Expositions of Holy Scripture: Psalms Part 17

The less, too, shall we dread their loss, the less be at the mercy of their fluctuations. The capitalist does not think so much of the year's gains as does the needy adventurer, to whom they make the difference between bankruptcy and competence. If you have G.o.d for your 'enduring substance,' you can face all varieties of condition, and be calm, saying--

'Give what Thou canst, without Thee I am poor, And with Thee rich, take what Thou wilt away.'

The amulet that charms away disquiet lies here. Still thine eager desires, arm thyself against feverish hopes, and s.h.i.+vering fears, and certain disappointment, and cynical contempt of all things; make sure of fulfilled wishes and abiding joys. 'Delight thyself in the Lord, and He shall give thee the desires of thine heart.'

II. But this is not all. The secret of tranquillity is found, secondly, in freedom from the perplexity of choosing our path.

'Commit thy way unto the Lord'--or, as the margin says, 'roll' it upon G.o.d; leave to Him the guidance of thy life, and thou shalt be at peace on the road.

This is a word for all life, not only for its great occasions. Twice, or thrice, perhaps in a lifetime, a man's road leads him up to a high dividing point, a watershed as it were, whence the rain runs from the one side of the ridge to the Pacific, and from the other to the Atlantic. His whole future may depend on his bearing the least bit to the right hand or to the left, and all the slopes below, on either side, are wreathed in mist. Powerless as he is to see before him, he has yet to choose, and his choice determines the rest of his days. Certainly he needs some guidance then. But he needs it not less in the small decisions of every hour. Our histories are made up of a series of trifles, in each of which a separate act of will and choice is involved.

Looking to the way in which character is made, as coral reefs are built up, by a mult.i.tude of tiny creatures whose united labours are strong enough to breast the ocean; looking to the mysterious way in which the greatest events in our lives have the knack of growing out of the smallest; looking to the power of habit to make any action of the mind almost instinctive: it is of far more importance that we should become accustomed to apply this precept of seeking guidance from G.o.d to the million trifles than to the two or three decisions which, at the time of making them, we know to be weighty. Depend upon it that, if we have not learned the habit of committing the daily-recurring monotonous steps to Him, we shall find it very, very hard to seek His help, when we come to a fork in the road. So this is a command for all life, not only for its turning-points.

What does it prescribe? First, the subordination--not the extinction--of our own _inclinations_. We must begin by ceasing from self. Not that we are to cast out of consideration our own wishes. These are an element in every decision, and often are our best helps to the knowledge of our powers and of our duties. But we have to take special care that they never in themselves settle the question. They are second, not first.

'Thus I will, and therefore thus I decide; my wish is enough for a reason,' is the language of a tyrant over others, but of a slave to himself. Our first question is to be, not 'What should I like?' but 'What does G.o.d will, if I can by any means discover it?' Wishes are to be held in subordination to Him. Our will is to be master of our pa.s.sions, and desires, and whims, and habits, but to be servant of G.o.d.

It should silence all their cries, and itself be silent, that G.o.d may speak. Like the lawgiver-captain in the wilderness, it should stand still at the head of the ordered rank, ready for the march, but motionless, till the Pillar lifts from above the sanctuary. Yes! 'Commit thy way'--unto whom? Conscience? No: unto Duty? No: but 'unto G.o.d'--which includes all these lower laws, and a whole universe besides.

Hold the will in equilibrium, that His finger may incline the balance.

Then the counsel of our text prescribes the submission of our _judgment_ to G.o.d, in the confidence that His wisdom will guide us. Committing our way unto the Lord does not mean s.h.i.+fting the trouble of patient thought about our duty off our own shoulders. It is no cowardly abnegation of the responsibility of choice which is here enjoined; nor is there any sanction of lazily taking the first vagrant impulse, wafted we know not whence, that rises in the mind, for the voice of G.o.d. But, just because we are to commit our way to Him, we are bound to the careful exercise of the best power of our own brains, that we may discover what the will of G.o.d is. He does not reveal that will to people who do not care to know it. I suppose the precursor of all visions of Him, which have calmed His servants' souls with the peace of a clearly recognised duty, has been their cry, 'Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?' G.o.d counsels men who use their own wits to find out His counsel. He speaks to us through our judgments when they take all the ordinary means of ascertaining our course. The law is: Do your best to find out your duty; suppress inclination, and desire to do G.o.d's will, and He will certainly tell you what it is. I, for my part, believe that the Psalmist spoke a truth when he said, 'In all thy ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct thy steps.' Only let the eye be fixed on Him, and He will guide us in the way. If we chiefly desire, and with patient impartiality try, to be directed by Him, we shall never want for direction.

