's. We feel as if worship were the crea tion of a fragrant atmosphere and musical speech in honour of Deity, which are excellent in the degree that they afford joy, pleasure, and satis faction to man ; but we forget that the speech of God, prophetic, evangelical, apostolical, is needed, in order, by bringing Him down into our midst, to lift us up into His presence. For in worship there must be a double activity — God's as well as man's. Praise and prayer are our acts, but the creative inspiration is His. If all the energy is ours, we but speak into vacancy ; He must possess our spirits that our acts may be done unto Him and as in His presence. And so worship is not made perfect by a sensuous har mony that knows no discord, but by soul and conscience so open to God that spiritual, moral, evangelical, eternal truth shall come from Him out of heaven into our hearts, to make us fit for living and capable of dying. The older ideal of 12 THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM. worship created the older strength, which was yet so winsome and genial and tender, because so awed by the presence and so subdued by the gentleness of the God who was the Shepherd of men. II. THE PSALM AND THE PSALMIST. This is said to be " A Psalm of David," but the man who made the Psalm did not write the superscription. It was added by some later hand, the scribe or editor who arranged the Psalter. Who made it no man can tell, and it is what no man need know to feel its inspiration. A song or prayer may be all the mightier for being nameless, for then it is not so much a man's as a people's; it lives as the voice, not of a person or a time, but of the race and the ages. And here the true and enduring things are not those peculiar to any individual, but those that are common, personal to each, yet universal as man. But if this Psalm was to stand under any man's name, there was none fitter than David's. It embodies his spirit; it is like the clarified soul of all he thought and purposed and achieved, so incarnated as to breathe forevermore the quickening breath THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM. 1 3 of life. And the ideal truth is made more real by being wedded to an actual person. For let us think what manner of man David was. Born a peasant, he yet became a monarch, the ideal king and poet of his people. In the sheepfold, where he tuned his pipe as he watched his flocks, and used his sling that he might guard his lambs, he learned how to fill the highest office in the state. The music which had charmed his own soul he used to subdue the savage in the breast of Saul; yet he suffered from the savage he could not wholly expel. The man who had failed to be a king saw and feared and hated the king in the man he had taken from the sheep- fold and the hills of Bethlehem, where he had watched the great stars that globed themselves in heaven, and the sun coming out of the east like a bridegroom from his chamber, and the moon that walked at night in beauty. But to be hated of Saul was to be loved of the people ; and in a tempestuous time, when a strong hand was needed to create order, he came to the throne by the natural right which most surely expresses the divine vocation. Yet he was by no means a sinless man. Strong passions were in him ; they had slumbered in the simple life of 14 THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM. the hillside and the sheepfold; they had been held in check by necessity when he had to rule the lawless spirits of Adullam ; they had been governed by discipline and duty when he had to be the active and organising head of a still chaotic state ; but they still lived within him, unvanquished, waiting their opportunity. And this opportunity came when, depraved by suc cess, he forgot his duty as a man and his work as a king, and clothed himself with pride. It was then that temptation fell upon him, and he stained his soul with sins which made him an offender against God, a reproach to man, and a shame to his kingdom. We may explain, but we dare not extenuate, his sin. He was an Oriental, and passion lives under the hot Eastern sun. He was a king, but virtue is hard to the man who feels no limit to his power save the fear of God. He was an Oriental king in a rude age when passions were as free as they were violent. His sin was but an ordinary and venial offence for his day and rank. What was extraordinary was his remorse for it ; and whence came this remorse ? Crime is against the law of man, which can be satisfied with punishment; sin is against God, who can THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM. 1 5 be satisfied only by the renunciation of the sin and the repentance of the sinner. So in the sense of crime there is but fear of law; in the sense of sin there is the horror of a soul estranged from the only Source of its life. And this was what possessed David. If manhood loses self-restraint, the loss is more utter than when lost by youth ; and it is more seldom regained. But here there was recovery. For the man who had greatly sinned deeply repented, and out of his repentance came the sorrow, the suffering, the shame that even the forgiveness of God could not altogether remove, though His grace changed them into new sources of in spiration and song. The highest saint is he who never knew sin; the humblest saint is he who through utter remorse for sin passes into the completest surrender to God. Learn from David that it is better so to live as never to need repentance ; but if you have so lived as to need it, then let your repentance be the renunciation of all sin and the pursuit of all holiness. But this Psalm, if it was David's, came before his sin. It has a purity as of innocence, while sin stains not only the soul, but all it touches. 