Bible Commentaries
Psalms 119

Verse 9

The Clean Path

Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way?

By taking heed thereto according to thy word.— Psalms 119:9.

1. It is a great matter to know what is the right question to put, and how to put it rightly. The secrets of nature disclose themselves to the man who knows how to question her properly; for he is already on the line of its solution when he sees clearly what the exact problem is. So also in any discussion, he who can lay aside all extraneous and irrelevant matter, and put his finger on the real point at issue, has already half won the battle; for our errors mainly arise from our mixing up of what is essential with subordinate points, the settlement of which is of no vital consequence. It is the same in the affairs of practical life. There, too, it is all-important to put clearly before our minds what is the supreme question we have to deal with as moral and responsible beings. Our character will depend on the answer to that, but the answer will not be difficult if we put the question rightly. Here we are, for a few short years, in a world of struggle and conflict, having duties to ourselves and to each other and to God, having also various endowments and various temptations. What is the line of thought which should press on each of us as the supreme matter for our most serious consideration? What is the question which every young man should put to himself as he looks out on the troubled sea of life with which he has to battle, and where he may make shipwreck if he take not heed?

2. The question of our text, “Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way?” if not absolutely the foremost, is yet among the weightiest thoughts which we should be laying to heart. There are, no doubt, still graver questions which we will do well to put to ourselves. What is the chief end of man? What is that by failing to achieve which we shall lose the very object of our existence? Or, again, What shall a man do to be saved? or yet further, Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his heart? These are points of still greater moment, and carry deeper results than the question of the Psalmist here. At bottom, no doubt, he had in view the cleansing of the heart as well as of the way; for his was no shallow spirit, that cared only for mere outside behaviour. The Psalmist knew that we must begin by purifying the fountain if the stream is to be made pure. But the question, as he formally puts it, points to our actions rather than our desires and affections, and so far it is defective. Still, any young man who shall put before him the cleansing of his way as the aim which he must specially strive to reach, will surely make a very much worthier life for himself than they do who start in the race careless whether the way they take be miry or clean.

I

An Anxious Question

“Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way?”

There are many questions about the future with which it is natural for young people to occupy themselves; and it is to be feared that the most of them ask more anxiously “How shall I make my way?” than “How shall I cleanse my way?” It is needful carefully to ponder the questions: “How shall I get on in the world—be happy, fortunate?” and the like. But there is another and more important question: “How shall I cleanse my way?” For purity is the best thing; and to be good is a wiser as well as a nobler object of ambition than any other.

1. The question of the Psalmist broadly stated is this, Can a man live, in all respects and in all his paths, a pure and beautiful life? and can all his ways be clean? We know well how much the question involves; we know also what the answer means; but we can answer without hesitation—as an ideal, Yes. A man can go into the world, and take his part in all natural and necessary engagements, and yet have, all through, a cleansed way. He may go into business, become a politician, enjoy pleasure, and build up a home, without inevitable stain, without wading to his object through dishonour; and is not this just what we want, to make all life what it ought to be? If the way of business were clean, if the ways of pleasure were clean, if the sanctities of domestic life were all kept unsullied, what a world it would be! What would become of fraud, and over-reaching, and plotting, and treachery, and strife, and the sickening suspicions of one another that now half choke human love and threaten to starve or poison the charities of life? We all know what would become of these things. They would die away as naturally as the mists before the advance of day. And why should it not be? Why should not a man begin life with the deep conviction that his may be a cleansed way?

2. But when the Psalmist speaks of cleansing our way, he implies that, at some points at least, our way has led us through the mire. The picture in his mind was of this sort. There stood before him a young man who had not long set out on the journey of life and who yet, to his own deep surprise and disgust, found many stains of travel already upon him. He had not meant to go wrong; as yet, perhaps, he has not gone very far wrong. And yet, where did all this filth come from? And how is it to be got rid of? And if, at the very outset of the journey, he has wandered into by-paths which have left these ugly stains upon him, what will he be like when he reaches the end of his journey? How can he hope to keep a right course, and to present himself, without spot, before God at the last? In short, how is he to make his way clean, and to keep it clean?

3. There are in our lives no isolated acts, but only ways. The wrong of which we say, “Only this once, and it shall never be repeated,” provokes its own repetition, starts us in its own direction. The violation of truth or integrity, with the expectation and purpose of retrieving it speedily, involves us in a labyrinth, in which we lose our way, and may never find our way back. The laws of sobriety or purity once transgressed, we have not the power which we previously thought we had to retrace our steps. We meant an act; we have found a way—a precipitous way, too, on which we gain momentum with every step. A way has a direction, and leads some whither. A way is continuous; and, if we are in it, we are advancing in it. A way differs in its direction from other ways, and diverges more and more from them the farther one travels upon it. There is hardly any error so perilous as that of imagining that there can be isolated acts or states of mind. Every present has its closely affiliated future. Every deed, every reverie, every thought, is a cause. We are moving on in character, as in years. We are not to-day what we were a week ago. We are advancing either in holiness or in unholiness.

Nature moves physically towards perfection, and morally there must be the same unseen but necessary motion. For if the Darwinian theory be true, the law of natural selection applies to all the moral history of mankind, as well as to the physical. Evil must die ultimately as the weaker element in the struggle with the good. The slow consent of the world’s history is in the direction of moral goodness, as its physical development is ever toward higher forms. This progress, of course, does not necessarily embrace any particular form of life or especial race. A given race may die, or may remain stagnant. The development goes on with some new variety or form of life. Such a “current of things towards righteousness,” or towards physical perfection, is slow, almost imperceptible. It is like the silent motion of the stars of heaven through eternity towards one centre of the universe. But if once the theory of development be accepted and this fact be admitted, what higher evidence can be demanded of a benevolent and perfect Creator than a current of all things towards the best, a drift towards perfection, a silent, august, secular movement of all beings and forms of life, all thought and morals, all history and events towards the completely good and perfect? 1 [Note: The Life of Charles Loring Brace, 302.]

Perhaps the present generation has heard more than enough about progress. Talk of that kind is an affectation that was always unprofitable, and has now become stale. Real progress needs no trumpeting. It announces itself like the flowing stream, which brawls only among the barren rocks, and is most felt as a beneficent agency that is penetrating and vitalizing in those parts where friction and noise are reduced to a minimum. True advancement is humble, earnest, practical. It is single-minded, simple-hearted devotion, ever growing in intelligence, to those grand objects which are dear to Christ and the angels, and the over-shadowing grandeur of which makes obtruding self-consciousness impossible. The Apostles advanced by forsaking the tradition of men and cleaving unto the word of the Lord, that they might do for the world what could be done in no other way. Luther advanced by bringing men up to the simple record of the New Testament, that they might find a firm footing as they passed into eternity and faced the awful facts of life and destiny. We can advance in the present day only as we come nearer to Jesus Christ, and bring others with us. 1 [Note: James Stark, John Murker of Banff, 54.]

The poet sings—

Our lives must climb from hope to hope,

And realize our longing,

but it is not often that the record of a man’s progress towards a pronounced condition of spiritual exaltation is one of uninterrupted climbing. There are usually some prominent milestones that mark momentous crises in the journey, frequently some definite boundary to which one can point and say, This is where such a one first dedicated himself to the service of God and of his fellows. But with Quintin Hogg one can trace the ever-mounting path back to his earliest days until it is lost in the pure innocence that is God’s birth-gift to every little child. There is no apparent genesis of conviction, of dedication. From a child upward he seems to have been imbued with a sense of service owed to a Wonderful Benefactor, and though of course there must have been times of struggle and of darkness, they were principally of a mental rather than of a spiritual character, causing no interruption of his self-appointed labours and leaving no contemporary external indications of their presence. 2 [Note: E. M. Hogg, Quintin Hogg, 35.]

II

A Simple Answer

“By taking heed.”

1. The answer, like the question of the text, is not perhaps the supremely best, but it is nevertheless very true, and needful to be borne in mind. We should begin by asking, “Wherewithal shall I cleanse my heart?” and the reply to that is, “If any man be in Chriat he is a new creature”—renewed in the spirit of his mind after the likeness of Christ. But, allowing that, for the practical uses of life, nothing better could be said to one than this, Take heed to your ways, and direct them according to the Word of God.

For not a little of the evil of this world arises from the heedlessness of youth. We did not mean to do wrong. Very few do, at least in the beginning. There may be some who have from the first perverse and evil natures, wholly indisposed to go the right way. But on the whole these are not the common staple of human creatures. Most youths are not wishful to do wrong, but would rather, if it did not cost very much trouble, do right in the main. But they do not think as strenuously about it as they should. They are not very watchful of their conduct, or careful to guide it aright; and so they fall into a snare. It is this heedlessness, this inconsiderateness, which does not weigh seriously the step we are going to take, and the consequences it may involve—this is the beginning of many a downward course. “Oh,” we say, “I did not think; I did not mean any wrong,” and we are fain to consider that a sufficient excuse. But it is not a sufficient excuse. We ought to think. God has given us a power of “seeing before and after” that we may direct our steps aright; and it will not serve our purpose that we did not use that power, but blundered into the mire which we should clearly have avoided. The foremost duty of a man is to think what he is about.

The best made road wants looking after if it is to be kept in repair. What would become of a railway that had no surfacemen and platelayers going along the line and noticing whether anything was amiss? I remember once seeing a bit of an old Roman road; the lava rocks were there, but for want of care, here a young sapling had grown up between two of them and had driven them apart, there were many split by the frost; here was a great ugly gap full of mud, and the whole thing ended in a jungle. How shall a man keep his road in repair? “By taking heed thereto.” Things that are left to go anyhow in this world have a strange knack of going one how. You do not need anything else than negligence to ensure that things will come to grief. 1 [Note: 1 A. Maclaren.]

One of the greatest of living Englishmen sums up the whole teaching of Goethe, the wisest German of the nineteenth century, in the brief citation: “Gedenke, zu leben,” which means literally, “Think, to live.” Carlyle translates, “Think of living.” But you will all get hold of its meaning if I say that what it comes to is this: “If you would live rightly and well, you must think—think how it is best to live.” So that, you see, two of the wisest men of our own time are of one mind with the Psalmist who lived between two and three thousand years before them. He says, “If you would walk in pure and noble ways of life, think of your ways.” 1 [Note: S. Cox, The Bird’s Nest, 136.]

2. If we examine our self-consciousness, we shall find that it is never as to the qualities of actions that we feel doubt or hesitation. The questions which perplex us, and which it is unspeakably dangerous for a young person to begin to ask, are such as these: How far may I go in a wrong direction, and yet be sure to go no farther? Is there any harm in a slight compromise of principle? Can I not with ultimate safety trespass once, or a little way, on forbidden ground? Can I not try the first pleasant, attractive steps on a way which I am determined on no account to pursue farther? May I not go as far in the wrong as others are going, without reproach and without fear? Is there not some redeeming grace in companionship, so that I may venture with others a little farther than I would be willing to go alone? May not my conscience, under careful home-training and choice home-examples, have become more rigid and scrupulous than is befitting or manly in one who has emerged into comparative freedom? In these questions are the beginnings of evil—the first, it may be, fatal steps in miry ways.

If you once allow yourself to fall into a habit of evil of whatever kind, the idea that you are helpless, that you are made so, that it is your nature, will very speedily creep in and try to lay hold of your mind. Whether it be a sin of passion or of temper, which comes only at times, leaving you free to live a right and perhaps even a religious life in the intervals, and returning with a sort of easy victory in the hour of temptation, making your falls all the more miserable by their contrast with your happier and better moments; or some of those palsies of the soul which seem to benumb the will—sloth for instance, or selfishness; or again, a petty fault which mars all your life without seeming ever to stain it deeply, making you ashamed, and justly ashamed, that you should find a difficulty in overcoming such a trifle; in such cases, over and above the temptation to the sin itself, there soon comes the added temptation to treat it as hopeless, to give up in despair, to reconcile yourself to your enemy, and say that you are made so, and cannot do otherwise. And this is indeed no trifling addition. The one chance of escape from habitual sin is never to intermit the struggle: do that, and you are quite sure to conquer; some better opportunity for getting power over the temptation presents itself; or the temptation seems to go away of itself, you do not know how; or it returns less and less frequently, till it returns no more; its going may be in one way or in another; but persevere in the battle, and go it surely will. Thus ere now have Christians overcome bodily temptations, to some men the severest trials of all; thus have Christians tamed down unruly temper; thus have they conquered pride and vanity; thus have they taught themselves to be true. 1 [Note: Archbishop Temple.]

3. But it is not in man to direct his steps aright. Therefore God has bestowed on us what should be “a lamp unto our feet, and a light unto our path.” It is something to be heedful and to walk warily, for we are beset on all hands by snares and temptations. But that is not enough. For besides these dangers that encompass us without, we have other perils to face in the shape of false ideals, mistaken views of what a man should be and do. Therefore the Psalmist reminds us that we can cleanse our ways only by taking heed to them according to God’s Word. He meant, of course, the Law of the Lord as it had been made known to Israel of old. That was to be their practical guide in the path of duty in his day. It was not merely a doctrine they were to believe, but a commandment they must obey. And a noble law it was, of brave and manly and self-denying virtue, leading them up the steep heights of arduous duty to the fellowship of Israel’s God. Yet, good and precious though it was, quickening the soul to a higher life than the rest of the world dreamt of, we have now a surer word and a fairer example to direct us, a more potent inspiration also urging us to higher and holier attainments. Think of the Perfect Man, the model of holy beauty, who is in all things our example, who teaches how to be rich in poverty, how to be wise though unlearned, how to bear wrong meekly, how to be true and faithful and brave with all the world against Him, and how to forget Himself in the love He bore to all.

In St. Peter the love of God is shown in Christian example. A plain and simple mind, fixed on plain duties, finding in the great law of right a supreme satisfaction, St. Peter seems to think of our Lord chiefly as showing us what we ought to be and do, and sent by the infinite love of God for that purpose. Do Christians find their duty hard? “Even hereunto were ye called: because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow his steps: who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth: who, when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not; but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously: who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed.” Or, again, are Christians persecuted? They are reminded that “Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust.” And so throughout his writings St. Peter ever seems to think of God’s love as upholding a man in doing what it is right to do, in bearing what it is right to bear, and of Christ’s life as the assurance of that love. 1 [Note: Archbishop Temple.]