But all this is possible only if we 'delight in the Lord.' Nothing else will still our desires--the voice within, and the invitations without, which hinder us from hearing the directions of our Guide. Nothing else will so fasten up and muzzle the wild pa.s.sions and l.u.s.ts that a little child may lead them. To delight in Him is the condition of all wise judgment. For the most part, it is not hard to discover G.o.d's will concerning us, if we supremely desire to know and do it; and such supreme desire is but the expression of this supreme delight in Him.

Such a disposition wonderfully clears away mists and perplexities; and though there will still remain ample scope for the exercise of our best judgment, and for reliance on Him to lead us, yet he whose single object is to walk in the way that G.o.d points, will seldom have to stand still in uncertainty as to what that way is. 'If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.'

Thus, dear brethren! these two keys--joy in G.o.d, and trust in His guidance--open for us the double doors of 'the secret place of the Most High'; where all the roar of the busy world dies upon the ear, and the still small voice of the present G.o.d deepens the silence, and hushes the heart. Be quiet, and you will hear Him speak--delight in Him, that you may be quiet. Let the affections feed on Him, the will wait mute before Him, till His command inclines it to decision, and quickens it into action; let the desires fix upon His all-sufficiency; and then the wilderness will be no more trackless, but the ruddy blaze of the guiding pillar will brighten on the sand a path which men's hands have never made, nor human feet trodden into a road. He will 'guide us with His eye,' if our eyes be fixed on Him, and be swift to discern and eager to obey the lightest glance that love can interpret. Shall we be 'like the horse or the mule, which have no understanding,' and need to be pulled with bridles and beaten with whips before they know how to go; or shall we be like some trained creature that is guided by the unseen cord of docile submission, and has learned to read the duty, which is its joy, in the glance of its master's eye, or the wave of his hand? 'Delight thyself in the Lord: commit thy way unto Him.'

III. Our text takes one more step. The secret of tranquillity is found, thirdly, in freedom from the anxiety of an unknown future. 'Best in the Lord, and wait patiently for Him.'

Such an addition to these previous counsels is needful, if all the sources of our disquiet are to be dealt with. The future is dim, after all our straining to see into its depths. The future is threatening, after all our efforts to prepare for its coming storms. A rolling vapour veils it all; here and there a mountain peak seems to stand out; but in a moment another swirl of the fog hides it from us. We know so little, and what we do know is so sad, that the ignorance of what may be, and the certainty of what must be, equally disturb us with hopes which melt into fears, and forebodings which consolidate into certainties. We are sure that in that future are losses, and sorrows, and death; thank G.o.d!

we are sure too, that He is in it. That certainty alone, and what comes of it, makes it possible for a thoughtful man to face to-morrow without fear or tumult. The only rest from apprehensions which are but too reasonable is 'rest in the Lord.' If we are sure that He will be there, and if we delight in Him, then we can afford to say, 'As for all the rest, let it be as He wills, it will be well.' That thought alone, dear friends! will give calmness. What else is there, brethren! for a man fronting that vague future, from whose weltering sea such black, sharp-toothed rocks protrude? Shall we bow before some stern Fate, as its lord, and try to be as stern as It? Shall we think of some frivolous Chance, as tossing its unguided waves, and try to be as frivolous as It?

Shall we try to be content with an animal limitation to the present, and heighten the bright colour of the little to-day by the black background that surrounds it, saying, 'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die'?

Is it not better, happier, n.o.bler, every way truer, to look into that perilous uncertain future, or rather to look past it to the loving Father who is its Lord and ours, and to wait patiently for Him?

Confidence that the future will but evolve G.o.d's purposes, and that all these are enlisted on our side, will give peace and power. Without it all is chaos, and we flying atoms in the anarchic ma.s.s; or else all is coldblooded impersonal law, and we crushed beneath its chariot-wheels.

