Bible Commentaries
Psalms 121

Verses 1-2

Help from beyond the Hills

I will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains:

From whence shall my help come?

My help cometh from the Lord,

Which made heaven and earth.— Psalms 121:1-2

This psalm is one of that remarkable series of fifteen which are called, in the ancient headings of our Bibles, “Psalms of Degrees,” or, as the Revised Version renders the Hebrew, “Songs of Ascents.” In the ancient Greek and Latin versions of the Scriptures the rendering is, “Songs of Steps,” or “of Staircases.” They are psalms connected somehow with steps upward, as to a shrine; and one ancient explanation of the heading is that there were fifteen steps leading up to the “Court of Israel” in the Temple of Jerusalem, and that the fifteen Songs of Degrees have connexion with those steps, and were sung on certain ceremonial occasions on them, or while worshippers went up by them. A mystic meaning is given to the title by some of the ancient Jewish expositors. One of them sees in these psalms an allusion to the spiritual steps “on which God leads the righteous up to a blessed hereafter”; and true it is that these psalms, in a sweet way of their own, lead us to views of His Word, of His promises, and of Himself, which afford an uplifting guide and help to the pilgrim as he ascends “from strength to strength” towards the heavenly shrine. Another account of the word is that these were psalms used, not upon the steps in the Temple, but on the ascending march of pilgrims returning from exile in Babylon, or going up at the great festivals to Jerusalem from the remote parts of the Holy Land. They climbed towards the mountain throne where the City and the Temple were set, and they solaced their way with these psalms of peculiar and beautiful faith, hope, and joy, as most of them conspicuously are.

These Psalms of Degrees, the Psalms from the 120th to 134th inclusive, display a certain characteristic rhythm, and they speak a tender pathetic dialect of their own, if one may use the word; a certain uplook, almost always, as out of a felt need to the ever-present Lord, seems to be the deepest inspiration of the song. This Psalm, assuredly, the 121st, is “a Song of Ascents,” a song of up-goings, a song befitting the heart which believes and loves, on its way to the eternal Zion. The whole direction of it is upwards, God-wards. It is, in the language of the Communion Service, a Sursum corda, a “Lift up your hearts; we lift them up unto the Lord.” Shall we describe the Psalm in few and simple words? It is the soul’s look, out from itself, and up to its all-sufficient God, under a sense of complete need, and with the prospect of a complete supply.

My need and Thy great fulness meet,

And I have all in Thee. 1 [Note: H. C. G. Moule, Thy Keeper, 8.]

The speaker, as we take it, was one of the Jews in Babylon. Under the hand of a tyrant and among heathen, neither day nor night, in going out or coming in, was he safe. Evening by evening, therefore, he put himself anew into a keeping that could not fail. Ever as the time came for the altar smoke to rise on Mount Zion did he come forth into the open. The great plain, arched by the great sky, was his temple: and Jehovah, the Lord of heaven and earth, was there. Nevertheless, his heart yearned towards the Holy of Holies, God’s chosen spot, and he turned his face to it. As he closed his eyes to pray, he saw the blue hills of Judah and the towers that crowned the Holy House. He sent his cry for mercy to the Mercy Seat. His help would come from beyond the hills, even from the Glory between the cherubim. 2 [Note: D. Burns, The song of the Well, 65.]

When I lived at Oxford, a good many years ago, one of the tutors lay dying of a cancerous disease. It was a summer of perfect warmth and beauty, and every meadow was as a haunt of dreams. But the dying man was a native of Iceland, and amid all the glory of those days, the cry on his lips was to get back to Iceland, just that he might see the snow again. That same feeling breathes in this verse “I to the hills will lift mine eyes.” The writer was an exile, far from home; he was in a land where everything was strange. And what did it matter to him though Babylonia was fairer than the country of his birth! The hills of his homeland were calling him. 3 [Note: G. H. Morrison, The Return of the Angels, 98.]

I

The Call of the Hills

“I will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains.”

1. The hills that the Psalmist was thinking about were visible from no part of that long-extended plain where he dwelt; and he might have looked till he wore his eyes out, ere he could have seen them on the horizon of sense. But although they were unseen, they were visible to the heart that longed for them. He directed his desires farther than the vision of his eyeballs can go. Just as his possible contemporary, Daniel, when he prayed, opened his window towards the Jerusalem that was so far away; and just as Mohammedans still, in every part of the world, when they pray, turn their faces to the Kaaba at Mecca, the sacred place to which their prayers are directed; and just as many Jews still, north, east, south or west though they be, face Jerusalem when they offer their supplications—so this Psalmist in Babylon, wearied and sick of the low levels that stretched endlessly and monotonously round about him, says, “I will look at the things that I cannot see, and lift up my eyes above these lownesses about me, to the loftinesses that sense cannot behold.”

The eyes that the Psalmist speaks of are the eyes of the soul, and the hills to which he looks are the hills of help for the soul. Our souls relate us to the world of the soul, as our senses relate us to the world of the senses. The soul’s faculty of faith is to our eternal nature what our senses are to our temporal nature. And as the evidence of the senses puts an end to all strife about the things presented to them, so faith gives restful assurance with respect to the objects of belief. Faith is that faculty of pure reason with which the soul of all the senses is endowed. The assurance of faith is, therefore, not the assurance of one but of all our faculties in that ground of our nature which unites all our powers. The assurance of faith is the assurance of seeing, of hearing, of tasting, of handling—all in one and at once. The Psalmist is fully assured as to the hills of help to which he lifts up his eyes. He only speaks of what he sees with “the eyes of his heart”; for it is “with the heart man believes” and looks at spiritual things. 1 [Note: W. Pulsford.]

Ruskin, in his Modern Painters, has called attention to a suggestive fact. It is that the greatest painters of the Holy Family have always a hint of the mountains in the distance. You might have looked for cornfield or for vineyard, or for some fine pleasant garden sleeping in the sunshine; but in the greatest painters that you never find; it is “I to the hills will lift mine eyes.” What they felt was, with one of these intuitions which are the birthright and the seal of genius—what they felt was that for a secular subject vineyard and meadow might be a fitting background; but for the Holy Family, and for the Child of God, and for the love of heaven incarnate in humanity, you want the mystery, the height, the depth, which call to the human spirit from the hills. It is not to man as a being with an intellect that the hills have spoken their unvarying message. It is to man as a being with a soul, with a cry in his heart for things that are above him. That is why Zeus in the old Pagan days came down to speak to men upon Mount Ida. That is why Genius painting Jesus Christ throws in its faint suggestion of the peaks. 1 [Note: G. H. Morrison, The Return of the Angels, 100.]