4. In Christ, who is the Incarnate Word, we have an all-sufficient Guide on our way through life. A guide of conduct must be plain—and whatever doubts and difficulties there may be about the doctrines of Christianity there is none about its morality. A guide of conduct must be decisive—and there is no faltering in the utterance of the Book as to right and wrong. A guide of conduct must be capable of application to the wide diversities of character, age, circumstance—and the morality of the New Testament especially, and of the Old in a measure, secures that, because it does not trouble itself about minute details, but deals with large principles. A guide for morals must be far in advance of the followers, and it has taken generations and centuries to work into men’s consciences, and to work out in men’s practice, a portion of the morality of that Book. If the world kept the commandments of the New Testament, the world would be in the millennium; and all the sin and crime, and ninety-nine-hundredths of all the sorrow, of earth would have vanished like an ugly dream.

I never saw a useful Christian who was not a student of the Bible. If a man neglect his Bible, he may pray and ask God to use him in His work, but God cannot make use of him, for there is not much for the Holy Ghost to work upon. We cannot overcome Satan with our feelings. The reason why some people have such bitter experience is that they try to overcome the devil by their feelings and experiences. Christ overcame Satan by the Word. 1 [Note: D. L. Moody.]

5. The fatal defect of all attempts at keeping our heart by our own watchfulness is that keeper and kept are one and the same, and so there may be mutiny in the garrison, and the very forces that ought to subdue the rebellion may have gone over to the rebels. We want a power outside of us to steady us. We want another motive to be brought to bear upon our conduct, and upon our convictions and our will, mightier than any that now influence them; and we get that if we will yield ourselves to the love that has come down from heaven to save us, and says to us, “If ye love me, keep my commandments.” We want, for keeping ourselves and cleansing our way, reinforcements to our own inward vigour, and we shall get these if we will trust to Jesus Christ, who will breathe into us the spirit of His own life, which will make us “free from the law of sin and death.” We want, if our path is to be cleansed, forgiveness for a past path, which is in some measure stained and foul, as well as strength for the future, to deliver us from the dreadful influence of the habit of evil. And we get all these in the blood of Jesus Christ which cleanses from all sin.

How are we to be made holy? God has made full provision for it. There is wonderful provision laid down in the Word for our sanctification. First of all there is the blood of Jesus Christ which cleanseth from all sin. There is power in it to cleanse even the young man’s heart. Secondly, there is the washing with the Word. You remember the Lord said to His disciples, “Now, ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you.” Thirdly, there is the keeping power of Christ Himself. “I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.” The power of Christ to keep is another part of the provision that God has made to keep us holy. Then there is the Holy Spirit of God, whose special office on earth is to do this work of sanctification through Christ. The blood of Jesus Christ; the Word of the living God; the keeping power of Christ; the sanctifying power of the Holy Ghost. What a provision is this! 1 [Note: J. Elder Cumming.]

Four letters that a child may trace!

Yet men who read may feel a thrill

From powers that know not time nor space,

Vibrations of the eternal will—

With body and mind and soul respond

To “Love” and all that lies beyond.

On truth’s wide sea, thought’s tiny skiff

Goes dancing far beyond our speech,

Yet thought is but a hieroglyph

Of boundless worlds it cannot reach:

We label our poor idols “God,”

And map with logic heavens untrod.

Music and beauty, life and art—

Regalia of the Presence hid—

Command our worship, move our heart,

Write “Love “on every coffin-lid:

But infinite—beyond, above—

The hope within that one word “Love.” 2 [Note: Annie Matheson, Maytime Songs, 59.]

Literature

Cox (S.), The Bird’s Nest, 131.

Cumming (J. E.), in Convention Addresses delivered at Bridge of Allan, 1895, p. 59.

Griffin (E. D.), Plain Practical Sermons, ii. 465.

Hopps (J. P.), Sermons of Love and Life, 65.

Leitch (R.), The Light of the Gentiles, 157.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions: Psalms li.–cxlv., 281.

Murphy (J. B. C), The Service of the Master, 9.

Norton (J. N.), Warning and Teaching, 140.

Simeon (C.), Works, vi. 302.

Smith (W. C.), Sermons, 146.

Voysey (C.), Sermons, xxi. (1898), No. 22.

Wiseman (N.), Children’s Sermons, 205.

Christian World Pulpit, xii. 198 (A. P. Peabody); xxiv. 90 (H. W. Beecher); xxix. 315 (H. W. Beecher).

Church Pulpit Year Book, 1911, p. 271.

Preacher’s Magazine, iv. 272 (J. Feather).

Verse 18

The Wondrous Law

Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold

Wondrous things out of thy law.— Psalms 119:18.

This is a very uncommon idea—that wonder should be the result of intellectual development or the “opening of the eyes.” The prevailing notion is the reverse—that wonder belongs to the primitive age alike of the individual and of the race. We say colloquially, “I opened my eyes in astonishment”; the Psalmist’s expression is the converse, “I became astonished by opening my eyes.” What the Psalmist says is that the marvels of life escape us by reason of our ignorance. His prayer is just the contrary of the common prayer. The common prayer is, “Make me a simple child again that I may feel the mystery of all things and bow with reverence before them.” But the Psalmist says,” Emancipate me from the ignorance of childhood, for it is only when I shall see with the eyes of a man that I shall behold the mystery, the marvel, the unfathomable depth, of that ocean on whose bosom I live and move and have my being.”

Do we find that the sense of wonder belongs to children? Not so. The sense of mystery is precisely what a child does not feel. He asks many questions; but he will accept the crudest answers as quite adequate explanations. He has not a consciousness of limitation. He has a feeling of power beyond his strength; he will put out his hand to catch the moon. He does not at an early date inquire where he came from. He does not ask who made a watch or who made the sun. To him the watch and the sun are both alive—moving by their own strength, upheld by their own power. His eyes are not opened, and therefore his wonder is not awake. To wake his wonder you must unbar the door of his mind. The mystery comes with his experience—not with the want of it. I do not read that man marvelled in Eden; I do that they marvelled in Galilee. Eden was as wonderful as Galilee; but the eyes were not opened. Knowledge is the parent of mystery. Experience is the forerunner of reverence. Only they who have let down the pitcher can utter the cry, “The well is deep.” 1 [Note: G. Matheson, Messages of Hope, 242.]

Mr. Morley, in his Life of Gladstone, speaking of his entrance into college life at Oxford, says: “It was from Gladstone’s introduction into this enchanted and inspiring world that we recognize the beginning of the wonderful course which was to show how great a thing the life of a man may be made.” So with Christian. Here, in the Interpreter’s House, his spiritual experiences really begin. He is no longer in the outer circle of the world’s empty life; he has come within the circle of God’s direct purposes and protecting power. Dangers he will have to meet, trials of faith and courage; the Hill of Difficulty, the Valley of Humiliation, the Castle of Giant Despair, the struggle with Apollyon—all this is before him. But he is on the pilgrim-road to Zion. There is the sweet companionship; there are the wonders by the way—the Interpreter’s House, the Cross where the burden is removed, the Palace Beautiful, the sight of the Delectable Mountains, the River of the Water of Life. So whatever might be the difficulties, Christian was on enchanted ground. He was near to God. He was on the path whose end was heaven. The wicket gate admits him to the rich field of Christian experience: the only experience that has any lasting value. 2 [Note: D. W. Whincup, The Training of Life, 21.]

I

1. The sense of wonder is one of our most useful emotions. The mind cannot remain long in a state of monotony without something like pain, or if it does, it is a sign of the low level to which it has sunk. It has a craving after what is fresh, and God has provided for this in the form of the world. He has made the works of nature pass before us with a perpetually diversified face. He has created summer and winter, and so ordered the sun that it has probably never set with the same look since man first saw it. Those works of nature are constantly turning up new subjects of thought and study, and will do so, during the world’s existence; while, at the same time, the world itself is weaving an ever-shifting and many-coloured web of history. In all this there is a stimulus to man to lead him to look and think.

Not by “mathesis,” not by deduction, or construction, not by measuring, or searching, canst thou find out God, but only by the faithful cry from the roadside of the world as He passes—“Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law.” In that prayer you have literally expressed to you, not in any wise as we too carelessly assume metaphorically, the two functions of the exercised senses, of which you have so often, I fear incredulously, heard me affirm the necessary connexion—the discerning of what is beautiful and of what is right. “Wondrous things out of thy law.” Wondrous, not as to the uneducated senses they are in terror, but wondrous to the educated senses in gentleness and delight; so that while to the modern demonstrator of the laws of Nature they become mysterious as dreadful in their tyranny, to the ancient perceiver of the laws of Heaven they became lovely no less than wondrous: in the tenderness and the voice of the Borgo Allegri, at the feet of the Mother of Christ, was joy no less of allegiance than wonder—“Oh, how love I thy law.” 1 [Note: Ruskin, Schools of Art in Florence, § 90 (Works, xxiii. 250).]

2. Wonder rises into admiration as we contemplate things that are grand and beautiful. There is a chord in the human heart to which the beautiful and sublime respond, whether these appear in the material or in the spiritual world. If we could only take men away for a little out of the dull, dead round, and from the corroding and often debasing things that draw them down in their common life, there are objects such as these appealing to them daily and hourly, and asking them if they have not a soul. Rich sunsets and moonlit skies are there, only requiring eyes to see them, and acts of self-devotion and heroism are being performed, and lives of patient suffering led, under our sight, which are as capable of thrilling us as anything recorded in history.

At a later time the Maréchale delivered addresses in other cities of France—such as Nîmes, Marseilles, Havre, Rouen, Lyons—and she was everywhere astonished to find that the French, who seem the most thoughtless, are yet among the most thoughtful people in the world. The result of such Conférences as these cannot be tabulated. For one thing, they made the Maréchale more than ever a mother-confessor and spiritual director. The thoughts of many hearts were revealed to her at private interviews of which no record was kept, and in letters, one of which may be given:—

“Your marvellous faith, your simple and powerful eloquence so deeply moved me that I cannot but thank you. I thank you as an artist, as a sincere admirer of beautiful work, of great characters; I thank you as a man blasé, sceptical, benumbed and deadened. As a child I adored Jesus, and now, after having thought much and suffered infinite pains which you cannot understand, I have said adieu to faith and also adieu to hope! I have become one of those you call sceptics. Ah! do not say ‘terrible’ sceptic, but unfortunate, pitiable, unhappy sceptic. You are, Madame, a great, beautiful, generous heart, and if ever earnest good wishes have been worth anything, I have cherished them for you, your work, and those who fight by your side. You will believe me, an unbeliever, who envies you, admires you, and ideally loves you.” 1 [Note: James Strahan, The Maréchale (1913), 123.]

3. Wonder and admiration deepen into awe as we realize the mystery of life. A reflective mind can take but a very few steps in thinking till it comes upon this. It is not so much that there are things unknown around us as that there are things unknowable, that there is an infinite and a mystery in the universe which we cannot now penetrate, and which may for ever stretch beyond us. The tokens of man’s highest nature lie not in his being able to comprehend but in his ability to feel that there are things which he cannot comprehend, and which he yet feels to be true and real, before which he is compelled to fall down in reverent awe. It is here, above all, that man comes into contact with religion, with a God, with an eternity; and he in whom there is little sense of wonder, or in whom it has been blunted and degraded, will have a proportionately feeble impression of these grand subjects which the soul can feel to be real but can never fully grasp.

I can call my Father a brave man (ein Tapferer). Man’s face he did not fear; God he always feared: his Reverence, I think, was considerably mixed with Fear. Yet not slavish Fear; rather Awe, as of unutterable Depths of Silence, through which flickered a trembling Hope. How he used to speak of Death (especially in late years) or rather to be silent, and look of it! There was no feeling in him here that he cared to hide: he trembled at the really terrible; the mock-terrible he cared nought for.—That last act of his Life; when in the last agony, with the thick ghastly vapours of Death rising round him to choke him, he burst through and called with a man’s voice on the great God to have mercy on him: that was like the epitome and concluding summary of his whole Life. God gave him strength to wrestle with the King of Terrors, as it were even then to prevail. All his strength came from God, and ever sought new nourishment there. God be thanked for it. 1 [Note: Carlyle, Reminiscences, i. 10.]

II

1. There is nothing so wonderful as God’s law; indeed, it may justly be said to include in itself all that is most wonderful—all that truly merits our admiration—all that will really reward our curiosity. For what is it? The Psalmist here was not thinking merely of the law given to Moses or of the words written in any book, however sacred. He was not thinking of spoken words or written characters, but of eternal realities. He was an earnest man, and his mind sought to be in contact with truth itself; he was a pious man, and his heart longed for nothing less or lower than communion with the living God. He felt himself in the Divine presence, and he felt that the Divine law was within and around him. The Bible tells us much about the law of God, but it is only by a figure of speech that we call it the law of God or even that it contains the law of God. In the Bible and other books we have the statements of God’s laws, but these laws themselves are far too real to be in any book.

2. It is the law of God that keeps the stars in their courses, regulates the movements of the seas and the revolutions of the earth, develops the plant and organizes the animal, works in our instincts and guides our reason, marks out the path of humanity and determines the rise and fall, the weal and woe, of nations, and measures out to virtue and vice their due rewards in time and eternity. It is not truly separable from God Himself, but is the whole of the modes in which He manifests His power, and wisdom, and goodness in the universe,—the whole of the ways in which He operates through matter and spirit, in creation, providence, and redemption, as Father and King and Judge. Hence it is that we say it is not only most wonderful but includes in itself all that is wonderful. The wonders of physical nature, of the human soul and human history, and of redeeming love and grace, are all wonders of that law of God which the Psalmist longed and prayed to behold—that law which ruleth alike in what is least and in what is greatest, to which all things in heaven and earth do homage, the seat of which is the bosom of the Eternal, the voice of which is the harmony of the universe.

