Bible Commentaries
Psalms 90

Verse 1

The Home of the Soul

Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place

In all generations.— Psalms 90:1.

The 90th Psalm, says Isaac Taylor, might be cited as perhaps the most sublime of human compositions, the deepest in feeling, the loftiest in theologic conception, the most magnificent in its imagery. True is it in its report of human life as troubled, transitory, and sinful; true in its conception of the Eternal—the Sovereign and the Judge, and yet the refuge and the hope of men who, notwithstanding the most severe trials of their faith, lose not their confidence in Him, but who, in the firmness of faith, pray for, as if they were predicting, a near-at-hand season of refreshment. Wrapped, one might say, in mystery, until the distant day of revelation should come, there is here conveyed the doctrine of Immortality; for in this very plaint of the brevity of the life of man, and of the sadness of these his few years of trouble, and their brevity, and their gloom, there is brought into contrast the Divine immutability: and yet it is in terms of a submissive piety: the thought of a life eternal is here in embryo. No taint is there in this psalm of the pride and petulance, the half-uttered blasphemy, the malign disputing or arraignment of the justice or goodness of God, which have so often shed a venomous colour upon the language of those who have writhed in anguish, personal or relative. There are few, probably, among those who have passed through times of bitter and distracting woe, or who have stood, the helpless spectators of the miseries of others, that have not fallen into moods of mind violently in contrast with the devout and hopeful melancholy which breathes throughout this Ode. Rightly attributed to the Hebrew lawgiver or not, it bespeaks its remote antiquity, not merely by the majestic simplicity of its style, but negatively, by the entire avoidance of those sophisticated turns of thought which belong to a late—a lost—age, in a people’s intellectual and moral history. This psalm, undoubtedly, is centuries older than the moralizing of that time, when the Jewish mind had listened to what it could never bring into a true assimilation with its own mind—the abstractions of the Greek Philosophy. 1 [Note: Isaac Taylor, Spirit of the Hebrew Poetry, 161.]

1. There was a tradition among the Jews, although these traditions are not altogether trustworthy, that Moses, the man of God, wrote this psalm or prayer. And it has always been felt that the psalm seemed to have some special connexion with, or reference to, the experience and the impressions of the children of Israel in the days that they were doomed to wander up and down in the wilderness without being allowed to enter into the Promised Land. And there is much in the psalm that corroborates that view. It is the psalm of a generation of men who felt themselves to be wasting away under God’s wrath, consumed by His anger. They are spending their years as a tale that is told. The vanity and emptiness of life are pressed home upon them with great severity. At the same time, it is not a psalm of mere wailing and lamentation. Very far from it. There is the exercise of faith in it, not only in the first verse, but in the appeal to God to come and dwell with them as their case requires, and make them experience His mercy. The cloud is dark that hangs over the congregation, but faith is still, as it were, seeing the bow in the cloud.

2. By whomsoever written, the psalm makes it plain that the writer was thinking and speaking not only for himself, but for all his own people of Israel, if not for the whole race of mankind. These opening words are the Eternal Gospel of the Fatherly Love of God, in which the sons of men can ever find their “home.” How precious is that last word, and what a pity that our translators did not adopt it instead of “dwelling place.” Alas! how many there are whose dwelling-place is not a “home.” The Prayer-Book Version is a little better in giving us the word “refuge”; for to most of us home is the best refuge we can find, if not the only one. It is our retreat after the toils and turmoils of the busy world, our refuge from the strife of tongues, our covert from the scornful rebuke of the proud. Our home, if it be as God intended it should be, is the place where all that is best and sweetest in life is cherished and enjoyed, the one sacred shrine where even the outcast can find love, and the stern, hard heart can also find an opportunity for giving a little love in return. Home is the scene of our keenest anxieties and our bitterest griefs, no less than of our most restful peace and of our highest joys. But in the process of evolving and growing mankind, all things are yet unfinished and imperfect; even our very homes are not full enough of purity and peace and love to satisfy the immortal heart of man. Defect, disturbance, and decay, with all the varied chances of this mortal life, make even the best of homes partial and transient. Our immortal souls want everlasting security, unbroken peace, unalloyed happiness. Nothing less than the Eternal God can be a perfect refuge, a perfect home, for the souls of His children. And in Him is all that the most craving and grasping can possibly desire. God has made us so that nothing shall, nothing can, ever satisfy us but Himself. And when we have found Him, and made Him our real refuge and home, we have gained the Eternal Peace, which the whole world can neither give nor take away.

“Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.” Beside that venerable and ancient abode, that has stood fresh, strong, incorruptible, and unaffected by the lapse of millenniums, there stands the little transitory canvas tent in which our earthly lives are spent.… If I make God my Refuge, I shall get something a great deal better than escape from outward sorrow—namely, an amulet which will turn the outward sorrow into joy. The bitter water will still be given me to drink, but it will be filtered water, out of which God will strain all the poison, though He leaves plenty of the bitterness in it; for bitterness is a tonic. The evil that is in the evil will be taken out of it in the measure in which we make God our Refuge, and all will be “right that seems most wrong,” when we recognize it to be “His sweet will.” 1 [Note: A. Maclaren, The God of the Amen, 166.]

I

Home

1. Men everywhere have either burrowed under the ground or built above it, and sought to provide some kind of place in which they might dwell, and which they call home. Rude and imperfect it often is, made of such materials as they could find to hand, or in such ways as their faculties could devise. Or where civilization and intelligence have advanced or wealth abounded, men have built houses larger, more splendid, and furnished with ample conveniences. But in all, the aim and desire have been to have a place where they could obtain shelter and rest.