2. The hills were associated with the greatest events in the history of Israel. The Old Testament is the record of the soul, and it is written against a background of the hills. It is true that it does not open in the mountains. It opens in the luxuriance of a garden. Its opening scene is an idyllic picture in the bosom of an earthly paradise. But when man has fallen, and sounded the great deeps, and begun to cry for the God whom he has lost, then are we driven from the garden scenery and brought amid the grandeur of the hills. It is on Ararat that the ark rests, when the judgment of the waters has been stayed. It is to a mountain-top that Abraham is summoned to make his sacrifice of Isaac. And not on the plain where the Israelites are camped, but amid the cloudy splendour of Mount Sinai, does God reveal Himself, and give His law, and enter into covenant with man. Do we wonder that the exiled Psalmist said, “I will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains”? They were dyed deep for him with sacred memory, and rich with the precious heritage of years. Nor was it merely a heritage of home; it was a heritage of God and of the soul. Among the hills Israel had learned everything that made her mighty as a spiritual power.

From Venice, Ruskin travelled by Milan and Turin to Susa, and over the Pass of Mont Cenis. Among the mountains he recovered at once health and spirits. His first morning among the hills after the long months in Italy, he accounted a turning-point in his life:

“I woke from a sound tired sleep in a little one-windowed room at Lans-le-bourg, at six of the summer morning, June 2nd, 1841; the red aiguilles on the north relieved against pure blue—the great pyramid of snow down the valley in one sheet of eastern light. I dressed in three minutes, ran down the village street, across the stream, and climbed the grassy slope on the south side of the valley, up to the first pines. I had found my life again;—all the best of it. What good of religion, love, admiration or hope, had ever been taught me, or felt by my best nature, rekindled at once; and my line of work, both by my own will and the aid granted to it by fate in the future, determined for me. I went down thankfully to my father and mother, and told them I was sure I should get well.”

Ruskin might have said very literally with the Psalmist: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, whence cometh my help.” 1 [Note: E. T. Cook, The Life of Ruskin, i. 120.]

Nature has many aspects, and God is behind them all; but the mass and grandeur, the vast solitudes and deep recesses in the heart of the hills, are, in a peculiar sense, the inner shrine where He waits for those who come, worn and confused, from the noise and strife of the world. Here the sounds of man’s struggle are lost in His peace; here the fever of desire and the agitation of emotion are calmed in His silence. The great hills, purple with heather or green with moss, rise peak beyond peak in sublime procession; the mountain streams run dark and cool through dim and hidden channels, singing that song without words which is sweet with all purity and fresh with the cleanness of the untrodden heights. Through the narrow passes one walks with a silent joy, born of a renewed sense of relationship with the sublime order of the world, and of a fresh communion with the Spirit of which all visible things are the symbol and garment. This is perhaps the greatest service which the hills of God render to him who seeks them with an open mind and heart. Their grandeur silently dispels one’s scepticism in the possible greatness of man’s life. In a world where such heights rise in lonely majesty, the soul, to which they speak with voices so manifold and so eloquent, feels anew the divinity which shapes its destiny, and gains a fresh faith in the things that are unseen and eternal. 2 [Note: H. W. Mabie, The Life of the Spirit, 81.]

3. The hills evermore summon us to look up. The influence of the world begets a downward look, a sort of set of the eyes and heart downwards. We are in the world; in a thousand subtle ways we are kin with the world. We are subject to its influences, caught by its wind of excitement, absorbed by its pressing claims, and then we may easily be of the world as well as in it. But everything the world presents to us is below us, beneath us, and it so keeps us looking down that at last the habit of down-looking grows upon us. The world offers the attraction of its riches, but money is all below us, and we must look down upon it. The world fascinates us with its learning and its science, but books and experiments are all below us, we must look down upon them. The world bids the siren pleasure float on golden wing before us, winning us to her pursuit; but she ever flies low, and we must look down upon her. Even the better things that the world may give us, the things of family life and love, are still all below us; we look down even on the children about our feet.

I have read of a woman who worked hard with her pen, and at last found her eyes troubling her. The oculist whom she consulted told her that her eyes needed rest and change. From the windows of her home there was a grand view of some distant hills, and the doctor told her, when her eyes were tired with work, to look out of the window and gaze on the distant hills. It is good for us all to look out of the window sometimes. If we are always looking at the rooms where we live, the shop where we trade, the farm or the counting-house, we begin to think there is nothing else. Our little bit of ground is all this world and the next; we never see anything beyond our own handiwork, we are blind to all else, like the horse in the coal-mine. 1 [Note: H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Day by Day Duty, 27.]

Sailors tell us that at sea, when the fog is so dense that they cannot see far ahead, they climb the rigging; and, seated there upon the yard-arm, they may see the heavens bathed in sunshine and the blue sky above the billows of mist that lie below.

God hath His uplands, bleak and bare,

Where He doth bid us rest awhile—

Crags where we breathe the purer air,

Lone peaks that catch the day’s first smile.

Lift me, O Lord, above the level plain,

Beyond the cities where life throbs and thrills,

And in the cool airs let my spirit gain

The stable strength and courage of Thy hills.

They are Thy secret dwelling places, Lord.

Like Thy majestic prophets, old and hoar,

They stand assembled in divine accord,

Thy sign of stablished power for evermore.

Lead me yet farther, Lord, to peaks more clear,

Until the clouds like shining meadows lie,

Where through the deeps of silence I may hear

The thunder of Thy legions marching by.

II

The Cry of Helplessness

“From whence shall my help come?”

1. The exile in Babylon had a dreary desert, peopled by wild tribes hostile to him, stretching between his present home and that home where he desired to be; and it would be difficult for him to get away from the dominion that held him captive, unless by consent of the power of whom he was the vassal. So the more the thought of the mountains of Israel drew the Psalmist, the more there came into his mind the thought, How am I to be made able to reach that blessed soil? And surely, if we saw, with anything like a worthy apprehension and vision, the greatness of the blessedness that lies yonder for Christian souls, we should feel far more deeply than we do the impossibility, as far as we are concerned, of our ever reaching it. The sense of our own weakness and the consciousness of the perils upon the path ought ever to be present with us all.

Man knows that he is low, that he needs to be lifted up, that he cannot lift himself—he can but lift up his eyes. He knows that his lowness is not lowly, but degraded and proud. By his natural birth he has come into low places, and in himself he has forsaken the heights. What he is by nature he has confirmed by choice, and allowed the conditions of his natural birth to form his character and determine his life. He has inverted the true order of his parts and powers, degraded his nobler faculties, and raised to a bad eminence his lower passions and propensities. 1 [Note: W. Pulsford.]