I read in the Bible that God has “set his glory in the heavens,” but in merely reading this I do not see that glory; it is only to be seen by “considering the heavens, which are the work of God’s fingers; the moon and the stars, which he has ordained.” This terrible law—“the wages of sin is death”—has been published in the Bible, but it does not exist and work in the Bible; it exists and works in the lives of sinful beings like you and me, and if we do not see it in ourselves we shall never see it at all, although we read a thousand times the words which announce it. So with its gracious counterpart—“the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ.” These blessed words point us to the most consoling law in all the universe, but they point us away from themselves; and only by our souls coming into communion with a living God through a living Saviour can they behold the wonders of mercy and truth which are in that law. 1 [Note: Robert Flint.]

Really, so far as spiritual vision is concerned, the angels must look upon this earth as a big blind asylum. We see close to us, but not afar off; we see the surface, and miss the depths; we see not as wide awake, but as those who rub their eyes hardly knowing whether they wake or sleep. Have I seen the “wondrous things” out of God’s law—the things which accompany salvation. Many feel the intellectual interest of God’s Word, enjoy its eloquence, extol its moral worth, or they appreciate its prudential wisdom, like Napoleon, who put it in the political section of his library; but they do not grasp its spiritual, saving message. They gather shining pebbles and painted shells, and overlook the pearl of great price. Oh! to see the wondrous depths of redeeming love! Whilst I study systems of theology and search the commentaries of exegetes do I sufficiently remember the promised Revealer and wait His illumination? “Ye have an unction from the Holy One, and know all things.” 2 [Note: W. L. Watkinson.]

III

1. The most wonderful of all laws are God’s moral and spiritual laws. They are the laws of God in a far higher sense than other laws. The laws of the physical world might have been quite different from what they are. God made them to be what they are by making the physical world itself what it is. If He had made quite a different material world with quite other laws, He would have been none the less God, the true object of our worship. But He did not make the fundamental laws of moral life to be what they are by any mere forthputting of His will. They are eternal and unchangeable. That God should alter them would be for Him to cease to be wise and righteous and holy and loving. It would be for Him to cease to be God. The wonders of these laws are thus the wonders of the Divine nature, and far greater, therefore, than any wonders of created nature. At the same time, these laws are the laws of our natures, of our spirits, of what is much higher and much more wonderful than anything else to be beheld in nature. “On earth,” it has been said, “there is nothing great but man, and in man there is nothing great but mind.” And certainly a soul is a far more wonderful thing than even a star, a spiritual being than a material world, and its laws are far more wonderful. It is spiritual law that determines men’s relations to their God and to one another, and it is on obedience or disobedience to it that the weal or woe of individuals or societies chiefly depends, so that all the marvels and mysteries of human nature and destiny gather round it.

I am not quite sure that the sole, or even chief, end of punishment is the reformation of the offender. I think a great deal of law. Law rules Deity; and its awful majesty is above individual happiness. That is what Kant calls “the categorical imperative,” that is, a sense of duty which commands categorically or absolutely—not saying “it is better,” but “thou shalt.” Why? Because “thou shalt,” that is all. It is not best to do right—thou must do right; and the conscience that feels that, and in that way, is the nearest to Divine humanity. Not that law was made, like the Sabbath, for man, but man was made for it. He is beneath it, a grain of dust before it; it moves on, and if he will not move before it, it crushes him; that is all, and that is punishment. I fancy that grand notion of law is what we have lost, what we require to get, before we are in a position to discuss the question of punishment at all, or to understand what it is. 1 [Note: Life and Letters of the Rev. F. W. Robertson, 236.]

2. To behold fully how wonderful the law is—how sacred God regards it to be—how terrible disobedience to it is—it is to the cross we must look; to the cross, towering high above all other subjects, in the midst of the ages, in the presence of the nations, to show sin in all its hideousness and righteousness in all its perfections. If we can see no wonders in the law which Christ died to satisfy and glorify, if we do not see it to be unspeakably more wonderful than all the other laws, assuredly our blindness is great indeed, and we cannot too earnestly cry to a merciful God, “Open Thou mine eyes.”

In a letter to her father Miss Nightingale says:

“What I dislike in Renan is not that it is fine writing, but that it is all fine writing. His Christ is the hero of a novel; he himself, a successful novel-writer. I am revolted by such expressions as charmant, delicieux, religion du pur sentiment, in such a subject.… As for the ‘religion of sentiment,’ I really don’t know what he means. It is an expression of Balzac’s. If he means the ‘religion of love,’ I agree and do not agree. We must love something loveable. And a religion of love must certainly include the explaining of God’s character to be something loveable—of God’s ‘providence,’ which is the self-same thing as God’s Laws, as something loving and loveable. On the other hand I go along with Christ, not with Renan’s Christ, far more than most Christians do. I do not think that ‘Christ on the Cross’ is the highest expression hitherto of God—not in the vulgar meaning of the Atonement—but God does hang on the Cross every day in every one of us; the whole meaning of God’s ‘providence,’ i.e. His laws, is the Cross. When Christ preaches the Cross, when all mystical theology preaches the Cross, I go along with them entirely. It is the self-same thing as what I mean when I say that God educates the world by His laws, i.e. by sin—that man must create mankind—that all this evil, i.e. the Cross, is the proof of God’s goodness, is the only way by which God could work out man’s salvation without a contradiction. You say, but there is too much evil. I say, there is just enough (not a millionth part of a grain more than is necessary) to teach man by his own mistakes,—by his sins, if you will—to show man the way to perfection in eternity—to perfection which is the only happiness.” 1 [Note: Sir Edward Cook, The Life of Florence Nightingale, i. 486.]

IV

Man’s eyes are veiled, so that he sees but a little way into God’s law. Our intellectual perception of law is one thing and I our spiritual perception of God in law is a very different thing. To see law itself we need only a clear and disciplined understanding. To see God in law we need spiritual discernment. The eye sees only what it brings with it the power of seeing. And neither mere bodily vision nor mere intellectual vision will enable us to behold spiritual reality. The things of the spirit must be spiritually discerned.

When on a serene night millions of stars sparkle in the depths of the sky, any man who has bodily eyes, although he may have no talent and culture, has only to raise them upwards to embrace at a glance all the splendours of the firmament, and thereby to receive into his soul, at least in some measure, the impressions which so sublime a spectacle is fitted to produce. But there may stand beside him one whose intellectual ability is far greater, and who has improved that ability to the utmost by diligent and carefully directed exercise, yet if Providence have denied to him the blessing of sight, in vain for him will there be all magnificence. There is another sky, and one far grander than the azure vault which is stretched over our heads, and this mystic sky is filled with the stars of Divine truth, the wonders of creative power, the mysteries of infinite wisdom, the bounties of Divine beneficence, the beauties of absolute holiness, the marvels of redeeming love, the riches of the Godhead, the glories of Father, Son, and Spirit, shining far more bright and pure than the sun at noonday. And yet to great men, to the wise of this world, to the most scholarly and the most scientific of men, they may be quite invisible, although they are lighting up with their Divine radiance the path of the simple peasant and causing his heart to leap and sing with joy as he beholds them. 1 [Note: Robert Flint.]

remember very well when Sir Redvers Buller came home from South Africa, in almost the first speech he made after landing at Southampton, he drew attention to the immense superiority of the Boer over the Briton in the matter of vision. Accustomed to the clear atmosphere and vast distances of South Africa, the Boer had brought his sight faculty to such a pitch of perfection that he could see a moving object a mile or two farther off than the average Englishman could, with the result that he was aware of the approach of the English soldier long before the Englishman became aware of his nearness. And Sir Redvers did not hesitate to set down some of our calamities and disasters and defeats to this cause. 2 [Note: J. D. Jones, Elims of Life, 126.]

1. One cause of this blindness is a hereditary defect in the unbelieving heart, a natural congenital blindness, which the lapse of years has not cured. We are all born blind, and remain blind to moral and spiritual truth long after birth. Discernment between right and wrong, a sense of duty, a sense of failure and secret shame in consequence, is a state or faculty into which we can grow only after we have lived as mere animals about four or five years. It takes some years longer before we grow into knowledge of the ideas of character, of trustworthiness in parents, of their unselfish love, and of the intense kindness of that discipline which at first we resisted and resented. Before that development we were blind, we could not discern spiritual things; we, could not know what true love is, for love is the most spiritual of all human faculties. It crowns the climax of all strictly human qualities. But, though it seems incredible, it is true that some men and women have grown up without any moral sense being developed, and also without any knowledge or sense of true love.

I came across a man well advanced in years who confided to me that he believed neither in God nor in a future life. I at once asked him: “Did you ever really love any one in the world?” After some days’ reflection, he replied to me: “No, I don’t think I ever did love anybody—at least, not as you define true love.” Now, if you cannot get as far as love in human development, you must, of course, be blind to God. You cannot see Him, cannot take any pleasure in the thought of Him, but must be practically dead towards Him. 1 [Note: Charles Voysey.]

2. Another cause of blindness is to be found in the conditions of life which are either forced upon us or have been chosen by ourselves. The worst and most widespread of these conditions is absorption in the concerns and pleasures of this life. Rich and poor alike suffer from this absorption, yet the rich suffer from it far more than the poor. Want and distress may open our eyes to God, fulness and luxury never. So long as our hearts are fixed wholly on worldly good and animal indulgence, our souls are utterly blind to God and to all spiritual things.

Christian saw in Interpreter’s House two boys, Passion and Patience. Passion had a bag of gold in his hand, but Patience was willing to take his Governor’s advice and wait for his good things till the next year. And these two boys, says John Bunyan, are typical of the worldly man and the true Christian. The worldly man, with his favourite proverb of “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” wants his good things at once; he wants his bag of gold in the hand, not seeming to realize that his money must perish with him; but the Christian is willing to do without this world’s wealth, because he looks not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. 1 [Note: J. D. Jones, Elims of Life, 134.]

A scientist delivered a lecture a little time ago in which he maintained, on the basis of studies started by the observation of the eye of a wounded bird, that all diseases of the body register themselves in the eye, that it was even possible to judge the location of the disease by the part of the pupil affected. Whether this can be demonstrated or not, there is no doubt that the eye has its connexion with organs of the body that are less honourably placed, and is affected by their accidents and disquietudes. Diseases of the blood and of the digestive functions cloud and vex the sight. You shall not be careless of your eating and drinking and maintain clear vision. The mists and the filmy globes which float before the eye are the indices of things wrong in parts of the system that are remote from the eye itself, and to be remedied by neither eye-lotions nor glasses. So neglect of the spiritual life results in blurred spiritual vision. 2 [Note: W. C. Piggott, The Imperishable Word, 68.]

3. Above and beyond these things which naturally darken our souls, there lie the conditions which we may create for ourselves. Not knowing anything about the soul and the spiritual life, some steep themselves in studies and occupations which prevent all entrance of light into their minds concerning God and His ways. They keep the company of irreligious and unbelieving men like themselves. They pore over essays and volumes which not only throw not a gleam of light upon the spiritual world, but are purposely written to shut it out, to make it more and more difficult to see God, to deepen the darkness in which they started on their search for what they call “Truth.” Thus, blind at the beginning, they take for their guides men and books still more blind than themselves, and flounder on with ever less and less power to recover their sight. And all the while they studiously neglect those means by which their eyes may be opened. They never lift up their hearts to God. They avoid all thoughts of religion unless only to sneer at it, or to look down upon it with supercilious curiosity. They never attend public worship or put themselves in the way of hearing what they never have heard. “What is the use,” cry the more intelligent among them—“what is the use of praying to a God who is absolutely unknowable?” But they forget that God is unknowable only to those who think Him to be so, to those who never pray. If they did but confer with those who have lifted up their hearts to God and have found Him, they might be brought to go down upon their knees to pray, “Lord, open Thou mine eyes that I may see.”

A little steam vessel in which I was sailing round the coast of Arran, emitted such a thick pall of smoke as to blot out the vision of Goat Fell. And sometimes our souls create those obscuring clouds and hide the glory of God. It may be the vapour of pride. It may be the steam of unclean passion. It may be the smoke of timidity and fear.

O may no earth-born cloud arise

To hide Thee from Thy servant’s eyes. 1 [Note: J. H. Jowett.]

Night comes; soon alone shall fancy follow sadly in her flight

Where the fiery dust of evening, shaken from the feet of light,

Thrusts its monstrous barriers between the pure, the good, the true,

That our weeping eyes may strain for, but shall never after view.

Only yester eve I watched with heart at rest the nebulæ

Looming far within the shadowy shining of the Milky Way;

Finding in the stillness joy and hope for all the sons of men;

Now what silent anguish fills a night more beautiful than then:

For earth’s age of pain has come, and all her sister planets weep,

Thinking of her fires of morning passing into dreamless sleep.

In this cycle of great sorrow for the moments that we last

We too shall be linked by weeping to the greatness of her past:

But the coming race shall know not, and the fount of tears shall dry,

And the arid heart of man shall be arid as the desert sky.

So within my mind the darkness dawned, and round me everywhere

Hope departed with the twilight, leaving only dumb despair. 2 [Note: A. E., Collected Poems (1913), 25.]

V

The Psalmist does not ask for a new faculty, but for clearer vision. The eyes are there already; they need only to be opened. It is not the bestowal of a new and supernatural power that enables a man to read the Bible to profit, but the quickening of a power he already possesses. A man will never grow into the knowledge of God’s Word by idly waiting for some new gift of discernment, but by diligently using that which God has already bestowed upon him, and using at the same time all other helps that lie within his reach. There are men and books that seem, beyond others, to have the power of aiding insight. All of us have felt it in the contact of some affinity of nature which makes them our best helpers; the kindred clay upon the eyes by which the great Enlightener removes our blindness ( John 9:6). Let us seek for such, and if we find them let us employ them without leaning on them. Above all, let us give our whole mind in patient, loving study to the book itself, and where we fail, at any essential part, God will either send His evangelist Philip to our aid (Acts 8) or instruct us Himself. But it is only to patient, loving study that help is given. God could have poured all knowledge into us by easy inspiration, but it is by earnest search alone that it can become the treasure of the soul.

