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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13353 ***
+
+LITTLE BOOKS ON RELIGION
+
+Edited by
+
+The Rev. W. Robertson Nicoll, LL.D.
+
+Elegantly bound in cloth, price _1s. 6d._ each.
+
+Christ and the Future Life.
+By R.W. Dale, LL.D.
+
+The Seven Words from the Cross.
+By the Rev. W. Robertson Nicoll, LL.D.
+
+The Visions of a Prophet.
+By the Rev. Professor Marcus Dods, D.D.
+
+Why be a Christian?
+Addresses to Young Men. By the same
+Author.
+
+The Four Temperaments.
+By the Rev. Alexander Whyte, D.D.
+
+The Upper Room.
+By the Rev. John Watson, M.A., D.D.
+
+Four Psalms.
+By the Rev. Professor George Adam Smith, D.D., LL.D.
+
+Gospel Questions and Answers.
+By the Rev. James Denney, D.D.
+
+The Unity and Symmetry of the Bible.
+By the Rev. John Monro Gibson, D.D.
+
+
+_HODDER & STOUGHTON_
+
+FOUR PSALMS
+
+XXIII. XXXVI. LII. CXXI.
+
+INTERPRETED FOR PRACTICAL USE
+
+BY
+
+GEORGE ADAM SMITH
+
+
+HODDER AND STOUGHTON
+
+TO
+
+M.S. AND H.A.S.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+I
+PSALM XXIII: GOD OUR SHEPHERD
+
+II
+PSALM XXXVI: THE GREATER REALISM
+
+III
+PSALM LII: RELIGION THE OPEN AIR OF THE SOUL
+
+IV
+PSALM CXXI: THE MINISTRY OF THE HILLS AND ALL GREAT THINGS
+PSALM XXIII
+
+GOD OUR SHEPHERD
+
+
+The twenty-third Psalm seems to break in two at the end of the fourth
+verse. The first four verses clearly reflect a pastoral scene; the fifth
+appears to carry us off, without warning, to very different associations.
+This, however, is only in appearance. The last two verses are as pastoral
+as the first four. If these show us the shepherd with his sheep upon the
+pasture, those follow him, shepherd still, to where in his tent he
+dispenses the desert's hospitality to some poor fugitive from blood. The
+Psalm is thus a unity, even of metaphor. We shall see afterwards that it
+is also a spiritual unity; but at present let us summon up the landscape
+on which both of these features--the shepherd on his pasture and the
+shepherd in his tent--lie side by side, equal sacraments of the grace and
+shelter of our God.
+
+A Syrian or an Arabian pasture is very different from the narrow meadows
+and fenced hill-sides with which we are familiar. It is vast, and often
+virtually boundless. By far the greater part of it is desert--that is,
+land not absolutely barren, but refreshed by rain for only a few months,
+and through the rest of the year abandoned to the pitiless sun that sucks
+all life from the soil. The landscape is nearly all glare: monotonous
+levels or low ranges of hillocks, with as little character upon them as
+the waves of the sea, and shimmering in mirage under a cloudless heaven.
+This bewildering monotony is broken by only two exceptions. Here and there
+the ground is cleft to a deep ravine, which gapes in black contrast to the
+glare, and by its sudden darkness blinds the men and sheep that enter it
+to the beasts of prey which have their lairs in the recesses. But there
+are also hollows as gentle and lovely as those ravines are terrible, where
+water bubbles up and runs quietly between grassy banks through the open
+shade of trees.
+
+On such a wilderness, it is evident that the person and character of the
+shepherd must mean a great deal more to the sheep than they can possibly
+mean in this country. With us, sheep left to themselves may be seen any
+day--in a field or on a hill-side with a far-travelling fence to keep them
+from straying. But I do not remember ever to have seen in the East a flock
+of sheep without a shepherd.
+
+On such a landscape as I have described he is obviously indispensable.
+When you meet him there, 'alone of all his reasoning kind,' armed,
+weather-beaten, and looking out with eyes of care upon his scattered
+flock, their sole provision and defence, your heart leaps up to ask: Is
+there in all the world so dear a sacrament of life and peace as he?
+
+There is, and very near himself. As prominent a feature in the wilderness
+as the shepherd is the shepherd's tent. To Western eyes a cluster of
+desert homes looks ugly enough--brown and black lumps, often cast down
+anyhow, with a few loutish men lolling on the trampled sand in front of
+the low doorways, that a man has to stoop uncomfortably to enter. But
+conceive coming to these a man who is fugitive--fugitive across such a
+wilderness. Conceive a man fleeing for his life as Sisera fled when he
+sought the tent of Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite. To him that space
+of trampled sand, with the ragged black mouths above it, mean not only
+food and rest, but dear life itself. There, by the golden law of the
+desert's hospitality, he knows that he may eat in peace, that though his
+enemies come up to the very door, and his table be spread as it were in
+their presence, he need not flinch nor stint his heart of her security.
+
+That was the landscape the Psalmist saw, and it seemed to him to reflect
+the mingled wildness and beauty of his own life. Human life was just this
+wilderness of terrible contrasts, where the light is so bright, but the
+shadows the darker and more treacherous; where the pasture is rich, but
+scattered in the wrinkles of vast deserts; where the paths are illusive,
+yet man's passion flies swift and straight to its revenge; where all is
+separation and disorder, yet law sweeps inexorable, and a man is hunted
+down to death by his blood-guiltiness. But not in anything is life more
+like the Wilderness than in this, that it is the presence and character of
+One, which make all the difference to us who are its silly sheep; that it
+is His grace and hospitality which alone avail us when we awaken to the
+fact that our lives cannot be fully figured by those of sheep, for men are
+fugitives in need of more than food--men are fugitives with the conscience
+and the habit of sin relentless on their track. This is the main lesson of
+the Psalm: the faith into which many generations of God's Church have sung
+an ever richer experience of His Guidance and His Grace. We may gather it
+up under these three heads--they cannot be too simple: I. The Lord is a
+Shepherd; II. The Lord is my Shepherd; and, III. if that be too feeble a
+figure to meet the fugitive and hunted life of man, the Lord is my Host
+and my Sanctuary for ever.
+
+I. _The Lord is my Shepherd_: or--as the Greek, vibrating to the force of
+the original--_The Lord is shepherding me; I shall not want_. This is the
+theme of the first four verses.
+
+Every one feels that the Psalm was written by a shepherd, and the first
+thing that is obvious is that he has made his God after his own image.
+
+There are many in our day who sneer at that kind of theology--pretty,
+indeed, as the pearl or the tear, but like tear or pearl a natural and
+partly a morbid deposit--a mere human process which, according to them,
+pretty well explains all religion; the result of man's instinct to see
+himself reflected on the cloud that bounds his view; man's honest but
+deluded effort to put himself in charge of the best part of himself,
+filling the throne of an imaginary heaven with an impossible exaggeration
+of his own virtues.
+
+But it is far better to hold with Jesus Christ than with such reasoners.
+Jesus Christ tells us that a man cannot be wrong if he argues towards God
+from what he finds best in himself. _If ye then, being evil, know how to
+give good gifts to your children: how much more shall your Heavenly Father
+give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him? What man of you, having an
+hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine
+in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it?
+Either what woman having ten pieces of silver, if she lose one piece, doth
+not light a candle, and sweep the house, and seek diligently till she find
+it? ... Likewise, I say unto you, There is joy in the presence of the
+angels of God over one sinner that repenteth_.
+
+That is a true witness, and strikes Amen out of every chord of our hearts.
+The Power, so evident in nature that He needs no proof, the Being so far
+beyond us in wisdom and in might, must also be our great superior in every
+quality which is more excellent than might. With thoughts more sleepless
+than our thoughts, as the sun is more constant than our lamps; with a
+heart that steadfastly cares for us, as we fitfully care for one another;
+more kingly than our noblest king, more fatherly than our fondest
+fatherhood; of deeper, truer compassion than ever mother poured upon us;
+whom, when a man feels that he highest thing in life is to be a shepherd,
+he calls his Shepherd, and knows that, as the shepherd, _whose the sheep
+are_, shrinks not to seek one of his lost at risk of limb or life, so his
+God cannot be less in readiness of love or of self-sacrifice. Such is the
+faith of strong and unselfish men all down the ages. And its strength is
+this, that it is no mere conclusion of logic, but the inevitable and
+increasing result of duty done and love kept pure--of fatherhood and
+motherhood and friendship fulfilled. One remembers how Browning has put
+it in the mouth of David, when the latter has done all he can do for
+'Saul,' and is helpless:
+
+  Do I find love so full in my nature,
+  God's ultimate gift,
+  That I doubt His own love can
+  compete with it? ...
+  Would I fain in my impotent yearning
+  do all for this man;
+  And dare doubt he alone shall not
+  help him, who yet alone can?
+  Could I wrestle to raise him from
+  sorrow, grow poor to enrich,
+  To fill up his life, starve my own out,
+  I would--knowing which
+  I know that my service is perfect.
+  Oh, speak through me now!
+  Would I suffer for him that I love?
+  So wouldst thou--so wilt thou!
+
+Thus have felt and known the unselfish of all ages. It is not only from
+their depths, but from their topmost heights--heaven still how far!--that
+men cry out and say, _There is a rock higher than I!_ God is stronger than
+their strength, more loving than their uttermost love, and in so far as
+they have loved and sacrificed themselves for others, they have obtained
+the infallible proof, that God too lives and loves and gives Himself away.
+Nothing can shake that faith, for it rests on the best instincts of our
+nature, and is the crown of all faithful life. He was no hireling herdsman
+who wrote these verses, but one whose heart was in his work, who did
+justly by it, magnifying his office, and who never scamped it, else had he
+not dared to call his God a shepherd. And so in every relation of our own
+lives. While insincerity and unfaithfulness to duty mean nothing less than
+the loss of the clearness and sureness of our faith in God; duty nobly
+done, love to the uttermost, are witnesses to God's love and ceaseless
+care, witnesses which grow more convincing every day.
+
+The second, third and fourth verses give the details. Each of them is
+taken directly from the shepherd's custom, and applied without
+interpretation to the care of man's soul by God. _He maketh me lie
+down_--the verb is to bring the flocks to fold or couch--_on pastures of
+green grass_--the young fresh grass of spring-time. _By waters of rest He
+refresheth me_.[1] This last verb is difficult to render in English; the
+original meaning was evidently to guide the flock to drink, from which it
+came to have the more general force of sustaining or nourishing. _My life
+He restoreth_--bringeth back again from death. _He leadeth me in paths
+of righteousness for His name's sake_, not necessarily straight paths, but
+paths that fulfil the duty of paths and lead to somewhere, unlike most
+desert tracks which spring up, tempt your feet for a little, and then
+disappear. _Yea, though I walk in a valley of deep darkness, I will fear
+no evil, for Thou art with me. Thy rod and Thy staff_ are not synonymous,
+for even the shepherd of to-day, though often armed with a gun, carries
+two instruments of wood, his great oak club, thick enough to brain a wild
+beast, and his staff to lean upon or to touch his sheep, while the ancient
+shepherd without firearms would surely still more require both. _They will
+comfort me_--a very beautiful verb, the literal meaning of which is to
+help another, choked with grief or fear, to breathe freely, and give his
+heart air.
+
+[Footnote 1: The Greek reads: epi hudatos anapauseôs exethrepse me]
+
+These simple figures of the conduct of the soul by God are their own
+interpretation. Who, from his experience, cannot read into them more than
+any other may help him to find? Only on two points is a word required.
+_Righteousness_ has no theological meaning. The Psalmist, as the above
+exposition has stated, is thinking of such desert paths as have an end and
+goal, to which they faultlessly lead the traveller: and in God's care of
+man their analogy is not the experience of justification and forgiveness,
+but the wider assurance that he who follows the will of God walks not in
+vain, that in the end he arrives, for all God's paths lead onward and lead
+home. This thought is clinched with an expression which would not have the
+same force if righteousness were taken in a theological sense: _for His
+name's sake._ No being has the right to the name of guide or shepherd
+unless the paths by which he takes the flock do bring them to their
+pasture and rest. The other ambiguous phrase is the _vale of deep
+darkness_. As is well known, the letters of the word may be made to spell
+_shadow of death_; but the other way of taking them is the more probable.
+This, however, need not lead us away from the associations with which our
+old translation has invested them. It is not only darkness that the poet
+is describing, but the darkness where death lurks for the poor sheep,--the
+gorges, in whose deep shadows are the lairs of wild beasts, and the
+shepherd and his club are needed. It stands thus for every dismal and
+deadly passage through which the soul may pass, and, most of all, it is
+the Valley of the Shadow of Death. There God is with men no less than by
+the waters of repose, or along the successful paths of active life. Was He
+able to recover the soul from life's wayside weariness and hunger?--He
+will equally defend and keep it amid life's deadliest dangers.
+
+II. But the Psalm is not only theology. It is personal religion. Whether
+the Psalmist sang it first of the Church of God as a whole, or of the
+individual, the Church herself has sung it, through all generations, of
+the individual. By the natural progress of religion from the universal to
+the particular; by the authority of the Lord Jesus, who calls men singly
+to the Father, and one by one assures them of God's Providence, Grace and
+Glory; by the millions who have taken Him at His word, and every man of
+them in the loneliness of temptation and duty and death proved His
+promise--we also in our turn dare to believe that this Psalm is a psalm
+for the individual. The Lord is _my_ shepherd: He maketh _me_ to lie down:
+He leadeth _me_: He restoreth _my_ soul. Lay your attention upon the
+little word. Ask yourself, if since it was first put upon your lips you
+have ever used it with anything more than the lips: if you have any right
+to use it: if you have ever taken any steps towards winning the right to
+use it. To claim God for our own, to have and enjoy Him as ours, means, as
+Christ our Master said over and over again, that we give ourselves to Him,
+and take Him to our hearts. Sheep do not choose their shepherd, but man
+has to choose--else the peace and the fulness of life which are here
+figured remain a dream and become no experience for him.
+
+Do not say that this talk of surrender to God is unreal to you. Happiness,
+contentment, the health and growth of the soul, depend, as men have proved
+over and over again, upon some simple issue, some single turning of the
+soul. Lives are changed by a moment's listening to conscience, by a single
+and quiet inclination of the mind. We must submit ourselves to God. We
+must bring our wills under His. Here and now we can do this by resolution
+and effort, in the strength of His Spirit, which is nearer us than we
+know. The thing is no mystery, and not at all vague. The mistake people
+make about it is to seek for it in some artificial and conventional form.
+We have it travestied to-day under many forms--under the form of throwing
+open the heart to excitement in an atmosphere removed from real life as
+far as possible: under the form of assent to a dogma: under the form of
+adherence to a church.
+
+But do you summon up the most real things in your life--the duty that is
+a disgust: the sacrifice for others from which you shrink. Summon up your
+besetting sin--the temptation which, for all your present peace, you know
+will be upon you before twenty-four hours are past. Summon up these grim
+realities of your life,--and in face of them give yourself to God's will,
+put your weakness into the keeping of His grace. He is as real as they
+are, and the act of will by which you give yourself to Him and His Service
+will be as true and as solid an experience as the many acts of will by
+which you have so often yielded to them.
+
+Otherwise this beautiful name, this name Shepherd, must remain to you the
+emptiest of metaphors: this Psalm only a fair song instead of the
+indestructible experience which both Name and Psalm become to him who
+gives himself to God.
+
+Men and women, who in this Christian land have grown up with this Psalm in
+your hearts, in all the great crises of life that are ahead shall this
+Psalm revisit us. In perplexity and doubt, in temptation and sorrow, and
+in death, like our mother's face shall this Psalm she put upon our lips
+come back to us. Woe to us then, if we have done nothing to help us to
+believe it! As when one lies sick in a foreign land, and music that is
+dear comes down the street and swells by him, and lifts his thoughts a
+little from himself, but passes over and melts into the distance, and he
+lies colder and more forsaken than before--so shall it be with us and this
+Psalm.
+
+But if we do give our hearts to God and His Will, if day by day of our
+strength we work and serve, live and suffer, with contented hearts--then I
+know what we shall say when the day of our darkness and loneliness comes
+down, whether it be of temptation, or of responsibility, or of death
+itself. In that day we shall lift our faces and say: _Yea, though I am
+walking in the Valley of the Shadow of Death I do fear no evil, for Thou
+art with me, and Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me_!
+
+III. But some one may turn round upon all this and say: 'It is simple, it
+is ideal, but the real man cannot reach it out of real life. For he is not
+the mere sheep, turned easily by a touch of the staff. He is a man: his
+life is no mere search for grass, it is a being searched; it is not a
+following, it is a flight. Not from the future do we shrink, even though
+death be there. The past is on our track, and hunts us down. We need more
+than guidance: we need grace.'
+
+This is probably what the Psalmist himself felt when he did not close with
+the fourth verse, otherwise so natural a climax. He knew that weariness
+and death are not the last enemies of man. He knew that the future is
+never the true man's only fear. He remembered the inexorableness of the
+past; he remembered that blood-guiltiness, which sheep never feel, is
+worse to men than death. As perchance one day he lifted his eyes from his
+sheep and saw a fugitive from the avenger of blood crossing the plain,
+while his sheep scattered right and left before this wild intruder into
+their quiet world,--so he felt his fair and gentle thoughts within him
+scattered by the visitation of his past; so he felt how rudely law breaks
+through our pious fancies, and must be dealt with before their peace can
+be secure; so he felt, as every true man has felt with him, that the
+religion, however bright and brave, which takes no account of sin, is the
+religion which has not a last nor a highest word for life.