Here, and here alone, is the secret of tranquillity.

But remember, brethren! that the peaceful confidence of this final counsel is legitimate only when we have obeyed the other two. I have no business, for instance, to expect G.o.d to save me from the natural consequences of my own worldliness or folly. If I have taken up a course from eager desires for earthly good, or from obedience to any inclination of my own without due regard to His will, I have no right, when things begin to go awry, to turn round to G.o.d and say, 'Lord! I wait upon Thee to save me.' And though repentance, and forsaking of our evil ways at any point in a man's course, do ensure, through Jesus Christ, G.o.d's loving forgiveness, yet the evil consequences of past folly are often mercifully suffered to remain with us all our days. He who has delighted in the Lord, and committed his way unto Him, can venture to front whatever may be coming; and though not without much consciousness of sin and weakness, can yet cast upon G.o.d the burden of taking care of him, and claim from his faithful Father the protection and the peace which He has bound Himself to give.

And O dear friends! what a calm will enter our souls then, solid, substantial, 'the peace of G.o.d,' gift and effluence from the 'G.o.d of peace'! How blessed then to leave all the possible to-morrow with a very quiet heart in His hands! How easy then to bear the ignorance, how possible then to face the certainties, of that solemn future! Change and death can only thin away and finally remove the film that separates us from our delight. Whatever comes here or yonder can but bring us blessing; for we must be glad if we have G.o.d, and if our wills are parallel with His, whose Will all things serve. Our way is traced by Him, and runs alongside of His. It leads to Himself. Then rest in the Lord, and 'judge nothing before the time.' We cannot criticise the Great Artist when we stand before His unfinished masterpiece, and see dim outlines here, a patch of crude colour there. But wait patiently for Him, and so, in calm expectation of a blessed future and a finished work, which will explain the past, in honest submission of our way to G.o.d, in supreme delight in Him who is the gladness of our joy, the secret of tranquillity will be ours.

THE BITTERNESS AND BLESSEDNESS OF THE BREVITY OF LIFE

'Surely every man walketh in a vain shew.... 12. I am a stranger with Thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were.'

--PSALM x.x.xix. 6, 12.

These two sayings are two different ways of putting the same thing.

There is a common thought underlying both, but the a.s.sociations with which that common thought is connected in these two verses are distinctly different. The one is bitter and sad--a gloomy half truth.

The other, out of the very same fact, draws blessedness and hope. The one may come from no higher point of view than the level of worldly experience; the other is a truth of faith. The former is at best partial, and without the other may be harmful; the latter completes, explains, and hallows it.

And that this progress and variety in the thought is the key to the whole psalm is, I think, obvious to any one who will examine it with care. I cannot here enter on that task but in the hastiest fas.h.i.+on, by way of vindicating the connection which I trace between the two verses of our text. The Psalmist begins, then, with telling how at some time recently pa.s.sed--in consequence of personal calamity not very clearly defined, but apparently some bodily sickness aggravated by mental sorrow and anxiety--he was struck dumb with silence, so that he 'held his peace even from good.' In that state there rose within him many sad and miserable thoughts, which at last forced their way through his locked lips. They shape themselves into a prayer, which is more complaint than pet.i.tion--and which is absorbed in the contemplation of the manifest melancholy facts of human life--'Thou hast made my days as an handbreadth; and mine age is as nothing before Thee.' And then, as that thought dilates and sinks deeper into his soul, he looks out upon the whole race of man--and in tones of bitterness and hopelessness, affirms that all are vanity, shadows, disquieted in vain. The blank hopelessness of such a view brings him to a standstill. It is true--but taken alone is too dreadful to think of. 'That way madness lies,'--so he breaks short off his almost despairing thoughts, and with a swift turning away of his mind from the downward gaze into blackness that was beginning to make him reel, he fixes his eyes on the throne above--'And now, Lord!