1. If we are to get spiritual sight our prayer must be sincere. The old Hebrew poet, speaking with a true insight confirmed by experience, says: “If thou seek him, he will be found of thee; yea, if thou seek him diligently with thy whole heart.” That is the secret. It will not do to be seeking God with a heart looking back to the idol which had taken His place. It will not do to be wanting to have God and the idol at one and the same time. God has made that to be impossible for the soul of man. One God or idol at a time, or not God at all. And while any lingering love for the idol remains, there is no room for God to enter in. It is not His fault, or His unwillingness, or His jealousy. But it is our own Divine incapacity to trifle or dissemble with Him; it is our own Divine necessity for wholeness, for uprightness and sincerity, that makes any attempt at double-mindedness futile.

An old colleague and friend of Denholm Brash writes:—

“Chief among my impressions of his excellences is that of his utter sincerity. It was so invariable that it bewildered the average man. He never troubled about maintaining any position he might have taken up yesterday. He told you what he thought to-day; every passing mood was faithfully reflected in his words; the fleeting opinion or feeling was not concealed. You were allowed to trace processes in his thought which most men hide from view.… I have seen him confound an old fox of a man by sheer candour. He left the enemy breathless with surprise at a simplicity he had thought faded out of the world with Eden. The man’s arts would have been a match for any arts they encountered, but artlessness dumbfounded him. The armour of light not only defended the wearer, but dismayed the assailant. Never was this servant of truth ‘off duty,’ and with the audacious simplicity of love he would attack an apparently impregnable fortress, and with one well-planted shot would bring a whole pile of hypocrisies toppling down. He had a short method with some of these Goliaths which worked wonders.” 1 [Note: Love and Life: The Story of J. Denholm Brash, 163.]

2. We must bring our hearts into harmony with the law. At South Kensington there is a clock made above 500 years ago under the hammer of a Glastonbury monk. It has measured out the moments of fifteen generations of men. That piece of mechanism has done and is still doing its maker’s will. It has served its maker’s purpose. It fulfils his praiseworthy intention and so praises him. Every stroke of its pendulum is to the glory of the Glastonbury smith. The thing has done good and done right. It keeps (so to say) its maker’s commandment. What he meant it to do it has done well and truly. Perhaps it may seem a little strained to apply such phraseology to a piece of inanimate mechanism, but it will surely aid us in seeing what the moralist means by telling men to live as they were meant to live. Think of this clockwork of the brain, this delicate mechanism of thought and feeling. Year in, year out, the restless wheels of desire and feeling, of thought and passion, play into one another and mark results on the solemn dial of life. Matters may be so mismanaged as to put the machinery into a whirl of wild confusion. It is, on the other hand, possible to secure such inward adjustment, such balance, such regulative control, such true impulse, as to make the soul a splendid harmony and the life a utility which men acknowledge with reverence and benediction. With God’s works as with man’s the essential thing is to be true to the Maker’s purpose. There is a commandment, a Divine intention, to which every one must be true. “Thy hands have made me, and fashioned me; give me understanding that I may learn thy commandment.”

The Lord will draw us and securely lead us to Himself, in a way contrary to all our natural will, until He have divested us thereof, and consumed it and made it thoroughly subject unto the Divine will. For this is His will: that we should cease to regard our own wishes or dislikes; that it should become a light matter to us whether He give or take away, whether we have abundance or suffer want, and let all things go, if only we may receive and apprehend God Himself; that, whether things please or displease us, we may leave all things to take their course and cleave to Him alone. Then first do we attain to the fulness of God’s love as His children, when it is no longer happiness or misery, prosperity or adversity, that draws us to Him, or keeps us back from Him. What we should then experience none can utter; but it would be something far better than when we were burning with the first flame of love, and had great emotion but less true submission; for here, though there may be less show of zeal, and less vehemence of feeling, there is more true faithfulness to God. That we may attain thereunto, may God help us with His grace. Amen! 1 [Note: Tatuler’s Life and Sermons (trans. by Susanna Winkworth), 297.]

3. In proportion as we love and obey the law, its wonders unfold themselves to our cleansed vision. Emerson says in his essay on Nature, “The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired so long as we can see far enough.” It is quite true that wide vision is refreshing. We have all been more depressingly tired in our own houses than on the broad upland and under the open sky. The mountaineer in his loftiest adventure knows no such oppressive weariness as the woman who sits “in unwomanly rags plying her needle and thread.” The man with the widest and furthest vision is the man with the most exuberant energy. Jesus, even with Gethsemane and Calvary before Him, is not so weary of life as Judas. St. Paul in labours more abundant is never so jaded as Nero. The early Christian martyrs, with their vision of the Name, amid all the unspeakable horror of their torture, were not so weary of their sufferings as their persecutors were weary of their persecution. They might still sing, as Chesterton splendidly puts it in the “Ballad of the White Horse,”

That on you is fallen the shadow,

And not upon the Name;

That though we scatter and though we fly

And you hang over us like the sky,

You are more tired of victory

Than we are tired of shame.

That though you hunt the Christian man

Like a hare on the hill side,

The hare has still more heart to run

Than you have heart to ride.

That though all lances split on you,

All swords be heaved in vain,

We have more lust again to lose

Than you to win again.

Literature

Flint (R.), Sermons and Addresses, 133.

Harper (F.), Nine Sermons, 31.

Ker (J.), Sermons, i. 29.

Matheson (G.), Messages of Hope, 241.

Salmond (C. A.), For Days of Youth, 346.

Voysey (C.), Sermons, vi. (1883), No. 44; xix. (1896), No. 16; xxvi. (1903), No. 22.

Whincup (D. W.), The Training of Life, 21.

British Weekly Pulpit, iii. 401 (W. Sanday).

Treasury (New York), xx. 722.

Verse 96

Liberty in God’s Law

I have seen an end of all perfection;

But thy commandment is exceeding broad.— Psalms 119:96.

This psalm throbs throughout with true religion, and is evidently the production of some venerable father in Israel who had endured greatly and had not fainted; who had been divinely taught and chastened by the toils, the troubles, and the temptations of life; who had striven to live in loyalty to the law revealed to him, and was left at once ardent about right doing, and devoted to meditation; at once sadly conscious of infirmity and weakness, and joyfully trustful in God’s goodness and mercy. Nevertheless, though thus confident, the writer of the psalm confesses, “I have seen an end of all perfection.” There is a sound of weariness and depression in the words; we can hear speaking in them a man who had suffered disenchantments and disappointments, who had tried things that looked inviting to find them less charming than they looked, void of what they had promised; a man who had aimed sanguinely in vain, and had sorrowfully learned that it must always be in vain; who had nursed bright expectations that had not been fulfilled, although again and again he had felt sure that they were going to be, and who knew now they never could be.

This was the favourite text of Dean Stanley, a choice characteristic alike of the man and of his work: “I see that all things come to an end; but Thy commandment is exceeding broad.” [Prayer-Book Version.] These words are inscribed on his own and his wife’s tomb in Henry VII.’s chapel in Westminster Abbey.

I

The Unsatisfactoriness of Our Experience

1. It was no young man who spoke the words of the text; young people have not seen “an end of all perfection,” have not arrived at the conclusion that every radiance is stained by the shadow of defect, that the fullest is not full, the most complete incomplete. On the contrary, they are setting out to climb to the top of delectable mountains descried in the distance, where they shall build their tabernacle and stay. They have visions of the perfect, and count on realizing them—would infallibly realize them, they say to themselves, if only such or such circumstances were granted them; and what is there to which they may not attain with all the world before them? No; he who uttered the exclamation of the text must have been a comparatively old man—a man, at all events, who had lived much, who had passed through many vicissitudes; who had found out with oft-repeated trial how much he could not do of what he once thought himself capable of doing, the delusiveness of many an apparent possibility.

There was much in 1850 to sadden Watts; the want of response, except amongst his own personal friends, to all the enthusiasm with which he had returned to England, full-of faith in a revival of great art, was making itself felt with chilling effect year by year. In a moment of depression he writes: “I do not expect at most to have the opportunity of doing more than prepare the way for better men—and not that always; more often I sit among the ruins of my aspirations, watching the tide of time.” No wonder that in such a mood he once signed “Finis” in the corner of one of his pictures. But the challenge to despair was given by Mr. Ruskin, who, on reading the word, took up the charcoal and added beneath, “et initium.” If the end, then a beginning; and so it proved to be. 1 [Note: George Frederic Watts, i. 126.]

2. Perhaps the disillusion which depressed the Psalmist, and for which he had found an antidote in the permanence and magnitude of the Divine law, was not limited to the religious aspect of life only. By his own simple pathway he had reached the conclusion, familiar to modern thinkers, that the present world is not of unimpeachable perfection, but a chaos of knotted problems, amazing anomalies, clashing interests, contending principles. He set out with other views, but he reminds himself that moral processes go on working themselves out upon a scale of immeasurable greatness, when the secular movements which once promised amelioration are threatened with arrest and defeat. God’s inward law, larger than the designs appearing in the history of contemporary nations, forms the centre round which his baffled and faltering faith rallies. Spiritual ends are continued in that larger kingdom of the unseen. God’s changeless and ever-enlarging law of right satisfies that sense of moral greatness which the course of secular events so often seems to mock.

I am old enough to be done with work, only that I feel that my best words have not been said after all, that what has been said is not its full expression. All is incomplete, and I must wait for the fresh, strong life of immortality, in the hope that through the mercy of Him who “knoweth our frame” and our weaknesses, I may be enabled to do better with the talent He has given me than I have done. 1 [Note: Life and Letters of J. G. Whittier, ii. 657.]

The longer we live the less we are inclined to be hero-worshippers, seeing more failings in the men and things we revered in the enthusiasm of youth. “I have seen an end of all perfection”; but it is well if we can add, “thy commandment is exceeding broad.” The more, however, we get to know the temptations and trials of men, and feel how our own accomplishment falls short of our ideal, the more charitable we become. 2 [Note: John Ker, Thoughts for Heart and Life, 13.]

One day I grieved because our greatest gain

Grows pale beside the smallest loss we feel;

One hour of wrong can years of right repeal;

One faulty link can spoil the strongest chain;

One little thorn can cause a cruel pain

That twice ten thousand roses cannot heal;

One harsh discordant note can straightway steal

All harmony from e’en the sweetest strain.

To these my doubts there came an answer sure—

“God’s laws are right if rightly understood!

Man’s patent of perfection lies in this,

That nought imperfect can his soul endure:

The highest natures seek the highest good

Till they are perfect as their Father is.” 3 [Note: Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler, Verses, Wise or Otherwise, 189.]

II

The Satisfactoriness of God’s Law

1. Everything earthly is only partial; it covers only a part of life. Whether it be wealth, fame, knowledge, power, it has a limit; its territory is not commensurate with the whole life of man. Though I have all knowledge, said the Apostle, and understand all mysteries, and have not love, it profiteth me nothing. Knowledge is measurable. There are heights and depths of spirit which it cannot fill. There is a limit to it. The only thing immeasurable is love, for love is the Infinite Himself. Nothing can endure for ever except that which touches the deeps of life, for that which is only fragmentary and partial must pass away. So there is an end to it also in the sense of termination because the limited must terminate; and, because there is an end to it, it will not satisfy us. We must have something without an end, because the spirit of man is larger than time, larger than any finite period; and, however man may have sometimes tried in the perverseness of his heart to deny it, he is still a child of immortality, and nothing less than immortality filled to the brim with possession will ever satisfy the yearning of man. “Broad is thy command exceedingly.” That is, it is immeasurable, it has no limit. This must be the Psalmist’s meaning, otherwise the contrast fails, and the command of God, being limited, must be declared inadequate like all other perfections. But the word of God has no limit whatsoever. Immeasurable! As soon as we touch the command of God with our heart and soul and spirit, at once we know that we are at the centre of immeasurableness. It reveals to us straight away the infinite God, the soul, and immortality.

“There are two things,” said Kant, “that fill me with amazement, the starry heaven above me, and the moral law within me.” Both of them immeasurable, stretching away into infinity, with man at the centre of them; yet God’s word is higher than the heavens, and when the moral law has touched the life of man he knows that he belongs to the infinite vast, and cannot be satisfied without it. 1 [Note: J. Thomas.]

Man feels capacities within him that ask an eternity for bloom and fruitage. There is in nature something that sends him in yearning search beyond and above nature.

That type of perfect in his mind

In nature can he nowhere find.

He sows himself on every wind.

In the entire universe, as revealed to man by his senses, there is nothing perfect; and the central impulse in all man’s noblest striving is derived from the aspiration of his spirit towards a perfect truth, a perfect beauty, a perfect happiness, which are exemplified nowhere in the world. Art, religion, and the impetuous career of the race towards a higher grade of civilization, depend alike upon universal imperfection of the material world and the impossibility that a God-related spirit, which man is, should be contented therewith. 1 [Note: P. Bayne, Lessons from My Masters, 284.]

2. Our advance is towards this infinite. It is in an unbroken advance towards it that human excellence consists. The standard of perfection lifts itself on new heights with the march of each new day and month. The perfection of yesterday ceases to be the perfection of to-day, because the commandment is ever adding increments to the demands it makes upon us, and binding the conscience with fresh sanctions. As men are emancipated from the senses and ushered into more delicate spheres of perception and experience, they find themselves face to face with new laws that have to be kept, new decalogues that must be reverently obeyed, new obligations that must be strenuously fulfilled.

The law which the God of righteousness, and the Father of all the families of the earth, may impose upon the children of men is obviously larger in its range of applications than the law congruous to the sovereignty of one known chiefly as the Lord of Hosts, and the Defender of an isolated group of clans. The precepts breathed into the conscience by One who has come into immediate converse with His worshippers exceed in scope and surpass in fine discriminations the precepts enjoined by a Divine King who dwells apart and is adored from afar by a people smitten with fear because of His majesty. To know the length and breadth, the depth and height of the love which surpasseth knowledge means that the soul is brought face to face with ranges of the commandment hitherto unexplored by human thought. The law cannot possibly be the same for an Israelite who stands before the flame-girt Horeb and the believer who bows wondering before the Cross where the Man of Sorrows bears the burdens of mankind. The commandment is broad before the vision of the man, to whom all life is becoming a theophany. 1 [Note: T. G. Selby, The Strenuous Gospel, 394.]