2. All the delights of Babylon could not satisfy the exile’s longing. He was perfectly comfortable in Babylon. There was abundance of everything that he wanted for his life. The Jews there were materially quite as well off as, and many of them a great deal better off than, ever they had been in their narrow little strip of mountain land, shut in between the desert and the sea. But for all that, fat, wealthy Babylon was not Palestine. So amid the luxuriant vegetation, the wealth of water and the fertile plains, the Psalmist longed for the mountains, though the mountains are often bare of green things. It was that longing that led to his looking to the hills. Do we know anything of that longing which makes us “that are in this tabernacle to groan, being burdened”? Unless our Christianity throws us out of harmony and contentment with the present, it is worth very little. And unless we know something of that immortal longing to be nearer to God, and fuller of Christ, and emancipated from sense and from the burdens and trivialities of life, we have yet to learn what the meaning of walking “not after the flesh but after the Spirit” really is.

Writing from Aberdeen to Lady Boyd, Samuel Rutherford says: “I have not now, of a long time, found such high springtides as formerly. The sea is out, and I cannot buy a wind and cause it to flow again; only I wait on the shore till the Lord sends a full sea.… But even to dream of Him is sweet.” And then just over the leaf, to Marion McNaught: “I am well: honour to God.… He hath broken in upon a poor prisoner’s soul like the swelling of Jordan. I am bank and brim full: a great high springtide of the consolations of Christ hath overwhelmed me.” But sweet as it is to read his rapturous expressions when the tide is full, I feel it far more helpful to hear how he still looks and waits for the return of the tide when the tide is low, and when the shore is full, as all left shores are apt to be, of weeds and mire, and all corrupt and unclean things. Rutherford is never more helpful to his correspondents than when they consult him about their ebb tides, and find that he himself either has been, or still is, in the same experience. 2 [Note: A. Whyte, Samuel Rutherford and Some of his Correspondents.]

3. Even the hills could not send help. Psalms 121:2 declares that, although the hills stand for earth’s best defence, the singer’s hope is in the Creator, not in things created, in Him who set fast the mountains, and is higher than they as heavens are higher than earth. The insufficiency of the hills is again implied in the two striking pictures of the third and fourth verses. Smooth rock or sliding sand, loose rubble or slippery turf, landslide beneath or avalanche from above, may betray the climber to injury or destruction. But Jehovah delivers His people from falling, and establishes their goings. Again, the recumbent hills lie ever wrapt in proverbial and unbroken sleep. They heed not, they hear not, and they suffer the night to change the cliff from a defence to a danger, and the slumbering slopes sound no alarm as the enemy scales them under cover of the night. But God is ever wakeful for His own—and darkness and the light are both alike to Him. The contrast is continued in Psalms 121:5. The hills are passive, God is active; He guards, He is fortress, garrison, and patrol. The strongest hill-forts must be well defended, or Petra will fall to Rome, the Heights of Abraham to Wolfe, Hannibal will pass the Alps, and Xerxes outflank Leonidas by Thermopylæ. The soldier must guard the hill that guards him, but God guards all.

We must avoid the mistakes frequently made by poets who have sought to personify nature and find in it a response to the varying moods of human life, and by theologians who have found in it an analogy of the ways of God. Nature is not like God. Her laws disclose no moral standards. When these are introduced she appears full not only of contradictions but of cruelties, and the God whose character we could induce from a consideration of the laws of nature would be as immoral as the pagan divinities. We need something nearer, more human and considerate, a God who can understand and suffer and love. Indeed we are so far from the poets who seek in nature an echo of their own inner life as to feel that it is in offering us an escape from ourselves that nature is most helpful to man. There she lies inscrutable, placid, expansive; now wrapped in mists and clouds, now sun-smitten or attacked by the furious onset of the thunderstorm. The craving for sympathy from her is morbid; we must find health in her unresponsiveness, her healing want of sympathy with morbid souls. 1 [Note: J. Kelman, Ephemera Eternitatis, 224.]

Tennyson’s outlook on the universe could not ignore the dark and dismaying facts of existence, and his faith, which rose above the shriek of Nature, was not based upon arguments derived from any survey of external, physical Nature. When he confined his outlook to this, he could see power and mechanism, but he could not from these derive faith. His vision must go beyond the mere physical universe; he must see life and see it whole; he must include that which is highest in Nature, even man, and only then could he find the resting-place of faith. He thus summed up the matter once when we had been walking up and down the “Ball-room” at Farringford: “It is hard,” he said, “it is hard to believe in God; but it is harder not to believe. I believe in God, not from what I see in Nature, but from what I find in man.” I took him to mean that the witness of Nature was only complete when it included all that was in Nature, and that the effort to draw conclusions from Nature when man, the highest-known factor in Nature, was excluded, could only lead to mistake. I do not think he meant, however, that external Nature gave no hints of a superintending wisdom or even love, for his own writings show, I think, that such hints had been whispered to him by flower and star; I think he meant that faith did not find her platform finally secure beneath her feet till she had taken count of man. The response to all that is highest in Nature is found in the heart of man, and man cannot deny this highest, because it is latent in himself already. But I must continue Tennyson’s own words: “It is hard to believe in God, but it is harder not to believe in Him. I don’t believe in His goodness from what I see in Nature. In Nature I see the mechanician; I believe in His goodness from what I find in my own breast.” 1 [Note: Bishop Boyd Carpenter, in Tennyson and His Friends, 303.]

III

The Faith of a True Israelite

“My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth.”