The wilderness episode in Israel’s life meant that they had no home. They were always moving, moving—all the year, and then another year, for forty years. Never settling down at home, always moving—you might well call such an experience a wilderness. Old Egypt, the land of bondage, had been bad enough; but at least there were homes in Egypt, and it was no wonder if at times the people longed to turn back into Egypt. Homes had been promised in Canaan, but that promise was for the benefit of their children. These adult Israelites through one long forlorn generation must be always moving. And the long-continued homelessness taught them something. For all time to come the memory of that homeless wilderness would make them value the homes that God should give them in Canaan.

Archbishop Leighton died in an inn in 1684 during a visit to Loudon. He had often expressed a wish to die in an inn “because it looks so like a pilgrim’s going home, to whom this world is all a pilgrimage.” 1 [Note: A. Alexander, in The Expository Times, xii. 563.]

How passionately the longing could possess Stevenson is familiar to all those who have read the thoughts of home from abroad in Songs of Travel and Vailima Letters. In a deeper sense, as it concerned the inward life, the same thing is true. Apparently an unresting traveller in the spiritual country, he yet had come to rest upon certain great convictions, in which his spirit had its home. These he expresses often with an evident sense of relief and the comfortable peace of assurance. In the longest journey of all, the lifelong journey, the same shadowy but hospitable and firelit sweetness awaits its close. The Covenanters pass the dark river amid a “storm of harsh and fiercely jubilant noises” which add a tenfold peacefulness to the shores which they had reached. For himself, who does not know the Requiem which, written seven years before his death, was inscribed upon his tombstone at the last:

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me;

“ Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.”

Such words imply more than they express; perhaps they mean more than the speaker knows. In them we hear echoes of a great voice that calls home the thinker to faith, the struggler to achievement, and the dead from dying to a new life. And so there is arrival as well as travel, after all. Indeed the two are combined in regard to faith, and achievement, and that dimly seen but beautiful country beyond the grave. In all these, the true life is at once making for a land that is very far off, and yet at the same time it is ever coming home. 1 [Note: John Kelman, The Faith of Robert Louis Stevenson, 183.]

Now more the bliss of love is felt,

Though felt to be the same;

’Tis still our lives in one to melt,

Within love’s sacred flame:

Each other’s joy each to impart,

Each other’s grief to share;

To look into each other’s heart,

And find all solace there:

To lay the head upon one breast,

To press one answering hand,

To feel through all the soul’s unrest,

One soul to understand:

To go into the teeming world,

The striving and the heat,

With knowledge of one tent unfurl’d

To welcome weary feet:

A shadow in a weary land,

Where men as wanderers roam:

A shadow where a rock doth stand—

The shadow of a Home. 2 [Note: George J. Romanes.]

2. There are places in which men live, calling them homes, but in which there is no comfort, and not even the appearance of it. Poor, wretched dwellings and abodes of poverty, squalor, and suffering, where there is scarce a glow on the hearth to warm, or a morsel on the table to soothe the pangs of hunger. Or there are dwellings of misery and wretchedness from vice and its effects, scenes of brawling, strife, and anger. Or there are abodes where, though there may be earthly abundance and luxuries, there is a moral coldness, a want of sympathy and affection between those who dwell under the same roof; and so with all its comforts, it is a home of misery. But it is not such that we associate with the true idea of home, for the right and good and true home is a place of happiness and comfort.

How can those who do not know Christ and our Father’s home in heaven form any idea of them save from what they see in us and our homes? That is the way the heathen learn of Christ and heaven. In Hangchow, China, Mrs. Mattox had been accustomed to invite the little children to her home and make them happy there. Once a Chinese teacher was talking to some of them, and asked, “Where do you want to go when you die—to heaven?” “No,” they answered. “To hell?” “No.” “Where, then, do you want to go?” “To Mrs. Mattox’s house,” they replied. They could not imagine anything more heavenly than that. 1 [Note: R. E. Speer, Men Who were Found Faithful, 141.]

3. There is no place on earth which is so dear to the heart as home, if the home is such as we usually associate with the name. It is connected with our earliest and happiest resolutions. It is the place round which are twined the most tender and hallowed memories. It is the spot in which are centred our fondest affections, and it contains in it the hopes of all the purity and goodness which are to come hereafter. However humble or lowly, still it is home, a dearer and a sweeter spot than all the world beside. And it is one of the most endearing aspects in which God can be regarded, when He is revealed as the home of His people, as the habitation, “the dwelling and abiding place,” of the soul in all time and under every circumstance.

Arriving in New York, after their tour in Canada, the party proceeded by the night train to Washington, where they spent a day driving round and seeing all the chief buildings, and then, two days afterwards, they went on board the “Lucania.” My father writes: “Never shall I forget the joy of this morning and the excitement of seeing, as we drove up, the funnels of the grand ‘Lucania’: I passed through the crowded wharf as on enchanted ground, and stepped on board with a feeling of delight and gratitude reaching almost to ecstasy. Thank God for this trip, for all His mercies, for all the kindness of friends and for the pleasure and instruction of the experience; but oh, the joy of returning to the old country, and to home! That swallows up all other gratification in one great rejoicing. When at length I reach the gates of death, may I have the same joy in prospect of the heavenly home!” 1 [Note: The Life of Henry J. Pope, by his Son, 174.]