Christ is the personification not of one part only, but of the whole of the law of God. His character has not the littleness of a mere teacher, nor the narrowness of a hermit or a saint, nor the eccentricity of genius. “His shoulder,” as the Prophet says, is broad enough “to bear the government” and the sins of the whole world. His mind is wide enough to sympathize with all our infirmities, as well as with all our efforts after good in every direction. No griefs of life are more trying than those which arise from the half-goodness or the half-wisdom of those whom we wish to love and respect. It is when we think of these things that the Perfect Law and the Perfect Mind of Christ is so inexpressibly consoling. 2 [Note: A. P. Stanley, Sermons in the East, 129.]

3. Unlike that story of the iron shroud or room, which enclosed its prisoner, day by day, within a narrower and narrower circle, the chamber of duty and of God’s commandment widens, and opens, and expands with new interests, new enjoyments, new affections, new hopes, at every successive step we take, till we find ourselves at last in that Presence, where there is indeed “fulness of joy and pleasures for evermore.”

Our earthly life, the earthly life of those whom we have known and loved, is cut short by that dark abyss into which we cannot penetrate, and over which our thoughts can hardly pass. But God’s commandment—and the fulfilment of God’s commandment—is “exceeding broad”; it is broad enough to span even that wide and deep river which parts this life and the next. For it is this that makes this life and the next life one. Knowledge, prophecies, gifts of all kinds pass away, but the love of God and the love of man never fail. They continue into the unseen world beyond the grave; the remembrance of these things, as we have known them here, enables us still to think of them there; the unselfish purpose, the generous sympathy, the deep affection, the transparent sincerity, the long self-control, the simple humility, of those to whom the commandment of God has been precious—these are the arches of that bridge on which our thoughts and hopes cross and re-cross the widest and most mysterious of all the chasms which divide us; the gulf which divides the dead and the living, the gulf which divides God and man.

In Stark’s Life of Murker of Banff we have this portrait of a church member: The last day on which her pastor saw Elspeth alive he asked, “Have you no fears at all in crossing the Jordan?” “No,” was the reply, “what should I be fear’d for, when I see Him who is the life an’ the resurrection on the ither side. His word drives awa’ a’ the mists. I’m just like a bairn that’s been awa’ on the fields pu’in’ flowers, an’ I maun confess whyles chasin’ butterflies, and noo when the sun’s fa’en I’m gaun toddlin’ hame. I’ve a wee bit burnie to cross; but, man, there’s the stappin’-stanes o’ His promises, an’ wi’ my feet firm on them, I’ve nae cause tae fear.” After awhile she again opened her lips, and was heard to say, “He is wi’ me in the swellings of Jordan.” 1 [Note: J. Stark, John Murker of Banff, 188.]

III

The Value of Dissatisfaction

1. The Psalmist had desired and purposed to keep God’s law, to be and to do the best according to his light, and had never been able to accomplish his object, had been always falling short of it; the perfection he craved and sought had always evaded him; he had striven worthily, and had more or less done worthily too; but it did not satisfy him—there was an excellence to be reached that was not reached. Or he had had conceptions of duty that had seemed to him all-comprehending, embracing all that could be required of him. Here, he had thought, was the whole duty of man; but in acting out, or endeavouring to act out, these conceptions, others, larger and loftier, had risen upon him. In following his standard of right, the standard rose, leaving him far behind when he fancied himself nigh; in yielding to the demands of conscience, the demands increased; the more he did, the more his obligation grew; so that he would have said with a modern poet—

I see the wider but I sigh the more,

Most progress is most failure.

Nothing satisfied the Psalmist; the present discredited the past, only to be in its turn discredited; every seeming fulness proved shortly an illusion, and why? Because a Divine commandment had been revealed to him which continually transcended all, which was continually showing something more and greater to be done, and continually urging him on when any height was gained. The more he looked into it, the more it enlarged for him the field of duty. When he fancied he had fulfilled all, it would straightway be whispering in his ear some fresh claim; when he meditated repose, it would still be disturbing him. Had he not known this commandment, he might have known the peace of satisfaction; it was its presence with, and pressure on, him that made an end of perfection, and kept him always discontented with the best that had been wrought. Yet our Psalmist would not have been without the commandment. “Oh, how I love thy law!” he cries, in the very next verse. This, in fact, was his distinction, his dignity, and blessedness—that he had it to his perpetual restlessness and dissatisfaction, and could not be as careless and happy as the heathen, though he should propose to be; that he had a vision of the right and of the good which robbed him of ease, and before which every highest attainment paled to poorness.

Here is the beautiful Divine secret of our troubled dissatisfaction with things; that we bear within us a commandment greater than ourselves, and are more than we are or can be. Our everlasting sense of limitation means that our illimitableness, our unappeasable hunger is due to our self-transcending capacity; nothing contents us because we are more than everything, because we are not a mere part of the visible system, but include, so to speak, something supernatural; capabilities, susceptibilities, not adjusted like the powers of other creatures to the scope and conditions of this mortal life, but overshooting them. And here, in the grander than ourselves, or the world—for the world is always insufficient for it, and we are always inferior to it—here in the grander than ourselves or the world which, possessing us, keeps us ever insatiable, ever unable to find perfection, let the world yield us what it will, or let us grow to what we may—here is the God of whom we dream and never hear or see, and whom men seek in vain to prove.

We feel, do we not? that we are capable of developments in knowledge and virtue which are never reached, that we are always imperfect at our best and greatest, and yet that there is no goodness or greatness to which we may not aspire; that there are no limits to our possible progress. We are burdened with an ideal which, strive and attain as we may, is always reproaching, depreciating, condemning us, always looking down on us with eyes of disdain. There is that in us which declares continually that we might be and ought to be what we cannot be, what with all our wistfulness and effort we are perpetually hindered from being. And what does it signify but that we are invaded by the Infinite—that God is in us? Our weary unrest, our successive disenchantments and disappointments, our scorn of what we have gained or wrought, our sighs, as we “look before and after, and pine for what is not”—these are the hints and tokens of God.

Inward distaste—emptiness—discontent. Is it trouble of conscience, or sorrow of heart? or the soul preying upon itself? or merely a sense of strength decaying and time running to waste? Is sadness—or regret—or fear—at the root of it? I do not know: but this dull sense of misery has danger in it; it leads to rash efforts and mad decisions. O for escape from self, for something to stifle the importunate voice of want and yearning! Discontent is the father of temptation. How can we gorge the invisible serpent hidden at the bottom of our well,—gorge it so that it may sleep? At the heart of all this rage and vain rebellion there lies—what? Aspiration, yearning! We are athirst for the infinite—for love—for I know not what. It is the instinct of happiness, which like some wild animal is restless for its prey. It is God calling—God avenging Himself. 1 [Note: Amiel’s Journal (trans, by Mrs. Humphry Ward), 271.]

2. It would not answer even for the Christian who has meant to surrender his will, and really wants to be perfected in the will of God, to be made safe in his plans and kept in continual train of successes. He wants a reminder every hour—some defeat, surprise, adversity, peril; to be agitated, mortified, beaten out of his courses, so that all that remains of self-will in him may be sifted out of him, and the very scent of his old perversity cleared. If we could be excused from all these changes and somersets, and go on securely in our projects, it would ruin the best of us. Life needs to have an element of danger and agitation,—perilous, changeful, eventful; we need to have our evil will met by the stronger will of God, in order to be kept advised, by our experience, of the impossibility of that which our sin has undertaken. It would not do for us to be uniformly successful even in our best meant and holiest works, our prayers, our acts of sacrifice, our sacred enjoyments; for we should very soon fall back into the subtle power of our self-will, and begin to imagine, in our vanity, that we are doing something ourselves. Even here we need to be defeated and baffled now and then, that we may be shaken out of our self-reliance and sufficiency, else the taste of our evil habits remains in us, and our scent is not changed.

We trust and fear, we question and believe,

From life’s dark threads a trembling faith to weave,

Frail as the web that misty night has spun,

Whose dew-gemmed awnings glitter in the sun.

While the calm centuries spell their lessons out,

Each truth we conquer spreads the realm of doubt;

When Sinai’s summit was Jehovah’s throne,

The chosen Prophet knew His voice alone;

When Pilate’s hall that awful question heard,

The heavenly Captive answered not a word.

Eternal Truth! beyond our hopes and fears

Sweep the vast orbits of thy myriad spheres!

From age to age, while history carves sublime

On her waste rock the flaming curves of time,

How the wild swayings of our planet show

That worlds unseen surround the world we know. 1 [Note: Oliver Wendell Holmes.]

Literature

Bramston (J. T.), Fratribus, 125.

Campbell (L.), The Christian Ideal, 109.

Farrar (F. W.), The Voice front Sinai, 85.

Ferguson (F.), in Sermons on the Psalms , 115.

King (E.), The Love and Wisdom of God, 294.

Knight (W.), Things New and Old, 172.

Roberts (A.), Miscellaneous Sermons, 295.

Selby (T. G.), The Strenuous Gospel, 380.

Stanley (A. P.), Sermons in the East, 123.

Thomas (J.), Myrtle Street Pulpit, iii. 19.

Christian World Pulpit, xxxvii. 355 (M. Bryce); l. 121 (E. King).

Preacher’s Magazine, ii. 220 (W. Hawkins).

Sunday Magazine, 1891, p. 171 (S. A. Tipple).

Treasury (New York), xxi. 675 (H. C. Swentzel).

Verse 105

The Light of God’s Word

Thy word is a lamp unto my feet,

And light unto my path.— Psalms 119:105

1. This psalm is a hymn in praise of the Mosaic Law, which, either as God’s law, or His statutes, or His commandments, or His testimonies, or His precepts, or His ceremonies, or His truth, or His way, or His righteousness, is referred to in every single verse of it except two. There is not much reason for doubting that it was written quite at the close of the Jewish Captivity in Babylon by some pious Jew who had felt all the unspeakable bitterness of the Exile, the insults and persecution of the heathen, the shame, the loss of heart, the “trouble above measure” which that compulsory sojourn in the centre of debased Eastern heathendom must have meant for him. The writer was a man for whom sorrow did its intended work, by throwing him back upon God, His ways, and His will; and so in this trouble, when all was dark around, and hope was still dim and distant, and the heathen insolent and oppressive, and the temptations to religious laxity or apostasy neither few nor slight, he still could say, “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and light unto my path.”

2. The witness of the captive Jew who wrote the psalm, thinking only of the Mosaic Law, has been echoed again and again by Christians, with reference to the whole Bible—both the Old Testament and the New—and in a deeper sense. They have found this book a lamp unto their feet, and light unto their path. They have found that the two parts of the verse are not different ways of saying the same thing. The Word of God is a lamp or lantern to the feet by night; it is a light, as that of the sun, by day. It makes provision for the whole of life; it is the secret of life’s true sunshine; it is the guide when all around is dark. It thus throws light on the “path” and the “feet,” on the true course which thought and conduct should follow, and on the efforts which are necessary to that end. With the Word of God at hand, we should be in no doubt about the greatest practical question with which man has to deal: the true road to everlasting happiness in another life.

I

The Function of the Bible

1. The text aptly describes the true function of the Holy Scriptures for the Christian soul. Their use in the first instance is practical, not speculative. It is in the earnest, devotional study of the Bible that we may look to obtain light. This is the use of it which all alike must make, whether child or peasant or philosopher, if they will become “wise unto salvation.” The Bible was designed to be to us in our journey through life what a lantern is to a wayfarer who would pass in safety along a dangerous pathway during a dark night. He wants the light to fall upon the ground over which he must walk at each successive step. The illustration is simple enough, but not so the carrying out of the principle with which it deals. The ease or difficulty will vary with the disposition of those who use the Bible. They who seek to know the truth that they may walk in it, who would know the will of God that they may do it, shall never lack the light; they will both perceive and know what things they ought to do. On the other hand, those who do not strive by God’s help to live up to the light which they have, those who know what they ought to do and do not make the honest effort to do it, those who shrink from knowing their duty, or wish to get it altered—to such the sacred oracles give no message; no light from God’s Word will fall upon their path. Such persons are like Saul, whom the Lord would not answer by Urim and Thummim. Let us but will to do God’s will, and we shall never lack guidance in the way of duty.

The Society of Illuminating Engineers and others too have long sought for a light which would, by excluding the ultraviolet rays, become fog-penetrating. An inventor has just made the desired discovery, and produced an electric lamp which can penetrate the densest fog. The Bible in the world of the soul is such a lamp. It is effective alike by what it includes and by what it excludes. The sincere, prayerful student of the sacred page will find his way through black and blinding illusions and delusions. Let me use it as “a lamp to my feet” for practical, personal uses; not as a Chinese lantern, engaging the fancy by virtue of its artistry and imagery, but as a signal lamp on the railway, a Davy lamp in the mine, an electric lamp in the fog. And the more we apply the sacred truths to action and experience, the more precious and luminous do they become. “The man who insists upon seeing with perfect clearness before he acts never acts,” writes Amiel; but, bringing the statutes, commandments, and promises to bear on life, they become ever clearer, and more fully evince their divinity. 1 [Note: W. L. Watkinson.]

Let no man confound the voice of God in His Works with the voice of God in His Word; they are utterances of the same infinite heart and will; they are in absolute harmony; together they make up “that undisturbèd song of pure concent”; one “perfect diapason”; but they are distinct; they are meant to be so. A poor traveller, “weary and waysore,” is stumbling in unknown places through the darkness of a night of fear, with no light near him, the everlasting stars twinkling far off in their depths, and the yet unrisen sun, or the waning moon, sending up their pale beams into the upper heavens, but all this is distant and bewildering for his feet, doubtless better much than outer darkness, beautiful and full of God, if he could have the heart to look up, and the eyes to make use of its vague light; but he is miserable, and afraid, his next step is what he is thinking of; a lamp secured against all winds of doctrine is put into his hands, it may in some respects widen the circle of darkness, but it will cheer his feet, it will tell them what to do next. What a silly fool he would be to throw away that lantern, or draw down the shutters, and make it dark to him, while it sits, “i’ the centre and enjoys bright day,” and all upon the philosophical ground that its light was of the same kind as the stars, and that it was beneath the dignity of human nature to do anything but struggle on and be lost in the attempt to get through the wilderness and the night by the guidance of those “natural” lights, which, though they are from heaven, have so often led the wanderer astray. The dignity of human nature indeed! Let him keep his lantern till the glad sun is up, with healing under his wings. Let him take good heed to the “sure” λόγον while in this αὐ?χμηρῷ? τοπῷ?—this dark, damp, unwholesome place, “till the day dawn and φωσφόρος—the day-star—arise.” 2 [Note: Dr. John Brown, Horæ Subsecivœ, ii. 470.]