Here is the mark rather of a Babylonian than of a home-abiding Jew. This way of describing God—“which made heaven and earth”—is not usual by any means in the Psalms or elsewhere in the Scriptures. It occurs three times in these Pilgrim Songs, and only once in all the Psalms besides, and that Psalm (the 115th) seems to have been written after the Captivity. This large thought of God did not come naturally to the mind of an Israelite. The truth indeed he did accept. It was an item of his creed that the Lord of his worship did make heaven and earth, all visible and invisible things: but it was not his spontaneous thought about God. “Thou that walkest in the camp of Israel.” “Thou that sittest between the cherubims, shine forth.” There was the localizing of God in the heart of a Jew: one holy place for the tabernacles of the Most High. “Walk about Zion, and go round about her: tell the towers thereof. Mark ye well her bulwarks, consider her palaces; that ye may tell it to the generation following. For this God is our God for ever and ever.” The King, yes the King of all the earth, but especially our God. But the exiled Jew has the one advantage at least, that he escaped this narrowness of thought. The Jew born in Babylon (and almost all of those who returned from the Captivity were born in Babylon; the ancient men who had seen the first Temple, and wept because of the poverty of the second Temple, were very few indeed)—the Jew born in Babylon could hardly fail to take broad views of life. There was a tendency in all surrounding things to uncramp the thoughts. He lived in the midst of vastness. The mighty town itself more than fifty miles in circuit; the palace of the kings within it more than twice as large as the whole city of Jerusalem: and then those boundless plains spread forth under the great heavens, and losing themselves on all sides in the distant horizon—they that lived in the midst of these scenes took an impress from them. The sign of it appears in these children of the Captivity, whose eyes were lifted towards the hills of the sacred land, and who, looking forth over the months of its weariness and hazards, asked, one on behalf of all, “From whence cometh my help?” and answered, one on behalf of all, “My help cometh from the Lord.” Not the God of Jacob or of Israel, or of Him that sitteth between the cherubims; the teaching of Babylon has erased those barriers and exalted God above the universe. “My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth.”

1. Help from God is sure to come when our spirits hold fellowship with Him. To do this often, and on occasion to linger long, cannot but have a great influence on our spirit. We become more and more of a heavenly mind, and look to heaven as our own place and as the goal of all our hopes. We live here with a view to our life there. We choose our intimates from those who shall still be our fellows there. We seek such gains as we can lay up there against the time of our coming. We disengage ourselves from all that we shall have to leave, and we refuse to make a home where our spirit never can feel at home. We keep ourselves free to arise at any moment and, by help from beyond the hills, to pass beyond, and not return.

Did you ever read that fascinating chapter in Washington Irving’s Life of Columbus where he describes the bursting of the New World upon the little crew which set out with Columbus on that memorable voyage? It is one of the most thrilling and most pathetic bits of recorded history. Columbus from a boy had dreamt of this discovery. Kings, statesmen, and philosophers had all been against him. But on he fought undaunted; and at last the reward was here.

Chances have laws as fixed as planets have,

And disappointment’s dry and bitter root,

Envy’s harsh berries, and the choking pool

Of the world’s scorn, are the right mother-milk

To the tough hearts that pioneer their kind,

And break a pathway to those unknown realms

That in the earth’s broad shadow lie enthralled;

Endurance is the crowning quality,

And patience all the passion of great hearts;

One faith against a whole earth’s unbelief,

One soul against the flesh of all mankind. 1 [Note: D. W. Whincup, The Training of Life, 39.]

2. When God sends help, the spirit finds rests. He who penned this psalm, being a slave and a foreigner, had much to bear and to fear, and he lived under constant strain. For him, moreover, there was no break in the routine, and only a faint hope of one day being set free to find his way home. His spirit, however, was beyond the hand of the conqueror, and need suffer no exile. It was lord of itself, and could choose its own place and take rest at due times. It had wings swifter than the dove’s, and could fly beyond the hills and alight within the hush of the Holy Shrine. There, with all about him so different from the accustomed scene, he found a peace such as common words could not express. To tell it, he had to sing it, and in this world of unquiet hearts his song has been so prized that now no other is more widely known.

One and all, we are bent on winning this same rest of spirit. All our quest is, indeed, but this one endeavour. We strive after success, or pleasure, or influence; but, behind it all, there is our inborn longing for the one true home and the one true life. Such rest can come to us—sinners, and exiles because of our sin—only as we look, with this man, beyond the hills to the blood-besprinkled Mercy Seat. There, where we see the Divine pardon, we see a Help that is alert by day and night, and that is active against all that would do us ill.

The Archduke Palatine died in 1847, a humble and believing penitent at the foot of the Cross. He had for many years been a regular reader of the Bible, but it was only when the shadows of the coming darkness gathered round him that full spiritual light arose in his soul. Several months before his death he was seized with a violent illness, which threatened to carry him off. From this he partially recovered. A cloud passed over him for a time, but it was dissolved, and he became unusually cheerful. He acknowledged afterwards that in the days of gloom he had been reviewing his past life, and had everywhere discovered sin, and that now he put his whole trust in the merits and righteousness of Christ. Soon afterwards his last illness began. A few hours before his death his wife said to him, “As you are now so soon to stand before the judgment-seat of God, I wish to hear from you for the last time what is the ground on which you rest your hope.” His immediate reply was, “The blood of Christ alone,” with a strong emphasis on the alone. 1 [Note: G. Carlyle, A Memoir of Adolph Saphir, 44.]

3. The help of the Lord means moral health and vigour. To this poet, life in Babylon was a ceaseless jeopardy of spirit. As he passed from day to day he seemed to himself as one hastening on foot across the desert. The sun blazed on him from a cloudless sky, and spears of fire struck into his heart and drank his strength. When the longed-for night came, the moon brought a dew that chilled him to the marrow, while she sought to pierce eye and brain with her arrows of steel. Nevertheless he journeyed unfainting and unfevered! One, unseen, walked at his right hand to do what his right hand, with all its strength and skill, could not accomplish. Not in vain had he made frequent flight of spirit beyond the hills, and kept alive his fellowship with the Lord of Zion. What though he could not stay day and night in the sanctuary? He who made it safe would come forth with him and be ever by him. The earthly figure was not fit to picture all the fact. The heavenly Guard, as Spirit Infinite, is in the threatened spirit. He fills and clears and lifts the life, so that the evil influences have no effect for evil. The godly man can live in Babylon, and be as safe from sin as if he were in Jerusalem, a priest at the altar and never outside the sacred walls.

When Dr. Wilberforce was enthroned as Bishop of Chichester, his first sermon in his new Cathedral had as its text the opening verse of his favourite Psalm—the 121st. The sermon concluded with these words: “If I inquire from those who have preceded me the secret of their power, as, called unto their rest, they now throng up the steeps of light, each, with faithful finger, points to the motto of his life, ‘I will lift up mine eyes to the hills, whence cometh my help.’ To the hills where the first faint rays of the coming dawn are seen; where echoes haunt and linger, caught from higher heights beyond, where air is pure and free and strong; to the hills lifted above the swamps and the miasma, above the low-lying lands of doubt and uncertainty, above the babble and the questioning, above ‘the world’s loud stunning tide,’ up where they rear themselves towards the gathering of the solemn stars, where the night winds whisper, and the beat of angel wings is heard, where man can commune with his God, whence cometh help. To the hills, where the showers gather big with blessing, and fall drop by drop till the rills begin to sparkle and leap, and the tiny rivulets are swelling into the broadening river, refreshing hamlet and homestead, falling down into the plain and cleansing every city, sweeping onward with its gathering burden to the mighty sea, the broad fertilizing stream of the life of the Church of God.” 1 [Note: J. B. Atlay, Bishop Ernest Wilberforce, 226.]