+
+Consider this system of blood revenge. It was the one element of law in
+the lawless life of the desert. Everything else in the wilderness might
+swerve and stray. This alone persisted and was infallible. It crossed the
+world; it lasted through generations. The fear of it never died down in
+the heart of the hunted man, nor the duty of it in the heart of the
+hunter. The holiest sanctions confirmed it,--the safety of society, the
+honour of the family, love for the dead. And yet, from this endless
+process, which hunted a man like conscience, a shelter was found in the
+custom of Eastern hospitality--the 'golden piety of the wilderness,' as it
+has been called. Every wanderer, whatever his character or his past might
+be, was received as the; 'guest of God'--such is the beautiful name which
+they still give him,--furnished with food, and kept inviolate, his host
+becoming responsible for his safety.
+
+That the Psalmist had this custom in view, when composing the last two
+verses of the Psalm, is plain from the phrase with which these open: _Thou
+spreadest before me a table in the very face of mine enemies_; and perhaps
+also from the unusual metaphor in verse 6: _Surely goodness and mercy
+shall follow,_ or _hunt, me all the days of my life._
+
+And even if those were right (which I do not admit) who interpret the
+enemies and pursuers as the mere foes and persecutors of the pious, it is
+plain that to us using the Psalm this interpretation will not suffice. How
+can we speak of this custom of blood-revenge and think only of our
+material foes? If we know ourselves, and if our conscience be quick, then
+of all our experiences there is but one which suits this figure of
+blood-revenge, when and wheresoever in the Old Testament it is applied to
+man's spiritual life. So only do the conscience and the habit of sin
+pursue a man. Our real enemies are not our opponents, our adversities, our
+cares and pains. These our enemies! Better comrades, better guides, better
+masters no man ever had. Our enemies are our evil deeds and their
+memories, our pride, our selfishness, our malice, our passions, which by
+conscience or by habit pursue us with a relentlessness past the power of
+figure to express. We know how they persist from youth unto the grave:
+_the sting of death is sin._ We know what they want: nothing less than our
+whole character and will. _Simon, Simon_, said Christ to a soul on the
+edge of a great temptation, _Satan hath asked you back again for himself_.
+
+Yet it is the abounding message of the whole Bible, of which our
+twenty-third Psalm is but a small fragment, that for this conscience and
+this habit of sin God hath made provision, even as sure as those thoughts
+of His guidance which refresh us in the heat of life and comfort us amidst
+its shadows.
+
+In Nature? Yes: for here too the goodness of God leadeth to repentance.
+There is nothing which the fifth verse so readily brings to mind as the
+grace of the Divine hospitality in nature. _Thou spreadest a table before
+me in the presence of mine enemies_. How these words contrast the fever
+and uncertain battle of our life with the calmness and surety of the
+Divine order! Through the cross currents of human strife, fretted and
+stained, the tides of nature keep their steady course, and rise to their
+invariable margins. The seasons come up undisturbed by crime and war.
+Spring creeps even into the beleaguered city; through the tents of the
+besiegers, across trench and scarp, among the wheels of the cannon, and
+over the graves of the dead, grass and wild flowers speed, spreading
+God's table. He sendeth His rain upon the just and the unjust. And even
+here the display is not merely natural, nor spread only in the sight of
+our physical enemies; but God's goodness leadeth to repentance, and Nature
+is equipped even for deliverance from sin. Who has come out upon a great
+landscape, who has looked across the sea, who has lifted his eyes to the
+hills and felt the winds of God blowing off their snows, who has heard
+earth's countless voices rising heavenwards, but has felt: What a wide
+place this world is for repentance! Man does find in Nature deliverance
+from himself, oblivion of his past, with peace and purity! And yet the
+provision, though real, is little more than temporary. The herdsmen of the
+desert are not obliged to furnish to their fugitive guest shelter for more
+than two nights with the day between. Little more than two nights with the
+day between is the respite from conscience and habit which Nature provides
+for the sinful heart. She is the million-fold opportunity of repentance;
+she is not the final or everlasting grace of God. And, therefore, whatever
+may have been the original intention of our Psalmist, the spiritual
+feeling of the Church has understood his last two verses to sing of that
+mercy and forgiveness of our God which were spoken to men by the prophets,
+but reached the fulness of their proclamation and proof in Jesus Christ.
+He who owned the simple trust of the first four verses, saying, 'Thou art
+right, I am the Good Shepherd,' so that since He walked on earth the name
+is no more a mere metaphor of God, but the dearest, strongest reality
+which has ever visited this world of shadows--He also has been proved by
+men as the Host and Defender of all who seek His aid from the memory and
+the pursuit of sin. So He received them in the days of His flesh, as they
+drifted upon Him across the wilderness of life, pressed by every evil with
+which it is possible for sin to harry men. To Him they were all 'guests of
+God,' welcomed for His sake, irrespective of what their past might have
+been. And so, being lifted up, He still draws us to Himself, and still
+proves Himself able to come between us and our past. Whatever we may flee
+from He keeps it away, so that, although to the last, for penitence, we
+may be reminded of our sins, and our enemies come again and again to the
+open door of memory, in Him we are secure. He is our defence, and our
+peace is impregnable.
+
+
+
+
+PSALM XXXVI
+
+THE GREATER REALISM
+
+
+Like the twenty-third Psalm, the thirty-sixth seems to fall into two
+unconnected parts, but with this difference, that while both of the
+twenty-third are understood by us, and heartily enjoyed, of the
+thirty-sixth we appreciate only those verses, 5-10, which contain an
+adoration of God's mercy and righteousness. Verses 1-4, a study of sin,
+are unintelligible in our versions, and hardly ever sung, except in
+routine, by a Christian congregation. So sudden is the break between the
+two parts, and so opposite their contents, that they have been taken by
+some critics to be fragments of independent origin. This, however, would
+only raise the more difficult question: Why, being born apart, and
+apparently so unsympathetic, were they ever wedded? To a more careful
+reading the Psalm yields itself a unity. The sudden break from the close
+study of sin to the adoration of God's grace is designed, and from his
+rhapsody the Psalmist returns to pray, in verses 10-12, against that same
+evil with which he had opened his poem. Indeed, it is in this, its most
+admirable method, more than in details, that the Psalm is instructive and
+inspiring.
+
+The problem of Israel's faith was the existence of evil in its most
+painful form of the successful and complacent sinner, the oppressor of
+good men. This problem our Psalm takes, not, like other Psalms, in its
+cruel bearing upon the people of God, but in its mysterious growth in the
+character of the wicked man. Through four verses of vivid realism we
+follow the progress of sin. Then, when eye and heart are full of the
+horror, the Psalmist steps suddenly back, and lifts his gaze beyond and
+above his study of evil to God's own world that stretches everywhere. The
+effect is to put the problem into a new perspective. The black bulk which
+had come between the Singer and his Sun shrinks from his new position to a
+point against that universal goodness of the Lord, and he conceives not
+only courage to pray against it, but the grace to feel it already beneath
+his feet. This is not an intellectual solution of the problem of evil: but
+it is a practical one. The Psalm is a study--if we can call anything so
+enthusiastic a study--in proportion; the reduction of the cruel facts of
+experience to their relation to other facts as real but of infinite comfort
+and glory; the expansion, in short, of the words of verse 9: _In Thy light
+we see light_.
+
+The Psalmist's analysis of sin has been spoiled in translation. Take our
+Old Version, or the Revised one, and you will find no meaning in the first
+two verses, but take the rendering offered on the margin by the Revisers
+(and approved by most scholars), and you get a meaning intelligible,
+profound, and true to experience:
+
+  _Oracle of sin hath the wicked in the
+    midst of his heart;
+  There is no fear of God before his eyes_.
+
+The word _oracle_ means probably secret whisper, but is elsewhere used
+(except in one case) of God's word to His prophets. It is the instrument
+of revelation. The wicked man has in him something comparable to this. Sin
+seems as mysterious and as imperative as God's own voice to the heart of
+His servants. And to counteract this there is no awe of God Himself.
+Temptation in all its mystery, and with no religious awe to meet it--such
+is the beginning of sin.
+
+The second verse is also obscure. It seems to describe the terrible power
+which sin has of making men believe that though they continue to do evil
+they may still keep their conscience. The verse translates most readily,
+though not without some doubt:
+
+  _For it flatters him, in his eyes,
+  That he will discover his guilt--that he will hate it_.
+
+While sin takes from a man his healthy taste for what is good, and his
+power to loathe evil, it deludes him with the fancy that he still enjoys
+them. Temptation, when we yield, is succeeded by self-delusion.
+
+The third and fourth verses follow clearly with the aggravated effects.
+Sin ceases to flatter, and the man's habits are openly upon him. Truth,
+common-sense and all virtue are left behind:
+
+  _The words of his mouth are iniquity
+  and deceit,
+  He has given up thinking sensibly
+  and doing good._
+
+So he becomes presumptuous and obstinate.
+
+_He devises iniquity upon his bed_--which is but the Hebrew for 'planning
+evil in cold blood'--
+
+  _He takes up his post on a way that
+  is not good,
+  He abhors not evil_.
+
+There we have the whole biography of sin from its first whisper in the
+centre of man's being, where it seems to speak with the mystery and power
+of God's own word, to the time when, through the corruption of every
+instinct and quality of virtue, it reaches the border of his being and
+destroys the last possibility of penitence. It is the horror of Evil in
+the four stages of its growth: Temptation, Delusion, Audacity, and Habit
+ending in Death.
+
+To us sin has not become any less of a mystery or a pain. Temptation is as
+sudden and demonic. Into every soul, however purged and fenced, evil
+appears to have as much freedom of entrance as God Himself. It begins as
+early. In the heart of every little child God works, but they who next to
+God have most right there, the father and the mother, know that something
+else has had, with God, precedence of themselves. As the years go on, and
+the knowledge of good and evil grows, becoming ever more jealous and
+expert a sentinel, it still finds its watch and fence of the outside world
+mocked by the mysterious upburst of sin within. The whole mystery of
+temptation is to have sins suggested to us, and to be swept after them by
+a sudden enthusiasm, which sometimes feels as strong as the Spirit of God
+ever made in us the enthusiasm for virtue. 'There are moments when our
+passions speak and decide for us, and we seem to stand by and wonder.
+They carry in them an inspiration of crime, that in an instant does the
+work of long premeditation.'[2] 'An inspiration of crime,' that is the
+_oracle of sin_. From that come the panic and the despair of temptation.
+The heart, which has still left in it some loyalty to God, is horrified by
+the ease and the surprise of evil. Yet the greater horror is that this
+horror may be lost: that men and women do continually exchange it for a
+complacent and careless temper toward the besetting sin which they have
+once felt to be worse than death. From being panic-stricken at the rise
+and surge of temptation, they will (and there is no more marvellous change
+in all fickle man's experience) grow easy and scornful about it, time
+after time permitting it to overcome them, in the delusion that they may
+reassert themselves when they will, and put it beneath their feet. The
+rest is certain. Falsehood becomes natural to him who was born loyal,
+audacity to him who grew up timid and scrupulous. The impulsive lover of
+good, who has fallen through the very warmth of his nature, develops into
+the deliberate sensualist. Natures sensitive and enthusiastic grow
+absolutely empty of power to revolt against what is unjust or foul. A
+great writer once said of himself in middle life: 'I am proud and
+intellectual, but forced by the habits of years to like the base and
+dishonourable from which I formerly revolted.' Little children have the
+seeds of all this within them; men and women are born with the inspiration
+which starts these mysterious and direful changes; the fatal decadence
+takes place in countless lives.
+
+[Footnote 2: George Eliot.]
+
+Before facts so horrifying--they are _within_ as well as everywhere around
+us--our real need is not an intellectual explanation of why they are
+permitted or whence this taint in the race arose. For, supposing that we
+were capable of understanding this, the probability is that we might
+become tolerant of the facts themselves, and, perceiving that cruelty and
+sin had a necessary place in the universe, lose the mind to fight them.
+Constituted as are the most of mankind, for them to discover a reason for
+a fact is, if not to conceive a respect for it, at least to feel a
+plausible excuse for their sluggishness and timidity in dealing with it.
+Nay, the very study of sin for the purpose of acquainting ourselves with
+its nature, too often either intoxicates the will, or paralyses it with
+despair; and it is in recoil from the whole subject that we most surely
+recover health to fight evil in ourselves and nerve to work for the
+deliverance from it of others. The practical solution of our problem is to
+remember how much else there is in the Universe, how much else that is
+utterly away from and opposed to sin. We must engross ourselves in that,
+we must exult in that. We must remember goodness, not only in the
+countless scattered instances about us, but in its infinite resource in
+the Power and Character of God Himself. We must feel that the Universe is
+pervaded by this: that it is the atmosphere of life, and that the whole
+visible framework of the world offers signals and sacraments of its real
+presence. We may not, we shall not, be able to reconcile this goodness
+with the cruel facts about us; but at least we shall have reduced these to
+a new proportion and perspective; we shall have disengaged our wills from
+the horrid influence of evil, and received a new temper for that contest,
+in which it is temper far more than any knowledge which overcomes.
+
+This is what our Psalmist does. From the awful realism of Sin he sweeps,
+without pause or attempt at argument, into a vision of all the goodness of
+God. The Divine Attributes spread out before him, and it takes him the
+largest things in nature to describe them: the personal loving-kindness
+and righteousness of the Most High: the care of Providence: the tenderness
+of intimate fellowship with God: the security of faith: the satisfaction
+of worship. He makes no claim that everything is therefore clear: still
+_are Thy judgments the Great Deep_, fathomless, awful. But we receive new
+vigour of life as from _a fountain of life,_ and the eyes, that had been
+strained and blinded, _see light:_ light to work, light to fight, light to
+hope. Mark how the rapture breaks away with the name of God:
+
+  _LORD, to the heavens is Thy leal
+    love!
+  Thy faithfulness to the clouds!
+  Thy righteousness is like the mountains of God,
+  Thy judgments are the Great Deep_.
+
+  _Man and beast thou preservest, O LORD.
+  How precious is Thy leal love, O God!
+  And so the children of men put their
+    trust in the shadow of Thy wings.
+  They shall be satisfied with the fatness of Thy house;
+  And of the river of Thy pleasures
+    Thou shall give them to drink.
+  For with Thee is the fountain of life,
+  In Thy light we see light_.
+
+The prayer follows, and closes with the assurance of victory as if already
+experienced:
+
+  _Continue Thy leal love unto them that know Thee,
+  And Thy righteousness to the upright of heart.
+  Let not the foot of pride come against me,
+  Nor the hand of the wicked drive me away.
+  There are the workers of iniquity
+  fallen,
+  They are flung down and shall not
+  be able to rise_.
+
+Two remarks remain.
+
+A prevailing temper of our own literature makes the method of this Psalm
+invaluable to us. A large and influential number of our writers have lent
+themselves, with ability and earnestness, to such an analysis of sin as we
+find in the first four verses of the Psalm. The inmost lusts and passions
+of men's hearts are laid bare with a cool and audacious frankness, and the
+results are inexorably traced in all their revolting vividness of action
+and character. I suppose that there has not been a period, at least since
+the Reformation, which has had the real facts of sin so nakedly and
+fearfully laid before it. The authors of the process call it Realism. But
+it is not the sum of the Real, nor anything like it. Those studies of sin
+and wickedness, which our moral microscopes have laid bare, are but
+puddles in a Universe, and the Universe is not only Law and Order, but is
+pervaded by the character of its Maker. God's mercy still reaches to the
+heavens, and His faithfulness to the clouds. We must resolutely and with
+'pious obstinacy' lift our hearts to that, else we perish. I think of one
+very flagrant tale, in which the selfishness, the lusts and the cruelties
+of modern men are described with the rarest of power, and so as to reduce
+the reader to despair, till he realises that the author has emptied the
+life of which he treats of everything else, except a fair background of
+nature which is introduced only to exhibit the evil facts in more horrid
+relief. The author studies sin in a vacuum, an impossible situation. God
+has been left out, and the conviction of His pardon. Left out are the
+power of man's heart to turn, the gift of penitence, the mysterious
+operations of the Spirit, and the sense of the trustfulness and patience
+of God with the worst souls of men. These are not less realities than the
+others; they are within the knowledge of, they bless, every stratum of
+life in our Christian land; they are the biggest realities in the world
+to-day. Let us then meet the so-called realism of our times with this
+Greater Realism. Let us tell men who exhibit sin and wickedness apart from
+God and from man's power of penitence, apart from love and from the
+realised holiness of our human race, that they are working in a vacuum,
+and their experiment is therefore the most un-real that can be imagined.
+We may not be able to eliminate the cruel facts of sin from our universe,
+but do not let us therefore eliminate the rest of the Universe from our
+study of sin. Let us be true to the Greater Realism.
+
+Again, the whole Psalm is on the famous keynote of the Epistle to the
+Philippians: _Rejoice in the Lord_. This is after all the only safe temper
+for tempted men. By preachers of a theology as narrow as their experience,
+it is often said that our guilt and native vileness, our unquestioned
+peril and instability, are such that no man of us can afford to be
+exultant in this life. But surely, just because of these, we cannot afford
+to be anything else. Whether from the fascination or from the despair of
+sin, nothing saves like an ardent and enthusiastic belief in the goodness
+and the love of God. Let us strenuously lift the heart to that. Let us
+rejoice and exult in it, and so we shall be safe. But, withal, we must
+beware of taking a narrow or an abstract view of what that goodness is.
+The fault of many Christians is that they turn to some theological
+definition, or to some mystical refinement of it, and their hearts are
+starved. We must seek the loving-kindness of God in all the breadth and
+open-air of common life. _Lord, Thou preservest man and beast_. Or, as
+St. Paul put it in that same Epistle: _Whatsoever things are true,
+whatsoever things are honourable, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever
+things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of
+good report, if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on
+these things_. It is, once more, the Greater Realism. But behind Paul's
+crowd of glorious facts let us not miss the greatest Reality of all, God
+Himself. God's righteousness and love, His grace and patience toward us,
+become more and more of a wonder as we dwell upon them, and by force of
+their wonder the most real facts of our experience. _How excellent is Thy
+loving-kindness, O God. Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say unto
+you, Rejoice_.