1 6 THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM. It can never be the same soul after that it was before the sin. The wound may heal, but the scar remains. But here there is trace neither of wound nor scar. We may say, then, that this is a young man's psalm, not an old man's. Youth is in its elevation, its sense of joy in nature ; its very trouble, yet peace in the face of death. Death is not to an old what it is to a young man. The old man reconciles himself to death, and feels as if it were part of nature. He has known life in its bitterness, known man in his weakness ; has come to feel that it is better that life be rounded and completed by death than drawn out to an indefinite length. But to a young man death is a contradiction of all he thinks and feels. His being seems to be des tined for eternity ; and for an eternal being to be confronted and ended by death, is, as it were, to be in his very essence abolished or unmade. He feels, therefore, that death has no right to be; that for man to pass under it is to endure something he was never intended to suffer. And so the young think more of death than the old; feel death to be more terrible, more a contradiction than a fulfilment of being. But here faith fulfils its promise, and the presence THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM. VJ of God changes the death that dissolves our mortal being into the way to immortality. If this Psalm, then, is David's, it belongs to the period when the future monarch was still the shepherd. Nature and life were to him parables which he interpreted into revelations of God. He saw in his own shepherd's thoughtfulness for his flock and care for the individual lambs a type of God's providence for man. As his sheep lay and fed on the green pastures, or wandered in the sultry days of summer beside the still waters, he thought of himself held in the hands of God. As he went watchful into some dark valley, prepared to defend his lambs against the lions or bears that lodged amid the crags and trees of its frowning sides, he found himself treading the way down to death, and felt that, guarded by the rod and staff of God, he would fear no evil. And then as he thought of the rest beyond the dark valley, there came into his mind the image of a pleasant land and a kindly host, who had just welcomed a hungry, footsore, and dusty traveller, and washed his feet, anointed his head, and set before him a full and rich re past; and in all this he saw the picture of his own soul wearied but saved, entering into the 1 8 THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM. house of God to abide in blessedness forever. Surely that was to the Psalmist a happy pros pect. A life here spent in green and watered places under the guardian care of God; a life hereafter passed in His house amid fulness of joy and peace forevermore; and between, the valley of death, lying, indeed, in sable shadow, but the presence of God making light about his spirit, and the rod and staff of God giving to his soul quietness and assurance. Even so, " let me live the life of the righteous, and let my last end be like his." THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM II. THE EXPOSITION THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM. ii. THE EXPOSITION. " The Lord is my Shepherd ; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures : He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul : He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil : for Thou art with me ; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies : Thou anointest my head with oil ; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life : and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever." — Ps. xxiii. iir~T^HE Lord." I do not like this word A. Lord. It expresses an idea altogether alien to the term it represents. "The Lord" translates here the name we so often use as Jehovah, without knowing what it means, but to the men that used it, it was a most significant name. It said, God is, He alone is, all others seem to be. It further said, He is a Person ; for 22 THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM. you use a name that describes Him as " He who is" — a living, conscious, personal Will. But it said more : He is One who stands by His word, who abides by His promise. Why did Israel come to be ? God had chosen him. Why had God chosen him ? For His own ends, not for those of Israel. To name God, therefore, "He who stands by His promise," was to say, What God purposed He will perform. He. can never be false to Himself, and this is the highest of all standards of faithfulness and truth. Men often say, God will be faithful to His promise; but this is the very lowest kind and measure of faithfulness. For higher than the faithfulness to His spoken or His written word, is His faithfulness to God. Were a child of ours to trust us no further than we had given him black and white for it — the cold but authentic terms of a legal or a written bond — would there be any trust at all ? The bond might be trusted, but not the parent; the bond supplanting the loving and personal trust which is equal joy to the father and to the child. So God is to be trusted for what He is, not simply for what He has said. He is made known in His Word, but only that He may be trusted far beyond THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM. 23 it. Here we walk by faith, yet faith that is grander than sight. If I trust Him who has made me, then I