2. If it be the case that, in a great proportion of cases, the Bible fails of its true purpose, and men read it, if at all, without securing the gift which it is meant to bestow, what is the reason? The answer is, that certain conditions are attached to the guiding and illuminating office of the Bible, and that, if it fails to guide and enlighten, these conditions are not complied with. What are they? One important condition is that the Bible should be diligently searched for those truths, those precepts, those examples, which will directly guide us through life to our eternal home. But, in order to succeed in this search for the true import of Scripture, we need method, order, regularity, purpose in reading it. Just as a single purpose in life, steadily pursued, lights up surrounding interests, and quickens energy for a hundred objects besides itself, so, in reading the Bible, the mental intentness which is necessary to the steady pursuit of one truth sheds rays of intelligence on other truths which sparkle around it. The keen searcher for diamonds tells us that he often finds, over and above that for which he is looking, crystals and precious stones which intrude themselves on his gaze in the course of his search.

In joy and sorrow, in health and in sickness, in poverty and in riches, in every condition of life, God has a promise stored up in His Word for you. If you are impatient, sit down quietly and commune with Job. If you are strong-headed, read of Moses and Peter. If you are weak-kneed, look at Elijah. If there is no song in your heart, listen to David. If you are a politician, read Daniel. If you are getting sordid, read Isaiah. If you are chilly, read of the beloved disciple. If your faith is low, read Paul. If you are getting lazy, study James. If you are losing sight of the future, read in Revelation of the promised land. 1 [Note: D. L. Moody.]

3. The Word of God is a light to us, not because we say so, but when we carefully observe everything on which its rays are falling—the path we tread, the objects we pass, the companions of our journey, the view it gives us of ourselves—and when we forthwith rouse ourselves into action. An example which we have striven to follow, a precept which we have honestly endeavoured to obey, and which is by the effort indented on the soul, means much more than it could have meant if we had read it with cheap admiration and passed on. Just so far as the will is exerted in order to make truth practically our own, does truth become to us present and real; not merely a light without, but a light within us; a light transferred from the pages of the Bible to the inner sanctuary in which conscience treasures up its guiding principles; a light which illuminates the humblest path with the radiance of the just, “shining more and more unto the perfect day.” The clearest evidence of the divinity of the Book is to be derived from personal experience, the inward sense of its power—a kind of witness that admits of daily renewal and lies within the reach of any thoughtful and devout reader. Only let Holy Scripture have its assigned place in the regulation of conduct and life, and the supernatural element in its composition will for certain come to light. Christ made the experimental to be the supreme test or line of proof: “If any man willeth to do his will, he shall know of the teaching, whether it be of God, or whether I speak from myself” ( John 7:17).

In another letter to an old pupil, full of profound ethical and spiritual counsel, Miss Pipe writes: “ Do thy work, and leave sorrow and joy to come of themselves. Do not limit the work to the outward activities of life. By work I mean not these only, though these certainly, but also the regulation of our moral feelings,—strive against pride, vanity, ostentation, self-righteousness, self-satisfaction and dissatisfaction, resentment, impatience, alienation, discontent, indolence, peevishness, hatred or dislike, inconstancy, cowardice,—untiring, hopeful effort after obedience to the will of God, and resolute, believing war with every temper contrary to the mind of Christ. It can be done, and it must be done. It is promised: it is commanded: it is possible. If you wish for something that you may not lawfully grasp, or cannot grasp, begin to fight, and never leave off until the wish is mastered and annihilated as completely as if it had never been once felt. This must be done not by desperate struggling so much as by calm, resolved, fixed faith. Do thus thy work, and leave sorrow and joy to come of themselves.… You see to obedience, faith and righteousness. God will give you peace and joy in such measure as He pleases, and in increasing measure as the years go by. Until I was five or six and twenty, I think I had no peace or joy at all. Indeed, I never found any until I had given up caring for, praying for, hoping for, or in any way seeking after, comfort and feeling. I took up with just an historical faith in the Bible and said: He will not make me glad, but He shall not find me, therefore, swerve from following Him. I will do His holy will so far as I can, I will serve Him as well as I can, though not perhaps so well as others to whom the joy of the Lord gives strength. I will be content to do without these inward rewards, but with or without such wages I will do my best work for the Master. With this resolve, arrived at after years of weary strife, rest began for me, and deepened afterwards into peace, and heightened eventually into joy, and now from year to year, almost from week to week, an ever greatening blessedness.” 1 [Note: A. M. Stoddart, Life and Letters of Hannah E. Pipe, 119.]

II

The Right Use of the Bible

1. If the Bible, then, is to do its work, we must be careful to act upon each truth which it teaches us as we learn it. For there is one great difference between moral or religious knowledge on the one hand and purely secular knowledge on the other, a difference which we cannot lay too closely to heart. It is that, while secular knowledge is, as a rule, remembered until the memory decays, moral and religious knowledge is soon forgotten if it is not acted on. The reason for this is that in the one case the will is interested, and in the other it is not. The will is interested in our losing sight, as soon as may be, of a precept which we disobey, or of a doctrine which we have professed, but which we feel condemns us; and so the will exerts a steady, secret pressure upon the intellect, a pressure which anticipates the ordinary decomposition and failure of memory, and extrudes the unwelcome precept or doctrine, gradually but surely, from among the subjects which are present to thought.

When the Duke of Wellington accepted the commission to form a Government in 1834, it was resolved to prorogue Parliament, and Lord Lyndhurst was desired by the King to go to Lord Grey and tell him such was his pleasure. Lyndhurst forgot it! In after-times, those who write the history of these days will probably discuss the conduct of the great actors, and it will not fail to be matter of surprise that such an obvious expedient was not resorted to in order to suspend violent discussions. Among the various reasons that will be imagined and suggested, I doubt if it will occur to anybody that the real reason was that it was forgotten. 1 [Note: The Greville Memoirs, iii. 50.]

2. The many-sidedness of the Bible, its immense resources, the great diversity of its contents and character, its relations with ages so wide apart as are the age of Moses and the age of St. Paul, its vast stores of purely antiquarian lore, its intimate bearings upon the histories of great peoples in antiquity, of which independently we know not a little, such as the Egyptians and the Assyrians, the splendour and the pathos of its sublime poetry—all these bristle with interest for an educated man, whether he be a good man or not. The Bible is a storehouse of literary beauties, of historical problems, of materials for refined scholarship and the scientific treatment of language, of different aspects of social theories or of the philosophy of life. A man may easily occupy himself with one of these subjects for a whole lifetime and never approach the one subject which makes the Bible what it is. And, indeed, much of the modern literature about the Bible is no more distinctly related to religion than if it had been written about Homer, or Herodotus, or Shakespeare. It deals only with those elements of the Bible which the Bible has in common with other and purely human literature; it treats the Bible as literature simply, and not as the vehicle of something which distinguishes it altogether from all merely human books. And, therefore, a serious effort is needed to set these lower aspects and interests of the Bible sufficiently aside in order to study its true and deepest meaning—the message which it conveys from God to the soul of man.

There is a story told of a man crossing a mountain in Carnarvonshire one stormy night. It was so cold that in order to shelter his hands from the biting wind, he put the lantern under his cloak, and as the moon shone dimly through the clouds he thought he could trace his way without the lantern. All at once a gust of wind blew aside his cloak; the light shone forth, and suddenly revealed the edge of a large slate quarry, over which, in another moment, he would have fallen and have been dashed to pieces. He soon retraced his steps, but he did not hide the lantern under his cloak that night again. There are many who think that they can go through life—dark and dangerous as the way often is—without this lamp of God’s truth; they therefore hide it out of sight, or neglect to trim it by constant and prayerful study. In many instances they do not find out their mistake and folly until it is too late. Others have had this light unexpectedly cast upon their path, to reveal to them some great danger; thus their steps have been suddenly arrested, and they have learnt never to try to do without that light again. 1 [Note: D. Davies, Talks with Men, Women and Children, i. 114.]

3. God hides Himself from those who would saunter with easy off-handedness through the pages of the Bible, as though they were taking a stroll up and down a back garden, and languidly noting the Immensities as if they were daisies or dandelions growing on either side of the path; as though, forsooth, nothing was so easy of comprehension at a glance as the Self-unveiling of the Eternal Mind! No, we find in the Bible what we seek in it: we find that which we can find as well in other literatures if that is all for which we search; but we find depths and heights, glories and abysses, which language can but suggest, and thought can but dimly perceive, if we are indeed, and with earnest prayer, seeking Him whose Word the Bible is. Only to those who sincerely desire and labour to have it so, is the Bible a lamp unto the feet, and light unto the path. The Bible was given us by God to shed light on the purity and vileness of our souls, to brace our wills in the hour of temptation, to elevate our thoughts amid the strife for bread, to lift our drowsy eyes to the sunlit summits of faith and prayer, and to send a thrill of Divine aspiration through lives that are ever becoming stupefied amid the murky damps of life’s low levels. If we seek for a spirit of uncompromising and ringing righteousness that shall keep us from making a truce with wrong, we find it in the pages of Jeremiah. If we look for a valuation of life that puts first things first, we follow St. Paul over mountains and seas, and hear him say, “Neither count I my life dear unto myself, so that I might finish my course with joy.” If we look for a pattern of a life truly Divine, and wish to see what God would do if He were a man, we walk with Christ around the Sea of Galilee. Indeed, it is in the light of His character that we interpret the whole Book.

When a man holds out his lantern, and asks you if there is a light in it, you may be able to convince him that there is; but the very circumstance of his asking such a question makes you fear that he is blind; and at all events five minutes of clear vision would be worth a world of your arguments. When a man asks, Do you think the Bible is inspired? Is it really the light of God which is shining there? you may prove it by unanswerable argument, and yet you cannot help regretting that he should need to appeal to others; nor can you help remembering how it stands written, “The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.” To any one who finds himself in this predicament, the best advice we can give is, Read and pray. Pray, “Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law.” And as you pray this prayer, read the Book, and ponder its sayings; and better feelings will spring up in your mind—holy thoughts and loving, grateful thoughts towards Christ, kind thoughts towards your fellows, devout and contrite thoughts towards God. “The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes”; and it opens the eyes by rejoicing the heart. 1 [Note: J. Hamilton, Works, ii. 17.]

III

The Uniqueness of the Bible

1. Do we value, as we ought, the priceless heritage that we have received in the Word of God? As a rule we value things just in proportion to their rarity. Many people will give fabulous sums of money for a book, a picture, a piece of china, an old article of furniture, and even a postage stamp, if it happens to be rare. But what is common, and can be purchased anywhere for a few pence, is, generally speaking, but little valued. This, it is to be feared, is too often the case with regard to the value that we put on the Bible. When copies of the Holy Scriptures were few in number and very costly, when the Bible was chained to the desk in our churches for fear that it might be stolen, people were much more eager to “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” the teaching of God’s Word than they are to-day.

I have been seriously perplexed to know how the religious feeling which is the essential base of conduct can be kept up without the Bible. By the study of what other book could children be so humanized and made to feel that each figure in that vast historical procession fills like themselves but a momentary interspace between the two eternities, and earns the blessings or curses of all time according to its effort to do good and hate evil, even as they also earn it by their works? 1 [Note: T. H. Huxley.]

2. Other books are for special times or separate races; the Bible has been for every clime. Other books are for the poor or for the rich, the great or the obscure; this Book, ignoring the inch-high distinction of rank and wealth, regards men solely in their relationship to God as heirs of the common mysteries of life and death, of corruption and immortality. Other books are for the mature or the youthful; this Book alone neither wearies the aged nor repels the child. Other books are for the learned or the ignorant; this Book, in the sweetest and simplest elements of its revelation, is not more dear to the German philosopher than to the negro’s child. In it mind becomes spontaneously luminous, heart flashes to heart with electric thrill. The North American Indian reads it in his rude wigwam on the icy coasts of Hudson’s Bay; the Kaffir in his kraal, the savage of the Pacific in his coral isle, the poor old woman in the squalid slum, no less than the emperor in his royal chamber and the scholar in his college-room. And, as St. Augustine said, we shall find here what we shall not find in Plato or in Aristotle, in Seneca or Marcus Aurelius: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” This Book it was that fired the eloquence of Chrysostom and St. Augustine, that inspired the immortal song of Dante and of Milton; Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Tennyson are full of it; it kindled the genius of Luther, the burning zeal of Whitefield, the bright imagination of Bunyan. With the hermits it made the wilderness blossom as the rose, with the martyrs it was as the whistling wind amidst the torturing flames; it sent the missionaries to plant the Rose of Sharon alike in the burning wastes of Africa and amid the icy hills of Nova Zembla; it inspired the pictures of Angelico and Raphael, the music of Handel and of Mendelssohn.