+
+
+
+
+PSALM LII
+
+RELIGION THE OPEN
+AIR OF THE SOUL
+
+
+With the thirty-sixth Psalm we may take the fifty-second, which attacks
+the same problem of evil in pretty much the same temper. It is peculiar in
+not being addressed, like others, to God or to the Psalmist's own soul,
+but to the wicked man himself. It is, at first at least, neither a prayer
+nor a meditation, but a challenge and an arraignment of character.
+
+Some may be disposed to cavil at its bitterness, and to say that for
+Christians it is too full of threats and vengeance. Perhaps it is; nay,
+certainly it is. But there are two noble feelings in it, and two vivid
+pictures of character. The Psalm is inspired by a brave contempt for
+wickedness in high places, and by a most devout trust in the love of God.
+And in expressing these two noble tempers, the poet analyses two
+characters. He analyses the character which is ruled from within by the
+love of Self, and he gives his own experience of a character inspired from
+without by faith--by faith in the mercy of the Living God.
+
+We Christians too hastily dismiss from our own uses the so-called Cursing
+Psalms. It is unfortunate that the translators have so often tempted us to
+this by exaggerating the violence of the Hebrew at the expense of its
+insight, its discrimination, and its sometimes delicate satire. If only we
+had a version that produced the exact colours of the original, and if we
+ourselves had the quick conscience and the honest wit to carry over the
+ideas into terms suitable to our own day--in which the selfishness of the
+human heart is the same old thing it ever was, though it uses milder and
+more subtle means,--then we should feel the touch of a power not merely of
+dramatic interest but of moral conviction, where we have been too much
+accustomed to think that we were hearing only ancient rant. So treated,
+Psalms like the fifth, the tenth, the fourteenth, and the fifty-second,
+which we so often pass over, offended by their violence, become quick and
+powerful, the very word of God to our own times and hearts.
+
+Let us take a more literal version of the Psalm before us:
+
+  _Why glory in evil, big man?
+  The leal love of God is all day long.
+  Thy tongue planneth mischiefs,
+  Like a razor sharp-whetted, thou worker of fraud.
+  Thou lovest evil more than good,
+  Lying than speaking the truth.
+  Thou lovest all words of voracity,
+    Tongue of deceit.
+  God also shall tear thee down, once for all_,
+
+  _Cut thee out, and pluck thee from the
+    tent,
+  And uproot thee from off the land
+      of the living.
+  That the righteous may see and fear,
+  And at him they shall laugh_.
+
+    '_Lo! the fellow who sets not God
+      for his stronghold,
+      But trusts in the mass of his
+      wealth,
+      Is strong in his mischief_.'
+
+  _But I like an olive-tree, green in God's
+    house,
+  I have trusted in God's leal love for
+    ever and aye.
+  I will praise Thee for ever, that Thou
+    hast done [this],
+  And I will wait on Thy name--for
+    'tis good--
+  In face of Thy saints_.
+
+
+The character who is challenged is easily made out, and we may recognize
+how natural he is and how near to ourselves.
+
+In the first verse he is called by a name expressing unusual strength or
+influence--a mighty man, _a hero_. The term may be used ironically, like
+our 'big fellow', 'big man.' But, whether this is irony or not, the man's
+bigness had material solidity. He was _rooted in the land of the living,_
+he _had abundance of riches._ Riches are no sin in themselves, as the
+exaggerated language of some people of the present day would lead us to
+imagine. Rich men are not always sent to hell, nor poor men always to
+heaven. As St. Augustine remarks with his usual cleverness: 'It was not
+his poverty but his piety which sent Lazarus in the parable to heaven, and
+when he got there, he found a rich man's bosom to rest in!' Riches are no
+sin in themselves, but, like all forms of strength, a very great and
+dangerous temptation. This man had yielded. Prosperity was so unchanging
+with him that he had come to trust it, and did not feel the need of
+trusting anything else. He was strong enough to stand alone: so strong
+that he tried to stand without God. If he was like many self-centred men
+of our own time he probably did not admit this. But it is not profession
+which reveals where a man puts his trust. It is the practice and discipline
+of life, betraying us by a hundred commonplace ways, in spite of all the
+orthodoxy we boast. It is sorrow and duty and the call to self-denial. When
+this man's feelings got low, when he was visited by touches of
+melancholy--those chills sent forward from the grave to every mortal
+travelling thither,--when conscience made him weak and fearful, then _he
+made not God his strength, but trusted in the abundance of his riches_.
+With that audacity which the touch of property breeds in Us, he said, 'I
+am sure of to-morrow,' plunged into cruel plans, _gloried in his
+mischief_, and was himself again.
+
+Trusting in riches--we all do it, when we seek to drive away uncomfortable
+fears and the visitations of conscience by self-indulgence; when, instead
+of saying _I will lift mine eyes unto the hills, whence cometh my
+help_?--and seeking the steep and arduous consolations of duty, we look
+into our nearest friends' faces and whine for a sympathy that is often
+insincere, or lie down in some place of comfort that is stolen or unclean.
+
+No man with such habits stops there. This big man _strengthened himself in
+his wickedness_ and in all manner of guile and cruelty. It is a natural
+development. The heart which finds life in material wealth is usually
+certain to go farther and seek for more in the satisfaction of base and
+sullen appetites. We hear, it is true, a great deal about the softening
+influence of wealth, and moralists speak of luxury as if its bad effects
+were negative and it only enervated. But if riches and the habit of
+trusting to them, if the material comforts of life and complacency in
+them, only made men sleek and tame--if luxury did nothing but soften and
+emasculate--the world would have been far more stupid and far less cruel
+than it is to-day.
+
+They are not negative tempers, but very positive and aggressive ones, which
+the Bible associates with a love of wealth, and we have but to remember
+history to know that the Bible is right. Luxury may have dulled the
+combative instincts in man, but it has often nursed the meanly cruel ones.
+The Romans with the rapid growth of their wealth loved the battlefield
+less; but the sight of the arena, with its struggling gladiators, and
+beasts tearing women and children, became more of a necessity to their
+appetites. Take two instances. Titus was a rough, hardened soldier; but he
+wept at the horrors which his siege obliged him to inflict on Jerusalem.
+Nero was an artist, and fiddled while Rome was burning. Coddle your boys;
+you may keep them from wishing to fight their equals, but you will not cure
+them of torturing animals. Idleness means not only sluggishness, but a
+morbid and criminal desire for sensation, which honest industry would have
+sweated out of the flesh. Money often renders those who have it
+unconsciously impatient with the slowness of poorer men, and unconsciously
+insolent about their defects. Everywhere, on the high places of history,
+and within our own humble experience, we perceive the same truth, that
+materialism, and the temper which trusts in wealth or in success, does not
+turn men into fat oxen, but into tigers. Hence the frequency with which the
+Old Testament, and especially the Psalms, connect an abundance of wealth
+with a strength of wickedness, and bracket for the same degree of doom the
+rich man and the violent one. Our Psalm is natural in adding to the clause,
+_trusting in the abundance of riches,_ that other about _strengthening
+himself in wickedness_. This is the very temper of a prosperous and
+pampered life: which seeks lust or cruelty not to forget itself, as a
+stunted and tortured nature may be forgiven for doing, but in order to work
+off its superfluous blood.
+
+Observe, too, how much sins of the tongue are mentioned,-, lying,
+backbiting and the love of swallowing men's reputations whole. _Thou lovest
+all words of voracity, thou tongue of deceit_. We are, too, apt to think
+that sins of speech most fiercely beset weak and puny characters: men that
+have no weapon but a sharp and nasty tongue. Yet none use their words more
+recklessly than the strong, who have not been sobered by the rebuffs and
+uncertainties of life. Power and position often make a man trifle with the
+truth. A big man's word carries far, and he knows it; till the temptation
+to be dogmatic or satirical, to snub and crush with a word, is as near to
+him as to a slave-driver is the fourteen-feet thong in his hand, with a
+line of bare black backs before him.
+
+These things are written of ourselves. In his great book on 'Democracy in
+America,' De Tocqueville pointed out, more than fifty years ago, the
+dangers into which the religious middle classes fall by the spread of
+wealth and comfort. That danger has increased, till for the _rich_ on whom
+Christ called woe, we might well substitute the _comfortable._ At a time
+when a very moderate income brings within our reach nearly all the
+resources of civilisation, which of us does not find day by day a dozen
+distractions that drown for him the voice of conscience: a crowd of men to
+lose himself in from God and his best friends: half a dozen base comforts,
+in the lap of which he forgets duty and dreams only of self? Comfort makes
+us all thoughtless, and thoughtlessness is the parent of every cruelty.
+
+The Psalm makes no attempt to turn this tyrant whom it challenges; it
+invokes the mercy of God, not to change him, but to show how vain his
+boasts are, and to give heart to those whom he oppresses. God's mercy
+endureth for ever; but he must pass away. The righteous shall see his end,
+and fear and laugh: their satire will have religion in it. But though the
+Psalm does not design this sinner's conversion, its very challenge contains
+an indication of the means by which he and all selfish people who are like
+him may be changed to nobler lives. In this respect it has a gospel for us
+all, which may be thus stated.
+
+There are poor invalids who ought to get their health again by seeking the
+open air and sunshine, but who keep between their bed and their hearthrug,
+cowering over their fire with the blinds pulled down;--to whom comes the
+wise doctor, pulls up the blinds, shows them that it is day outside, with
+the sun shining and the trees growing, and men walking about, and tells
+them that the health they are trying to get inside, and thereby only
+making themselves worse invalids, they will get out there. This big man
+was such a moral invalid, seeking strength within his own riches and
+qualities. And so doing he had developed the nasty indoor tempers, till it
+seemed pleasant and satisfactory to him to be spiteful, slanderous and
+false. Meantime, outside the darkened windows of his selfishness, the mercy
+of God, in which other men gloried and grew strong, rose every day. With
+one sweep the Psalmist tears the curtains down and lets in the sunshine.
+_The leal love of God is every day_. There, in that commonplace daily
+light: in that love which is as near you as the open air and as free as
+the sunshine, are the life and exultation which you seek so vainly within
+yourself.
+
+It was in the sunshine that the Psalmist felt himself growing:
+
+  _But I am like an olive-tree, green in God's house.
+  I trust in the leal love of God for ever and aye_.
+
+This open-air figure suggests (though we have no confirmation of the fact)
+a tree growing in the high temple precincts, as trees to this day grow upon
+the Haram around the great mosque in Jerusalem, open to the sunshine and
+washed by the great rush of wind from the west. The Old Testament as much
+as the New haunts the open air for its figures of religion--a tree in full
+foliage, a tree planted by a river, a river brimming to its banks, the
+waves of a summer sea. Now this is not only because there is nothing else
+that will reflect the freedom of God's grace and the lavish joy it brings
+upon the world, but still more because the Bible feels the eternal truth,
+that to win this joy and freedom a man has got to go outside himself,
+outside his selfishness and other close tempers, outside his feelings and
+thoughts about himself, and receive the truths of religion as objective to
+him, taking the knowledge of God's pardon and peace as freely as he takes
+the sunshine of heaven, the calm of earth in summer, and the cool, strong
+winds from off the hills. To those old founders of our faith, religion was
+never man's feelings about religion: it was the love of God. God was not
+man's thoughts about God, but God Himself in His wonderful grace and truth,
+objective to our hearts. Therefore those ancient saints moved to the Spirit
+as the tree rustles to the wind, and as in summer she is green and glad in
+the sunshine that bathes her, so they rejoiced in the Lord, and in His
+goodness. _I will give thanks, for_ THOU _hast done it_.
+
+But this getting out of self does not only bring a man into the open air,
+and to gladness in a God who worketh for him. It gives him the company of
+all good and noble men. I _will wait on Thy name, for it is good, in the
+presence of Thy saints_. What a fellowship faith and unselfishness make a
+man aware of!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Let us turn back for a moment to the man, to whose close character this
+open air is offered  as a contrast. Is it really difficult for us to
+imagine him? There is not one of us who has not tried this kind of thing
+again and again,--and has succeeded in it with far less substance than the
+great man had to come and go upon. He trusted in the abundance of his
+riches: he lost God for the multitude of his temptations. But for us there
+is no such excuse. There has been no pleasure too sordid, no comfort too
+selfish, no profit too mean, no honour too cheap and vulgar, but we have
+sometimes preferred it, in seeking for happiness, to the infinite and
+everlasting mercy of our God. We may not be big men, and deserve to have
+psalms written about us; but in our own little ways we exult in our
+selfishness and the tempers it breeds in us just as guiltily as he did,
+and just as foolishly, for God's great love is as near to us, and could as
+easily chase these vapours from our souls, if we would but open the windows
+to its air.
+
+Take one or two commonplace cases that do not require the great capital
+which this fellow put into his business of sinning, but are quite within
+reach of your and my very ordinary means of selfishness.
+
+You have been overreached in some business competition, or disappointed in
+getting a post, or foiled along some path of public service. You come home
+with a natural vexation in your heart: sore at being beaten and anxious
+about your legitimate interests. It is all right enough. But sit down at
+the fire for a little and brood over it. Shut God out as care and anger
+can. Forget that your Bible is at your elbow. Think only of your wrong, and
+it is wonderful how soon you will find spite rising, and envy and the
+cruellest hate. It is wonderful how quickly plans of revenge will form
+themselves in your usually slow mind, and how happy they will make you.
+Malice is like brandy to a man's brain, and will send him back with a
+beaming face to the work he left with scowls. Ah, _why boast thyself in
+mischief, O man? God's leal love is all day long!_ The Bible is within
+reach of you. The lustre is as fresh on the promises as the rain-drops were
+under the glints of sun this morning. Walk there with God in His own
+garden: all God's steps are comfort and promise to the meek who will walk
+with Him. God is full of gentleness, and His gentleness shall make you
+great. _I will be as the dew unto Israel_. Or seek with the Master the
+crowds of men. Keep near Him in the dust and the crush: watch how He
+endures the contradiction of sinners, how patient He is with men, how
+forgiving. Watch most of all how He prays. Bow the knee like Him, and He
+shall lift thee up a sane and a happy man. To think of it--all that Divine
+fellowship and solace may be ours by opening the pages of a Book which lies
+on every table. _God's love is all the day_.
+
+Let the other case be for young men and young women. For you the fresh air
+and sunshine are not yet shut out by the high walls of success or the thick
+ones of material prosperity. The dust of strife for you has not yet hidden
+heaven. But we all know that passion can build as solidly as wealth, and
+that a young heart may be as closely prisoned in a sudden temptation as an
+old one among the substantial accumulations of a lifetime. What is
+Temptation?
+
+  I turned to her: she built a house
+  And Thought was her swift architect,
+  And Falsehood let the curtains fall,
+  And Fancy all the tables deck'd.
+
+  And so we shut the world out,
+  Soul and Temptation face to face,
+  And perfumed air and music sweet,
+  And soft desire fill'd all the place.
+
+O brothers, in such an hour, and it comes to every one of us, think upon
+the vast world outside, and the walls so magically built will as magically
+fall. God's sunshine is there, and God's fresh air, to think upon which,
+with the companies of men and women who walk up and down in it and are
+fair, is the most sovereign charm against temptation that I know. _Why
+glory in this evil_? Put that challenge to your heart in the crisis of
+every evil passion. _God's mercy is all day long_. Think of the love of
+the Father: of His patience with thee, of His trust of thee; think of the
+Love of the Redeemer, Who gave Himself for thy life; think of the great
+objective truths of religion--righteousness, joy and peace in the Holy
+Ghost. Or if these seem unsubstantial thoughts, that flash and fade
+again like clouds on the western sky at evening, come out among the
+flesh-and-blood proofs of them which walk our own day. Frequent the
+pure, strong men and women who are in sight of us all, fair on every
+countryside, radiant in every city crowd. Hearken to the greater spirits
+who by their songs and books come down and speak with the lowliest and
+most fallen. And do not forget the holy dead, nor doubt that though unseen
+they are with us still.
+
+  _I will wait on Thy name,
+  for 'tis good, in face of Thy
+  Saints._
+
+
+
+
+PSALM CXXI
+
+THE MINISTRY OF THE HILLS AND ALL GREAT THINGS
+
+
+We catch the key-note of this Psalm if we read the words _whence cometh my
+help_ not as a statement but as a question. Our older version takes them
+as a statement; it makes the Psalmist look to the hills, as if his help
+broke and shouted from them all like waterfalls. But with the Revised
+Version we ought to read: _I will lift mine eyes unto the mountains--from
+whence cometh my help?_ The Psalmist looks up, not because his help is
+stored there, but because the sight of the hills stirs within him an
+intense hope. His heart is immediately full of the prayer, _Whence cometh
+my help_? and of the answer, _My help is from the Lord, that made heaven
+and earth_.
+
+We need not wish to fix a locality or a date to this Psalm. It is enough
+that the singer had a mountain skyline in view, and that below in the
+shadows, so dark that we cannot make out their features, lay God's church
+and people. They were threatened, and there was neither help nor hope of
+help among themselves.