As one contemplates Mr. Gladstone’s triumphs, one finds oneself recurring in memory to the beautiful background of domestic quiet and stately dignity in which he was as much or more at home than in the public gaze. I can see him now in an old wideawake and cloak—trudging off in the drizzle of an October morning to an early service. I remember how, at Hawarden in 1896, on one of the sad evenings after my father’s death, I dined alone with him and one other guest, and with what beautiful consideration he talked quietly on about things in which he thought we should be interested—things that needed neither comment nor response, and all so naturally and easily, that one hardly realized the tender thoughtfulness of it all. And last of all, I remember how I came one evening at a later date to dine at Hawarden, and was shown into a little half-lit ante-room next the dining-room. He was just at the beginning of his last illness, and he was suffering from discomfort and weakness. There on a sofa he sat, side by side with Mrs. Gladstone; they were sitting in silence, hand in hand, like two children, the old warrior and his devoted wife. It seemed almost too sacred a thing to have seen; but it is not too sacred to record, for it seemed the one last perfect transfiguring touch of love and home. 2 [Note: A. C. Benson, Along the Road, 53.]

II

God our Home

Moses was a homeless man. Early in life he had fled from Pharaoh’s court, where he had been brought up. When he lived in Midian as the son-in-law of Jethro, he took part in the wandering life of the desert tribes. When he was called upon to deliver the children of Israel from Egypt, and to be their leader and lawgiver, he shared their wanderings for forty years in the great and terrible wilderness, where they had no fixed abode. In all their journeys they had before them the prospect of Canaan, the good land which God was to give them for a possession. But Moses was not permitted to enter upon that goodly inheritance. He was to see it from afar from Mount Pisgah, but he was to die in the wilderness, where “no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.” And so the old man, who knew no home or lasting abode on earth, finds his home and refuge in Him. He contrasts the eternity and unchangeableness of God with the transitory and fleeting circumstances of man. Thinking of the past generations, he remembered what God was to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, when they had no fixed abode, but confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on earth. And looking to future generations he discerned beyond the earthly Canaan the city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God. And so, for the homeless man and the homeless people, faith beheld the promise of a dwelling-place, a home, in the Lord.

Nay, by no cumulative changeful years,

For all our bitter harvesting of tears,

Shalt thou tame man, nor in his breast destroy

The longing for his home which deadens joy.

Not blindly in such moments, not in vain,

The open secret flashes on the brain,

As if one almost guessed it, almost knew

Whence we have sailed and voyage whereunto;

Not vainly, for albeit that hour goes by,

And the strange letters perish from the sky,

Yet learn we that a life to us is given

One with the cosmic spectacles of heaven,—

Feel the still soul, for all her questionings,

Parcel and part of sempiternal things;

For us, for all, one overarching dome,

One law the order, and one God the home. 1 [Note: F. W. H. Myers, The Renewal of Youth.]

1. God is the natural home of the soul. In that home it was born, from that great Father our spirits came, “trailing clouds of glory from God, who is our home.” To live and dwell in Him, nurtured by His care, fed by His bounty, watched by His grace, guarded by His mercy; to be brought up and kept in His love, and to love Him with our heart and soul, and there and then to find all peace, rest, and blessedness—that is our purpose and our destiny, that the design and blessedness of our existence. And only in Him do we find what we require—protection against temptation, shelter from trials, and refuge from calamity, light in the midst of darkness, warmth to cheer our dulled and deadened hearts, release from the burden of sin, deliverance from the power of passion, food for our hunger, safety from every evil, and rest, quiet, peaceful rest, to our agitated and worn hearts.

When we have been long in a foreign land, associating with strangers or casual acquaintances who have little interest in us, and no love for us; if we have been ill, far away from home and friends, and have had no friendly faces to smile on us, and no sweet, tender sympathy to soothe us, how gladsome it is, after such an experience, to leave that land of exile and strangeness and to sail for home, where we know—

There is an eye will mark

Our coming, and look brighter when we come.

And how cheering and comforting it is for us to know that, though now we are wanderers from home, our home in God still awaits us, the door is ever open to receive us, and the kind, compassionate Father watching for us, eager for our return, and ready to receive us and enfold us in His love, and set us in royal state at His own right hand to partake of His fulness, to be with Him and His dear and loved ones, whose faces will beam on us with tenderness and whose hearts will overflow to us with sympathy and affection; and that out of that home we shall never again go, but be there in infinite joy and glory for evermore. Your soul leaves its house of clay within which it has dwelt here below. Where shall that soul, when it goes, find rest and home?

Here is the house,

Empty and lone;

Where is the home of that which is gone,

Out in the regions of boundless black space,

Floating and floating, no space, no place?

Or did it gather its wealth and remove

To the home up above?

All’s still in the house here below,

God grant that the soul that has wandered away,

Be not homeless to-day.

Into Thy house,

Lord, take us straight,

Lest we be left in the darkness to wait;

Lest we be lost in realms without sun,

And wander for ever where mansion is none,

Crying without, “Let us in! Let us in!”

When the feast shall begin,

And the door shall be shut. 1 [Note: R. Stephen, Divine and Human Influence, ii. 271.]

2. Home suggests a place where care is thrown aside, while the affections expand themselves freely and fully, and loving looks and kindly words and gentle deeds are the order of the day. When God is said to be the refuge or home of man, it is meant that God offers man His best and tenderest welcome; that in God, and God alone, man finds that which yields perfect repose and satisfaction to all the pure and tender sympathies of his nature. For man’s higher or spiritual self the One Eternal Being is what the fireside represents to the heart’s affection—a sphere in which man may abandon himself to perfect enjoyment, to that unrestrained delight which accompanies a sense of being among friends, with whom reserve is neither necessary nor possible.