can feel everywhere in His presence and always at home. The name Jehovah, then, ought not to be translated by a term merely expressive of dominion — owner ship on the one side and bondage on the other ; still less, as a late distinguished critic recom mended, by " the Eternal," for " the Eternal " is but an abstract phrase, denotive of duration, but giving no character, ascribing no moral quality to what endures. Jehovah is a covenant name, expresses the love and care of Him who makes the covenant for those on whose behalf it is made ; and they, when they use it, confess their love of Him and abiding faith in His faithfulness. Hence, if we must translate it, the fittest word were "Father." What God is as Father to us, He was as Jehovah to Israel. No distant sovereign, no autocratic king, no arbitrary monarch, but a gracious God, faithful to Himself and therefore to men. "My Shepherd." We have even greater dif ficulty in understanding the word " Shepherd " than Jehovah. We are too modern to realise what it means. We understand the successful 24 THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM. merchant — the man that makes his fortune, that builds his barns and fills them to bursting. We understand the successful legislator — the man who by eloquence persuades the people, and works through the people his will. We understand the successful soldier — the man who can, out of a multitude of men, make one vast machine that he can, as it were, hurl at an enemy and break him into pieces. We under stand the city and its ways ; the author and his works. But the shepherd lies away far behind us, or out in phases of society so simple as to be alien to us and to our modes of thought and life. But think what shepherd meant to the ancient Hebrew men. Abraham was a shep herd, and had watched his flocks by his tent door at Mamre. Isaac was a shepherd, who walked in quiet meditation through his fields and amid his herds in the still eventide. Jacob was a shepherd, whose pastoral life was a strange blending of idyllic beauty and lust of gain. Moses was a shepherd, and was tending the flocks of Jethro his father-in-law when he saw the bush that burned yet was not consumed, and was called to be the saviour and lawgiver of his people. David was a shepherd, and was THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM. 2$ taken from the sheepfold, where he had tended the flocks great with young, to be the lord and the king of Israel. And so the fondest and most ideal memories of the Hebrew men were pastoral and steeped in pastoral associations. The men who most symbolised God's care for His own people had lived the simple shepherd's life. What, then, so fit as that they should think of God under this, to them, holy and hal lowed form? The great Father was the tender Shepherd of loving men ; He watched the young, tended the feeble, called home the errant, was ever" ready with His gracious and helpful pres ence, and His guardian and helpful eye to seek and to save. The word was significant to the men, "The Lord is my Shepherd." All I can be to my flock God is to me. But God acts according to the name He bears, and His people's experiences correspond to His action. There is the most comprehensive trust : " I shall not want " — neither now nor at any future period, whether as to body or soul, in time or in eternity. The assurance is most positive, but the expectation most modest. It is not, " I shall have wealth or abundance ; God will make this the best of all possible worlds for 26 THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM. me ; " but simply, " I shall not want." Yet it is large. " Not to want " is to be wholly satisfied, and this surely is the wealthiest state. Many a rich man has had a devouring sense of poverty, because devoid of the only good that can satisfy. Leanness of flesh may bring the truest blessing, just as the most awful famine God can send is fatness of flesh and leanness of soul. Want is just the desire to possess what we are conscious of not possessing ; and if the thing we desire be in its own nature unsatisfying, it is impossible that we can ever be satisfied. And this is the state of the want that is poverty. Men who feel it are devoured by care, and suffer more from anticipation of want than from the want they anticipate. If a man will take over out of the hands of Providence into his own as it were the very responsibilities of God, he will be a miser able god unto himself. But it is needful to be clear as to what trust means. We trust God by serving, not by leaving all to the God we trust. To fail to be dutiful is to distrust. " Take no thought for the morrow " does not mean " do no work to-day." Rather it means, To-day must be filled with duty, that thought may be free from care, and to-morrow full of happiness. THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM. 27 He who would face life with the feeling that he will not want, must face it as the birds of the air do, doing in each day the duty fit for it, doing in each season the duty fit for it, remem bering this, that the basis of all right to trust in God is obedience to the God that is trusted. Only, therefore, as duty is done, as man obeys, has he a right to say, " I shall not want." " He maketh me to lie down in green pas tures." Think how beautiful and suggestive the " green " is. " Green pastures." We hardly, in deed, know the gratefulness of greenery, for it is everywhere in this country, and we need never feel its want. Men come out of the East and out of the West to this land of rich green grass and of turf centuries old, and soft underfoot, and as they walk over it