+
+Perhaps it was one of those frequent periods in the life of Israel, in
+which the religious institutions of the people were so abased that the
+Psalmist could see in them no pledge nor provocation of hope. Indeed, these
+institutions may have been altogether overthrown. There was no leader on
+whom God had set His seal, and the national life had nothing to raise the
+heart, but was full of base thoughts and paltry issues that dissipate
+faith, and render the interference of God an improbable thing. So the
+Psalmist lifted his thoughts to the sacraments which God has fixed in the
+framework of His world. He did not identify his help with the hills--no
+true Israelite could have done that,--but the sight of them started his
+hope and filled his heart with the desire to pray. This may have happened
+at sunrise, when, even more than at other hours, mountains fulfil the
+ministry of hope. Below them all was in darkness; it was still night, but
+the peaks saw the morning, and the signal of its coming fell swiftly down
+their flanks. In this case the Psalm is a matin-song, a character which
+the rest of the verses carry out. Or at any other hour of the day, it may
+simply have been the high, clear outline of the hills which inspired the
+Psalm--that firm step between heaven and earth, that margin of a world of
+possibility beyond. A prophet has said, _How beautiful upon the mountains
+are the feet of them that bring good tidings!_ But to our Psalmist the
+mountains spread a threshold for a Divine arrival. Up there God Himself
+may be felt to be afoot.
+
+Now to a pure heart and a hungry heart this is always what a mountain view
+effects. 'A hill-top,' says a recent writer, 'is a moral as well as a
+physical elevation.' He is right, or men would not have worshipped on
+hill-tops, nor high places have become synonymous with sacred ones. Whether
+we climb them or gaze at them, the mountains produce in us that mingling of
+moral and physical emotion in which the temper of true worship consists.
+They seclude us from trifles, and give the mind the fellowship of
+greatness. They inspire patience and peace; they speak of faithfulness and
+guardianship. But chiefly the mountains are sacraments of hope. That high,
+steadfast line--how it raises the spirits, and lifts the heart from care;
+how early it signals the day, how near it brings heaven! To men of old its
+margin excited thoughts of an enchanted world beyond; its clear step
+between heaven and earth made easy the imagination of God descending among
+men.
+
+So it is here. At the sight of the hills our Psalmist's hope--instead of
+lying asleep in confidence of a help too far away to be vivid, or dying of
+starvation because that help is so long of coming--leaps to her feet, all
+watch and welcome for an instant arrival. _Whence cometh my help? My help
+cometh from the Lord, that made heaven and earth_. This is not fancy; it is
+an attitude of real life. This is not a poet with a happy phrase for his
+idea: it is a sentry at his difficult post, challenging the signal, and
+welcoming the arrival, of that help which makes all the difference to life.
+
+But we may widen the application of the Psalmist's words far beyond the
+hills. This is a big thing to which he lifts his eyes to feed his hope. God
+is unseen; so he betakes himself to the biggest thing he can see. And
+therein is a lesson which we need all across our life. For it is just
+because, instead of lifting our eyes to the big things around us, we busy
+and engross ourselves with trifles, that the practical enthusiasm which
+beats through this Psalm is failing among us, and that we have so little
+faith in God's readiness to act, and to act speedily, within the circle of
+our own experience. Trifles, however innocent or dutiful they may be, do
+not move within us the fundamental pieties. They reveal no stage worthy for
+God to act upon. They give no help to the imagination to realise Him as
+near. A church which never lifts her eyes above her own denominational
+details, petty differences in doctrine or government, petty matters of
+ritual and posture, cannot continue to believe in the nearness of the
+living God. The strain on faith is too great to last. The reason recoils
+from admitting that God can help on such battle-fields as those on which
+the churches are often so busy, that He can come to help such causes as
+the sects, neglectful of the real interests of the world, too often stoop
+to champion. And so the churches insensibly get settled in far-off,
+abstract views of God, and are sapped of the primal and practical energies
+of religion. Whereas it is evident that in the religious communities which
+lift their eyes above their low hedges to the high hills of God--to the
+great simple outlines of His kingdom, to the ideals and destiny which God
+has set before mankind--in such churches faith in His nearness to the world
+and in His readiness to help must always abound. To men who have an eye for
+the big things of earth, God will always seem to be afoot upon it. They
+are conscious of an arena worthy for Him to descend upon, and of causes
+worthy for Him to interfere in. It is no shock to their reason, no undue
+strain upon their imagination, to feel the Almighty and the All-loving come
+down to earth, when earth has such horizons and such issues.
+
+Turning to ourselves as individuals, we may ask why we have such distant
+notions of God, so shy a faith of His coming within the circle of our own
+life and work? Why are our prayers so formal, so empty of the expectation
+of an immediate and divine answer? Why is our attitude at our work so
+destitute of practical enthusiasm? Because we, too, are not lifting our
+eyes to the hills. We are looking for nothing but little things, and
+therefore we see nowhere any threshold or field worthy of God. How can the
+sense that the living God is near to our life, that He is interested in it
+and willing to help it, survive in us, if our life be full of petty things?
+Absorption in trifles, attention only to the meaner aspects of life, is
+killing more faith than is killed by aggressive unbelief. For if all a man
+sees of life be his own interests, if all he sees of home be its comforts,
+if all he sees of religion be the outlines of his own denomination, the
+complexion of his preacher's doctrine, the agreeableness and taste of his
+fellow-worshippers--to such a man God must always seem far away, for in
+those things there is no call upon either mind or heart to feel God near.
+But if, instead of limiting ourselves to trifles, we resolutely and 'with
+pious obstinacy' lift our eyes to the hills--whether to those great
+mountain-tops of history which the dawn of the new heavens has already
+touched, periods of faith and action that signal to our more forward but
+lower ages the promise of His coming; or to the great essentials of human
+experience that at sunrise, noon and evening remain the same through all
+ages; or to the ideals of truth and justice; to the possibilities of human
+nature about us; to the stature of the highest characters within our sight;
+to the bulk and sweep of the people's life; to the destinies of our own
+nation that still rise high above all party dust and strife--then we shall
+see thresholds prepared for a divine arrival, conditions upon which we can
+realise God acting. Our hope will spring, an eager sentinel, as if she
+already heard upon them all the footfalls of His coming.
+
+These lines may meet the eyes of some who have lost their faith, and are
+sorry and weary to have lost it. Whether the blame be outside yourselves,
+in the littleness of many of the prevailing aspects of religious life, and
+the crowding of our religious arenas with the pettiest of interests, or
+within yourselves, in your own mean and slovenly views of life, your
+indolence to extricate details and discriminate the large eternal issues
+among them--there is for you but one way back to faith. Lift your eyes to
+the hills. Let your attention haunt the spots where life rises most near to
+heaven, and your hearts will again become full of hopes and reasons for God
+being at work upon earth.
+
+Let those who, still in their youth, have preserved their faith and
+fullness of hope, keep looking up. Amid all the cynicism and the
+belittling of life, strenuously take the highest views of life. Amid all
+the selfishness and impatience, which in our day consider life upon its
+lowest levels, and there break it up into short and selfish interests,
+strenuously lift your eyes and sweep with them the main outlines, summits
+and issues. May no man lose sight of the hills for want of looking up,
+till at the last he is laid upon his back,--and then must look up whether
+he has done so before or not--and in the evening clearness and evening
+quiet those great outlines stand forth before his eyes--stand forth but
+for a few moments and are lost for ever in the falling night.
+
+Many men have bravely lifted their eyes to the hills, who have felt nothing
+come back upon them save a vague wonder and influence of purity. They have
+been struck with an awe to which they could give no name, with a health and
+energy which they could only ascribe to physical infection. But to this
+Psalmist the hope and worship which the hills excited were satisfied by the
+revelation of a Person. Above earth and her hills he saw a Character.
+
+There have been revelations of God more rich and brilliant than this one.
+But its simplicity suits the Psalmist's point of view. He is looking to the
+hills. It is on that high line he sees his Helper appearing. Now we all
+know how a figure looks upon a skyline. We see just the outline of it--a
+silhouette, as it were: no details, expression, voice nor colour, but only
+an attitude. This is all the Psalmist sees of God on that high threshold
+against the light--His attitude. The attitude is that of a sentinel. The
+Lord is thy Keeper--thy watchman. The figure is familiar in Palestine,
+especially where the tents of the nomads lie. The camp or flock lies low
+among the tumbled hills, unable to see far, and subject, in the intricate
+land, to sudden surprise. But sentinels are posted on eminences round
+about, erect and watchful. This is the figure which the Psalmist sees his
+help assume upon the skyline to which he has lifted his eyes.
+
+Compared with other experiences of God, this outline of Him may seem bare.
+Yet if we feel the fact of it with freshness of heart and imagination, what
+may it not do for us? Life may be hallowed by no thought more powerfully
+than by this, that it is watched: nor peace secured by any stronger trust
+than that the Almighty assumes responsibility for it; nor has work ever
+been inspired by keener sense of honour than when we feel that God gives
+us freedom and safety for it. These are the fundamental pieties of the
+soul; and no elaborateness of doctrine can compensate for the loss of fresh
+convictions of their truth.
+
+_The Lord is thy Keeper_. If men had only not left this article out of
+their creeds when they added all the rest, how changed the religious life
+of to-day would have been!--how simple, how strenuous, how possibly heroic!
+
+_The Lord is thy Keeper_. What sense of proportion and what tact does the
+thought of those sleepless thoughts bring upon our life! How quickly it
+restores the instinct to discriminate between what is essential and what is
+not essential in faith and morals; that instinct, from the loss of which
+the religious world of to-day suffers so much. How hard does it make us
+with ourselves that His eyes are on us, yet how hopeful that He counts us
+worth protecting! When we realise, that not only many of the primal forces
+of character, but its true balance and proportion, are thus due to so
+simple a faith in God, we understand the insistence laid upon this by the
+prophets and by Christ. There is no truth which the prophets press more
+steadily upon Israel than that all their national life lies in the sight
+and on the care of God. The burden of many prophetic orations is no more
+than this--you are defended, you are understood, you are watched, by God.
+And in the Sermon on the Mount, and in that address to the disciples now
+given in the tenth of Matthew, there is no message more clear or frequent
+than that God cares for us, has to be reckoned with by all our enemies, is
+aware of everything that befalls us, and while He relieves us from
+responsibility in the things that are too great for us, makes us the more
+to feel our responsibility for things within our power--in short, that the
+Lord is our Keeper.
+
+Of course we shall be able to realise this, according as we realise life.
+If we have a heart for the magnitudes of life, it will not seem vain to
+believe that God Himself should guard it.
+
+If we keep looking to the hills, God shall be very clear upon them as our
+Keeper.
+
+But this distant view of God upon the skyline, full as it is of discipline
+and of peace, does not satisfy the Psalmist. To him the Lord is not only
+Israel's Keeper or Sentinel, but the Lord is also _thy shade on thy right
+hand: the sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night._ The
+origin of these expressions is vague, but their application here is vivid
+enough. A sentinel is too far away, and is, physically, too narrow a figure
+to fulfil man's imagination of God. The Psalmist requires something near
+enough to express both intimacy and shelter. So he calls God the Comrade as
+well as the Sentinel of His people; their Champion as well as their
+Watchman. The _shade upon thy right hand_ is of course the shade upon the
+fighting or working arm, to preserve it from exposure, and in the full
+freedom of its power.
+
+Now it is never ideas about God, nor even aspirations after Him, which in
+the real battle of life keep us fresh and unexhausted. Ideas, and even
+aspirations, strain as much as they lift. They give the mind its direction,
+but by themselves they cannot carry it all the way. Nor is the influence of
+a Personality sufficient if that Personality remain far off. Reverence
+alone never saved any human soul in the storm of life. It is One by our
+side Whom we need. It is by the sense of trust, of sympathy, of
+comradeship, of fighting together in the ranks, that our strength is
+thrilled and our right hand preserved in freshness. Without all this
+between us and bare heaven, we must in the end weary and wither.
+
+Twofold is the experience in which we especially need such compassion and
+fellowship--in the time of responsibility and in the time of temptation.
+These are the two great Lonelinesses of life--the Loneliness of the Height
+and the Loneliness of the Deep--in which the heart needs to be sure of more
+than being remembered and watched. The Loneliness of the Height, when God
+has led us to the duty of a great decision, or given us the charge of other
+lives, or sent us on the quest of some truth, or lifted us to a vision and
+ideal. The king, the father, the thinker, the artist, all know this
+loneliness of the height, which no human fellow can share, no human heart
+fully sympathise with. Then it is that, with another Psalmist, the heart,
+exposed to the bare heaven, cries out for something higher than itself to
+come between the heaven and it: _What time my heart is overwhelmed do Thou
+lead me unto the rock that is higher than I_; and God answers us by being
+Himself _a shade upon the right hand, and the sun shall not smite by day,
+nor the moon by night_. And there is the Loneliness of the Deep, when we
+are plunged into the pit of our hearts to fight with terrible
+temptations--a conflict no other man knows about or can help us in. Shall
+God, Who sees us fighting there, and falling under the sense of our
+helplessness, leave us to fight alone? The Lord is thy shade on thy right
+hand; thy Comrade, fighting with thee, His presence shall keep thy heart
+brave and thine arm fresh. It is a truth enforced through the whole of the
+Old Testament. God is not a God far away. He descends, He comes to our
+side: He battles for and suffers with His own.
+
+These then are the main thoughts of this Psalm. What new authority and
+vividness have Jesus Christ and His Cross put into them? There are few of
+the Psalms which the early Christians more frequently employed of Christ.
+On the lintel of an ancient house in Hauran I once read the inscription:
+'O Jesus Christ, be the shelter and defence of the home and of the whole
+family, and bless their incoming and outgoing.' How may we also sing this
+Psalm of Christ? By remembering the new pledges He has given us, that God's
+thoughts and God's heart are with us. By remembering the infinite degree,
+which the Cross has revealed, not only of the interest God takes in our
+life, but of the responsibility He Himself assumes for its eternal issues.
+The Cross was no new thing. The Cross was the putting of the Love of God,
+of the Blood of Christ, into the old fundamental pieties of the human
+heart, the realising by Jesus in Himself of the dearest truths about God.
+Look up, then, and sing this Psalm of Him. Can we lift our eyes to any of
+the hills without seeing His figure upon them? Is there a human ideal, duty
+or hope, with which Jesus is not inseparably and for ever identified? Is
+there a human experience--the struggle of the individual heart in
+temptation, the pity of the multitude, the warfare against the strongholds
+of wickedness--from which we can imagine Him absent? No; it is impossible
+for any high outline of morality or religion to break upon the eyes of our
+race, it is impossible for any field of righteous battle, any floor of
+suffering to unroll, without the vision of Christ upon it. He dominates our
+highest aspirations, and is felt by our side in our deepest sorrows. There
+is no loneliness, whether of height or of depth, which He does not enter by
+the side of His own.
+
+Who has warned us like Christ? To this day He stands the great Sentinel of
+civilisation. If all within the camp do not acknowledge Him, no new thing
+starts up in its midst, no new thing comes upon it from outside, which He
+does not challenge. His judgment is still the highest, clearest, safest the
+world has ever known; and each new effort of service, each new movement of
+knowledge, is determined by its worth to His Kingdom.
+
+Who has assumed responsibility for our life as Christ has? Who has taken
+upon himself the safety and the honour, not of the little tribe for whom
+this Psalm was first sung, but of the whole of the children of men! He
+called about Himself our weariness, He lifted our sorrow, He disposed of
+our sin--as only God can call or lift or dispose. Nothing exhausted His
+pity, or His confidence to deal with us; nothing ever betrayed a fault in
+His character, or belied the trust His people put in Him. _He suffers not
+thy foot_ _to be moved; He neither slumbers nor sleeps_.
+
+For all this we sing the Psalm of Christ. We know that so long as we have
+our conversation among the lofty things of life, His dominating Presence
+grows only the more clear; and so long as we are beset by things adverse
+and tempting, His sympathy and His prevailing grace become the more sure.
+
+_The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil. He shall preserve thy soul_.
+
+_The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in, from this time
+forth and for evermore._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Edinburgh University Press
+T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty
+
+By the same Author
+
+THE HISTORICAL
+
+GEOGRAPHY OF THE
+
+HOLY LAND
+
+With Six Maps, specially prepared.
+
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+
+With New Index and additions, and corrections.
+
+'A very noteworthy contribution to the study of sacred history, based
+upon the three indispensable conditions of personal acquaintance with
+the land, a study of the explorations, discoveries, and decipherments
+... and the employment of the results of Biblical criticism.'--_Times_.
+
+'Professor Smith is well equipped at all points for this work. He is
+abreast of the latest findings of Scripture exegesis, and of geographical
+survey, and of archæological exploration; and he has himself travelled
+widely over Palestine. The value of the work is incalculably increased
+by the series of geographical maps, the first of the kind representing
+the whole lift and lie of the land by gradations of colour.'--_Scotsman_.
+
+HODDER & STOUGHTON
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+THE BOOK OF ISAIAH
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+VOL. I.--CHAPS, I.--XXXIX.
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+All we desire is to let English readers know how very lucid, impressive,
+and, indeed, how vivid a study of Isaiah is within their reach.... We will
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+VOL. II.--CHAPS, XL.--LXVI.
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+need one in the case of the present volume add the qualifying remark that
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+previous book on Isaiah showed the same qualities of fairness, historical
+imagination, and enthusiasm for a great subject that now appear in the
+handling of these precious fragments from the lesser prophets of Israel.
+Each separate prophecy calls out an appropriate literary and historical
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+THE PSALMS
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+_IN THREE VOLUMES_
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+By Alexander Maclaren, D.D.
+
+_Crown 8vo, cloth, 7s. 6d. each_.
+
+In 'The Expositor's Bible' Series.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A
+
+BIBLICAL COMMENTARY
+
+ON THE PSALMS
+
+By Professor Franz Delitzsch
+
+Translated by the Rev. David Eaton, M.A. from the latest Edition, and
+Specially Revised by the Author.
+
+_In Three Volumes    Crown 8vo, each 7s. 6d_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
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+
+THE PSALTER
+
+By Joseph Parker, D.D.