When sick of life and all the world—

How sick of all desire but Thee!—

I lift mine eyes up to the hills,

Eyes of my heart that see,

I see beyond all death and ills

Refreshing green for heart and eyes,

The golden streets and gateways pearled,

The trees of Paradise. 2 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti.]

Literature

Brooks (P.), The Candle of the Lord, 270.

Butler (H. M.), Public School Sermons, 49.

Capen (E. H.), The College and the Higher Life, 59.

Cox (S.), The Pilgrim Psalms , 24.

Doney (C. G.), The Throne-Room of the Soul, 173

Hutton (J. A.), At Close Quarters, 125.

Kelman (J.), Ephemera Eternitatis, 223.

King (T. S.), Christianity and Humanity, 285.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions: Psalms 51–145, 335.

McNeill (J.), Regent Square Pulpit, iii. 249.

Morrison (G. H.), The Return of the Angels, 98.

Moule (H. C. G.), Thy Keeper, 7.

Power (P. B.), The “wills” of the Psalms, 217.

Pulsford (W.), Trinity Church Sermons, 50.

Scott (J. M.), Some Favourite Psalms , 117.

Smellie (A.), In the Hour of Silence, 42.

Smith (G. A.), Four Psalms , 99.

Voysey (C.), Sermons, xiv. (1891), No. 37.

Whincup (D. W.), The Training of Life, 33.

Wilmot-Buxton (H. J.), Day by Day Duty, 27.

Wright (D.), Waiting for the Light, 238.

Christian World Pulpit, xiv. 154 (R. Tuck).

Homiletic Review, li. 219 (W. H. Walker); lxiv. 139 (W. J. C. Pike).

Treasury (New York), xvii. 668 (D. M. Pratt).

Verse 8

Guardianship in Daily Life

The Lord shall keep thy going out and thy coming in,

From this time forth and for evermore.— Psalms 121:8

1. We often make a mistake in endeavouring to associate these Old Testament hymns with great occasions in the history of God’s chosen race, with the important events and crises through which they were called to pass, forgetting, as we do, that Israel, and God’s servants of every age and place, need Him most of all, and need the uplift of every possible grace most of all, in the continuous processes of life’s development and the humdrum experiences of an everyday world. It needs no great stretch of the imagination to believe that some Robert Burns of his generation wrote down these lines as the expression of his simple belief in the all-providing care of Jehovah and His sleepless watchfulness.

2. The very essence of the psalm is simplicity; here you find no high flights of poetic imagination, no startling metaphors or fresh truth. And yet there is a warm glow in its message, and there is a fragrance in its simple trust, which have made it one of the best loved of all the psalms, to both Jews and Christians throughout the world. It is the song of a man who found life transfigured by a thought, a thought born out of his own experience—that the God of the everlasting hills was no mere spectator of human struggles, no indolent Deity calming himself to sleep amid the perturbations of a universe and the unheeded cries of his creatures. It is the song of a man who had seen God’s rainbow on the dark background of the day’s routine, and was assured that all is well. It is the song of a man whose ambitions were of a lowly character, and who was content to go out and in, to meet life’s appointments, if so be that the Lord Himself would be his keeper. And what a power lies secreted in the heart of a song when a man can sing it with the emphasis of experience!

I

Going Out and Coming In

1. These words practically mean the activities, the intercourse, the incidents of life. Again and again we meet with this phrase in the Old Testament Scriptures. Take for instance 2 Samuel 3:25 There Joab warns David that Abner has come with the pretence of friendship, but really to take note of his circumstances and the weak points at which to attack his throne. “He came,” said Joab, “to know thy going out and thy coming in, and to know all that thou doest.” Again, see Isaiah 37:28; there the Lord through His prophet is speaking of the terrible Sennacherib, the assailant of Jerusalem. “I know thy abode,” so run the words, “and thy going out, and thy coming in, and thy rage against me.” Here in both passages, the meaning clearly is the whole course and conduct of life, all its active incidents, all things in which man goes out amongst others and comes home to himself again, alternating company and privacy, engaging in the varied undertakings of an active existence. It is in fact life, not spent in the monotony of a cloister, or of a wilderness, but thronging with the realities of the common day and hour.

2. Home is the centre of the picture; the day begins and ends here. Its journey does not take its bearings from the points of the compass. It is not eastward or westward, but homeward or away from home. So simple are the directions of the daily pilgrimage, going out and coming in, that some of us perhaps hardly value the fair promise that God shall protect them both. We, whose lives move through a limited field, easily form the habit of prosaic outlooks, regarding our existence as a commonplace and dull matter. We go out without wonder, and return without surprise. We lose that fine fancy of childhood which made a walk into the next street an expedition and brought us back from the woodlands as travellers from a far country. That we can now step from the door with no thrill in the morning, and that our hearts do not throb as our hands feel for the latch at eventide, speaks an imagination of crippled power.

One of the great dividing-lines in human life is the threshold-line. On one side of this line a man has his “world within the world,” the sanctuary of life, the sheltered place of peace, the scene of life’s most personal, sacred, and exclusive obligations. And on the other side lies the larger life of mankind, wherein also a man must take his place and do his work. Life is spent in crossing this threshold-line, going out to the many and coming in to the few, going out to answer the call of labour and coming in to take the right to rest. And over us all every hour there watches the Almighty Love. The division-lines in the life of man have nothing that corresponds to them in the love of God. We may be here or there, but He is everywhere. 1 [Note: P. C. Ainsworth, The Threshold Grace, 11.]

3. The threshold of the home does not draw the truest division-line in life between the outward and the inward. Life is made up of thought and action, of the manifest things and the hidden things. “Thy going out.” That is our life as it is manifest to others, as it has points of contact with the world about us. We must go out. We must take up some attitude towards all other life. We must add our word to the long human story and our touch to the fashioning of the world. We need the pledge of Divine help in that life of ours in which, for their good or ill, others must have a place and a part. “And thy coming in”—into that uninvaded sanctum of thought. Did we say uninvaded? Not so. In that inner room of life there sits Regret with her pale face, and Shame with dust on her forehead, and Memory with tears in her eyes. Our coming in is a pitiable thing at times. More than one man has consumed his life in a flame of activity because he could not abide the coming in. “The Lord shall keep … thy coming in.” That means help for every lonely, impotent, inward hour of life.