and look at it with eyes full of pleasure, they ask wondering, How came 'it to be ? Familiarity has made us so insensible to its beauty that we do not hunger after it, in eye and foot and soul, as does the traveller of the desert or the voyager of the sea. But away in the land where this Psalm was written, green was so grateful because so rare. The hot sun high overhead, the blistering sand underfoot, and the dry river-bed by the wayside, 28 THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM. make the shepherd suffer with his weary flock; and they panted together and in sympathy for the soft, shady, greenery and the grateful brook. And into pleasant and sheltered places God leads the man who trusts in Him. " He maketh me to lie down in green pastures." " He leadeth me beside the still waters." As the green pastures are grateful, so still waters are soothing. There is music in the soft sound — " The noise like of a hidden brook In the leafy month of June, That to the sleeping woods all night Singeth a quiet tune." And what sounds so softly creeps into the soul and creates rest and peace. Did you ever seek to escape from the sound and sights and pres sure of a crowded city, that you might rest far from the haunts of passionate and eager men ? In such a mood you love a quietness which the murmur of the madding crowd cannot reach to disturb ; and, perhaps, you have sought it in a Highland glen, remote from cities. But bicker ing down the glen comes a Highland burn, brawling as it leaps from stone to stone, or rushes round the boulder that bars its way and THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM. 29 divides its waters. And all night through in the lonely inn you have lain awake listening to the brook, as it babbled and brawled, until the pleasant has become a fretful sound, and you have wished to be beside stiller waters. But when you need a quiet as well as a shady place, and are led of God, He will guide you beside streams that by their very murmurs make sweet ness and beget repose. " He giveth His beloved sleep ; " and, in the sleep of God, blissful rest and holy refreshment shall most surely come. Rest in such lives as we are forced to live has a great and necessary place. We all know the season of exhaustion, when the lightest effort is a burden. In all duty there is endeavour, in all endeavour toil. Where work has become but play it has ceased to be discipline, and even spontaneous effort spends energy that must be repaired and restored. Idleness is more tiring than work; indolence is at once the most exhausting labour and the most exacting master. But to those who have not the monotonous weariness of idleness, but the constant exhilara tion of work, rest must come lest they faint by the way ; for we live in a mixed world, where there is friction and strain enough to create 30 THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM. weariness and exhaustion, even if we had noth ing in ourselves. We all of us have at times to meet or work with men whose speech provokes and whose very presence pains. It is not given to many to have a completely congenial sphere, and we all know the mood when to transact business is a misery, and to be active in its modes or ways a reproach or a shame. Even the ministry of the home, where love reigns and where it is made to sweeten the bitter things of life, has an exhaustion of its own. There are wives and mothers, matrons and widows, who suffer day by day from the hard and anxious labour of making the two refractory ends of a diminishing income and an enlarging expen diture meet and harmonise. We have still with us Martha with her trouble of much serving, and Mary with her inconsolable sorrow. We meet and admire the chastened face without knowing the issue of blood it hides, that has been running unseen for years ; we enjoy the jest which plays on the witty tongue, but we do not know the care which is eating out the heart. Yet, what ever the state or need of man, one thing is clear — that to him who trusts in God and lives in daily fellowship with Him, there shall come rest THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM. 3 1 and refreshment. " He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters." " He restoreth my soul." Rest brings resto ration ; freshness comes out of refreshment. The rest which is taken for its own sake, only the more worries and wearies. The rest that is taken because duty has made it needful, and work has earned it, "restoreth the soul." The man lives after it as if he were a new man ; work becomes a pleasure ; the renewed strength loves new exercise. So, when God has refreshed, He shows the way to duty and new endeavour. " He leadeth me in the paths of righteous ness " — which are ever the right paths ; often steep and thorny, but ever with a gracious end ing. "The path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day." For He who leads has the highest end in view — "for His name's sake." The end God conducts us to is one that becomes His fatherly character and purpose. He acts in a way worthy of Himself, and for us God's ends must ever remain better than our own, "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil." The figure 32 THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM. is still pastoral. The flock that has rested in the green meadow and by the still waters must seek fresh fields and pastures new ; but between the new fields and the old lies a gloomy and frowning gorge. In it is no water, or verdure, or any green thing. On either hand rise the steep hillsides, covered with mighty boulders haunted by wild beasts, frequented by the