I grant you that the Bible will have no power over my life if ever it ceases to command my conscience, or appeal to my judgment. It may contain passages of transcendent beauty that touch my æsthetic sense. It may arouse my curiosity by the light it sheds on the customs of strange people in the far-distant past. It may even start the tears, like the memories aroused by the sweet echoes of the prayer of a child. But its grip on my life will be gone. Of what use is a “lamp unto my feet” that goes out on the edge of the first precipice I meet? If the Bible deserves to be called “the Word of God,” ought not its message to be so plain, and clear, and reliable, that all honest and earnest men who turn to its pages shall be in substantial agreement as to its teachings? I answer that it ought. I say more, it is. In all ages men have been in substantial agreement that in the pages of the Bible, if read with discrimination, we can find the true ideal of human life and character. I do not know one critic who would deny the power of its pages to quicken faith, to renew hope, to start the impulses of prayer, to thaw the frozen fountains of the affections, and to help the man of God to be “furnished unto every good work.” But when men have gone to it to discover an authoritative account of the making of the mountains and the birth of the stars; when men have gone to it to cover a complete and infallible system of church polity that would lock up the Kingdom of God in a first-century mausoleum; when men have gone to it to mine out proof-texts, to bolster up a system of metaphysics and settle for ever the question between nominalism and realism, between evolution and transcendence—then they have been in a hopeless tangle of disagreement and strife. 1 [Note: G. H. Ferris, in The Homiletic Review, lx. 237.]

3. The lamp spoken of in the text has often been found fault with. Complaint has been made of its shape, of the media through which the light shines, of the materials of which the reflectors are made, and of the manner in which the light is supplied. The answer that the lamp gives is to shine. No modern invention has caused this lamp to be cast aside among old lumber. It is sometimes covered over with dust, but its light is so great that it pierces every obstruction, and is always sufficient to guide heavenward. An American writer tells us that, going two miles to read to a company, and at the close being about to return through a narrow path in the woods where paths diverged, he was provided with a torch of light wood or pitch pine. He objected that it was too small, weighing not over half a pound. “It will light you home,” answered the host. And to all objections came, “It will light you home.” So if the Bible be taken, it will be found sufficient to light us home. Some may object to this part of the Bible and others to another part; but the answer of the Bible to all objectors is, “It will light you home.” This is our practical, everyday need—a light to guide us home. The stars are sublime, meteors are dazzling; but a lamp shining in a dark place is close to our practical needs. Such is the Word of God.

It is the darkness which makes the lantern so welcome. And it is the darkness of the sick-room or the house of mourning in which this “Night-lamp” emits such a soft and heavenly radiance. You will find it so. Fond as you are of books, there is only one that you will value at last; with your head on the pillow you will hardly care to be told that a new history is published, or a marvellous epic. “No; read me the Twenty-third Psalm. Let me hear the fourteenth of John.” When your strength sinks yet lower it will for a moment rally the worn faculties to hear the whisper, “My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever.” “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.” 1 [Note: J. Hamilton, Works, ii. 30.]

However mingled with mystery which we are not required to unravel, or difficulties which we should be insolent in desiring to solve, the Bible contains plain teaching for men of every rank of soul and state in life, which so far as they honestly and implicitly obey, they will be happy and innocent to the utmost powers of their nature, and capable of victory over all adversities, whether of temptation or pain. Indeed, the Psalter alone, which practically was the service book of the Church for many ages, contains merely in the first half of it the sum of personal and social wisdom. The 1st, 8th, 12th, 14th, 15th, 19th, 23rd, and 24th psalms, well learned and believed, are enough for all personal guidance; the 48th, 72nd, and 75th have in them the law and prophecy of all righteous government; and every real triumph of natural science is anticipated in the 104th. For the contents of the entire volume, consider what other group of historic and didactic literature has a range comparable with it. There are—

i. The stories of the Fall and of the Flood, the grandest human traditions founded on a true horror of sin.

ii. The story of the Patriarchs, of which the effective truth is visible to this day in the polity of the Jewish and Arab races.

iii. The story of Moses, with the results of that tradition in the moral law of all the civilized world.

iv. The story of the Kings—virtually that of all Kinghood, in David, and of all Philosophy, in Solomon: culminating in the Psalms and Proverbs, with the still more close and practical wisdom of Ecclesiasticus and the Son of Sirach.

v. The story of the Prophets—virtually that of the deepest mystery, tragedy, and permanent fate, of national existence.

vi. The story of Christ.

vii. The moral law of St. John, and his closing Apocalypse of its fulfilment.

Think if you can match that table of contents in any other—I do not say “book” but “literature.” Think, so far as it is possible for any of us—either adversary or defender of the faith—to extricate his intelligence from the habit and the association of moral sentiment based upon the Bible, what literature could have taken its place, or fulfilled its function, though every library in the world had remained, unravaged, and every teacher’s truest words had been written down. 1 [Note: Ruskin, Our Fathers Have Told Us, chap. iii. § 37.]

No metal can compare with gold, which is of small volume, and of even quality, and easy of transport, and readily guarded, and steady in value, and divisible without loss—besides being beautiful, brilliant, and durable almost to eternity. This is why all civilized nations have adopted it as the standard by which they measure the value of every other kind of merchandise. We habitually think and speak of wealth in terms of gold. Naturally, the name of this standard metal comes to be used as a symbol or metaphor to stand for whatever we prize as most precious of its kind. There is a special sense in which the Bible deserves to be called more golden than gold, because it remains the supreme standard for the Christian Church, by comparison with which we measure and test all spiritual values. “The Bible,” said Newman, “is the record of the whole revealed faith; so far all parties agree.” It is the one book which preserves for us all that we certainly know about the life and words and character of Christ Himself. The teaching of the great Reformers on this matter has been summed up by a profound modern scholar, whose verdict we may venture to quote: “If I am asked why I receive Scripture as the Word of God and as the only perfect rule of faith and life, I answer with all the Fathers of the Protestant Church, Because the Bible is the only record of the redeeming love of God, because in the Bible alone I find God drawing near to man in Christ Jesus, and declaring to us in Him His will for our salvation. And this record I know to be true by the witness of His Spirit in my heart, whereby I am assured that none other than God Himself is able to speak such words to my soul.” 1 [Note: T. H. Darlow, More Golden than Gold, 9.]

Literature

Aglionby (F. K.), The Better Choice, 21.

Armstrong (W.), Five-Minute Sermons to Children, 20, 32.

Beecher (H. W.), Sunday Evening Sermons, 31.

Bevan (S. P.), Talks to Boys and Girls, 75.

Davies (D.), Talks with Men, Women and Children, i. 113.

Fleming (A. G.), Silver Wings, 116.

Griffiths (W.), Onward and Upward, 13.

Hamilton (J.), Works, ii. 5.

Hodgson (A. P.), Thoughts for the King’s Children, 10.

Lamb (R.), In the Twilight, 76.

Liddon (H. P.), Advent in St. Paul’s, 471.

Macmillan (H.), The Spring of the Day, 197.

Norton (J. N.), Old Paths, 18.

Phillips (S.), The Heavenward Way, 39.

Christian World Pulpit, xlix. 312 (F. W. Farrar).

Church of England Pulpit, lii. 38 (J. B. Crozier).

Church Pulpit Year Book, 1913, p. 249.

Churchman’s Pulpit: Sermons to the Young, xvi. 77 (J. R. Macduff).

Clergyman’s Magazine, 3rd Ser., xiv. 331 (W. Burrows).

Homiletic Review, liii. 377 (H. Anstadt); lx. 237 (G. H. Ferris).

Preacher’s Magazine, iv. 127 (R. Brewin).

Record, Dec. 11, 1908 (E. S. Talbot).

Verse 130

The Opening of God’s Word

The opening of thy words giveth light;

It giveth understanding unto the simple.— Psalms 119:130

1. The section of the psalm in which the text occurs is a gem of spiritual beauty. In verse after verse we are led through the deep places of religious faith and love, and the Psalmist guides our feet like one conversant with the holiest secrets of the spiritual pilgrim’s way. His thoughts are perennial, and his words sound like the utterance of a believing soul here and now in this present generation.

“God’s word is wonderful, mysterious.” It holds a great mystery which is an offence to the pretentious intellectualism of the wise, but in this very wonderfulness the obedient soul finds rest. Through obedience comes fuller knowledge. “God’s word opens.” And fuller knowledge creates fuller trust and devotion. For “the light grows with the opening of the word,” and in it there is no darkness at all. New light produces new longing, a more eager “panting” of the spirit for the word of God. The longing for God’s word quickly reveals itself as a longing for God Himself, a hungering for His mercy and love. In the vision of God’s face the desire for purity of life is intensified and the soul pleads for deliverance from the “dominion of iniquity.” Then the man rises into full consciousness of his privilege as one of God’s freemen, whom no power shall enslave and no fetters shall bind. “The oppression of man shall not hold him in bondage.” And so he stands in the gladness of spiritual strength while God’s face “shines upon him” like the sun from heaven. Living in God’s light, his heart, like God’s, becomes full of compassion for a sinful world. As the Son of God in later days wept for the sins and woes of Jerusalem, so this ancient Psalmist says: “Mine eyes run down with rivers of water, because they observe not thy law.”

2. The object of Christian faith may be compared to a jewel enclosed in a casket. The jewel is the Lord Jesus Christ; the casket is the Bible. Now, we believe that a man may possess the jewel who has never seen the casket, or who has got it in his hands in an imperfect and broken form. There is such an efficacy in the Lord Jesus Christ, such a fitness in Him for the sins and sorrows and wants of poor fallen humanity, that the Holy Spirit of God can bring Him home to the soul with saving power by a small portion of knowledge. A single Gospel, a single Epistle, a Psalm such as the Twenty-third, or a verse such as “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life,” if explained simply and brought home by God’s Spirit, may become God’s power unto salvation. The Bible came to men in fragments, piece after piece, through many generations, and a fragment of it still does its proper work. It has a principle of life that is complete in its separate parts, and you may see all its truth in one text, as you can see all the sun’s image in one drop of dew in a flower. This is a wise, Divine arrangement, which may reassure some who fear they are losing Christ, when the question is about the meaning of some parts of the Bible. If a man were so driven about on seas of difficulty that he could have only a board or broken piece of the ship, it would “bring him safe to land.” Nevertheless, the care and completeness of the casket are of very great moment. Our salvation may be gained by one word about Christ, but our edification, our Christian comfort and well-being, depend on the full word of Christ. Whenever He is set forth, however dimly, there is something for us to learn, something needful to make us thoroughly furnished unto every good work. Here the Bible may be compared, not to a casket enclosing a jewel, but to a piece of tapestry on which a figure is inwoven. If it be mutilated, or the golden threads that meet and intermingle be torn and tarnished, we lose, so far, the complete image of truth that is the inheritance of the Church of Christ—the inheritance which the Apostle thus describes: “Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope.”

Bartholdi’s statue of “Liberty Enlightening the World” occupies a fine position on Bedloes Island, which commands the approach to New York Harbour. It holds up a torch which is lit at night by an immense electric light. The statue was cast in portions in Paris. The separate pieces were very different, and, taken apart, of uncouth shape. It was only when all was brought together, each in its right place, that the complete design was apparent. Then the omission of any one would have left the work imperfect. In this it is an emblem of Holy Scripture. We do not always see the object of certain portions; nevertheless each has its place, and the whole is a magnificent statue of Christ Jesus, who is the true “Liberty Enlightening the World,” casting illuminative rays across the dark, rocky ocean of time, and guiding anxious souls to the desired haven. 1 [Note: G. Jackson.]

I

The Light Hid

1. The word of God is not a book. There are plenty of Bibles in the world to-day. Indeed there never was a time when so many were distributed. The printing presses of Christendom fairly groan with the innumerable volumes. Nor is the word of God preaching. Churches abound and times of prosperity see them built and rebuilt in ever more magnificent form. The greater the wealth of the community and the more easy and abundant its luxury, the more gorgeous become its churches, the more elegant their ritual, and the more eloquent their preaching. The word of God is the voice of God in a man’s soul. As the Saviour put it: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” That is the voice which, through whatever channel it comes and in whatever words it declares itself, becomes the compelling voice in a man’s heart, awakening him to a new consciousness of his relations to his Maker.

2. The word of God is a living word, addressed to men, and it brings the power of God Himself along with it. God did not wait to speak to men until they had advanced so far that they were able to provide themselves with some kind of record of what He said. Far back in the infancy and childhood of the human race, God condescended to men in their weakness and frailty, spoke to them and made Himself intelligible, and lodged the incorruptible seed in their hearts. All the epistles in those days were living epistles, and the living word of God was not written down, but passed like fire, with all its power to quicken and redeem, from heart to heart.

3. No book can adequately express God’s word. What God had to say to men, what God at last actually did say to men, was something too great for human words to record. “God,” we read in the Bible itself, “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in times past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son.” “By his Son”—revelation was consummated in Christ. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us … full of grace and truth,” and Christ, in all the fulness of His grace and truth, is God’s last word to man. Could anybody produce an adequate record of Christ? Could any words that man could use ever tell all the wonderful meaning of that manifestation of God? Evangelists, after they had done their best, declared that half had never been told. You remember how the last of them, John, says at the end of his Gospel, after he had tried to tell everything: “The world itself would not contain the books that should be written.” No human word, the most wonderful or searching or patient, could ever tell out for men everything that God meant when He sent His Son to save the world.

You do right to call it “The Book,” but you must not forget that it is a book. It has the limitations of a book, the mistakes of a book, the obscurities of a book, the impotence of a book. And while it is the treasury of the most profound and unquestionable and authoritative in books, it is still only a book. There is something more than the Book. There is a life, a living passion, a moulding faith, a lifting hope; and they are greater than the Book. 1 [Note: P. C. Ainsworth, A Thornless World, 15.]

What is a word, a sentence, a book, a library? What are all libraries? A mere peep into the inexpressible. The best writers know this, and are not surprised if they find out their most important things in between the lines, and the best readers soon learn where to look for them. The best speakers know this, and feel when all is done that they have left their most impressive thoughts unspoken because they are unspeakable. However, the best hearers understand perfectly well, perhaps better than if they had been spoken. The poets know best how to use language. They often express their most inexpressible, or evanescent thoughts by means of repugnant, or somewhat paradoxical epithets; as, for example, Coleridge when he says:

The stilly murmur of the distant sea

Tells us of silence.

The belief that it is easy to speak plainly on these great subjects is at the bottom of nearly all the mistakes which divide men in religion, and, it may be added, of nearly all the scepticism which has ever existed. 1 [Note: S. Hall.]