what wait I for? my hope is in Thee.' These words form the turning-point of the psalm. After them, the former thoughts are repeated, but with what a difference--made by looking at all the blackness and sorrow, both personal and universal, in the bright light of that hope which streams upon the most lurid ma.s.ses of opaque cloud, till their gloom begins to glow with an inward l.u.s.tre, and softens into solemn purples and reds. He had said, 'I was dumb with silence--even from good.' But when his hope is in G.o.d, the silence changes its character and becomes resignation and submission. 'I opened not my mouth; because Thou didst it.' The variety of human life and its transiency is not less plainly seen than before; but in the light of that hope it is regarded in relation to G.o.d's paternal correction, and is seen to be the consequence, not of a defect in His creative wisdom or love, but of man's sin. 'Thou with rebukes dost correct man for iniquity.' That, to him who waits on the Lord, is the reason and the alleviation of the reiterated conviction, 'Every man is vanity.' Not any more does he say every man 'at his best state,' or, as it might be more accurately expressed, 'even when most firmly established,'--for the man who is established in the Lord is not vanity, but only the man who founds his being on the fleeting present. Then, things being so, life being thus in itself and apart from G.o.d so fleeting and so sad, and yet with a hope that brightens it like suns.h.i.+ne through an April shower--the Psalmist rises to prayer, in which that formerly expressed conviction of the brevity of life is reiterated, with the addition of two words which changes its whole aspect, 'I am a stranger _with Thee_.' He is G.o.d's guest in his transient life. It is short, like the stay of a foreigner in a strange land; but he is under the care of the King of the Land--therefore he need not fear nor sorrow.

Past generations, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob--whose names G.o.d 'is not ashamed' to appeal to in His own solemn designation of Himself--have held the same relation, and their experience has sealed His faithful care of those who dwell with Him. Therefore, the sadness is soothed, and the vain and fleeting life of earth a.s.sumes a new appearance, and the most blessed and wisest issue of our consciousness of frailty and insufficiency is the fixing of our desires and hopes on Him in whose house we may dwell even while we wander to and fro, and in whom our life being rooted and established shall not be vain, howsoever it may be brief.

If, then, we follow the course of contemplation thus traced in the psalm, we have these three points brought before us--first, the thought of life common to both clauses; second, the gloomy, aimless hollowness which that thought breathes into life apart from G.o.d; third, the blessedness which springs from the same thought when we look at it in connection with our Father in heaven.

I. Observe the very forcible expression which is given here to the thought of life common to both verses.

'Every man walketh in a vain show.' The original is even more striking and strong. And although one does not like altering words so familiar as those of our translation, which have sacredness from a.s.sociation and a melancholy music in their rhythm--still it is worth while to note that the force of the expression which the Psalmist employs is correctly given in the margin, 'in an image'--or 'in a shadow.' The phrase sounds singular to us, but is an instance of a common enough Hebrew idiom, and is equivalent to saying--he walks in the character or likeness of a shadow, or, as we should say, he walks as a shadow. That is to say, the whole outward life and activity of every man is represented as fleeting and unsubstantial, like the reflection of a cloud which darkens leagues of the mountains' side in a moment, and ere a man can say, 'Behold!' is gone again for ever.

Then, look at the other image employed in the other clause of our text to express the same idea, 'I am a stranger and a sojourner, as all my fathers.' The phrase has a history. In that most pathetic narrative of an old-world sorrow long since calmed and consoled, when 'Abraham stood up from before his dead,' and craved a burying-place for his Sarah from the sons of Heth, his first plea was, 'I am a stranger and a sojourner with you.' In his lips it was no metaphor. He was a stranger, a visitor for a brief time to an alien land; he was a sojourner, having no rights of inheritance, but settled among them for a while, and though dwelling among them, not adopted into their community. He was a foreigner, not naturalised. And such is our relation to all this visible frame of things in which we dwell. It is alien to us; though we be in it, our true affinities are elsewhere; though we be in it, our stay is brief, as that of 'a wayfaring man that turns aside to tarry for a night.'

And there is given in the context still another metaphor setting forth the same fact in that dreary generalisation which precedes my text, 'Every man at his best state'--or as the word means, 'established,'--with his roots most firmly struck in the material and visible--'is only a breath.' It appears for a moment, curling from lip and nostril into the cold morning air, and vanishes away, so thus vaporous, filmy, is the seeming solid fact of the most stable life.

These have been the commonplaces of poets and rhetoricians and moralists in all time. But threadbare as the thought is, I may venture to dwell on it for a moment. I know I am only repeating what we all believe--and all forget. It is never too late to preach commonplaces, until everybody acts on them as well as admits them--and this old familiar truth has not yet got so wrought into the structure of our lives that we can afford to say no more about it.