There is a presence moving in that home, anticipating all our wants, cheering us when we are sad, hushing us when we are fretful and impatient, smoothing us when we are ruffled, ministering to us when we are in suffering; and the soul, enfolded in God’s great, tender love, finds rest and blessedness. And as it is a home of love, it is one in which there is no coldness or reserve. In the world there is always a certain reserve. There are joys which delight us, but which others cannot care for. There are sorrows, cares, anxieties which trouble us, but in which others have no interest. There are things that we do not tell and cannot tell. Even with our most familiar acquaintances, there are some chambers in our heart kept locked from them. But at home, in a home of love, everything is open, frank, free, natural; we throw off all restraint, unbosom all our heart’s cares and troubles; we know we shall get sympathy; we speak to interested ears and loving hearts, whose joys and sorrows are ours. We are not afraid to whisper our secrets. It is to no rude and heartless gaze we expose them. We do not fear ridicule or cold indifference. We confide in hearts which love us as they love themselves. And we get relief by others sharing and bearing with us. So the soul finds sympathy in God.

Lord, I have viewed this world over, in which Thou hast set me; I have tried how this and that thing will fit my spirit, and the design of my creation, and can find nothing on which to rest, for nothing here doth itself rest, but such things as please me for a while, in some degree, vanish and flee as shadows from before me. Lo! I come to Thee—the Eternal Being—the Spring of life—the Centre of rest—the Stay of the Creation—the Fulness of all things. I join myself to Thee; with Thee I will lead my life, and spend my days, with whom I aim to dwell for ever, expecting, when my little time is over, to be taken up ere long into Thy eternity. 1 [Note: John Howe, The Vanity of Man as Mortal.]

3. The Old Testament is rich in promises that God will supply the earthly needs of those whose trust is in Him. He fed His people with manna in the wilderness; He satisfieth our mouth with good things ( Psalms 103:5). He prepareth a table before us in the presence of our enemies ( Psalms 23:5). The promise to those who trust in the Lord is that verily they shall be fed ( Psalms 37:3). And the Psalmist records his lifelong experience that he had never “seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread” ( Psalms 37:25). And He who gives us our daily bread also satisfies the higher needs of our souls. This blessed fact is fully developed in the New Testament; but even the Old Testament saints record that they panted for God “as the hart panteth after the water brooks” ( Psalms 42:1); that by Him their “soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness” ( Psalms 63:5). “He satisfieth the longing soul, and filleth the hungry soul with goodness” ( Psalms 107:9). If we make the Lord our habitation, all our wants, spiritual and temporal, will be supplied.

As is a mother to her babe, so is God to us. She makes the children’s home—not the two-roomed cottage of the peasant, with the bare walls and scant furniture, nor the many-roomed ducal palace, with its teeming wealth and oppressive luxury; but the love and light, the warm kisses and tender care, the sweet smile and the strong soul of the mother—she, and all that she is, makes “Home, sweet, sweet Home.” She is the dwelling-place of the child’s heart, the satisfaction of desire, the unfailing nourishment of the child’s life. What God has made that mother to her child, He Himself is to us men—our asylum of peace, our refuge from passing foes, our dwelling-place and home from age to age. 1 [Note: J. Clifford, Social Worship, 26.]

4. The inviolability of home is the spirit of our English proverb, that a man’s house is his castle. And in this sense God is the Home of the soul; the soul finds in the presence of God a protection against the enemies which threaten it with ruin in the rough life of the world. In this sense David cries, “I will love thee, O Lord, my strength. The Lord is my rock, and my fortress and my deliverer; my God, my strength, in whom I will trust; my buckler and the horn of my salvation, and my high tower.” Or again, “Be thou my strong rock for an house of defence to save me. For thou art my rock and my fortress.” Or, again, “Be thou my strong habitation, whereunto I may continually resort; thou hast given commandment to save me; for thou art my rock and my fortress.” Once more, “He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress; my God, in whom I will trust. For he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence. He shall cover thee with his pinions, and under his wings shalt thou take refuge: his truth is a shield and a buckler.” 2 [Note: H. P. Liddon, Christmastide Sermons, 243.]

One incident of the voyage to America served as a sharp test to Wesley of his own spiritual condition. Amongst the passengers he found a little group of Moravian exiles, who, by the simplicity and seriousness of their piety, strangely interested him. A storm broke over the ship one evening just as these simple-minded Germans had begun a religious service; Wesley describes what follows: “In the midst of the Psalm wherewith their service began, the sea broke over, split the mainsail in pieces, covered the ship, and poured in between the decks as if the great deep had already swallowed us up. A terrible screaming began amongst the English. The Germans calmly sang on. I asked one of them afterwards, ‘Were you not afraid?’ He answered, ‘I thank God, no.’ I asked, ‘But were not your women and children afraid?’ He replied mildly, ‘No; our women and children are not afraid to die.’ From them I went to their crying, trembling neighbours, and pointed out to them the difference in the hour of trial between him that feareth God and him that feareth Him not.” 1 [Note: W. H. Fitchett, Wesley and His Century, 98.]