hunted and hunting robber, pierced by the cave that hides one knows not what. To walk under its deep shadow and below its beetling cliffs is to feel the impotence of the man who moves within it and the danger of the flock he guards. Be hind every boulder the beast of prey may lurk ; in the deep shadows cruel eyes may watch the favourable moment for the deadly spring. And the gloom and the terror affect the flock even more than the shepherd. In him is courage, foresight, strength, and will ; in them is cowering fear of nature and dependence on him. Where he is they fear no evil ; without him, fear were the master and they its slave. But to feel con fidence in him is to be freed from danger and its terrors, which are the greatest danger of all. So does the writer think, not of death, but of the valley of the shadow. THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM. 33 It is dying that is terrible, and it is terrible as a shadow, for what it may hide, and not as a sub stance, or a reality, for what it is. There are many who do not fear death, but fear dying, though alike in death and dying, where the presence of God is, while there may be dark ness, there can be no terror. There may be the long valley, but there is the gracious comfort of His presence. And what is the shadow to him beside whom God walks, save the light from beyond, which makes darkness in the eye that gazes full in its face ? The radiance that streams out of eternity dazzles the vision like excess of light; but though excess of light be another name for darkness, it is a darkness in which we feel the strength of God and fear not any foe. Enough that He who leads guides us through the shadow into His own eternal home. "Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies : Thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over." The figure is most fitly changed. Instead of the shepherd there is now the host. We can imag ine the scene ; the valley of the shadow of death has been passed, and the shepherd has led his flock out into a clear and open space. Behind 34 THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM. him gather the dark faces and forms that had made the terror of the way ; but before him is a spacious tent, and a table laden with refresh ment and food, and a gracious host who receives the traveller and his wearied flock. He is led into the tent, and there the cooling and grateful oil is poured upon his head; his blistered feet are bathed; he is clothed in new raiment and then is led forth, and set down at the prepared table, while the enemies that had thronged in the valley see his safety and envy his rest. The table is not a mere figure of speech for food ; it speaks of entertainment, and cheer, and friend ship. He who invites us to his home and table gives us more than a meal. Hospitality is not charity. Charity may simply feed the hungry and clothe the naked ; but hospitality welcomes the friend, opens the house and makes it into the home, and says : " Use it as if it were thine own, and whatsoever thou requirest ask, and it shall be given unto thee." So in the mansion of the Father we shall enjoy not the charity but the hos pitality of God. His mansion is the home of His sons. So when the trouble of dying is over, and the Shepherd has led the troubled soul through, when THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM. 35 the last look of time has been taken, the last word uttered, and the last kiss been given and received, then the shadow lifts, the night of death breaks into the morning of heaven, and the soul stands in eternity before the open and gracious face of God. The sorrows of the way are all forgotten, the eternal rest has come, and, in the festival of reconciliation and return, the soul sits at the table of the Father. " Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life : and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever." THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF RELIGION THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF RELIGION. " Pure religion and undenled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world." — James i., 27. JAMES is rich in the practical wisdom the Hebrew loved, the wisdom whose natural speech is the proverb, whose organ is a sort of transcendent common sense. He is the pre eminent Apostle of Christian duty in its homeliest aspects and most every-day actions and functions. The men who made up his Church, which was indeed his world, were better in creed than in conduct, and what he said were the things they most needed to hear. Men who are careful of the major often neglect the minor moralities of life, and hardly know they do it. There are many who think that, provided they speak the truth, it does not much matter how or for what purpose they speak it — nay, that it is all the 40 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF RELIGION. better and more useful if it be so spoken as to wound a neighbour or serve a selfish end. They forget what one of the supremest moralists said : " Speak the truth in love." Not otherwise, indeed, will the truth consent to be spoken. Where it is spoken in hate it ceases to be true, becomes false as the spirit that speaks it. The man who uses the truth that he may hurt or wrong a brother man, changes it into a lie. What is used for a devil's purpose becomes a devil's tool. What a man receives from God must be employed for ends God approves, and in ways He honours, that it may do the Work of God in the man and through him. Inconsist encies of this order James had an eye quick to see, a tongue sharp to reprove. To him the worst heresy was a life which contradicted the faith, making profession of the right while leaving practice in the wrong. Like John, he held that the best thing for a man was not to say, but to do the truth, to love God by loving his brother. Without this there could not be the truth of nature that most surely secured truth of speech. God is love; and so only he who dwelt in love could truly do and truly speak the truth of God. Other men might seem to be religious, but THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF RELIGION. 