It is as we convince and persuade ourselves that God is our Keeper who is also the Maker of heaven and earth, that we are delivered from our bondage to care and fear. We could do no wiselier, then, if we are still seeking the rest of faith, than to translate the phrases of this ancient Psalm into the terms of our modern experience, and to adopt them as a meditation and a prayer:—

“I am beset with cares, night and day—cares for myself and cares for my friends, cares for health physical and mental, cares of business and cares of home, cares about life and cares about death, cares for both body and soul. Where shall I look for help? None can really help me but God. He will help me. And He is the Maker of all things. What can I want, then, that He cannot give? What need I fear when He is my Shield? He is not a man, as I am, soon fatigued, soon exhausted. He has worked hitherto, and will work. The whole course of the human story has been ordained and conducted by Him; and, in every age and every nation, those who have sincerely trusted in Him have been content and at peace. Why should I distrust Him, then? I will not distrust Him. He will keep me in the perils of the day, and in the perils of the night. No form of evil can evade His eye or resist His will. Why should He not keep me from all evil, if He cares for me, as He does, and for all men? When I go down to business He will keep me. He will watch over, not my body alone, or my health, or my life: He will also keep my soul, strengthening it by adversity and by the changes of time. No change, no lapse of time, neither death, nor even life, can separate me from Him, my chief Good, and the Source of all other good. I will trust in Him. I will rest in Him. I have done with care, and fear, and the frets of life, and the dread of death; for I have taken sanctuary in Him, who will be the health of my soul from this time forth and for evermore.”

If we were thus to dwell and linger on the thought of God and His care for us, to insist on it to ourselves, to repeat and vary our expression of it, to hark back to it again and again; if we could but rise and settle into the conviction of a tender fatherly Providence that covers our whole life, and extends through all time; we too might feel the swell and sacred glow of the Hebrew pilgrims who sang the praise of Jehovah, their Keeper and ours. 1 [Note: S. Cox, The Pilgrim Psalms , 44.]

II

The Peril of the Common Round

It was much for the folk of an early time to say that as they went forth the Lord went with them, but it is more for men to say and know that same thing to-day. The “going out” has come to mean more age after age, generation after generation. It was a simpler thing once than it is now. “Thy going out”—the shepherd to his flocks, the farmer to his field, the merchant to his merchandise. There are still flocks and fields and markets, but where are the leisure, the grace, and the simplicity of life for him who has any share in the world’s work? Men go out to-day to face a life shadowed by vast industrial, commercial, and social problems. Life has grown complicated, involved, hard to understand, difficult to deal with. Tension, conflict, subtlety, surprise, and amid it all, or over it all, a vast brooding weariness that ever and again turns the heart sick.

1. There is peril in going out.—What does this going out involve? Surely it means a great exchange—an exchange of peace for warfare, passing from privacy into publicity, leaving those who know us so intimately and love us so well, and going amongst the many, perhaps unknowing and unloving. On the one side of the line we share with others, on the other side we are claiming for ourselves. Here we find our greatest joy in giving; there, usually, our greatest joy is in getting. Here we love and work for one another; there the common aim is to work for ourselves. Within the doorway, on this side of the threshold, life is common, but there, outside, it is individualistic to a degree. Competition rages, fierce and unabating, every day changing its detail, its methods, and its scope. There are slow, grinding changes in the common life which crush the sluggard to the wall, and there are quick sudden surprises which overwhelm even the wary.

There are elements of danger in modern life that threaten all the world’s toilers, whatever their work may be and wherever they may have to do it. There is the danger that always lurks in things—a warped judgment, a confused reckoning, a narrowed outlook. It is so easily possible for a man to be at close grips with the world, and yet to be ever more and more out of touch with its realities. The danger in the places where men toil is not that God is denied with a vociferous atheism; it is that He is ignored by an unvoiced indifference. It is not the babel of the market-place that men need to fear; it is its silence. If we say that we live only as we love, that we are strong only as we are pure, that we are successful only as we become just and good, the world into which we go forth does not deny these things, but it ignores them. And thus the real battle of life is not the toil for bread. It is fought by all who would keep alive and fresh in their hearts the truth that man doth not live by bread alone. For no man is this going out easy; for some it is at times terrible, for all it means a need that only this promise avails to meet—“The Lord shall keep thy going out.” He shall fence thee about with the ministry of His Spirit, and give thee grace to know, everywhere and always, that thou art in this world to live for His kingdom of love and truth and to grow a soul.

Put before your mind a man who is fully exposed to real life; imagine him with all the complications of his character: his defects of will, his disadvantage of temperament, his imperfect balance of thought and feeling. What is to happen to him in his going out and coming in? Look at him going out from church for instance. Even on the Sunday night he cannot leave these doors But more or less he finds himself in miscellaneous circumstances at once. And he will soon be waking up to Monday morning, and all the calls and all the undertakings of the week. He will not spend the week—we shall not spend it—under a sanctuary roof; he will have to engage in the business of the hour, to attend, like most of us, to things which in themselves are of the earth, earthy. He will have to do, as we shall, possibly in close personal intercourse, time after time, with those who know not our hope and love not our Lord, and are thinking of anything in the world but of helping us on for heaven. Look at this man in his “going out”—out to all the countless circumstances that make up life for him; and he cannot keep himself! Look at him in his “coming in.” He comes into the home circle; and home is too often the place where man is most off his guard. Or perhaps he is away from home life, living by himself; he comes into the privacy of his study, to his college rooms, to his lodgings in the town. However, he “comes in”; and the enemy will be waiting for that man; some snare, be sure, will be set for his feet, within or without, in the regions of thought, of imagination, of habit, all alone. Ah, what shall he do? How shall he face the perpetual effort, to watch always, to meet and to conquer everything in the going out and the coming in? 1 [Note: H. C. G. Moule, Thy Keeper, 73.]

2. There is peril in coming in.—It might seem to some that once a man was safely across the threshold of his home he might stand in less need of this promise of help. But experience says otherwise. The world has little respect for any man’s threshold. It is capable of many a bold and shameless intrusion. The things that harass a man as he earns his bread sometimes haunt him as he eats it. No home is safe unless faith be the doorkeeper. “In peace will I both lay me down and sleep: for thou, Lord, alone makest me dwell in safety.” The singer of that song knew that, as in the moil of the world, so also in the shelter of the place he named his dwelling-place, peace and safety were not of his making, but of God’s giving.