5. The soul that talks to God rises out of a narrow and selfish individualism into fellowship, not only with the Eternal Creator, but also with the vast and various family of God in the past, present, and future. We are dwelling in the same home as our fathers and brothers and sons. Israel is there in its completeness. God is the eternal home of the race. “The elders who, through faith, obtained a good report,” in the grey dawn of the world, dwelt therein. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the founders of Israel, had long since passed away, but their home was not broken up, for they still lived in and to God. Indeed, all our dead live in Him, for He is not the God of dead men, but of living men, for all live unto Him. Thus we are already all together with the Lord.

Bunyan’s Mr. Fearing was “kept very low, and made his life burdensome to himself” by fear of death. But as he came near to his end his fear disappeared, and “he went over at last not much above wetshod,” sending, as his last message to his friends, the brave words, “Tell them all, it’s all right.” 2 [Note: J. Clifford, Social Worship, 31.]

Literature

Clifford (J.), Social Worship an Everlasting Necessity, 26.

Glover (R.), The Forgotten Resting-place, 3.

Liddon (H. P.), Christmastide in St. Paul’s, 240.

Marten (C. H.), Plain Bible Addresses, 173.

Myres (W. M.), Fragments that Remain, 122.

Rendall (G. H.), Charterhouse Sermons, 276.

Richards (W. R.), For Whom Christ Died, 141.

Shannon (F. F.), The Soul’s Atlas, 68.

Spurgeon (C. H.), New Park Street Pulpit, i. (1855), No. 46.

Stephen (R.), Divine and Human Influence, ii. 255.

Christian Commonwealth, xxxi. (1911) 557 (R. J. Campbell).

Christian World Pulpit, xlvii. 396 (W. Sinclair); lxiv. 419 (E. H. Eland); lxv. 102 (R. Rainy).

Verse 12

The Right Use of Time

So teach us to number our days,

That we may get us an heart of wisdom.— Psalms 90:12.

1. This psalm of man’s pilgrimage through all generations has in it, says Ewald, “something unusually arresting, solemn, sinking deep into depths of the Divinity. Moses might well have been seized by these awful thoughts at the close of his wanderings; and the author, whoever he be, is clearly a man grown grey with vast experience, who here takes his stand at the close of his earthly course.” The verses of the psalm have become the funeral hymn of Christendom, which every Church recites at the burial of its dead.

The slow, sad experience of life wrought out in the Psalmist a twofold result—he has learned the secret both of detachment and of attachment. This aged pilgrim grows more and more weaned from the world and detached from things trivial and temporal; he stands aloof and absolved from the accidents of existence. But he clings closer and closer still to things unseen and eternal, and is made partaker of their everlastingness. Such should be the effect of a right numbering of the days and years as they escape us—to teach at last that, though the world passeth away, and the lust thereof, yet he who doeth the will of God abideth for ever.

2. But he has learned more than that. He has learned that God is from everlasting to everlasting. It would help to cheer us if we could lay this thought to heart, numbering our days, not merely to realize their brevity, but to realize by contrast the length of God’s years. We have but a short time to work, and it is well to remember that, in order that we may be diligent. But God has a whole eternity wherein to work, and it is well to remember that also, so that we may cease from fretfulness and impatience at the slow progress of the Divine Kingdom. It is by so numbering both our years and God’s that we attain to a wise heart.

Time was Napoleon’s most precious commodity, and for every stage and state of life he had a routine from which he deviated most unwillingly. In these years his days were spent in the careful husbanding of every hour. 1 [Note: W. M. Sloane, Napoleon Bonaparte, ii. 253.]

I

A Prayer for Instruction

“Teach us.”

1. At first thought it would seem as though we needed not to be instructed on such a subject. It would seem as though man’s mortality were so evident that it would be impossible for him to hide it from himself. Nevertheless, he does hide it from himself, and on this account no prayer is more important than the prayer of the text. The demonstration of human mortality is in a hundred generations of the dead. It is in the ground beneath our feet, which is billowy with graves full of the dust which once lived in human forms and spoke and was loved. It is in the long line of the one hundred thousand human lives which every day pass the boundary-line from time into eternity and melt into nothingness before our eyes. It is in every tick of the clock which marks the passage of some immortal soul and declares the death-rate of the world. Yet, humanity at large does not realize the mortality of humanity. So thoroughly unrealized is the mortality of man that the first condition of right living, the fundamental thought of a wise life, is ignored and undreamed of by thousands and thousands.

We can number other men’s days and years, and think they will die ere it be long, if we see them sick or sore or cold: but we cannot number our own. When two ships meet on the sea, they which are in one ship think that the other ship doth sail exceedingly fast, but that their ship goeth fair and softly, or rather standeth still, although in truth one ship saileth as fast as the other; so every man thinks that the other post and run and fly to the grave, but that himself standeth stock still, although, indeed, a year with him is no longer than it is with the other. 1 [Note: Henry Smith.]

I remember, in the seminary, a fellow student who had upon the crown of his head a tumour that was constantly growing. The physicians told him that it was impossible, by any effort of human skill, to relieve him. He was waiting the moment when, in its growth, it should at last pierce the hard bone of the skull; and he knew that the moment that should be accomplished, he would fall dead. God has spared him these many years to preach the gospel. But, when others were full of frolic and fun, I noted the serious mirth of that man. He lived in a division of his days. He counted nothing in the future. He finished each day’s work when the night came. 2 [Note: S. H. Tyng.]