'Surely every man walketh in a shadow.' Did you ever stand upon the sh.o.r.e on some day of that 'uncertain weather, when gloom and glory meet together,' and notice how swiftly there went, racing over miles of billows, a darkening that quenched all the play of colour in the waves, as if all suddenly the angel of the waters had spread his broad wings between sun and sea, and then how in another moment as swiftly it flits away, and with a burst the light blazes out again, and leagues of ocean flash into green and violet and blue. So fleeting, so utterly perishable are our lives for all their seeming solid permanency. 'Shadows in a career, as George Herbert has it--breath going out of the nostrils. We think of ourselves as ever to continue in our present posture. We are deceived by illusions. Mental indolence, a secret dislike of the thought, and the impostures of sense, all conspire to make us blind to, or at least oblivious of, the plain fact which every beat of our pulses might preach, and the slow creeping hands of every parish clock confirm.

How awful that silent, unceasing footfall of receding days is when once we begin to watch it! Inexorable, pa.s.sionless--though hope and fear may pray, 'Sun! stand thou still on Gibeon; and thou moon! in the valley of Ajalon,'--the tramp of the hours goes on. The poets paint them as a linked chorus of rosy forms, garlanded, and clasping hands as they dance onwards. So they may be to some of us at some moments. So they may seem as they approach; but those who come hold the hands of those who go, and that troop has no rosy light upon their limbs, their garlands are faded, the suns.h.i.+ne falls not upon the grey and shrouded shapes, as they steal ghostlike through the gloom--and ever and ever the bright and laughing sisters pa.s.s on into that funereal band which grows and moves away from us unceasing. Alas! for many of us it bears away with it our lost treasures, our shattered hopes, our joys from which all the bright petals have dropped! Alas! for many of us there is nothing but sorrow in watching how all things become 'part and parcel of the dreadful past.'

And how strangely sometimes even a material a.s.sociation may give new emphasis to that old threadbare truth. Some more permanent _thing_ may help us to feel more profoundly the shadowy fleetness of _man_. The trifles are so much more lasting than their owners. Or, as 'the Preacher' puts it, with such wailing pathos, 'One generation pa.s.seth away, and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth for ever.'

This material is perishable--but yet how much more enduring than we are!

The pavements we walk upon, the coals in our grates--how many millenniums old are they? The pebble you kick aside with your foot--how many generations will it outlast? Go into a museum and you will see hanging there, little the worse for centuries, battered s.h.i.+elds, notched swords, and gaping helmets--aye, but what has become of the bright eyes that once flashed the light of battle through the bars, what has become of the strong hands that once gripped the hilts? 'The knights are dust,'

and 'their good swords are' _not_ 'rust.' The material lasts after its owner. Seed corn is found in a mummy case. The poor form beneath the painted lid is brown and hard, and more than half of it gone to pungent powder, and the man that once lived has faded utterly: but the handful of seed has its mysterious life in it, and when it is sown, in due time the green blade pushes above English soil, as it would have done under the shadow of the pyramids four thousand years ago--and its produce waves in a hundred harvest fields to-day. The money in your purses now, will some of it bear the head of a king that died half a century ago. It is bright and useful--where are all the people that in turn said they 'owned' it? Other men will live in our houses, will preach from this pulpit, and sit in these pews, when you and I are far away. And other June days will come, and the old rose-trees will flower round houses where unborn men will then be living, when the present possessor is gone to nourish the roots of the roses in the graveyard!

'Our days are as a shadow, and there is none abiding.' So said David on other occasions. We know, dear brethren! how true it is, whether we consider the ceaseless flux and change of things, the mystic march of the silent-footed hours, or the greater permanence which attaches to the 'things which perish,' than to our abode among them. We know it, and yet how hard it is not to yield to the inducement to act and feel as if all this painted scenery were solid rock and mountain. By our own inconsiderateness and sensuousness, we live in a lie, in a false dream of permanence, and so in a sadder sense we walk in 'a vain show,'--deluding ourselves with the conceit of durability, and refusing to see that the apparent is the shadowy, and the one enduring reality G.o.d. It is hard to get even the general conviction vivified in men's minds, hardest of all to get any man to reflect upon it as applying to himself. Do not think that you have said enough to vindicate neglect of my words now, when you call them commonplace. So they are. But did you ever take that well-worn old story, and press it on your own consciousness--as a man might press a common little plant, whose juice is healing, against his dim eye-ball--by saying to yourself, 'It is true of _me_. _I_ walk as a shadow. _I_ am gliding onwards to my doom.