4 1 religious those alone were who, "swift to hear, slow to speak," lived as in the sight of God, benevolent, beneficent, blameless in the world. In this twenty-seventh verse James supplies us with what is not so much a definition as a description of " pure and undefiled religion." It concludes a paragraph, and to understand the verse we must follow the argument that leads up to it. The paragraph begins at verse 19 : "Ye know this, my beloved brethren." Hitherto he had been concerned with " first principles," known, held, approved in common ; now he was com ing to a more delicate matter, the practical issues and duties they involved. " But let every man be swift to hear." Of course the thing to be heard is " the word of truth " (verse 18) ; as regards any other word the command had been, " Be slow to hear." Evil speech is bad, evil hearing is no better. The tongue of malice would soon be silent were all ears shut to it. It is the demand for frivolous or malicious gossip that creates the supply. False reports unheard would die in the very 42 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF RELIGION. moment of birth. But to be "swift to hear" " the word of truth " is to be apt to learn, and the willing learner is the willing worker, the best hearer the most efficient doer of the truth. " Slow to speak." Speech is the glory of man, and so easily becomes his shame. Weighed words are words at once weighted and winged with thought ; hasty words are thoughtless, mis chievous in the degree that they are void of mind and truth. Were speech slower it would be stiller but mightier, and it is in quietness that the spiritual forces of the universe most love to do their creative and ameliorative work. It is "the fool who is full of words," whose " lips will swallow up himself."* " Slow to wrath." ^Passion causes swift speech. It is always foolish in its talk. An angry sage is no wiser than a passionate fool, differs from him only in the shame he feels at the recollec tion of the words he had spoken in his rage. So James bids men be " slow to wrath," certain that where passion is subdued speech will be measured. And he adds in his emphatic way a reason against wrath : it " worketh not the righteousness of God." Underneath this lies a * Eccles. x., 12, 14. THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF RELIGION. 43 fine principle — what serves God must be God like. There can be no bad means to good ends; bad means make the ends bad. If man is to further the purposes of the righteous God, it must be by righteousness. That, as James knew right well, was a much needed principle in those days of change. The bigotry of the old faith, and the enthusiasm of the new, did not easily brook difference ; so said he, Remem ber, "the wrath of man worketh not the right eousness of God." But how was this wisdom of speech, this rectitude of spirit and of way, to be obtained ? There were two conditions, a negative and a positive. The negative was : " Lay aside all filthiness and preeminence of malice." It is the evil nature that does the evil thing ; the last sin is not an act of the will, but a state of the spirit. Right living must begin in rec tified being, and it in renunciation, surrender of the evil in us, that evil may cease to work by us. The positive condition was : " Receive with meekness the implanted word. " That word is creative, generative, begets a new life which supplants and expels the old. The ab sence of vice were poor virtue, the renunciation 44 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF RELIGION. of evil but an illusory holiness. Through the Word of God the life of God enters a man ; where it germinates He regenerates, the piece of leaven leavening the whole lump. But that the word may do its work it must be heard ; the life it creates must be expressed in action, embodied in conduct. Word and action are correlated spiritual forces; the truth that comes to us by hearing is transformed into being, and produces higher thought and nobler living. Without this correlation the spiritual force is dissipated, fails of its destined good. Such failure James thought possible ; the society he knew was full, as it were, of abortive efforts at change. Many had heard the word, believed it in a way, yet remained as before ; many others had heard and made pro fession of faith, yet were, in the matter of moral conformity, as if they stood afar off. It was only the rarer and more elect spirits that were made by it hew and true men. The difference is so vital that James essays to explain its cause ; he will have his readers understand why men who hear the same word so widely differ, are agreed, in faith but are as aliens in religion. He does it by a figure of remarkable force and significance. The mere THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF RELIGION. 