+
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+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Four Psalms, by George Adam Smith
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13353 ***
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #13353 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13353)
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Four Psalms, by George Adam Smith
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Four Psalms
+
+Author: George Adam Smith
+
+Release Date: September 2, 2004 [EBook #13353]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FOUR PSALMS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Newman, Valerine Blas and PG Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+LITTLE BOOKS ON RELIGION
+
+Edited by
+
+The Rev. W. Robertson Nicoll, LL.D.
+
+Elegantly bound in cloth, price _1s. 6d._ each.
+
+Christ and the Future Life.
+By R.W. Dale, LL.D.
+
+The Seven Words from the Cross.
+By the Rev. W. Robertson Nicoll, LL.D.
+
+The Visions of a Prophet.
+By the Rev. Professor Marcus Dods, D.D.
+
+Why be a Christian?
+Addresses to Young Men. By the same
+Author.
+
+The Four Temperaments.
+By the Rev. Alexander Whyte, D.D.
+
+The Upper Room.
+By the Rev. John Watson, M.A., D.D.
+
+Four Psalms.
+By the Rev. Professor George Adam Smith, D.D., LL.D.
+
+Gospel Questions and Answers.
+By the Rev. James Denney, D.D.
+
+The Unity and Symmetry of the Bible.
+By the Rev. John Monro Gibson, D.D.
+
+
+_HODDER & STOUGHTON_
+
+FOUR PSALMS
+
+XXIII. XXXVI. LII. CXXI.
+
+INTERPRETED FOR PRACTICAL USE
+
+BY
+
+GEORGE ADAM SMITH
+
+
+HODDER AND STOUGHTON
+
+TO
+
+M.S. AND H.A.S.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+I
+PSALM XXIII: GOD OUR SHEPHERD
+
+II
+PSALM XXXVI: THE GREATER REALISM
+
+III
+PSALM LII: RELIGION THE OPEN AIR OF THE SOUL
+
+IV
+PSALM CXXI: THE MINISTRY OF THE HILLS AND ALL GREAT THINGS
+PSALM XXIII
+
+GOD OUR SHEPHERD
+
+
+The twenty-third Psalm seems to break in two at the end of the fourth
+verse. The first four verses clearly reflect a pastoral scene; the fifth
+appears to carry us off, without warning, to very different associations.
+This, however, is only in appearance. The last two verses are as pastoral
+as the first four. If these show us the shepherd with his sheep upon the
+pasture, those follow him, shepherd still, to where in his tent he
+dispenses the desert's hospitality to some poor fugitive from blood. The
+Psalm is thus a unity, even of metaphor. We shall see afterwards that it
+is also a spiritual unity; but at present let us summon up the landscape
+on which both of these features--the shepherd on his pasture and the
+shepherd in his tent--lie side by side, equal sacraments of the grace and
+shelter of our God.
+
+A Syrian or an Arabian pasture is very different from the narrow meadows
+and fenced hill-sides with which we are familiar. It is vast, and often
+virtually boundless. By far the greater part of it is desert--that is,
+land not absolutely barren, but refreshed by rain for only a few months,
+and through the rest of the year abandoned to the pitiless sun that sucks
+all life from the soil. The landscape is nearly all glare: monotonous
+levels or low ranges of hillocks, with as little character upon them as
+the waves of the sea, and shimmering in mirage under a cloudless heaven.
+This bewildering monotony is broken by only two exceptions. Here and there
+the ground is cleft to a deep ravine, which gapes in black contrast to the
+glare, and by its sudden darkness blinds the men and sheep that enter it
+to the beasts of prey which have their lairs in the recesses. But there
+are also hollows as gentle and lovely as those ravines are terrible, where
+water bubbles up and runs quietly between grassy banks through the open
+shade of trees.
+
+On such a wilderness, it is evident that the person and character of the
+shepherd must mean a great deal more to the sheep than they can possibly
+mean in this country. With us, sheep left to themselves may be seen any
+day--in a field or on a hill-side with a far-travelling fence to keep them
+from straying. But I do not remember ever to have seen in the East a flock
+of sheep without a shepherd.
+
+On such a landscape as I have described he is obviously indispensable.
+When you meet him there, 'alone of all his reasoning kind,' armed,
+weather-beaten, and looking out with eyes of care upon his scattered
+flock, their sole provision and defence, your heart leaps up to ask: Is
+there in all the world so dear a sacrament of life and peace as he?
+
+There is, and very near himself. As prominent a feature in the wilderness
+as the shepherd is the shepherd's tent. To Western eyes a cluster of
+desert homes looks ugly enough--brown and black lumps, often cast down
+anyhow, with a few loutish men lolling on the trampled sand in front of
+the low doorways, that a man has to stoop uncomfortably to enter. But
+conceive coming to these a man who is fugitive--fugitive across such a
+wilderness. Conceive a man fleeing for his life as Sisera fled when he
+sought the tent of Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite. To him that space
+of trampled sand, with the ragged black mouths above it, mean not only
+food and rest, but dear life itself. There, by the golden law of the
+desert's hospitality, he knows that he may eat in peace, that though his
+enemies come up to the very door, and his table be spread as it were in
+their presence, he need not flinch nor stint his heart of her security.
+
+That was the landscape the Psalmist saw, and it seemed to him to reflect
+the mingled wildness and beauty of his own life. Human life was just this
+wilderness of terrible contrasts, where the light is so bright, but the
+shadows the darker and more treacherous; where the pasture is rich, but
+scattered in the wrinkles of vast deserts; where the paths are illusive,
+yet man's passion flies swift and straight to its revenge; where all is
+separation and disorder, yet law sweeps inexorable, and a man is hunted
+down to death by his blood-guiltiness. But not in anything is life more
+like the Wilderness than in this, that it is the presence and character of
+One, which make all the difference to us who are its silly sheep; that it
+is His grace and hospitality which alone avail us when we awaken to the
+fact that our lives cannot be fully figured by those of sheep, for men are
+fugitives in need of more than food--men are fugitives with the conscience
+and the habit of sin relentless on their track. This is the main lesson of
+the Psalm: the faith into which many generations of God's Church have sung
+an ever richer experience of His Guidance and His Grace. We may gather it
+up under these three heads--they cannot be too simple: I. The Lord is a
+Shepherd; II. The Lord is my Shepherd; and, III. if that be too feeble a
+figure to meet the fugitive and hunted life of man, the Lord is my Host
+and my Sanctuary for ever.
+
+I. _The Lord is my Shepherd_: or--as the Greek, vibrating to the force of
+the original--_The Lord is shepherding me; I shall not want_. This is the
+theme of the first four verses.
+
+Every one feels that the Psalm was written by a shepherd, and the first
+thing that is obvious is that he has made his God after his own image.
+
+There are many in our day who sneer at that kind of theology--pretty,
+indeed, as the pearl or the tear, but like tear or pearl a natural and
+partly a morbid deposit--a mere human process which, according to them,
+pretty well explains all religion; the result of man's instinct to see
+himself reflected on the cloud that bounds his view; man's honest but
+deluded effort to put himself in charge of the best part of himself,
+filling the throne of an imaginary heaven with an impossible exaggeration
+of his own virtues.
+
+But it is far better to hold with Jesus Christ than with such reasoners.
+Jesus Christ tells us that a man cannot be wrong if he argues towards God
+from what he finds best in himself. _If ye then, being evil, know how to
+give good gifts to your children: how much more shall your Heavenly Father
+give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him? What man of you, having an
+hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine
+in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it?
+Either what woman having ten pieces of silver, if she lose one piece, doth
+not light a candle, and sweep the house, and seek diligently till she find
+it? ... Likewise, I say unto you, There is joy in the presence of the
+angels of God over one sinner that repenteth_.
+
+That is a true witness, and strikes Amen out of every chord of our hearts.
+The Power, so evident in nature that He needs no proof, the Being so far
+beyond us in wisdom and in might, must also be our great superior in every
+quality which is more excellent than might. With thoughts more sleepless
+than our thoughts, as the sun is more constant than our lamps; with a
+heart that steadfastly cares for us, as we fitfully care for one another;
+more kingly than our noblest king, more fatherly than our fondest
+fatherhood; of deeper, truer compassion than ever mother poured upon us;
+whom, when a man feels that he highest thing in life is to be a shepherd,
+he calls his Shepherd, and knows that, as the shepherd, _whose the sheep
+are_, shrinks not to seek one of his lost at risk of limb or life, so his
+God cannot be less in readiness of love or of self-sacrifice. Such is the
+faith of strong and unselfish men all down the ages. And its strength is
+this, that it is no mere conclusion of logic, but the inevitable and
+increasing result of duty done and love kept pure--of fatherhood and
+motherhood and friendship fulfilled. One remembers how Browning has put
+it in the mouth of David, when the latter has done all he can do for
+'Saul,' and is helpless:
+
+  Do I find love so full in my nature,
+  God's ultimate gift,
+  That I doubt His own love can
+  compete with it? ...
+  Would I fain in my impotent yearning
+  do all for this man;
+  And dare doubt he alone shall not
+  help him, who yet alone can?
+  Could I wrestle to raise him from
+  sorrow, grow poor to enrich,
+  To fill up his life, starve my own out,
+  I would--knowing which
+  I know that my service is perfect.
+  Oh, speak through me now!
+  Would I suffer for him that I love?
+  So wouldst thou--so wilt thou!
+
+Thus have felt and known the unselfish of all ages. It is not only from
+their depths, but from their topmost heights--heaven still how far!--that
+men cry out and say, _There is a rock higher than I!_ God is stronger than
+their strength, more loving than their uttermost love, and in so far as
+they have loved and sacrificed themselves for others, they have obtained
+the infallible proof, that God too lives and loves and gives Himself away.
+Nothing can shake that faith, for it rests on the best instincts of our
+nature, and is the crown of all faithful life. He was no hireling herdsman
+who wrote these verses, but one whose heart was in his work, who did
+justly by it, magnifying his office, and who never scamped it, else had he
+not dared to call his God a shepherd. And so in every relation of our own
+lives. While insincerity and unfaithfulness to duty mean nothing less than
+the loss of the clearness and sureness of our faith in God; duty nobly
+done, love to the uttermost, are witnesses to God's love and ceaseless
+care, witnesses which grow more convincing every day.
+
+The second, third and fourth verses give the details. Each of them is
+taken directly from the shepherd's custom, and applied without
+interpretation to the care of man's soul by God. _He maketh me lie
+down_--the verb is to bring the flocks to fold or couch--_on pastures of
+green grass_--the young fresh grass of spring-time. _By waters of rest He
+refresheth me_.[1] This last verb is difficult to render in English; the
+original meaning was evidently to guide the flock to drink, from which it
+came to have the more general force of sustaining or nourishing. _My life
+He restoreth_--bringeth back again from death. _He leadeth me in paths
+of righteousness for His name's sake_, not necessarily straight paths, but
+paths that fulfil the duty of paths and lead to somewhere, unlike most
+desert tracks which spring up, tempt your feet for a little, and then
+disappear. _Yea, though I walk in a valley of deep darkness, I will fear
+no evil, for Thou art with me. Thy rod and Thy staff_ are not synonymous,
+for even the shepherd of to-day, though often armed with a gun, carries
+two instruments of wood, his great oak club, thick enough to brain a wild
+beast, and his staff to lean upon or to touch his sheep, while the ancient
+shepherd without firearms would surely still more require both. _They will
+comfort me_--a very beautiful verb, the literal meaning of which is to
+help another, choked with grief or fear, to breathe freely, and give his
+heart air.
+
+[Footnote 1: The Greek reads: epi hudatos anapauseôs exethrepse me]
+
+These simple figures of the conduct of the soul by God are their own
+interpretation. Who, from his experience, cannot read into them more than
+any other may help him to find? Only on two points is a word required.
+_Righteousness_ has no theological meaning. The Psalmist, as the above
+exposition has stated, is thinking of such desert paths as have an end and
+goal, to which they faultlessly lead the traveller: and in God's care of
+man their analogy is not the experience of justification and forgiveness,
+but the wider assurance that he who follows the will of God walks not in
+vain, that in the end he arrives, for all God's paths lead onward and lead
+home. This thought is clinched with an expression which would not have the
+same force if righteousness were taken in a theological sense: _for His
+name's sake._ No being has the right to the name of guide or shepherd
+unless the paths by which he takes the flock do bring them to their
+pasture and rest. The other ambiguous phrase is the _vale of deep
+darkness_. As is well known, the letters of the word may be made to spell
+_shadow of death_; but the other way of taking them is the more probable.
+This, however, need not lead us away from the associations with which our
+old translation has invested them. It is not only darkness that the poet
+is describing, but the darkness where death lurks for the poor sheep,--the
+gorges, in whose deep shadows are the lairs of wild beasts, and the
+shepherd and his club are needed. It stands thus for every dismal and
+deadly passage through which the soul may pass, and, most of all, it is
+the Valley of the Shadow of Death. There God is with men no less than by
+the waters of repose, or along the successful paths of active life. Was He
+able to recover the soul from life's wayside weariness and hunger?--He
+will equally defend and keep it amid life's deadliest dangers.
+
+II. But the Psalm is not only theology. It is personal religion. Whether
+the Psalmist sang it first of the Church of God as a whole, or of the
+individual, the Church herself has sung it, through all generations, of
+the individual. By the natural progress of religion from the universal to
+the particular; by the authority of the Lord Jesus, who calls men singly
+to the Father, and one by one assures them of God's Providence, Grace and
+Glory; by the millions who have taken Him at His word, and every man of
+them in the loneliness of temptation and duty and death proved His
+promise--we also in our turn dare to believe that this Psalm is a psalm
+for the individual. The Lord is _my_ shepherd: He maketh _me_ to lie down:
+He leadeth _me_: He restoreth _my_ soul. Lay your attention upon the
+little word. Ask yourself, if since it was first put upon your lips you
+have ever used it with anything more than the lips: if you have any right
+to use it: if you have ever taken any steps towards winning the right to
+use it. To claim God for our own, to have and enjoy Him as ours, means, as
+Christ our Master said over and over again, that we give ourselves to Him,
+and take Him to our hearts. Sheep do not choose their shepherd, but man
+has to choose--else the peace and the fulness of life which are here
+figured remain a dream and become no experience for him.
+
+Do not say that this talk of surrender to God is unreal to you. Happiness,
+contentment, the health and growth of the soul, depend, as men have proved
+over and over again, upon some simple issue, some single turning of the
+soul. Lives are changed by a moment's listening to conscience, by a single
+and quiet inclination of the mind. We must submit ourselves to God. We
+must bring our wills under His. Here and now we can do this by resolution
+and effort, in the strength of His Spirit, which is nearer us than we
+know. The thing is no mystery, and not at all vague. The mistake people
+make about it is to seek for it in some artificial and conventional form.
+We have it travestied to-day under many forms--under the form of throwing
+open the heart to excitement in an atmosphere removed from real life as
+far as possible: under the form of assent to a dogma: under the form of
+adherence to a church.
+
+But do you summon up the most real things in your life--the duty that is
+a disgust: the sacrifice for others from which you shrink. Summon up your
+besetting sin--the temptation which, for all your present peace, you know
+will be upon you before twenty-four hours are past. Summon up these grim
+realities of your life,--and in face of them give yourself to God's will,
+put your weakness into the keeping of His grace. He is as real as they
+are, and the act of will by which you give yourself to Him and His Service
+will be as true and as solid an experience as the many acts of will by
+which you have so often yielded to them.
+
+Otherwise this beautiful name, this name Shepherd, must remain to you the
+emptiest of metaphors: this Psalm only a fair song instead of the
+indestructible experience which both Name and Psalm become to him who
+gives himself to God.
+
+Men and women, who in this Christian land have grown up with this Psalm in
+your hearts, in all the great crises of life that are ahead shall this
+Psalm revisit us. In perplexity and doubt, in temptation and sorrow, and
+in death, like our mother's face shall this Psalm she put upon our lips
+come back to us. Woe to us then, if we have done nothing to help us to
+believe it! As when one lies sick in a foreign land, and music that is
+dear comes down the street and swells by him, and lifts his thoughts a
+little from himself, but passes over and melts into the distance, and he
+lies colder and more forsaken than before--so shall it be with us and this
+Psalm.
+
+But if we do give our hearts to God and His Will, if day by day of our
+strength we work and serve, live and suffer, with contented hearts--then I
+know what we shall say when the day of our darkness and loneliness comes
+down, whether it be of temptation, or of responsibility, or of death
+itself. In that day we shall lift our faces and say: _Yea, though I am
+walking in the Valley of the Shadow of Death I do fear no evil, for Thou
+art with me, and Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me_!
+
+III. But some one may turn round upon all this and say: 'It is simple, it
+is ideal, but the real man cannot reach it out of real life. For he is not
+the mere sheep, turned easily by a touch of the staff. He is a man: his
+life is no mere search for grass, it is a being searched; it is not a
+following, it is a flight. Not from the future do we shrink, even though
+death be there. The past is on our track, and hunts us down. We need more
+than guidance: we need grace.'
+
+This is probably what the Psalmist himself felt when he did not close with
+the fourth verse, otherwise so natural a climax. He knew that weariness
+and death are not the last enemies of man. He knew that the future is
+never the true man's only fear. He remembered the inexorableness of the
+past; he remembered that blood-guiltiness, which sheep never feel, is
+worse to men than death. As perchance one day he lifted his eyes from his
+sheep and saw a fugitive from the avenger of blood crossing the plain,
+while his sheep scattered right and left before this wild intruder into
+their quiet world,--so he felt his fair and gentle thoughts within him
+scattered by the visitation of his past; so he felt how rudely law breaks
+through our pious fancies, and must be dealt with before their peace can
+be secure; so he felt, as every true man has felt with him, that the
+religion, however bright and brave, which takes no account of sin, is the
+religion which has not a last nor a highest word for life.