2. The uncertainty of human life and the vanity of human wishes have always been the theme of the satirist as well as of the preacher. But satire by itself is no remedy; it can, at best, only point out the disease. In the very fact that nothing is certain about life except its uncertainty, we have a safeguard. We know roughly the limits by which we are circumscribed; we know enough to warn, but not enough to paralyse. Could we look forward with absolute certainty to half a century of health and vigour, we might be carried away even more than we are by the pride of life. Did we know that death awaited us in the near future, our spirits would be dulled, our ardour damped in carrying out legitimate schemes of useful work. As it is, we may construct our averages of life, we may frame our insurance tables for the mass with some approach to accuracy; but we cannot predict the length of an individual life, save when medical skill can anticipate by a little the decree which has already gone forth. It is a merciful dispensation that has so ordered things. God would, indeed, have us to ponder over the mysteries which surround our existence, but not in such a way as to sap the power of action in us.

Herein is the secret, the true alleviation of the burden of to-morrow; not the false and feeble attempt to oppose care by carelessness, to turn from the anxieties and troubles of life to a wild recklessness, assuming only a painful jauntiness which conceals the pain. The true remedy is not forgetfulness, but faith. This is the peace of God which passeth all understanding, which guards the heart and calms the fevered life. To the soul which has this noble courage born of faith no turn of affairs can come amiss. He is not open to the blows of chance. It is not mere resignation: it is glad confidence that all things work together for good to them that love the Lord. “If I should intend Liverpool and land in heaven,” said John Howe about a passage from Ireland. If, what then? To John Howe, who knew that the eternal God was his refuge, and underneath were the everlasting arms, what shadow could the future have? Why should he be bowed down by the burden of to-morrow? As his days, right on till the last sand had run, right on till the last gasp of breath, so would be his strength. 1 [Note: Hugh Black, Comfort, 189.]

II

A Wise Enumeration

“Teach us to number our days.”

1. What does it mean to “number our days”? Not just to calculate the chances of our own survival in this world—which we may easily gather from the actuarial tables of an insurance company. It means to take the measure of our days as compared with the work to be performed, with the provision to be laid up for eternity, with the preparation to be made for death, with the precaution to be taken against judgment to come. It is to estimate human life by the purposes to which it should be applied, by the eternity to which it must conduct. It means to gauge and test our own career in the light of its moral and spiritual issues. And as God teaches us this, we understand the secret of true wisdom. For wisdom lies in a just estimate of the real value of things. “What shall it profit a man?” remains the final question. As Plato said, in one of his mystical sentences, it is the art of measurement which would save the soul.

2. The Psalmist’s petition in effect asks that we shall so mind the things of this world as not to forget their issues; and that we shall so mind the things of eternity as not to forget that they are to be gained through godliness, righteousness, and sobriety in using the things of time. The sublime motive in the distance must not overpower us, so that we shall be rendered unfit for discharging our present duty, small and insignificant though it may be; nor must we be so engrossed with the present duty as to lose sight of the grand motive, which redeems from littleness every duty, however small, which is a means to so great an end.

3. The true way to number our days is not so to number them that they seem to include the result of our lives, but so to number them that they seem to include simply the beginning of our lives. They and all they bring are only stepping-stones which lead us up to the threshold of a nobler life, nobler in its opportunities, occasions, and the character of its joy. Life is not mere existence, the coming and the going of breath, and its coming again; life means all that it includes of feeling and thinking and doing and growth. And the heavenly life is only the continuing of our activities and the multiplication of serviceable occasions along those high levels and stretches of being to the altitude of which we are lifted by the movement of prior activities, as birds are lifted by the movement of their wings. The man who numbers his days rightly, numbers them not as if they ended anything, but as if they began something. He thinks of them in their termination as bringing him not to an end but to a beginning—a beginning for which, if rightly used, they prepare and fit him.

“What would you wish to be doing,” was the question once put to a wise man, “if you knew that you were to die the next minute?” “Just what I am doing now,” was his reply, though he was neither repeating the creed nor telling his religious experience, but, for aught I know, posting his accounts, or talking merry nonsense with his children round the fire. Nothing that is worthy of a living man can be unworthy of a dying one; and whatever is shocking in the last moment, would be disgraceful in every other. 1 [Note: James Martineau.]

The family motto of Dr. Doddridge was Dum vivimus, vivamus, which in its primary significance is, to be sure, not very suitable to a Christian divine; but he paraphrased it thus:—

Live, while you live, the epicure would say,

And seize the pleasures of the present day.

Live, while you live, the sacred preacher cries,

And give to God each moment as it flies.

Lord, in my views let both united be,

I live in pleasure, when I live to Thee. 2 [Note: Gentleman’s Magazine, 1786, p. 35.]

Life is unutterably dear,

God makes to-day so fair;

Though heaven is better,—being here

I long not to be there.

The weights of life are pressing still,

Not one of them may fall;

Yet such strong joys my spirit fill,

That I can bear them all.

Though Care and Grief are at my side,

There would I let them stay,

And still be ever satisfied

With beautiful To-day! 1 [Note: Charlotte F. B. Rogé.]

III

The Units of Life

“Our days.”

1. Notice the writer’s unit of computation in measuring life. He speaks not of years, not even of months or weeks, but of days. There is something very impressive in such a mode of reckoning. A year is a long period; and while we may hope for years of life, be they many or few, the passage of time is not continuously felt by us. But days—how they rush past and fly away with a rapidity which on reflection is almost appalling! Even the heedless man must feel the ebb of life when it comes to be calculated by days. Yet as we see the winged hours go by, we are apt to think as lightly of them as if the series would never cease. We sleep and play and busy ourselves with what we call the serious business of life without much reference to the rising and setting of the sun. A day lost, a day half wasted, a day misused, causes us no poignant regret. We are so confident that many others are still in store for us. As they have come and gone in the past, so will they come and go in the future. We must admit, if we are pressed, that the supply is not absolutely unlimited. An end will be reached at some indefinite epoch, but not yet—not yet; and if meanwhile we are careless or prodigal, we anticipate many opportunities of “making up for lost time”—as if it were ever possible to make up for lost time!