45 hearer is like a man beholding his natural face in a mirror — beholding himself, then going away and straightway forgetting what manner of man he was. But the true hearer is a man who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and so continueth, watchful, studious, bringing himself and his conduct into conform ity with what he sees there. To the former the word is a mere mirror. What he sees in it is a reflection of himself; as he looks in, the image of his own face looks out; no beautiful face, indeed, with which its owner does well to be pleased, but a face whose lines and features ought to admonish him of evil, and persuade him to change. Yet so careless is he, so swift to speak, so slow to think, that he goes away and forgets straightway that he ought not to be the manner of man he is. But to the other, the true hearer, the word is " the perfect law." * As he contem plates it, the face of the Christ looks into his soul, and invites him to become as He is, to be changed into the same image; and as the face and the soul continue to look into each other, the spirit of the Christ grows in the man, and the life of the Christ becomes the force that determines * 2. Cor. iii., 18. 46 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF RELIGION. his conduct. The law secures his liberty ; obedi ence is freedom. He knows the truth, and the truth makes him free, which is what God meant him to be. II. The man who thus, by looking into the perfect law, comes to embody or realise its ideal, is a man " blessed in his doing." He is a good man, and so he does good ; he lives in harmony with the divine will, and so he serves the divine ends. In his emphatic and antithetical manner James next exhibits the false and the true man in the sphere of conduct. As they do to the "word of truth," so they are in the world of action. The man to whom the word is but a mirror which reflects his own face and form, only seems to be religious, while the man who looks into "the perfect law of liberty" is religious. The former lives in a world of illusions, thinks himself religious while his unbridled tongue makes his irreligion manifest to all ; but the latter lives amid realities, is what his God and Father approves, does what blesses and benefits men. The man who hears but does not, in thinking himself religious only " deceives his THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF RELIGION. 47 own heart" — his "religion is vain;" but the man who hears and does, possesses and exhibits " pure religion and undefiled." Now, the cardinal word in this verse is " relig ion." What does it mean? It is one of the most ambiguous words in our mother - speech, has too many meanings fitly to express the sim ple and clear idea James intends here to convey. It sometimes denotes the entire body of institu tions, customs, doctrines, history belonging to a given faith, as in " the Christian religion," " the Mohammedan religion," " the religions of Asia." Again, it signifies the conduct or practice which becomes a given profession of faith, as when we distinguish theology and religion, the one term denoting the truths or doctrines believed, the other the life in which they are expressed or realised. Then, religion may mean a system of duty apprehended as commanded by God or due to Him, as distinguished from morality, the system of duty discovered and determined by conscience and reason. Again, it may mean the mode in which a man elects to make profession of his belief, with its corre sponding ideal of life, as when men who would alike claim to be Christians are distinguished as 48 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF RELIGION. religious and secular, as within or without an order of religion. Once more, religion may de note either the worship or the spirit it ought to express, as when we speak on the one hand of the rites of religion, or on the other distinguish profession and religion. These ambiguities be long to our English term, but in no way to the term James employs. That had a simple and precise enough meaning ; denoted the culius, the external worship, the ceremonial usages, the form or body in which the inward piety was articulated. Neither the word nor any cognate or derivative occurs in the LXX., but the noun dpijaxeia * and the verb Oprjcxevco f in the Book of Wisdom. In each case the reference is to the worship of idols, and so to outward observances and rites. Opriaxsla occurs frequently in Jose- phus, always denoting, with one possible excep tion, t the public and ceremonial worship which the king may forsake,§ the people perform,! and the priests administer. T In Clemens Romanus** it denotes an outer and manifest worship of God as opposed to the outer and manifest worship of * Ch. xiv., 18, 27. f Ch. xi., 15 ; xiv. 16. t An*., i., 13, 1. § lb. viii., n, 1. || lb. jdi., 5, 4. H Bel. Jud. iv., 5, 2. ** 1 Cor. xiv. THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF RELIGION. 49 his own image which Nebuchadnezzar had com manded to be set up. In this, the Hellenistic followed the classical usage. The term denotes worship in a ceremonial and ritual sense — the service which can be performed and seen, not the spirit which prompts it. * This meaning made it even more applicable to foreign than to native Greek worship, to the mysteries than to the national and State religion, f So, too, in the New Testament, it denotes the worship of angels, t which was a matter of mystic rites, not of pious reverence. And Paul uses it to characterise the Pharisees, " the straitest sect of our religion,"§ the sect devoted to the most rigorous ceremonial, and most loyal to traditional observances. Now, the word in James must be interpreted through the established, and especially the Hel lenistic use. Qptjaxeia was to him the service, the ceremonial, as it were, of the new faith, the mode in which its inward spirit and reverence was outwardly manifested and declared. It was the counterpart in the new economy of the rites and sacrifices which had characterised the old ; the moral and spiritual service which Christ had * Herod, ii., 37, 64 ; Dion. Hal. 63. t P'tit. Alex. 2. t Col. ii., 18. § Acts xxvi., 5. 