+
+Consider this system of blood revenge. It was the one element of law in
+the lawless life of the desert. Everything else in the wilderness might
+swerve and stray. This alone persisted and was infallible. It crossed the
+world; it lasted through generations. The fear of it never died down in
+the heart of the hunted man, nor the duty of it in the heart of the
+hunter. The holiest sanctions confirmed it,--the safety of society, the
+honour of the family, love for the dead. And yet, from this endless
+process, which hunted a man like conscience, a shelter was found in the
+custom of Eastern hospitality--the 'golden piety of the wilderness,' as it
+has been called. Every wanderer, whatever his character or his past might
+be, was received as the; 'guest of God'--such is the beautiful name which
+they still give him,--furnished with food, and kept inviolate, his host
+becoming responsible for his safety.
+
+That the Psalmist had this custom in view, when composing the last two
+verses of the Psalm, is plain from the phrase with which these open: _Thou
+spreadest before me a table in the very face of mine enemies_; and perhaps
+also from the unusual metaphor in verse 6: _Surely goodness and mercy
+shall follow,_ or _hunt, me all the days of my life._
+
+And even if those were right (which I do not admit) who interpret the
+enemies and pursuers as the mere foes and persecutors of the pious, it is
+plain that to us using the Psalm this interpretation will not suffice. How
+can we speak of this custom of blood-revenge and think only of our
+material foes? If we know ourselves, and if our conscience be quick, then
+of all our experiences there is but one which suits this figure of
+blood-revenge, when and wheresoever in the Old Testament it is applied to
+man's spiritual life. So only do the conscience and the habit of sin
+pursue a man. Our real enemies are not our opponents, our adversities, our
+cares and pains. These our enemies! Better comrades, better guides, better
+masters no man ever had. Our enemies are our evil deeds and their
+memories, our pride, our selfishness, our malice, our passions, which by
+conscience or by habit pursue us with a relentlessness past the power of
+figure to express. We know how they persist from youth unto the grave:
+_the sting of death is sin._ We know what they want: nothing less than our
+whole character and will. _Simon, Simon_, said Christ to a soul on the
+edge of a great temptation, _Satan hath asked you back again for himself_.
+
+Yet it is the abounding message of the whole Bible, of which our
+twenty-third Psalm is but a small fragment, that for this conscience and
+this habit of sin God hath made provision, even as sure as those thoughts
+of His guidance which refresh us in the heat of life and comfort us amidst
+its shadows.
+
+In Nature? Yes: for here too the goodness of God leadeth to repentance.
+There is nothing which the fifth verse so readily brings to mind as the
+grace of the Divine hospitality in nature. _Thou spreadest a table before
+me in the presence of mine enemies_. How these words contrast the fever
+and uncertain battle of our life with the calmness and surety of the
+Divine order! Through the cross currents of human strife, fretted and
+stained, the tides of nature keep their steady course, and rise to their
+invariable margins. The seasons come up undisturbed by crime and war.
+Spring creeps even into the beleaguered city; through the tents of the
+besiegers, across trench and scarp, among the wheels of the cannon, and
+over the graves of the dead, grass and wild flowers speed, spreading
+God's table. He sendeth His rain upon the just and the unjust. And even
+here the display is not merely natural, nor spread only in the sight of
+our physical enemies; but God's goodness leadeth to repentance, and Nature
+is equipped even for deliverance from sin. Who has come out upon a great
+landscape, who has looked across the sea, who has lifted his eyes to the
+hills and felt the winds of God blowing off their snows, who has heard
+earth's countless voices rising heavenwards, but has felt: What a wide
+place this world is for repentance! Man does find in Nature deliverance
+from himself, oblivion of his past, with peace and purity! And yet the
+provision, though real, is little more than temporary. The herdsmen of the
+desert are not obliged to furnish to their fugitive guest shelter for more
+than two nights with the day between. Little more than two nights with the
+day between is the respite from conscience and habit which Nature provides
+for the sinful heart. She is the million-fold opportunity of repentance;
+she is not the final or everlasting grace of God. And, therefore, whatever
+may have been the original intention of our Psalmist, the spiritual
+feeling of the Church has understood his last two verses to sing of that
+mercy and forgiveness of our God which were spoken to men by the prophets,
+but reached the fulness of their proclamation and proof in Jesus Christ.
+He who owned the simple trust of the first four verses, saying, 'Thou art
+right, I am the Good Shepherd,' so that since He walked on earth the name
+is no more a mere metaphor of God, but the dearest, strongest reality
+which has ever visited this world of shadows--He also has been proved by
+men as the Host and Defender of all who seek His aid from the memory and
+the pursuit of sin. So He received them in the days of His flesh, as they
+drifted upon Him across the wilderness of life, pressed by every evil with
+which it is possible for sin to harry men. To Him they were all 'guests of
+God,' welcomed for His sake, irrespective of what their past might have
+been. And so, being lifted up, He still draws us to Himself, and still
+proves Himself able to come between us and our past. Whatever we may flee
+from He keeps it away, so that, although to the last, for penitence, we
+may be reminded of our sins, and our enemies come again and again to the
+open door of memory, in Him we are secure. He is our defence, and our
+peace is impregnable.
+
+
+
+
+PSALM XXXVI
+
+THE GREATER REALISM
+
+
+Like the twenty-third Psalm, the thirty-sixth seems to fall into two
+unconnected parts, but with this difference, that while both of the
+twenty-third are understood by us, and heartily enjoyed, of the
+thirty-sixth we appreciate only those verses, 5-10, which contain an
+adoration of God's mercy and righteousness. Verses 1-4, a study of sin,
+are unintelligible in our versions, and hardly ever sung, except in
+routine, by a Christian congregation. So sudden is the break between the
+two parts, and so opposite their contents, that they have been taken by
+some critics to be fragments of independent origin. This, however, would
+only raise the more difficult question: Why, being born apart, and
+apparently so unsympathetic, were they ever wedded? To a more careful
+reading the Psalm yields itself a unity. The sudden break from the close
+study of sin to the adoration of God's grace is designed, and from his
+rhapsody the Psalmist returns to pray, in verses 10-12, against that same
+evil with which he had opened his poem. Indeed, it is in this, its most
+admirable method, more than in details, that the Psalm is instructive and
+inspiring.
+
+The problem of Israel's faith was the existence of evil in its most
+painful form of the successful and complacent sinner, the oppressor of
+good men. This problem our Psalm takes, not, like other Psalms, in its
+cruel bearing upon the people of God, but in its mysterious growth in the
+character of the wicked man. Through four verses of vivid realism we
+follow the progress of sin. Then, when eye and heart are full of the
+horror, the Psalmist steps suddenly back, and lifts his gaze beyond and
+above his study of evil to God's own world that stretches everywhere. The
+effect is to put the problem into a new perspective. The black bulk which
+had come between the Singer and his Sun shrinks from his new position to a
+point against that universal goodness of the Lord, and he conceives not
+only courage to pray against it, but the grace to feel it already beneath
+his feet. This is not an intellectual solution of the problem of evil: but
+it is a practical one. The Psalm is a study--if we can call anything so
+enthusiastic a study--in proportion; the reduction of the cruel facts of
+experience to their relation to other facts as real but of infinite comfort
+and glory; the expansion, in short, of the words of verse 9: _In Thy light
+we see light_.
+
+The Psalmist's analysis of sin has been spoiled in translation. Take our
+Old Version, or the Revised one, and you will find no meaning in the first
+two verses, but take the rendering offered on the margin by the Revisers
+(and approved by most scholars), and you get a meaning intelligible,
+profound, and true to experience:
+
+  _Oracle of sin hath the wicked in the
+    midst of his heart;
+  There is no fear of God before his eyes_.
+
+The word _oracle_ means probably secret whisper, but is elsewhere used
+(except in one case) of God's word to His prophets. It is the instrument
+of revelation. The wicked man has in him something comparable to this. Sin
+seems as mysterious and as imperative as God's own voice to the heart of
+His servants. And to counteract this there is no awe of God Himself.
+Temptation in all its mystery, and with no religious awe to meet it--such
+is the beginning of sin.
+
+The second verse is also obscure. It seems to describe the terrible power
+which sin has of making men believe that though they continue to do evil
+they may still keep their conscience. The verse translates most readily,
+though not without some doubt:
+
+  _For it flatters him, in his eyes,
+  That he will discover his guilt--that he will hate it_.
+
+While sin takes from a man his healthy taste for what is good, and his
+power to loathe evil, it deludes him with the fancy that he still enjoys
+them. Temptation, when we yield, is succeeded by self-delusion.
+
+The third and fourth verses follow clearly with the aggravated effects.
+Sin ceases to flatter, and the man's habits are openly upon him. Truth,
+common-sense and all virtue are left behind:
+
+  _The words of his mouth are iniquity
+  and deceit,
+  He has given up thinking sensibly
+  and doing good._
+
+So he becomes presumptuous and obstinate.
+
+_He devises iniquity upon his bed_--which is but the Hebrew for 'planning
+evil in cold blood'--
+
+  _He takes up his post on a way that
+  is not good,
+  He abhors not evil_.
+
+There we have the whole biography of sin from its first whisper in the
+centre of man's being, where it seems to speak with the mystery and power
+of God's own word, to the time when, through the corruption of every
+instinct and quality of virtue, it reaches the border of his being and
+destroys the last possibility of penitence. It is the horror of Evil in
+the four stages of its growth: Temptation, Delusion, Audacity, and Habit
+ending in Death.
+
+To us sin has not become any less of a mystery or a pain. Temptation is as
+sudden and demonic. Into every soul, however purged and fenced, evil
+appears to have as much freedom of entrance as God Himself. It begins as
+early. In the heart of every little child God works, but they who next to
+God have most right there, the father and the mother, know that something
+else has had, with God, precedence of themselves. As the years go on, and
+the knowledge of good and evil grows, becoming ever more jealous and
+expert a sentinel, it still finds its watch and fence of the outside world
+mocked by the mysterious upburst of sin within. The whole mystery of
+temptation is to have sins suggested to us, and to be swept after them by
+a sudden enthusiasm, which sometimes feels as strong as the Spirit of God
+ever made in us the enthusiasm for virtue. 'There are moments when our
+passions speak and decide for us, and we seem to stand by and wonder.
+They carry in them an inspiration of crime, that in an instant does the
+work of long premeditation.'[2] 'An inspiration of crime,' that is the
+_oracle of sin_. From that come the panic and the despair of temptation.
+The heart, which has still left in it some loyalty to God, is horrified by
+the ease and the surprise of evil. Yet the greater horror is that this
+horror may be lost: that men and women do continually exchange it for a
+complacent and careless temper toward the besetting sin which they have
+once felt to be worse than death. From being panic-stricken at the rise
+and surge of temptation, they will (and there is no more marvellous change
+in all fickle man's experience) grow easy and scornful about it, time
+after time permitting it to overcome them, in the delusion that they may
+reassert themselves when they will, and put it beneath their feet. The
+rest is certain. Falsehood becomes natural to him who was born loyal,
+audacity to him who grew up timid and scrupulous. The impulsive lover of
+good, who has fallen through the very warmth of his nature, develops into
+the deliberate sensualist. Natures sensitive and enthusiastic grow
+absolutely empty of power to revolt against what is unjust or foul. A
+great writer once said of himself in middle life: 'I am proud and
+intellectual, but forced by the habits of years to like the base and
+dishonourable from which I formerly revolted.' Little children have the
+seeds of all this within them; men and women are born with the inspiration
+which starts these mysterious and direful changes; the fatal decadence
+takes place in countless lives.
+
+[Footnote 2: George Eliot.]
+
+Before facts so horrifying--they are _within_ as well as everywhere around
+us--our real need is not an intellectual explanation of why they are
+permitted or whence this taint in the race arose. For, supposing that we
+were capable of understanding this, the probability is that we might
+become tolerant of the facts themselves, and, perceiving that cruelty and
+sin had a necessary place in the universe, lose the mind to fight them.
+Constituted as are the most of mankind, for them to discover a reason for
+a fact is, if not to conceive a respect for it, at least to feel a
+plausible excuse for their sluggishness and timidity in dealing with it.
+Nay, the very study of sin for the purpose of acquainting ourselves with
+its nature, too often either intoxicates the will, or paralyses it with
+despair; and it is in recoil from the whole subject that we most surely
+recover health to fight evil in ourselves and nerve to work for the
+deliverance from it of others. The practical solution of our problem is to
+remember how much else there is in the Universe, how much else that is
+utterly away from and opposed to sin. We must engross ourselves in that,
+we must exult in that. We must remember goodness, not only in the
+countless scattered instances about us, but in its infinite resource in
+the Power and Character of God Himself. We must feel that the Universe is
+pervaded by this: that it is the atmosphere of life, and that the whole
+visible framework of the world offers signals and sacraments of its real
+presence. We may not, we shall not, be able to reconcile this goodness
+with the cruel facts about us; but at least we shall have reduced these to
+a new proportion and perspective; we shall have disengaged our wills from
+the horrid influence of evil, and received a new temper for that contest,
+in which it is temper far more than any knowledge which overcomes.
+
+This is what our Psalmist does. From the awful realism of Sin he sweeps,
+without pause or attempt at argument, into a vision of all the goodness of
+God. The Divine Attributes spread out before him, and it takes him the
+largest things in nature to describe them: the personal loving-kindness
+and righteousness of the Most High: the care of Providence: the tenderness
+of intimate fellowship with God: the security of faith: the satisfaction
+of worship. He makes no claim that everything is therefore clear: still
+_are Thy judgments the Great Deep_, fathomless, awful. But we receive new
+vigour of life as from _a fountain of life,_ and the eyes, that had been
+strained and blinded, _see light:_ light to work, light to fight, light to
+hope. Mark how the rapture breaks away with the name of God:
+
+  _LORD, to the heavens is Thy leal
+    love!
+  Thy faithfulness to the clouds!
+  Thy righteousness is like the mountains of God,
+  Thy judgments are the Great Deep_.
+
+  _Man and beast thou preservest, O LORD.
+  How precious is Thy leal love, O God!
+  And so the children of men put their
+    trust in the shadow of Thy wings.
+  They shall be satisfied with the fatness of Thy house;
+  And of the river of Thy pleasures
+    Thou shall give them to drink.
+  For with Thee is the fountain of life,
+  In Thy light we see light_.
+
+The prayer follows, and closes with the assurance of victory as if already
+experienced:
+
+  _Continue Thy leal love unto them that know Thee,
+  And Thy righteousness to the upright of heart.
+  Let not the foot of pride come against me,
+  Nor the hand of the wicked drive me away.
+  There are the workers of iniquity
+  fallen,
+  They are flung down and shall not
+  be able to rise_.
+
+Two remarks remain.
+
+A prevailing temper of our own literature makes the method of this Psalm
+invaluable to us. A large and influential number of our writers have lent
+themselves, with ability and earnestness, to such an analysis of sin as we
+find in the first four verses of the Psalm. The inmost lusts and passions
+of men's hearts are laid bare with a cool and audacious frankness, and the
+results are inexorably traced in all their revolting vividness of action
+and character. I suppose that there has not been a period, at least since
+the Reformation, which has had the real facts of sin so nakedly and
+fearfully laid before it. The authors of the process call it Realism. But
+it is not the sum of the Real, nor anything like it. Those studies of sin
+and wickedness, which our moral microscopes have laid bare, are but
+puddles in a Universe, and the Universe is not only Law and Order, but is
+pervaded by the character of its Maker. God's mercy still reaches to the
+heavens, and His faithfulness to the clouds. We must resolutely and with
+'pious obstinacy' lift our hearts to that, else we perish. I think of one
+very flagrant tale, in which the selfishness, the lusts and the cruelties
+of modern men are described with the rarest of power, and so as to reduce
+the reader to despair, till he realises that the author has emptied the
+life of which he treats of everything else, except a fair background of
+nature which is introduced only to exhibit the evil facts in more horrid
+relief. The author studies sin in a vacuum, an impossible situation. God
+has been left out, and the conviction of His pardon. Left out are the
+power of man's heart to turn, the gift of penitence, the mysterious
+operations of the Spirit, and the sense of the trustfulness and patience
+of God with the worst souls of men. These are not less realities than the
+others; they are within the knowledge of, they bless, every stratum of
+life in our Christian land; they are the biggest realities in the world
+to-day. Let us then meet the so-called realism of our times with this
+Greater Realism. Let us tell men who exhibit sin and wickedness apart from
+God and from man's power of penitence, apart from love and from the
+realised holiness of our human race, that they are working in a vacuum,
+and their experiment is therefore the most un-real that can be imagined.
+We may not be able to eliminate the cruel facts of sin from our universe,
+but do not let us therefore eliminate the rest of the Universe from our
+study of sin. Let us be true to the Greater Realism.
+
+Again, the whole Psalm is on the famous keynote of the Epistle to the
+Philippians: _Rejoice in the Lord_. This is after all the only safe temper
+for tempted men. By preachers of a theology as narrow as their experience,
+it is often said that our guilt and native vileness, our unquestioned
+peril and instability, are such that no man of us can afford to be
+exultant in this life. But surely, just because of these, we cannot afford
+to be anything else. Whether from the fascination or from the despair of
+sin, nothing saves like an ardent and enthusiastic belief in the goodness
+and the love of God. Let us strenuously lift the heart to that. Let us
+rejoice and exult in it, and so we shall be safe. But, withal, we must
+beware of taking a narrow or an abstract view of what that goodness is.