The returns of life are hardly less adventurous and fraught with surprise than its outgoings. There are apprehensions that wake as we move into the areas of our familiar places again. What may have chanced in the hours of absence? What shock of joy or sorrow may have broken on the home? To what revelation for which our hearts are unprepared are we drawing near? There are moods in which the least sensitive of us has known these questionings. When sickness or anxiety is in the house, our feelings are intensified to a pitch at which we scarcely know whether to hasten or to linger. Or, when our nerves have been strained and jangled in the business hours, they may be quickened to an ominous foreboding.

And, indeed, it is always true that as changes have been worked for us who have been out in the busy world, so for those we left at home there have been also sequences of change. As we do not return the same men we went out in the morning, we do not find quite the same presences awaiting us. The home has had its own temptations and battle-grounds as well as the shop; the wife and children have passed through their spiritual disciplines as well as ourselves. For some hours we have been out of contact; our developments may have been different. The ways along which we have journeyed may not have been the same, not even parallel, nor in the same direction. Our lessons may not have been similar, and our moods and thoughts may have moved on divergent planes.

We may be coming with buoyant steps from a day’s work, where all has gone fairly and smoothly, to a house where numberless small irritations have ruffled the temper and played upon the heart. Or we may return weary and disheartened to a hearth where the day has passed in peaceful routine. We are in a sense strangers to one another. We have to adjust ourselves and to seek a new point of contact, and it may be very easily missed. We may strike in sudden discord upon one another, our unattuned moods may jar and clash. A husband’s buoyancy may enter unsympathetically upon a mood of his wife who is worried and overstrained, or the man’s ruffled temper may turn the placid welcome of the woman to bitterness, and so the peace that ought ever to be found on the threshold of home is not found there.

A Christian woman in a burst of querulous questioning said, “Ah, if these good men had like me the charge of six little children, and only a careless girl to help them, they would know better whether it is possible to be always at peace.” Yes! “The Lord shall keep thy coming in.” Home—nursery—kitchen, are His as much as the closet. His keeping is needed in them all, and is equally possible there. 1 [Note: J. E. Cumming, The Blessed Life, 100.]

III

The Keeper of Our Way

1. The recurring and characteristic word of the psalm is “keep”; it is repeated no fewer than six times in the last six verses. The Creator of the universe is the Keeper of Israel. The Keeper of the whole nation is the Keeper of the individual man. The Keeper of the man and the nation does not fall into slumber from weariness; nor is his life, through mortal weakness, an alternate waking and sleeping; He guards them from the perils of the night as well as from the perils of the day. He keeps those who trust in Him from evil of every form. He keeps their very soul, their most inward and secret life. He keeps them in all the changes and intercourses of their outward life, their goings out and their comings in. He keeps them through all lapse of time, now and for evermore.

We need more than ever to convince our own hearts and to lay emphasis upon the truth of the constant supervision of our Father in Heaven over the minutest details of our lives, for, as Carlyle put it, “The Almighty God is not like a clockmaker that once in old, immeasurable ages, having made his horologe of a universe, sits ever since and sees it go.” Such a travesty of Providence leads to a gloomy fatalism, a fatalism that robs the heart of joy and of the safe-guarding realization of God’s near and ever-defending Presence. And there is nothing that can counteract this movement towards spiritual pessimism, but “practising the presence of God.”

In the little introductory poem to the Autobiography of Mark Rutherford, there is a line that expresses the feelings of a multitude of men and women: “I was ever commonplace.” That was certainly never true of Rutherford, and it is never true of any man. And that feeling robs life of all its beauty and its strength. If we believe that we are commonplace, our work commonplace, and our destiny commonplace, then we will do our best not to belie our character. Therefore, our hopes are blasted, and our work becomes in very deed a cruel drudgery. Could we but convince ourselves that the Lord Himself is our Keeper; could we but assure ourselves that we are linked to the eternal purpose of the Almighty, that nothing is commonplace in the outgoings and the incomings of our lives, then we should dream dreams and see visions. We should stand on our feet as the sons of God. We should be filled with the glowing hope of a new enthusiasm. Every duty would be an anvil on which we would forge another link for the chain of character, and every temptation another opportunity of adding something to our credit and the honour of our Lord. Even the very darkness of sorrow and pain would but bring out the stars of God’s mercies.

You have heard of the man who, when he was dying, asked that they should inscribe upon his tombstone just one word, and that one word was not his name, his good deeds, or anything about him; but over the anonymous corpse that lay beneath was to be the word “Kept.” It was a stroke of genius. “Kept.” That will do. If I live until I am ninety, and do well all that time, when I come to die, put me down in my grave, and only put that over the top of me, and I will be full content—“Kept.” 1 [Note: J. McNeill, Regent Square Pulpit, iii. 249.]

2. God stands at the door morning and evening, like a sentinel, to keep us under friendly observation. The Hebrews attached a good deal of religious significance to the doorway. Even now the pious Jew hangs on his doorpost the mezuzah, a small metal cylinder, which contains a piece of parchment on which is inscribed the famous command in Deuteronomy: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children … and thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates.” That command is still fulfilled. The Jew fixes the little case, with the parchment inside, on the upper part of the right-hand post of his door, and every time he goes in or comes out he touches it and he recites the words of this text.

It is said that the great conqueror, Alexander, was able, like Napoleon, to sleep amid the noise and tumult of battle. On a friend expressing surprise at the achievement, he replied, Parmenio watches! But the Maker of Parmenio, the faithful sentinel, is our keeper! How safe we are when we lie in the Bosom of God! How safe when we walk with our hand in God’s! Walking or resting, waking or sleeping, we are safe, if the Lord is our Shepherd. 1 [Note: J. M. Scott, Some Favourite Psalms , 124.]

3. The true Guardian is also the Good Shepherd. There are few of the psalms which the early Christians referred more frequently to Christ. On the lintel of an ancient house in the Hauran may be read the inscription: “O Jesus Christ, be the shelter and defence of the home and of the whole family, and bless their incoming and outgoing.” How may we also sing this psalm of Christ? By remembering the new pledges He has given us that God’s thoughts and God’s heart are with us. By remembering the infinite degree which the cross has revealed, not only of the interest God takes in our life, but of the responsibility He Himself assumes for its eternal issues. The cross was no new thing. The cross was the putting of the love of God, of the blood of Christ, into the old fundamental pieties of the human heart, the realizing by Jesus in Himself of the dearest truths about God. Look up, then, and sing this psalm of Him. Can we lift our eyes to any of the hills without seeing His figure upon them? Is there a human ideal, duty or hope with which Jesus is not inseparably and for ever identified? Is there a human experience—the struggle of the individual heart in temptation, the pity of the multitude, the warfare against the strongholds of wickedness—from which we can imagine Him absent? No; it is impossible for any high outline of morality or religion to break upon the eyes of our race; it is impossible for any field of righteous battle, any flood of suffering to unroll, without the vision of Christ upon it. He dominates our highest aspirations, and is felt by our side in our deepest sorrows. There is no loneliness, whether of height or of depth, which He does not enter by the side of His own.