50 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF RELIGION. made to displace and replace the sacerdotalism of Moses. It did not denote the whole of the Christian religion, only the manner and form of its manifestation, the character and sphere of its distinctive and visible worship. The context shows the relation in which Oprjaxua. stood to the genesis and ideal of the Christian life. Faith came by hearing. A man was renewed, begotten again, by " the word of truth." That word heard, received, and implanted by faith saved the soul ; the soul saved had to meditate on the law that had given freedom and life, had to contemplate its living and gracious Ideal till changed into the same form, till the beholder and the Beheld became alike, the younger brother on earth conformed to the image of the Firstborn in heaven. And the outward service which could alone express this inward spirit was the Christ-like; not the old ceremonial and sacerdotal worship, but beneficence and blame- lessness, visiting "the fatherless and widows, and keeping himself unspotted from the world." III. James in so teaching stood in essential har mony with all the other teachers of the New THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF RELIGION. 5 1 Testament. His doctrine was the doctrine of the Sermon on the Mount. There the Master had exhibited religion freed from the forms and sacrifices of the priest, the dominion and cere monies of the scribe, become a life of humanest, stillest, unhasting, unresting duty. Nothing was so characteristic in the new religion as the way in which it broke with the ancient ideals of worship. Jesus was no priest, called no priest to be an Apostle, gave to no man He called a name or office implying priestly authority or functions ; said no word, did nothing that signi fied for Himself respect and for His people retention of sacerdotal observances or rites. With Him God was Spirit, could be worshipped any where, at any time, by any one, but only in spirit and in truth. No duty could be performed by sacrifices, all duties through love; to love God with the whole heart and the neighbour as one self was to fulfil the whole law; and on this matter the apostolic writers understood and fol lowed Him completely. Nothing is more re markable than the way in which they leave all ceremonial and sacerdotal elements out of the religion, translating all the terms descriptive of these which they use into a spiritual sense, and 52 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF RELIGION. emphasising all the elements of intellectual and ethical significance. Their endeavour was not only to repeat, but to transcend the law. To Paul it was the dispensation of the letter, the ministration of death, written and engraven on stone ; * to be under it was to " be held in bondage under the rudiments of the world ; " to return to it was to " turn back to the weak and beggarly elements."t To the author of Hebrews it was only " a shadow of good things to come," imperfect in all its acts and places of worship. Paul liked to look behind the law to the promise ; Hebrews seeks to get behind Aaron to Melchize- dek. But the significant thing for us here is the change they introduce into the technical terms of the older worship. These are used only as meta phors, the more emphatically to enforce ethical duties or spiritual truths. So Paul introduces his great discourse on duty with the words : " I beseech you, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reason able service." t So he describes the gifts he has received from the Philippians as " an odour of a sweet smell, a sacrifice acceptable, well- * 2 Cor. iii., 6, 7. t Gal. iv., 3, 9. t Rom. xii., 1. THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF RELIGION. S3 pleasing to God ; " * and he urges the Ephesians to " walk in love, even as Christ also loved us, and gave Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for an odour of a sweet smell." f The author of the Hebrews exhorts his readers to offer up through Christ " the sacrifices of praise to God continually ; " $ and Peter de scribes the men he addresses as " elect, built up a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God through Jesus Christ." § Now James follows up, and as it were gives accurate expression to the ideas that underlie these phrases and exhortations. The new relig ion, like the old, has its Optjaxeta, but the new, unlike the old dptjcxsia, is ethical through and through — spiritual holiness before God, dutiful service of man. Where rites and symbols stood under Moses, a benevolent and blameless life stands under Christ. The new faith, like the old, has its sacrifices, but they are affairs of the spirit, the complete consecration of the man in thought and act to God. The Hebrew who neglected the worship received by tradition from the fathers was alien from " the Jews' religion ; " * Phil, iv., 18. tEph.v.,1. t Ch, ail., 15. § 1 Pet. ii., 5. 54 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF RELIGION. the man was no Christian who left uncultivated the graces made illustrious by the Person of Christ, or unpractised the virtues that were the truest proofs of faith and acts of piety. The filial spirit reverences a father by obedience ; the pious spirit worships God by the active and anticipating love of a devoted life. THE END. YALE UNIVERSITY I 3 9002 05094 0718