+The fault of many Christians is that they turn to some theological
+definition, or to some mystical refinement of it, and their hearts are
+starved. We must seek the loving-kindness of God in all the breadth and
+open-air of common life. _Lord, Thou preservest man and beast_. Or, as
+St. Paul put it in that same Epistle: _Whatsoever things are true,
+whatsoever things are honourable, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever
+things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of
+good report, if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on
+these things_. It is, once more, the Greater Realism. But behind Paul's
+crowd of glorious facts let us not miss the greatest Reality of all, God
+Himself. God's righteousness and love, His grace and patience toward us,
+become more and more of a wonder as we dwell upon them, and by force of
+their wonder the most real facts of our experience. _How excellent is Thy
+loving-kindness, O God. Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say unto
+you, Rejoice_.
+
+
+
+
+PSALM LII
+
+RELIGION THE OPEN
+AIR OF THE SOUL
+
+
+With the thirty-sixth Psalm we may take the fifty-second, which attacks
+the same problem of evil in pretty much the same temper. It is peculiar in
+not being addressed, like others, to God or to the Psalmist's own soul,
+but to the wicked man himself. It is, at first at least, neither a prayer
+nor a meditation, but a challenge and an arraignment of character.
+
+Some may be disposed to cavil at its bitterness, and to say that for
+Christians it is too full of threats and vengeance. Perhaps it is; nay,
+certainly it is. But there are two noble feelings in it, and two vivid
+pictures of character. The Psalm is inspired by a brave contempt for
+wickedness in high places, and by a most devout trust in the love of God.
+And in expressing these two noble tempers, the poet analyses two
+characters. He analyses the character which is ruled from within by the
+love of Self, and he gives his own experience of a character inspired from
+without by faith--by faith in the mercy of the Living God.
+
+We Christians too hastily dismiss from our own uses the so-called Cursing
+Psalms. It is unfortunate that the translators have so often tempted us to
+this by exaggerating the violence of the Hebrew at the expense of its
+insight, its discrimination, and its sometimes delicate satire. If only we
+had a version that produced the exact colours of the original, and if we
+ourselves had the quick conscience and the honest wit to carry over the
+ideas into terms suitable to our own day--in which the selfishness of the
+human heart is the same old thing it ever was, though it uses milder and
+more subtle means,--then we should feel the touch of a power not merely of
+dramatic interest but of moral conviction, where we have been too much
+accustomed to think that we were hearing only ancient rant. So treated,
+Psalms like the fifth, the tenth, the fourteenth, and the fifty-second,
+which we so often pass over, offended by their violence, become quick and
+powerful, the very word of God to our own times and hearts.
+
+Let us take a more literal version of the Psalm before us:
+
+  _Why glory in evil, big man?
+  The leal love of God is all day long.
+  Thy tongue planneth mischiefs,
+  Like a razor sharp-whetted, thou worker of fraud.
+  Thou lovest evil more than good,
+  Lying than speaking the truth.
+  Thou lovest all words of voracity,
+    Tongue of deceit.
+  God also shall tear thee down, once for all_,
+
+  _Cut thee out, and pluck thee from the
+    tent,
+  And uproot thee from off the land
+      of the living.
+  That the righteous may see and fear,
+  And at him they shall laugh_.
+
+    '_Lo! the fellow who sets not God
+      for his stronghold,
+      But trusts in the mass of his
+      wealth,
+      Is strong in his mischief_.'
+
+  _But I like an olive-tree, green in God's
+    house,
+  I have trusted in God's leal love for
+    ever and aye.
+  I will praise Thee for ever, that Thou
+    hast done [this],
+  And I will wait on Thy name--for
+    'tis good--
+  In face of Thy saints_.
+
+
+The character who is challenged is easily made out, and we may recognize
+how natural he is and how near to ourselves.
+
+In the first verse he is called by a name expressing unusual strength or
+influence--a mighty man, _a hero_. The term may be used ironically, like
+our 'big fellow', 'big man.' But, whether this is irony or not, the man's
+bigness had material solidity. He was _rooted in the land of the living,_
+he _had abundance of riches._ Riches are no sin in themselves, as the
+exaggerated language of some people of the present day would lead us to
+imagine. Rich men are not always sent to hell, nor poor men always to
+heaven. As St. Augustine remarks with his usual cleverness: 'It was not
+his poverty but his piety which sent Lazarus in the parable to heaven, and
+when he got there, he found a rich man's bosom to rest in!' Riches are no
+sin in themselves, but, like all forms of strength, a very great and
+dangerous temptation. This man had yielded. Prosperity was so unchanging
+with him that he had come to trust it, and did not feel the need of
+trusting anything else. He was strong enough to stand alone: so strong
+that he tried to stand without God. If he was like many self-centred men
+of our own time he probably did not admit this. But it is not profession
+which reveals where a man puts his trust. It is the practice and discipline
+of life, betraying us by a hundred commonplace ways, in spite of all the
+orthodoxy we boast. It is sorrow and duty and the call to self-denial. When
+this man's feelings got low, when he was visited by touches of
+melancholy--those chills sent forward from the grave to every mortal
+travelling thither,--when conscience made him weak and fearful, then _he
+made not God his strength, but trusted in the abundance of his riches_.
+With that audacity which the touch of property breeds in Us, he said, 'I
+am sure of to-morrow,' plunged into cruel plans, _gloried in his
+mischief_, and was himself again.
+
+Trusting in riches--we all do it, when we seek to drive away uncomfortable
+fears and the visitations of conscience by self-indulgence; when, instead
+of saying _I will lift mine eyes unto the hills, whence cometh my
+help_?--and seeking the steep and arduous consolations of duty, we look
+into our nearest friends' faces and whine for a sympathy that is often
+insincere, or lie down in some place of comfort that is stolen or unclean.
+
+No man with such habits stops there. This big man _strengthened himself in
+his wickedness_ and in all manner of guile and cruelty. It is a natural
+development. The heart which finds life in material wealth is usually
+certain to go farther and seek for more in the satisfaction of base and
+sullen appetites. We hear, it is true, a great deal about the softening
+influence of wealth, and moralists speak of luxury as if its bad effects
+were negative and it only enervated. But if riches and the habit of
+trusting to them, if the material comforts of life and complacency in
+them, only made men sleek and tame--if luxury did nothing but soften and
+emasculate--the world would have been far more stupid and far less cruel
+than it is to-day.
+
+They are not negative tempers, but very positive and aggressive ones, which
+the Bible associates with a love of wealth, and we have but to remember
+history to know that the Bible is right. Luxury may have dulled the
+combative instincts in man, but it has often nursed the meanly cruel ones.
+The Romans with the rapid growth of their wealth loved the battlefield
+less; but the sight of the arena, with its struggling gladiators, and
+beasts tearing women and children, became more of a necessity to their
+appetites. Take two instances. Titus was a rough, hardened soldier; but he
+wept at the horrors which his siege obliged him to inflict on Jerusalem.
+Nero was an artist, and fiddled while Rome was burning. Coddle your boys;
+you may keep them from wishing to fight their equals, but you will not cure
+them of torturing animals. Idleness means not only sluggishness, but a
+morbid and criminal desire for sensation, which honest industry would have
+sweated out of the flesh. Money often renders those who have it
+unconsciously impatient with the slowness of poorer men, and unconsciously
+insolent about their defects. Everywhere, on the high places of history,
+and within our own humble experience, we perceive the same truth, that
+materialism, and the temper which trusts in wealth or in success, does not
+turn men into fat oxen, but into tigers. Hence the frequency with which the
+Old Testament, and especially the Psalms, connect an abundance of wealth
+with a strength of wickedness, and bracket for the same degree of doom the
+rich man and the violent one. Our Psalm is natural in adding to the clause,
+_trusting in the abundance of riches,_ that other about _strengthening
+himself in wickedness_. This is the very temper of a prosperous and
+pampered life: which seeks lust or cruelty not to forget itself, as a
+stunted and tortured nature may be forgiven for doing, but in order to work
+off its superfluous blood.
+
+Observe, too, how much sins of the tongue are mentioned,-, lying,
+backbiting and the love of swallowing men's reputations whole. _Thou lovest
+all words of voracity, thou tongue of deceit_. We are, too, apt to think
+that sins of speech most fiercely beset weak and puny characters: men that
+have no weapon but a sharp and nasty tongue. Yet none use their words more
+recklessly than the strong, who have not been sobered by the rebuffs and
+uncertainties of life. Power and position often make a man trifle with the
+truth. A big man's word carries far, and he knows it; till the temptation
+to be dogmatic or satirical, to snub and crush with a word, is as near to
+him as to a slave-driver is the fourteen-feet thong in his hand, with a
+line of bare black backs before him.
+
+These things are written of ourselves. In his great book on 'Democracy in
+America,' De Tocqueville pointed out, more than fifty years ago, the
+dangers into which the religious middle classes fall by the spread of
+wealth and comfort. That danger has increased, till for the _rich_ on whom
+Christ called woe, we might well substitute the _comfortable._ At a time
+when a very moderate income brings within our reach nearly all the
+resources of civilisation, which of us does not find day by day a dozen
+distractions that drown for him the voice of conscience: a crowd of men to
+lose himself in from God and his best friends: half a dozen base comforts,
+in the lap of which he forgets duty and dreams only of self? Comfort makes
+us all thoughtless, and thoughtlessness is the parent of every cruelty.
+
+The Psalm makes no attempt to turn this tyrant whom it challenges; it
+invokes the mercy of God, not to change him, but to show how vain his
+boasts are, and to give heart to those whom he oppresses. God's mercy
+endureth for ever; but he must pass away. The righteous shall see his end,
+and fear and laugh: their satire will have religion in it. But though the
+Psalm does not design this sinner's conversion, its very challenge contains
+an indication of the means by which he and all selfish people who are like
+him may be changed to nobler lives. In this respect it has a gospel for us
+all, which may be thus stated.
+
+There are poor invalids who ought to get their health again by seeking the
+open air and sunshine, but who keep between their bed and their hearthrug,
+cowering over their fire with the blinds pulled down;--to whom comes the
+wise doctor, pulls up the blinds, shows them that it is day outside, with
+the sun shining and the trees growing, and men walking about, and tells
+them that the health they are trying to get inside, and thereby only
+making themselves worse invalids, they will get out there. This big man
+was such a moral invalid, seeking strength within his own riches and
+qualities. And so doing he had developed the nasty indoor tempers, till it
+seemed pleasant and satisfactory to him to be spiteful, slanderous and
+false. Meantime, outside the darkened windows of his selfishness, the mercy
+of God, in which other men gloried and grew strong, rose every day. With
+one sweep the Psalmist tears the curtains down and lets in the sunshine.
+_The leal love of God is every day_. There, in that commonplace daily
+light: in that love which is as near you as the open air and as free as
+the sunshine, are the life and exultation which you seek so vainly within
+yourself.
+
+It was in the sunshine that the Psalmist felt himself growing:
+
+  _But I am like an olive-tree, green in God's house.
+  I trust in the leal love of God for ever and aye_.
+
+This open-air figure suggests (though we have no confirmation of the fact)
+a tree growing in the high temple precincts, as trees to this day grow upon
+the Haram around the great mosque in Jerusalem, open to the sunshine and
+washed by the great rush of wind from the west. The Old Testament as much
+as the New haunts the open air for its figures of religion--a tree in full
+foliage, a tree planted by a river, a river brimming to its banks, the
+waves of a summer sea. Now this is not only because there is nothing else
+that will reflect the freedom of God's grace and the lavish joy it brings
+upon the world, but still more because the Bible feels the eternal truth,
+that to win this joy and freedom a man has got to go outside himself,
+outside his selfishness and other close tempers, outside his feelings and
+thoughts about himself, and receive the truths of religion as objective to
+him, taking the knowledge of God's pardon and peace as freely as he takes
+the sunshine of heaven, the calm of earth in summer, and the cool, strong
+winds from off the hills. To those old founders of our faith, religion was
+never man's feelings about religion: it was the love of God. God was not
+man's thoughts about God, but God Himself in His wonderful grace and truth,
+objective to our hearts. Therefore those ancient saints moved to the Spirit
+as the tree rustles to the wind, and as in summer she is green and glad in
+the sunshine that bathes her, so they rejoiced in the Lord, and in His
+goodness. _I will give thanks, for_ THOU _hast done it_.
+
+But this getting out of self does not only bring a man into the open air,
+and to gladness in a God who worketh for him. It gives him the company of
+all good and noble men. I _will wait on Thy name, for it is good, in the
+presence of Thy saints_. What a fellowship faith and unselfishness make a
+man aware of!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Let us turn back for a moment to the man, to whose close character this
+open air is offered  as a contrast. Is it really difficult for us to
+imagine him? There is not one of us who has not tried this kind of thing
+again and again,--and has succeeded in it with far less substance than the
+great man had to come and go upon. He trusted in the abundance of his
+riches: he lost God for the multitude of his temptations. But for us there
+is no such excuse. There has been no pleasure too sordid, no comfort too
+selfish, no profit too mean, no honour too cheap and vulgar, but we have
+sometimes preferred it, in seeking for happiness, to the infinite and
+everlasting mercy of our God. We may not be big men, and deserve to have
+psalms written about us; but in our own little ways we exult in our
+selfishness and the tempers it breeds in us just as guiltily as he did,
+and just as foolishly, for God's great love is as near to us, and could as
+easily chase these vapours from our souls, if we would but open the windows
+to its air.
+
+Take one or two commonplace cases that do not require the great capital
+which this fellow put into his business of sinning, but are quite within
+reach of your and my very ordinary means of selfishness.
+
+You have been overreached in some business competition, or disappointed in
+getting a post, or foiled along some path of public service. You come home
+with a natural vexation in your heart: sore at being beaten and anxious
+about your legitimate interests. It is all right enough. But sit down at
+the fire for a little and brood over it. Shut God out as care and anger
+can. Forget that your Bible is at your elbow. Think only of your wrong, and
+it is wonderful how soon you will find spite rising, and envy and the
+cruellest hate. It is wonderful how quickly plans of revenge will form
+themselves in your usually slow mind, and how happy they will make you.
+Malice is like brandy to a man's brain, and will send him back with a
+beaming face to the work he left with scowls. Ah, _why boast thyself in
+mischief, O man? God's leal love is all day long!_ The Bible is within
+reach of you. The lustre is as fresh on the promises as the rain-drops were
+under the glints of sun this morning. Walk there with God in His own
+garden: all God's steps are comfort and promise to the meek who will walk
+with Him. God is full of gentleness, and His gentleness shall make you
+great. _I will be as the dew unto Israel_. Or seek with the Master the
+crowds of men. Keep near Him in the dust and the crush: watch how He
+endures the contradiction of sinners, how patient He is with men, how
+forgiving. Watch most of all how He prays. Bow the knee like Him, and He
+shall lift thee up a sane and a happy man. To think of it--all that Divine
+fellowship and solace may be ours by opening the pages of a Book which lies
+on every table. _God's love is all the day_.
+
+Let the other case be for young men and young women. For you the fresh air
+and sunshine are not yet shut out by the high walls of success or the thick
+ones of material prosperity. The dust of strife for you has not yet hidden
+heaven. But we all know that passion can build as solidly as wealth, and
+that a young heart may be as closely prisoned in a sudden temptation as an
+old one among the substantial accumulations of a lifetime. What is
+Temptation?
+
+  I turned to her: she built a house
+  And Thought was her swift architect,
+  And Falsehood let the curtains fall,
+  And Fancy all the tables deck'd.
+
+  And so we shut the world out,
+  Soul and Temptation face to face,
+  And perfumed air and music sweet,
+  And soft desire fill'd all the place.
+
+O brothers, in such an hour, and it comes to every one of us, think upon
+the vast world outside, and the walls so magically built will as magically
+fall. God's sunshine is there, and God's fresh air, to think upon which,
+with the companies of men and women who walk up and down in it and are
+fair, is the most sovereign charm against temptation that I know. _Why
+glory in this evil_? Put that challenge to your heart in the crisis of
+every evil passion. _God's mercy is all day long_. Think of the love of
+the Father: of His patience with thee, of His trust of thee; think of the
+Love of the Redeemer, Who gave Himself for thy life; think of the great
+objective truths of religion--righteousness, joy and peace in the Holy
+Ghost. Or if these seem unsubstantial thoughts, that flash and fade
+again like clouds on the western sky at evening, come out among the
+flesh-and-blood proofs of them which walk our own day. Frequent the
+pure, strong men and women who are in sight of us all, fair on every
+countryside, radiant in every city crowd. Hearken to the greater spirits
+who by their songs and books come down and speak with the lowliest and
+most fallen. And do not forget the holy dead, nor doubt that though unseen
+they are with us still.
+
+  _I will wait on Thy name,
+  for 'tis good, in face of Thy
+  Saints._
+
+
+
+
+PSALM CXXI
+
+THE MINISTRY OF THE HILLS AND ALL GREAT THINGS
+
+
+We catch the key-note of this Psalm if we read the words _whence cometh my
+help_ not as a statement but as a question. Our older version takes them
+as a statement; it makes the Psalmist look to the hills, as if his help
+broke and shouted from them all like waterfalls. But with the Revised
+Version we ought to read: _I will lift mine eyes unto the mountains--from
+whence cometh my help?_ The Psalmist looks up, not because his help is
+stored there, but because the sight of the hills stirs within him an
+intense hope. His heart is immediately full of the prayer, _Whence cometh
+my help_? and of the answer, _My help is from the Lord, that made heaven
+and earth_.
+
+We need not wish to fix a locality or a date to this Psalm. It is enough
+that the singer had a mountain skyline in view, and that below in the
+shadows, so dark that we cannot make out their features, lay God's church
+and people. They were threatened, and there was neither help nor hope of
+help among themselves.