Who has assumed responsibility for our life as Christ has? Who has taken upon himself the safety and the honour, not of the little tribe for whom this psalm was first sung, but of the whole of the children of men? He took upon Himself our weariness, He lifted our sorrow, He disposed of our sin—as only; God can call or lift or dispose. Nothing exhausted His pity, or His confidence to deal with us; nothing ever betrayed a fault in His character, or belied the trust His people put in Him. He suffers not thy foot to be moved; He neither slumbers nor sleeps.

Christ will keep us as a shepherd doth his flock. What a possession those of us have who can say, “The Lord is my shepherd,” not “the” or “our,” but “my” own, even should there be thousands of other sheep besides. Why is He called “the great Shepherd of the sheep”? Because surely He is Intercessor, High Priest, Mediator, Surety, Captain of Salvation, Author and Finisher of Faith, Forerunner, King of Righteousness, King of Peace: He is all these, and all else His sheep need; for see our provision, “I shall not want.” I should think not; with such a Shepherd, how can we? Our position, “He maketh me to lie down.” No sheep lies down until it is satisfied—so our position as kept is just “to lie down,” to rest on His bosom, secure in His care from all attacks from without or within.… Being kept by such a Shepherd, “surely goodness and mercy shall follow us all the days of our life.” The meaning of this is that in the East the head shepherd goes in front and two under-shepherds follow behind the sheep, to pick up any who become lame, or are prone to wander. Our Shepherd, who is to keep us, has commissioned Goodness and Mercy to thus follow us. We “shall never perish, neither shall any one pluck us out of his hand,” and “we shall dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.” Having been kept all the way by His own power, for He will not give this work to another; we are so precious to Him that we are to be kept by the power that created heaven and earth. “Keep them in thine own name,” He prays. The very name of the Lord is at stake. 1 [Note: G. Clarke, The Keeper and the Kept, 56.]

4. The help and protection of the Lord accommodate themselves to all our individually varying states and circumstances. Help on our “right hand” is help for our whole sphere of life; help “by day and by night” is help under all changes; help which subdues the fierce power of the light and also protects from the evils which “walk in darkness” is help in all our conditions; “preservation for our soul” is help for our whole nature from its centre, help for body, soul, and spirit; help in our “going out and coming in” is help watchful and perpetual.

I do not know how these words were interpreted when very literal meanings were attached to the parabolic words about the streets of gold and the endless song. But they present no difficulty to us. Indeed, they confirm that view of the future which is ever taking firmer hold of men’s minds, and which is based on the growing sense of the continuity of life. To offer a man an eternity of music-laden rest is to offer him a poor thing. He would rather have his going out and his coming in. Yes, and he shall have them. All that is purest and best in them shall remain. Hereafter he shall still go out to find deeper joys of living and wider visions of life; still come in to greater and ever greater thoughts of God. 1 [Note: P. C. Ainsworth, The Threshold Grace, 17.]

I know of a “going out” and a “coming in” when we shall specially need the preserving care of God; and to these, as to, every other, may the promise be extended. There is a “going out” from this world; there is a “coming in” to the next world; the departure from the present scene of existence on the unknown futurity. But the Lord shall “preserve thy going out and thy coming in.” Christ Jesus, according to His own declaration, has the keys of death and the invisible world; and therefore, it must be He who dismisses the spirit from the flesh, and opens to it the separate state. 2 [Note: Henry Melvill.]

The last day dawned, bringing a busy morning with correspondence and future plans. At a quarter to five letters and cheques were brought to him to sign, and he dictated two other letters. Soon after he fell asleep, and awoke at a quarter to six and partook of a light meal. During the progress of the meal he said to his wife, “My head is so heavy, let me rest it on your face.” He appeared to have no pain but a slight choking sensation. Then he leaned back in his chair and passed away. He was not afraid of death. “I have looked,” he had written not long previously in sympathizing with a dear friend on the loss of her husband, “into the face of death. Three times has my life been given back to me after a dire struggle that nearly ended it all. But oh! I can tell you death is not so dark and drear as it is painted, even to the Christian. I felt as in the embrace of a friend.” 1 [Note: Memoirs of the Late Dr. Barnardo, 269.]

She sat within Life’s Banquet Hall at noon,

When word was brought unto her secretly:

“ The Master cometh onwards quickly; soon

Across the Threshold He will call for thee.”

Then she rose up to meet Him at the Door,

But turning, courteous, made a farewell brief

To those that sat around. From Care and Grief

She parted first: …

Then turning unto twain

That stood together, tenderly and oft

She kissed them on their foreheads, whispering soft:

“ Now must we part; yet leave me not before

Ye see me enter safe within the Door;

Kind bosom-comforters, that by my side

The darkest hour found ever closest bide,

A dark hour waits me, ere for evermore

Night with its heaviness be overpast;

Stay with me till I cross the Threshold o’er.”

So Faith and Hope stayed by her till the last.

But giving both her hands

To one that stood the nearest: “Thou and I

May pass together; for the holy bands

God knits on earth are never loosed on high.

Long have I walked with thee; thy name arose

E’en in my sleep, and sweeter than the close

Of music was thy voice; for thou wert sent

To lead me homewards from my banishment

By devious ways, and never hath my heart

Swerved from thee, though our hands were wrung apart

By spirits sworn to sever us; above

Soon shall I look upon Thee as Thou art.”

So she cross’d o’er with Love. 2 [Note: Dora Greenwell, The Soul’s Parting.]

Literature

Ainsworth (P. C.), The Threshold Grace, 11.

Cox (S.), The Pilgrim Psalms , 44.

Cumming (J. E.), The Blessed Life, 94.

McNeill (J.), Regent Square Pulpit, ii. 249.

Melvill (H.), Sermons, 1854, No. 2241.

Moule (H. C. G.), Thy Keeper, 63.

Piggott (W. C.), The Imperishable Word, 120.

Pulsford (W.), Trinity Church Sermons, 50.

Scott (J. M.), Some Favourite Psalms , 126.

Smith (G. A.), Four Psalms , 127.

Wilson (J. M.), Sermons Preached in Clifton College Chapel, ii 147.

Christian World Pulpit, lxxxiii. 107 (G. E. Darlaston).

Presbyterian, Jan. 23, 1913 (J. R. M‘Lean).