4. Multitudes are unconscious of the highest truths, incapable of them. They lack a sense, the sublimest sense of all, the faculty to discern the reality of the Divine and eternal. Clever enough in the arts of this life, they are stone-blind to the higher. Standing beneath the visible world, patent to us all, is an invisible underworld of atoms, ether, colours, and subtle movements, which only the disciplined sense of the scientist can detect and measure; all around us is another world of beauty, music, and poetry, perceived and appreciated only by those possessed of the artistic sense; and again, above us is a supreme world of which God is the everlasting light and glory, a realm evident only to those whose senses are exercised in holy thought, constant purity, and willing obedience.

We say that the eye creates half that it sees: but no eye is nearly so creative as a blind one; and the proud critic, knowing nothing as he ought to know, enlarges copiously and confidently on his speculations. It is the astronomy of the blind. Competent on questions of the lower spheres, these talkers are of no account in regard to the reality and blessedness of personal godliness. Their astronomy is the veriest superstition set forth in the language of philosophy. The least in the Kingdom of God is greater than these. Only men born again see the eternal light clearly and steadily. Only as we experience the truths Divine do we comprehend them. Only as we do the will of God in daily obedience do we know the doctrine. As Carlyle puts it: “He who has done nothing has known nothing.” Then do we see light in God’s light, and know the secret of the world, of life, of the future when we believe in our heart and obey in our life.

That Thou art nowhere to be found, agree

Wise men, whose eyes are but for surfaces;

Men with eyes opened by the second birth,

To whom the seen, husk of the unseen is,

Descry the soul of everything on earth.

Who knows Thy ends, Thy means and motions see;

Eyes made for glory soon discover Thee.

Not very long ago The Times newspaper contained a correspondence on the desirableness of science lecturers making their great themes more clear to the ordinary audience. In defence the lecturers maintained that it is almost impossible to make lucid the problems of nature to listeners so entirely destitute of knowledge and sympathy as the majority are. More difficult still is it for certain minds to grasp mathematical or metaphysical problems. How completely the ungifted and undisciplined stand away from the mysteries of music! While Glinka was writing his immortal work, his wife complained before everyone that “he was wasting ruled paper.” The obtuse content themselves with the sarcasm that “music is a noise costlier than other noises.” And as to the arts, the critics declare that genuine work is unintelligible to the crowd. “The beautiful is what your servant instinctively thinks is frightful.” 1 [Note: W. L. Watkinson, Life’s Unexpected Issues, 27.]

II

The Light Revealed

“The opening of thy words giveth light.” When the book is opened, the light streams forth. The term translated “giveth light” is a transitive verb which means “to cause to shine.” The direct object of the verb may be supplied by using any term which will indicate the lover of God’s word. “The opening of God’s Word maketh the attentive heart to shine.” That is, the Word of God gives light by enkindling the light of truth within our souls. It is the same word that is used concerning God in the 135th verse—“Make thy face to shine upon thy servant.” As His face shines upon us, He makes our hearts shine back upon Him and upon the world. He does not illuminate our path mechanically, but sets His light within us livingly. He uses us, not as passive reflectors of His brightness, but as burning and shining lights.

1. We must learn to open the book. If God has given us a heavenly Word, a Divinely communicated Word, the first thing we should do is to learn diligently to understand that Word. If God has spoken, then our greatest business is to try to understand what God has said. Suppose a great prince or a great sage spoke words of wisdom, and a thoughtless, foolish person rushed in and began to babble his inanities, instead of trying to understand the wisdom of the counsellor, what would you think? You would probably think more than you would like to say. Are we any better, if, when God has spoken, and in the face of that utterance, instead of setting ourselves in lowliness to understand His great message, we go on babbling our own little passing speculations? We are people of many books to-day, and we speak of our fathers sarcastically as “men of one book.” There is no objection to many books, but we would do well to get back to the one, and to understand something more of the great mystery of Divine love which God has revealed to us.

Mr. Moody tells us in an amusing way of his own experience: “I used at one time to read so many chapters a day, and if I did not I thought I was cold and backsliding, but, mind you, if a man had asked me an hour afterwards what I had read, I could not have told him—I had forgotten nearly it all. When I was a boy I used to hoe turnips on a farm, and I used to hoe them so badly to get over so much ground that at night I had to put a stick into the ground so as to know next morning where I had left off.” That was somewhat in the same fashion as much Bible reading. A man will say: “Wife, did I read that chapter?” “Well,” she says, “I don’t remember”; and neither of them can recollect. Now, there is no sort of merit or profit in that sort of Bible reading; no blessing comes with it. It is of no more use than galloping through so many columns of advertisements or so many pages of the dictionary. If the Scriptures are to profit us, we must ask, as we read, “What does this mean? What does it teach? What lesson may I learn from it? Does it suggest prayer? Does it prompt praise? Does it prescribe duty?” It would be well if all of us might sometimes be pulled up in our reading by the question, “Understandest thou that which thou readest?” 1 [Note: G. H. James.]

2. The more we study the Word, the more freely the light breaks upon us. “The opening of thy words giveth light” means not only that God’s Word gives light, but that this light grows with the growing revelation or understanding of the Word. As the Word opens before the soul the Divine shines forth from it more clearly, and the glory of the God it exhibits becomes more wonderful. The more we understand the Word, the more we see of God. The deeper we go into the revelation, the nearer we get to the blaze of the eternal Light.

A friend of mine visited Mr. Prang’s chromo establishment in Boston. Mr. Prang showed him a stone on which was laid the colour for making the first impression toward producing the portrait of a distinguished public man, but he could see only the faintest possible line of tinting. The next stone that the paper was submitted to deepened the colour a little, but still no trace of the man’s face was visible. Again and again was the sheet passed over successive stones, until at last the outline of a man’s face was dimly discerned. Finally, after some twenty impressions from as many different stones, the portrait of the distinguished man stood forth so perfectly that it seemed to lack only the power of speech to make it living. Thus it is with Christ in the Scriptures. 2 [Note: G. Jackson.]

A Hindoo gentleman, holding a high office in the Presidency of Bombay, told me a few years ago that during his vacation he was anxious to read with his son for an hour or two daily a book of high moral and spiritual influence. He thought of many, and at last decided to take the Book of Psalms. “We treat it,” he said, “like any other book; we investigate questions of authorship, we try to discover the circumstances in which each psalm was written, we separate the purely Jewish elements from those of more general interest and importance, we try to discriminate between what is human and faulty, and what is lofty and spiritual. By doing this we seem often to hear the voice of God speaking in our hearts, showing us the way of truth and duty, and calling us to higher aspirations and efforts.” The man who said this to me was not a Christian. It shows us what hope there is in presenting our Scriptures to non-Christians in the right way, and how true it is that these Scriptures possess a universal adaptation to the human spirit. 3 [Note: A. Macarthur.]

III

The Light Utilized

1. “It giveth understanding unto the simple.” We all know what it means to have the intellect enlightened. Everywhere we are encountering new knowledge. The sciences are all new, the practical affairs of life are conducted on new methods, with new instruments and, we may also say, with new purposes. We live not only on a new continent, but in a veritable new world. Enlightenment of the understanding seems at times the single, all-important necessity. All our great system of schools and colleges and universities is to the one end of providing this enlightened understanding for the growing generation; and we summon the young people to every sacrifice to attain to the enlightenment which is so much needed. We are charmed when we come upon any indication of what it holds in store for them.

When Professor Agassiz came to America and made his first journey westward from the sea-coast, he sat all day in the train looking out of the window, for everywhere he quickly discovered what no one else had seen—signs of the action of the great glaciers of the ice period upon the surface of the continent. Every rounded hill, every pond in Massachusetts, every undulation in the levels south of Lake Erie was to him the proof of the theory of the Ice Age as he had held it. And these indisputable signs of a great geological epoch had laid openly before the eyes of generations of men who had been blind to see them. The record of geological history was written on the very face of the continent, and up to that hour no one had read it. With what excitement he turned the leaf of the great story! With what interest he told what he saw! With what open-eyed wonder people responded to the new teaching! We want enlightened intelligence in matters of religion. There are truths as new, as important, and as interesting in regard to revelation, and in regard to the Bible. We may well pray that the Church everywhere, and all believers, may have as a gift of God, enlightenment of their understanding. 1 [Note: H. A. Stimson, The New Things of God, 188.]

India has a venerable civilization, such as it is, and sacred books which contain a great deal of wisdom and beauty; but the Light of Asia has never brought enlightenment to the millions who receive it. With all the intellectual glory of ancient Greece, popular education was a thing unknown. Rome trained her people to war and plunder for the aggrandizement of the State. Certain of the slaves were educated to teach their master’s sons, but the plebeian multitude were poor, ignorant, and despised. Let the intellectual status of the people of Russia, Italy, Spain, or even France be compared with that of the people in Germany, England, or the United States, and how significant are the facts which appear. 1 [Note: S. O. Benton.]

2. But if we need enlightenment of the intellect, we need still more the dew of heaven upon the heart. The heart is the man, and the man must be reached if the work of God is to go forward. Sadly we discover that the enlightenment of the intellect goes but a short way in changing the character. Character rests upon decisions of the will, the abiding purposes of life, and these are determined primarily by the feelings. It is therefore the enlightenment of the heart, the stirring up of the feelings, the opening of the deep wells of the soul, and the appeal to the essential nature of the man himself that alone answers the call of God, and that alone can make men free, in the large sense of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The mere accumulation of knowledge is like the stuffing of the stove with fuel—it remains as cold and dead as the iron itself until the fire is kindled, which alone can transform it, and set free its imprisoned energies.

This is the unique triumph of God’s word that it recreates the soul, and changes the unrighteous into the image of Christ. No other power on earth has been able thus to renew the spirit of man. But this word of God renews its power in every generation. Into the dark soul its light enters, and in the lowly spirit the fire of God burns with inextinguishable blaze. In God’s light we see light, and the enkindled soul communes with the glory of God. In Christ Jesus the fallen one rises to be a new creation, and hears a holy voice cry, “Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.”

This characteristic has been splendidly manifest in the propagation of the gospel in foreign lands. The hindrances to the exercise of this power are enormous among the devotees of false religions. Custom, tradition, sentiment, imagination, and all the vast conservatism of social forces, are arrayed against the incoming of the light of the Gospel. The feeble groundwork of truth upon which the false superstructure is reared has an ancient influence which counts for much. Yet, wherever the Word of God gets an opportunity, its results are similar to those which we have ourselves experienced. In Africa, India, China, and the islands of the sea, men and women rise to the same childlike assurance of pardon and peace in Jesus Christ, and confess in the common language of Christian faith the light-giving and life-giving virtue of the Word of God. The people that sat in darkness have seen a great slight, and that light is the Son of God. 1 [Note: J. Thomas, Concerning the King, 57.]

The other day I was reading a story of a Frenchman who was being entertained by a Christian chief in one of the Pacific Islands. The chief had a Bible, which the Frenchman sneered at, saying that in Europe they had got past that. The chief led his guest out of the house, showed him where they used to cook and eat their meals in cannibal days, and clinched everything by saying, “My friend, if it had not been for that Book, I should have been dining upon you now.” 2 [Note: J. R. Walker.]

3. Understanding comes only to the simple-hearted: “Unto the simple.” A simple person is often supposed to be a person who has no understanding or wisdom. But here “simple” means sincere, honest—a person who has a right aim, a right eye. What says the Saviour of such? “If thine eye be single”—rendered sometimes “simple”—if thine eye be simple, “thy whole body shall be full of light.” There is the entrance of God’s word. “But if thine eye be evil,”—if it be double, if it be hypocritical, if it be deceitful,—“thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If, therefore, the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is the darkness!” And how gracious it is of God, how merciful, that He should put the condition of our receiving the inward light, not upon intellectual and moral capacity. What if He had rested it on intellect, on philosophy, on science, or rank, or natural power of intellect: if He had promised it to the man who could muster different languages, or solve profound and difficult problems! But, so far from this, it is just the reverse; for this is what the Spirit of God tells us of His work, “Ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called: but God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; and base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are: that no flesh should glory in his presence”; and, it is added, “He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord.”

A teacher eminent in scientific research in describing the wondrous beauty and the mysterious structure of a leaf, has said that any tyro can see the facts for himself if he is provided with a leaf and a microscope. But how helpless would the tyro be if he had only the leaf, and not the microscope! The leaf would be perfect in all its parts, it would contain rare beauty of form, colour, and structure, though the tyro was ignorant of it, and had not a microscope to see it. Without the aid of a microscope, a scientific teacher even could not see the mysterious substance, the strange movements, and the beautiful structure of the leaf. The optical instrument is as necessary for the intelligent as for the ignorant, for the scientific as for the uneducated. If a man were to examine the leaf, without the aid of the instrument, and declare his inability to see any inner beauty, form, and structure in the leaf, the simple answer would be that these are things which can only be microscopically discerned. Now this is not merely the teaching of scientists, it is the teaching of the Apostle. Spiritual things can be seen and known only by a spiritual mind—a mind aided and strengthened by the higher power of vision which the Spirit of God imparts. 1 [Note: W. Simpson.]

There was a literary woman who stood high among book critics. One day in reviewing a book she said, “Who wrote this book? It is beautifully written, but there is something wrong here and there!” She proceeded to criticize with a good deal of severity. Some months afterwards this lady became acquainted with the author of the book, fell in love, and married him. She took the same book again and said, “What a beautiful book! There are some mistakes here and there, but they ought to be overlooked.” The book was just the same as it had been before, but the critic had changed. When she began to love the author it changed her attitude toward the book. So it is with us and the Bible. People do not love the Bible because they do not love Christ. 2 [Note: G. Jackson.]

Literature

Ellis (J.), Sermons in a Nutshell, 96.

Hind (T.), The Treasures of the Snow, 111.

Ker (J.), Sermons, ii. 186.

Stowell (H.), Sermons, 158.

Swing (D.), Truths for To-day, ii. 161.

Thomas (J.), Concerning the King, 50.

Children’s Pulpit: Second Sunday in Advent, i. 136 (G. H. James).

Christian World Pulpit, xiv. 56 (F. W. Aveling); lxviii. 28 (A. Macarthur).

Churchman’s Pulpit: Second Sunday in Advent, i. 403 (S. O. Benton).

Homiletic Review, xviii. 191.