+
+Perhaps it was one of those frequent periods in the life of Israel, in
+which the religious institutions of the people were so abased that the
+Psalmist could see in them no pledge nor provocation of hope. Indeed, these
+institutions may have been altogether overthrown. There was no leader on
+whom God had set His seal, and the national life had nothing to raise the
+heart, but was full of base thoughts and paltry issues that dissipate
+faith, and render the interference of God an improbable thing. So the
+Psalmist lifted his thoughts to the sacraments which God has fixed in the
+framework of His world. He did not identify his help with the hills--no
+true Israelite could have done that,--but the sight of them started his
+hope and filled his heart with the desire to pray. This may have happened
+at sunrise, when, even more than at other hours, mountains fulfil the
+ministry of hope. Below them all was in darkness; it was still night, but
+the peaks saw the morning, and the signal of its coming fell swiftly down
+their flanks. In this case the Psalm is a matin-song, a character which
+the rest of the verses carry out. Or at any other hour of the day, it may
+simply have been the high, clear outline of the hills which inspired the
+Psalm--that firm step between heaven and earth, that margin of a world of
+possibility beyond. A prophet has said, _How beautiful upon the mountains
+are the feet of them that bring good tidings!_ But to our Psalmist the
+mountains spread a threshold for a Divine arrival. Up there God Himself
+may be felt to be afoot.
+
+Now to a pure heart and a hungry heart this is always what a mountain view
+effects. 'A hill-top,' says a recent writer, 'is a moral as well as a
+physical elevation.' He is right, or men would not have worshipped on
+hill-tops, nor high places have become synonymous with sacred ones. Whether
+we climb them or gaze at them, the mountains produce in us that mingling of
+moral and physical emotion in which the temper of true worship consists.
+They seclude us from trifles, and give the mind the fellowship of
+greatness. They inspire patience and peace; they speak of faithfulness and
+guardianship. But chiefly the mountains are sacraments of hope. That high,
+steadfast line--how it raises the spirits, and lifts the heart from care;
+how early it signals the day, how near it brings heaven! To men of old its
+margin excited thoughts of an enchanted world beyond; its clear step
+between heaven and earth made easy the imagination of God descending among
+men.
+
+So it is here. At the sight of the hills our Psalmist's hope--instead of
+lying asleep in confidence of a help too far away to be vivid, or dying of
+starvation because that help is so long of coming--leaps to her feet, all
+watch and welcome for an instant arrival. _Whence cometh my help? My help
+cometh from the Lord, that made heaven and earth_. This is not fancy; it is
+an attitude of real life. This is not a poet with a happy phrase for his
+idea: it is a sentry at his difficult post, challenging the signal, and
+welcoming the arrival, of that help which makes all the difference to life.
+
+But we may widen the application of the Psalmist's words far beyond the
+hills. This is a big thing to which he lifts his eyes to feed his hope. God
+is unseen; so he betakes himself to the biggest thing he can see. And
+therein is a lesson which we need all across our life. For it is just
+because, instead of lifting our eyes to the big things around us, we busy
+and engross ourselves with trifles, that the practical enthusiasm which
+beats through this Psalm is failing among us, and that we have so little
+faith in God's readiness to act, and to act speedily, within the circle of
+our own experience. Trifles, however innocent or dutiful they may be, do
+not move within us the fundamental pieties. They reveal no stage worthy for
+God to act upon. They give no help to the imagination to realise Him as
+near. A church which never lifts her eyes above her own denominational
+details, petty differences in doctrine or government, petty matters of
+ritual and posture, cannot continue to believe in the nearness of the
+living God. The strain on faith is too great to last. The reason recoils
+from admitting that God can help on such battle-fields as those on which
+the churches are often so busy, that He can come to help such causes as
+the sects, neglectful of the real interests of the world, too often stoop
+to champion. And so the churches insensibly get settled in far-off,
+abstract views of God, and are sapped of the primal and practical energies
+of religion. Whereas it is evident that in the religious communities which
+lift their eyes above their low hedges to the high hills of God--to the
+great simple outlines of His kingdom, to the ideals and destiny which God
+has set before mankind--in such churches faith in His nearness to the world
+and in His readiness to help must always abound. To men who have an eye for
+the big things of earth, God will always seem to be afoot upon it. They
+are conscious of an arena worthy for Him to descend upon, and of causes
+worthy for Him to interfere in. It is no shock to their reason, no undue
+strain upon their imagination, to feel the Almighty and the All-loving come
+down to earth, when earth has such horizons and such issues.
+
+Turning to ourselves as individuals, we may ask why we have such distant
+notions of God, so shy a faith of His coming within the circle of our own
+life and work? Why are our prayers so formal, so empty of the expectation
+of an immediate and divine answer? Why is our attitude at our work so
+destitute of practical enthusiasm? Because we, too, are not lifting our
+eyes to the hills. We are looking for nothing but little things, and
+therefore we see nowhere any threshold or field worthy of God. How can the
+sense that the living God is near to our life, that He is interested in it
+and willing to help it, survive in us, if our life be full of petty things?
+Absorption in trifles, attention only to the meaner aspects of life, is
+killing more faith than is killed by aggressive unbelief. For if all a man
+sees of life be his own interests, if all he sees of home be its comforts,
+if all he sees of religion be the outlines of his own denomination, the
+complexion of his preacher's doctrine, the agreeableness and taste of his
+fellow-worshippers--to such a man God must always seem far away, for in
+those things there is no call upon either mind or heart to feel God near.
+But if, instead of limiting ourselves to trifles, we resolutely and 'with
+pious obstinacy' lift our eyes to the hills--whether to those great
+mountain-tops of history which the dawn of the new heavens has already
+touched, periods of faith and action that signal to our more forward but
+lower ages the promise of His coming; or to the great essentials of human
+experience that at sunrise, noon and evening remain the same through all
+ages; or to the ideals of truth and justice; to the possibilities of human
+nature about us; to the stature of the highest characters within our sight;
+to the bulk and sweep of the people's life; to the destinies of our own
+nation that still rise high above all party dust and strife--then we shall
+see thresholds prepared for a divine arrival, conditions upon which we can
+realise God acting. Our hope will spring, an eager sentinel, as if she
+already heard upon them all the footfalls of His coming.
+
+These lines may meet the eyes of some who have lost their faith, and are
+sorry and weary to have lost it. Whether the blame be outside yourselves,
+in the littleness of many of the prevailing aspects of religious life, and
+the crowding of our religious arenas with the pettiest of interests, or
+within yourselves, in your own mean and slovenly views of life, your
+indolence to extricate details and discriminate the large eternal issues
+among them--there is for you but one way back to faith. Lift your eyes to
+the hills. Let your attention haunt the spots where life rises most near to
+heaven, and your hearts will again become full of hopes and reasons for God
+being at work upon earth.
+
+Let those who, still in their youth, have preserved their faith and
+fullness of hope, keep looking up. Amid all the cynicism and the
+belittling of life, strenuously take the highest views of life. Amid all
+the selfishness and impatience, which in our day consider life upon its
+lowest levels, and there break it up into short and selfish interests,
+strenuously lift your eyes and sweep with them the main outlines, summits
+and issues. May no man lose sight of the hills for want of looking up,
+till at the last he is laid upon his back,--and then must look up whether
+he has done so before or not--and in the evening clearness and evening
+quiet those great outlines stand forth before his eyes--stand forth but
+for a few moments and are lost for ever in the falling night.
+
+Many men have bravely lifted their eyes to the hills, who have felt nothing
+come back upon them save a vague wonder and influence of purity. They have
+been struck with an awe to which they could give no name, with a health and
+energy which they could only ascribe to physical infection. But to this
+Psalmist the hope and worship which the hills excited were satisfied by the
+revelation of a Person. Above earth and her hills he saw a Character.
+
+There have been revelations of God more rich and brilliant than this one.
+But its simplicity suits the Psalmist's point of view. He is looking to the
+hills. It is on that high line he sees his Helper appearing. Now we all
+know how a figure looks upon a skyline. We see just the outline of it--a
+silhouette, as it were: no details, expression, voice nor colour, but only
+an attitude. This is all the Psalmist sees of God on that high threshold
+against the light--His attitude. The attitude is that of a sentinel. The
+Lord is thy Keeper--thy watchman. The figure is familiar in Palestine,
+especially where the tents of the nomads lie. The camp or flock lies low
+among the tumbled hills, unable to see far, and subject, in the intricate
+land, to sudden surprise. But sentinels are posted on eminences round
+about, erect and watchful. This is the figure which the Psalmist sees his
+help assume upon the skyline to which he has lifted his eyes.
+
+Compared with other experiences of God, this outline of Him may seem bare.
+Yet if we feel the fact of it with freshness of heart and imagination, what
+may it not do for us? Life may be hallowed by no thought more powerfully
+than by this, that it is watched: nor peace secured by any stronger trust
+than that the Almighty assumes responsibility for it; nor has work ever
+been inspired by keener sense of honour than when we feel that God gives
+us freedom and safety for it. These are the fundamental pieties of the
+soul; and no elaborateness of doctrine can compensate for the loss of fresh
+convictions of their truth.
+
+_The Lord is thy Keeper_. If men had only not left this article out of
+their creeds when they added all the rest, how changed the religious life
+of to-day would have been!--how simple, how strenuous, how possibly heroic!
+
+_The Lord is thy Keeper_. What sense of proportion and what tact does the
+thought of those sleepless thoughts bring upon our life! How quickly it
+restores the instinct to discriminate between what is essential and what is
+not essential in faith and morals; that instinct, from the loss of which
+the religious world of to-day suffers so much. How hard does it make us
+with ourselves that His eyes are on us, yet how hopeful that He counts us
+worth protecting! When we realise, that not only many of the primal forces
+of character, but its true balance and proportion, are thus due to so
+simple a faith in God, we understand the insistence laid upon this by the
+prophets and by Christ. There is no truth which the prophets press more
+steadily upon Israel than that all their national life lies in the sight
+and on the care of God. The burden of many prophetic orations is no more
+than this--you are defended, you are understood, you are watched, by God.
+And in the Sermon on the Mount, and in that address to the disciples now
+given in the tenth of Matthew, there is no message more clear or frequent
+than that God cares for us, has to be reckoned with by all our enemies, is
+aware of everything that befalls us, and while He relieves us from
+responsibility in the things that are too great for us, makes us the more
+to feel our responsibility for things within our power--in short, that the
+Lord is our Keeper.
+
+Of course we shall be able to realise this, according as we realise life.
+If we have a heart for the magnitudes of life, it will not seem vain to
+believe that God Himself should guard it.
+
+If we keep looking to the hills, God shall be very clear upon them as our
+Keeper.
+
+But this distant view of God upon the skyline, full as it is of discipline
+and of peace, does not satisfy the Psalmist. To him the Lord is not only
+Israel's Keeper or Sentinel, but the Lord is also _thy shade on thy right
+hand: the sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night._ The
+origin of these expressions is vague, but their application here is vivid
+enough. A sentinel is too far away, and is, physically, too narrow a figure
+to fulfil man's imagination of God. The Psalmist requires something near
+enough to express both intimacy and shelter. So he calls God the Comrade as
+well as the Sentinel of His people; their Champion as well as their
+Watchman. The _shade upon thy right hand_ is of course the shade upon the
+fighting or working arm, to preserve it from exposure, and in the full
+freedom of its power.
+
+Now it is never ideas about God, nor even aspirations after Him, which in
+the real battle of life keep us fresh and unexhausted. Ideas, and even
+aspirations, strain as much as they lift. They give the mind its direction,
+but by themselves they cannot carry it all the way. Nor is the influence of
+a Personality sufficient if that Personality remain far off. Reverence
+alone never saved any human soul in the storm of life. It is One by our
+side Whom we need. It is by the sense of trust, of sympathy, of
+comradeship, of fighting together in the ranks, that our strength is
+thrilled and our right hand preserved in freshness. Without all this
+between us and bare heaven, we must in the end weary and wither.
+
+Twofold is the experience in which we especially need such compassion and
+fellowship--in the time of responsibility and in the time of temptation.
+These are the two great Lonelinesses of life--the Loneliness of the Height
+and the Loneliness of the Deep--in which the heart needs to be sure of more
+than being remembered and watched. The Loneliness of the Height, when God
+has led us to the duty of a great decision, or given us the charge of other
+lives, or sent us on the quest of some truth, or lifted us to a vision and
+ideal. The king, the father, the thinker, the artist, all know this
+loneliness of the height, which no human fellow can share, no human heart
+fully sympathise with. Then it is that, with another Psalmist, the heart,
+exposed to the bare heaven, cries out for something higher than itself to
+come between the heaven and it: _What time my heart is overwhelmed do Thou
+lead me unto the rock that is higher than I_; and God answers us by being
+Himself _a shade upon the right hand, and the sun shall not smite by day,
+nor the moon by night_. And there is the Loneliness of the Deep, when we
+are plunged into the pit of our hearts to fight with terrible
+temptations--a conflict no other man knows about or can help us in. Shall
+God, Who sees us fighting there, and falling under the sense of our
+helplessness, leave us to fight alone? The Lord is thy shade on thy right
+hand; thy Comrade, fighting with thee, His presence shall keep thy heart
+brave and thine arm fresh. It is a truth enforced through the whole of the
+Old Testament. God is not a God far away. He descends, He comes to our
+side: He battles for and suffers with His own.
+
+These then are the main thoughts of this Psalm. What new authority and
+vividness have Jesus Christ and His Cross put into them? There are few of
+the Psalms which the early Christians more frequently employed of Christ.
+On the lintel of an ancient house in Hauran I once read the inscription:
+'O Jesus Christ, be the shelter and defence of the home and of the whole
+family, and bless their incoming and outgoing.' How may we also sing this
+Psalm of Christ? By remembering the new pledges He has given us, that God's
+thoughts and God's heart are with us. By remembering the infinite degree,
+which the Cross has revealed, not only of the interest God takes in our
+life, but of the responsibility He Himself assumes for its eternal issues.
+The Cross was no new thing. The Cross was the putting of the Love of God,
+of the Blood of Christ, into the old fundamental pieties of the human
+heart, the realising by Jesus in Himself of the dearest truths about God.
+Look up, then, and sing this Psalm of Him. Can we lift our eyes to any of
+the hills without seeing His figure upon them? Is there a human ideal, duty
+or hope, with which Jesus is not inseparably and for ever identified? Is
+there a human experience--the struggle of the individual heart in
+temptation, the pity of the multitude, the warfare against the strongholds
+of wickedness--from which we can imagine Him absent? No; it is impossible
+for any high outline of morality or religion to break upon the eyes of our
+race, it is impossible for any field of righteous battle, any floor of
+suffering to unroll, without the vision of Christ upon it. He dominates our
+highest aspirations, and is felt by our side in our deepest sorrows. There
+is no loneliness, whether of height or of depth, which He does not enter by
+the side of His own.
+
+Who has warned us like Christ? To this day He stands the great Sentinel of
+civilisation. If all within the camp do not acknowledge Him, no new thing
+starts up in its midst, no new thing comes upon it from outside, which He
+does not challenge. His judgment is still the highest, clearest, safest the
+world has ever known; and each new effort of service, each new movement of
+knowledge, is determined by its worth to His Kingdom.
+
+Who has assumed responsibility for our life as Christ has? Who has taken
+upon himself the safety and the honour, not of the little tribe for whom
+this Psalm was first sung, but of the whole of the children of men! He
+called about Himself our weariness, He lifted our sorrow, He disposed of
+our sin--as only God can call or lift or dispose. Nothing exhausted His
+pity, or His confidence to deal with us; nothing ever betrayed a fault in
+His character, or belied the trust His people put in Him. _He suffers not
+thy foot_ _to be moved; He neither slumbers nor sleeps_.
+
+For all this we sing the Psalm of Christ. We know that so long as we have
+our conversation among the lofty things of life, His dominating Presence
+grows only the more clear; and so long as we are beset by things adverse
+and tempting, His sympathy and His prevailing grace become the more sure.
+
+_The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil. He shall preserve thy soul_.
+
+_The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in, from this time
+forth and for evermore._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Edinburgh University Press
+T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty
+
+By the same Author
+
+THE HISTORICAL
+
+GEOGRAPHY OF THE
+
+HOLY LAND
+
+With Six Maps, specially prepared.
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+With New Index and additions, and corrections.
+
+'A very noteworthy contribution to the study of sacred history, based
+upon the three indispensable conditions of personal acquaintance with
+the land, a study of the explorations, discoveries, and decipherments
+... and the employment of the results of Biblical criticism.'--_Times_.
+
+'Professor Smith is well equipped at all points for this work. He is
+abreast of the latest findings of Scripture exegesis, and of geographical
+survey, and of archæological exploration; and he has himself travelled
+widely over Palestine. The value of the work is incalculably increased
+by the series of geographical maps, the first of the kind representing
+the whole lift and lie of the land by gradations of colour.'--_Scotsman_.
+
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+All we desire is to let English readers know how very lucid, impressive,
+and, indeed, how vivid a study of Isaiah is within their reach.... We will
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+VOL. II.--CHAPS, XL.--LXVI.
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+previous book on Isaiah showed the same qualities of fairness, historical
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+handling of these precious fragments from the lesser prophets of Israel.
+Each separate prophecy calls out an appropriate literary and historical
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+THE PSALMS
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+_IN THREE VOLUMES_
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+By Alexander Maclaren, D.D.
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+_Crown 8vo, cloth, 7s. 6d. each_.
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+In 'The Expositor's Bible' Series.
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+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A
+
+BIBLICAL COMMENTARY
+
+ON THE PSALMS
+
+By Professor Franz Delitzsch
+
+Translated by the Rev. David Eaton, M.A. from the latest Edition, and
+Specially Revised by the Author.
+
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+       *       *       *       *       *
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+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Four Psalms, by George Adam Smith
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