Through _my_ slack hands the golden sands are flowing, and soon _my_ hour-gla.s.s will run out, and _I_ shall have to stop and go away.' Let me beseech you for one half-hour's meditation on that fact before this day closes. You will forget my words then, when with your own eyes you have looked upon that truth, and felt that it is not merely a toothless commonplace, but belongs to and works in _thy_ life, as it ebbs away silently and incessantly from _thee_.

II. Let me point, in the second place, to the gloomy, aimless hollowness which that thought, apart from G.o.d, infuses into life.

There is, no doubt, a double idea in the metaphor which the Psalmist employs. He desires to set forth, by his image of a shadow, not only the transiency, but the unsubstantialness of life. Shadow is opposed to substance, to that which is real, as well as to that which is enduring.

And we may further say that the one of these characteristics is in great part the occasion of the other. Because life is fleeting, therefore, in part, it is so hollow and unsatisfying. The fact that men are dragged away from their pursuits so inexorably makes these pursuits seem, to any one who cannot see beyond that fact, trivial and not worth the following. Why should we fret and toil and break our hearts, 'and scorn delights, and live laborious days' for purposes which will last so short a time, and things which we shall so soon have to leave? What is all our bustle and business, when the sad light of that thought falls on it, but 'labouring for the wind'? 'Were it not better to lie still?' Such thoughts have at least a partial truth in them, and are difficult to meet as long as we think only of the facts and results of man's life that we can see with our eyes, and our psalm gives emphatic utterance to them. The word rendered 'walketh' in our text is not merely a synonym for pa.s.sing through life, but has a very striking meaning. It is an intensive frequentative form of the word--that is, it represents the action as being repeated over and over again. For instance, it might be used to describe the restless motion of a wild beast in a cage, raging from side to side, never still, and never getting any farther for all the racing backward and forward. So here it signifies 'walketh to and fro,' and implies hurry and bustle, continuous effort, habitual unrest.

It thus comes to be parallel with the stronger words which follow,--'Surely they are _disquieted_ in vain'; and one reason why all this effort and agitation are purposeless and sad, is because the man who is straining his nerves and wearying his legs is but a shadow in regard to duration--'He heapeth up riches, and knoweth not who shall gather them.'

Yes! if we have said all, when we have said that men pa.s.s as a fleeting shadow--if my life has no roots in the Eternal, nor any consciousness of a life that does not pa.s.s, and a light that never perishes, if it is derived from, directed to, 'cribbed, cabined, and confined' within this visible diurnal sphere, then it is all flat and unprofitable, an illusion while it seems to last, and all its pursuits are folly, its hopes dreams, its substances vapours, its years a lie. For, if life be thus short, I who live it am conscious of, and possess whether I be conscious of them or no, capacities and requirements which, though they were to be annihilated to-morrow, could be satisfied while they lasted by nothing short of the absolute ideal, the all-perfect, the infinite--or, to put away abstractions, 'My soul thirsteth for G.o.d, the living G.o.d!' 'He hath put eternity in their heart,' as the book of Ecclesiastes says. Longings and aspirations, weaknesses and woes, the limits of creature helps and loves, the disproportion between us and the objects around us--all these facts of familiar experience do witness, alike by blank misgivings and by bright hopes, by many disappointments and by indestructible expectations surviving them all, that nothing which has a date, a beginning, or an end, can fill our souls or give us rest. Can you fill up the swamps of the Mississippi with any cartloads of f.a.ggots you can fling in? Can you fill your souls with anything which belongs to this fleeting life? Has a flying shadow an appreciable thickness, or will a million of them pressed together occupy a s.p.a.ce in your empty, hungry heart?