Oh, Day, if I squander a wavelet of thee,

A mite of my twelve hours’ treasure,

The least of thy gazes or glances,

(Be they grants thou art bound to or gifts above measure)

One of thy choices or one of thy chances,

(Be they tasks God imposed thee or freaks at thy pleasure)

—My Day, if I squander such labour or leisure,

Then shame fall on Asolo, mischief on me! 1 [Note: Browning, Pippa Passes.]

2. On our maps we have lines to mark the parallels of latitude—but these lines are only on the map. Crossing the equator or the tropics you see no score in the water, no line in the sky, to mark it; the vessel gives no lurch, no call is emitted from the deep; it is only the man of skill, the pilot or the captain, with his eye on the signs of heaven, who can tell that an event has happened, and that a definite portion of the voyage is completed. And, so far, our life is like a voyage on the open sea, every day repeating its predecessor—the same watery plain around and the same blue dome above—each so like the other that you might fancy the charmed ship was standing still. But it is not so. The watery plain of to-day is far in advance of the plain of yesterday, and the blue dome of to-day may be very like its predecessors, but it is fashioned from quite another sky.

Their advent is as silent as their going,

They have no voice nor utter any speech,

No whispered murmur passes each to each,

As on the bosom of the years’ stream flowing,

They pass beyond recall, beyond our knowing,

Farther than sight can pierce or thought can reach,

Nor shall we ever hear them on Time’s beach,

No matter how the winds of life are blowing.

They bide their time, they wait the awful warning

Of that dread day, when hearts and graves unsealing,

The trumpet’s note shall call the sea and sod,

To yield their secrets to the sun’s revealing:

What voices then shall thrill the Judgment morning,

As our lost hours shall cry aloud to God? 2 [Note: R. T. W. Duke.]

3. Is it because God gives us time so imperceptibly that none of us estimates the full value of time? The individual moment is not looked upon as a precious grain of gold. One could prove this in many ways; but let us be satisfied with one way. Take, as an example, the names of our various methods of getting rid of time. These indicate our undervaluation of time. Notice some of these names: “pastime,” i.e., what consumes and uses up the hours easily; “amusement,” i.e., what prevents musing or meditation; “diversion,” i.e., what turns aside; “entertainment,” i.e., what holds in suspense or equilibrium. These words, which are in common use, indicate and reveal a wrong condition of thought and feeling about time. They characterize it as a drug in the market to be got rid of at any price and in any quantity, whereas it is the most precious trust we have.

The illusion haunts us, that a long duration, as a year, a decade, a century, is valuable. But an old French sentence says, “God works in moments,”—“En peu d’heure Dieu labeure.” We ask for long life, but ’tis deep life, or grand moments that signify. Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical. Life is unnecessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance—what ample borrowers of eternity they are! 1 [Note: Emerson.]

Forenoon and afternoon and night,—forenoon

And afternoon and night,—forenoon and—what?

The empty song repeats itself. No more?

Yea, that is life: make this forenoon sublime,

This afternoon a psalm, this night a prayer,

And Time is conquered, and thy crown is won. 2 [Note: Edward Rowland Sill.]

IV

Reckoning with a Purpose

“So teach us to number our days, that we may get us an heart of wisdom.”

The reckoning must be made with a purpose. Objectless meditations, and laments without a practical outcome, will avail nothing. The result of our counsels must be the attainment of “wisdom,” and wisdom does not consist in the mere recognition of a truth, however momentous. It is a small thing to face the fact of the shortness of human life, and call it an evil not to be avoided by any. The shallowest of heathen philosophies could tell us that. “So teach us to number our days, that we may get us an heart of wisdom.”

1. Wisdom is a great word, because the idea it symbolizes is great. It is greater than knowledge, for knowledge symbolizes only what one has received. Knowledge signifies the accumulation of facts, the gathering and retention of information, the reception on the part of our memories of whatever has been discovered. But wisdom represents that finer power, that higher characteristic of mind, which suggests the proper application of facts, the right use of knowledge, the correct direction of our faculties. Knowledge is full of error. The stubble and the chaff lie together in its chambers, and both represent it. But wisdom never errs. It separates the wheat from the chaff. It discards what is worthless, and retains only the valuable. Knowledge represents the results of human industry. Wisdom represents the characteristic of Divinity. He whose heart is applied to wisdom has put himself in such a position that he can think divinely—think as God would think in his place.

Wisdom signifies an acquisition, by means of the soul’s faculty of perception, of true knowledge; and the lack of such knowledge is ignorance. The idea, held by many people, that wisdom is a gift bestowed on a few privileged souls is erroneous. Wisdom is open to all, without price or favour. Wisdom, beautiful and divine, represents the highest development of the human soul. There is a path leading from the lowest to the highest, and it is open equally to all. As soon as a man begins to seek for knowledge and truth, he begins to advance out of ignorance and to acquire wisdom. The desire for knowledge and truth is itself an evidence of Wisdom 1 [Note: R. H. Hodgson, Glad Tidings, 42.]