And so, dear brethren! I come to you with a message which may sound gloomy, and beseech you to give heed to it. No matter how you may get on in the world--though you may fulfil every dream with which you began in your youth--you will certainly find that without Christ for your Brother and Saviour, G.o.d for your Friend, and heaven for your hope, life, with all its fulness, is empty. It lasts long, too long as it sometimes seems for work, too long for hope, too long for endurance; long enough to let love die, and joys wither and fade, and companions drop away, but without G.o.d and Christ, you will find it but 'as a watch in the night.'

At no moment through the long weary years will it satisfy your whole being; and when the weary years are all past, they will seem to have been but as one troubled moment breaking the eternal silence. At every point _so_ profitless, and all the points making so thin and short a line! The crested waves seem heaped together as they recede from the eye till they reach the horizon, where miles of storm are seen but as a line of spray. So when a man looks back upon his life, if it have been a G.o.dless one, be sure of this, that he will have a dark and cheerless retrospect over a tossing waste, with a white rim of wandering barren foam vexed by tempest, and then, if not before, he will sadly learn how he has been living amidst shadows, and, with a nature that needs G.o.d, has wasted himself upon the world. 'O life! as futile then as frail'; 'surely,' in such a case, 'every man walketh in a vain show.'

III. But note, finally, how our other text in its significant words gives us the blessedness which springs from this same thought of life, when it is looked at in connection with G.o.d.

The mere conviction of the brevity and hollowness of life is not in itself a religious or a helpful thought. Its power depends upon the other ideas which are a.s.sociated with it. It is susceptible of the most opposite applications, and may tend to impel conduct in exactly opposite directions. It may be the language of despair or of bright hope. It may be the bitter creed of a worn-out debauchee, who has wasted his life in hunting shadows, and is left with a cynical spirit and a barbed tongue.

It may be the pa.s.sionless belief of a retired student, or the fanatical faith of a religious ascetic. It may be an argument for sensuous excess, 'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die'; or it may be the stimulus for n.o.ble and holy living, 'I must work the works of Him that sent me while it is day. The night cometh.' The other accompanying beliefs determine whether it shall be a blight or a blessing to a man.

And the one addition which is needed to incline the whole weight of that conviction to the better side, and to light up all its blackness, is that little phrase in this text, 'I am a stranger _with Thee_, and a sojourner.' There seems to be an allusion here to remarkable words connected with the singular Jewish inst.i.tution of the Jubilee. You remember that by the Mosaic law, there was no absolute sale of land in Israel, but that every half century the whole returned to the descendants of the original occupiers. Important economical and social purposes were contemplated in this arrangement, as well as the preservation of the relative position of the tribes as settled at the Conquest. But the law itself a.s.signs a purely religious purpose--the preservation of the distinct consciousness of the tenure on which the people held their territory, namely, obedience to and dependence on G.o.d.

'The land shall not be sold for ever, for the land is Mine, for ye are _strangers and sojourners with Me_.' Of course, there was a special sense in which that was true with regard to Israel, but David thought that the words were as true in regard to his whole relation to G.o.d, as in regard to Israel's possession of its national inheritance.

If we grasp these words as completing all that we have already said, how different this transient and unsubstantial life looks! You must have the light from both sides to stereoscope and make solid the flat surface picture. Transient! yes--but it is pa.s.sed in the presence of G.o.d.

Whether we know it or no, our brief days hang upon Him, and we walk, all of us, in the light of His countenance. That makes the transient eternal, the shadowy substantial, the trivial heavy with solemn meaning and awful yet vast possibilities. 'In our embers is something that doth live.' If we had said all, when we say 'We are as a shadow,' it would matter very little, though even then it _would_ matter something, how we spent our shadowy days; but if these poor brief hours are spent 'in the great Taskmaster's eye,'--if the shadow cast on earth proclaims a light in the heavens--if from this point there hangs an unending chain of conscious being--Oh! then, with what awful solemnity is the brevity, with what tremendous magnitude is the minuteness, of our earthly days invested! 'With Thee'--then I am constantly in the presence of a sovereign Law and its Giver; 'with Thee'--then all my actions are registered and weighed yonder; 'with Thee'--then 'Thou, G.o.d, seest me.'

Brethren! it is the prismatic halo and ring of eternity round this poor gla.s.s of time that gives it all its dignity, all its meaning. The lives that are lived before G.o.d cannot be trifles.