2. Now wisdom for time and for eternity does not lie in the pursuit of pleasure, not even in the pursuit of happiness, but in the cultivation of a rising life. This is not to say that happiness may never be hoped for or enjoyed when it comes. If we did not desire to be happy, we should be more than human,—or less. But the only way of obtaining happiness is to renounce altogether the pursuit of it. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things”—things which go to make life happy—“shall be added unto you.” Self-consecration is the root of all true happiness. It is the one thing that ensures contentment here and hereafter; the one thing that will bring a man peace at the last. Only by losing our life in God can we hope to find it immortalized. Only by a dedication of all that we have, and are, and desire, shall we attain to the perfect existence. This is wisdom and this is happiness.

The third chapter of Dr. Hanna’s Memoir describes Dr. Chalmers’ ordination to his Fifeshire parish of Kilmany, in the Maytime of 1803; but we have to journey on to the eighth chapter and the winter of 1811, before the preacher has any Gospel to proclaim. Through the intervening years Chalmers was more interested in mathematics than in the New Testament, and in his lectures to the students of St. Andrews on chemistry and geology than in the spiritual welfare of his people. “The author of this pamphlet,” he wrote in self-defence, “can assert, on the authority of his own experience, that, after the satisfactory discharge of his parish duties, a minister may enjoy five days in the week of uninterrupted leisure for the prosecution of any science in which his taste may dispose him to engage.” Years afterwards, in a debate in the Assembly of 1825, he recanted the words and confessed his error amid the deathlike stillness of the House. “I have no reserve in saying that the sentiment was wrong, and that, in the utterance of it, I penned what was most outrageously wrong. Strangely blinded that I was! What, sir, is the object of mathematical science.? Magnitude, and the proportions of magnitude. But then, sir, I had forgotten two magnitudes. I thought not of the littleness of time; I recklessly thought not of the greatness of eternity.” 1 [Note: A. Smellie, Robert Murray McCheyne, 13.]

3. The end of life is not to live the maximum number of hours in pleasure, but to form a character for all eternity; and if we want to take stock of loss and gain aright, we must look into our own hearts. We must see what treasure it is to which they are drawn, whether above or below. Let us not scruple to put this to familiar and matter-of-fact tests; there should be no false dignity about religion. Let us ask ourselves plain questions like these: Has our time been frittered away, in society, in amusement, in the thousand distractions of life—harmless, perhaps, each one taken by itself, but in the aggregate fatal to the usefulness and true greatness of life? Has God been crowded out of our thoughts? Has our hold on the unseen diminished? Have we become more encrusted with earthly things, till we find it impossible to look up, prayer being more difficult and the thought of religion more unwelcome? Is our moral courage less? Are we more afraid to confess God before men, or to protest against insults which we hear offered to His name? Are we more haunted by evil thoughts, and less able to resist them? Have we grown in patience, cheerfulness, humility? Are we more ready to do the “little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness,” which have none of the charm of heroism, and remain unknown beyond the narrowest circle? Has our will grown in strength, so that we are less at the mercy of “chance desires” and sudden temptations, more at unity with ourselves, more settled in the drift and direction of our lives? And an answer we can give to these if we take the trouble—not necessarily the same answer to all, not perhaps an unqualified answer to many, but still something that will show us whether we are being carried along by the stream or making way against it.

The universe is full of miracle and mystery; the darkness and silence are set for a sign we dare not despise. The pall of night lifts, leaving us engulphed in the light of immensity under a tossing heaven of stars. The dawn breaks, but it does not surprise us, for we have watched from the valley and seen the pale twilight. Through the wondrous Sabbath of faithful souls, the long day of rosemary and rue, the light brightens in the East; and we pass on towards it with quiet feet and opening eyes, bearing with us all of the redeemed earth that we have made our own, until we are fulfilled in the sunrise of the great Easter Day, and the peoples come from north and south and east and west to the city which lieth foursquare—the Beatific Vision of God. 1 [Note: Michael Fairless, The Roadmender, 90.]

Time speeds on his relentless track,

And—though we beg on bended knees—

No prophet’s hand for us puts back

The shadow ten degrees:

Yet dream we each returning spring,

When woods are decked in gold and green,

The dawning year to us will bring

The best that yet has been.

Which is an earnest of the truth

That when the years have passed away,

We shall receive eternal youth

And never-ending day.

An angel to each land and clime

Shall locust-eaten years restore,

And swear by Him who conquered Time

That Time shall be no more. 1 [Note: Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler, Love’s Argument, 115.]

Literature

Darlow (T. H.), The Upward Calling, 346.

Gregg (D.), Our Best Moods, 339.

Hobhouse (W.), The Spiritual Standard, 210.

Hodge (C.), Princeton Sermons, 346.

Lee (R.), Sermons, 268.

Lefroy (E. C.), The Christian Ideal, 102.

Morgan (G. E.), Dreams and Realities, 49.

Murray (W. H.), The Fruits of the Spirit, 157.

Prothero (G.), The Armour of Light, 33.

Smellie (A.), In the Secret Place, 396.

Trimmer (R.), Thirsting for the Living Waters, 132.

Tyng (S. H.), The People’s Pulpit, iv. 205.

Christian World Pulpit, lviii. 65 (M. G. Pearse).

Guardian, lxvii. (1912) 418 (J. W. Willink).

Homiletic Review, l. 379 (M. G. Pearse).

Literary Churchman, xxiii. (1877) 540.

National Preacher, xxxiv. 33 (A. Barnes).

Preacher’s Magazine, viii. 557 (T. Puddicombe); xxii. 67 (J. Edwards).