Four Psalms | Page 5

him
who gives himself to God.
Men and women, who in this Christian land have grown up with this
Psalm in your hearts, in all the great crises of life that are ahead shall
this Psalm revisit us. In perplexity and doubt, in temptation and sorrow,

and in death, like our mother's face shall this Psalm she put upon our
lips come back to us. Woe to us then, if we have done nothing to help
us to believe it! As when one lies sick in a foreign land, and music that
is dear comes down the street and swells by him, and lifts his thoughts
a little from himself, but passes over and melts into the distance, and he
lies colder and more forsaken than before--so shall it be with us and
this Psalm.
But if we do give our hearts to God and His Will, if day by day of our
strength we work and serve, live and suffer, with contented hearts--then
I know what we shall say when the day of our darkness and loneliness
comes down, whether it be of temptation, or of responsibility, or of
death itself. In that day we shall lift our faces and say: _Yea, though I
am walking in the Valley of the Shadow of Death I do fear no evil, for
Thou art with me, and Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me_!
III. But some one may turn round upon all this and say: 'It is simple, it
is ideal, but the real man cannot reach it out of real life. For he is not
the mere sheep, turned easily by a touch of the staff. He is a man: his
life is no mere search for grass, it is a being searched; it is not a
following, it is a flight. Not from the future do we shrink, even though
death be there. The past is on our track, and hunts us down. We need
more than guidance: we need grace.'
This is probably what the Psalmist himself felt when he did not close
with the fourth verse, otherwise so natural a climax. He knew that
weariness and death are not the last enemies of man. He knew that the
future is never the true man's only fear. He remembered the
inexorableness of the past; he remembered that blood-guiltiness, which
sheep never feel, is worse to men than death. As perchance one day he
lifted his eyes from his sheep and saw a fugitive from the avenger of
blood crossing the plain, while his sheep scattered right and left before
this wild intruder into their quiet world,--so he felt his fair and gentle
thoughts within him scattered by the visitation of his past; so he felt
how rudely law breaks through our pious fancies, and must be dealt
with before their peace can be secure; so he felt, as every true man has
felt with him, that the religion, however bright and brave, which takes
no account of sin, is the religion which has not a last nor a highest word
for life.
Consider this system of blood revenge. It was the one element of law in

the lawless life of the desert. Everything else in the wilderness might
swerve and stray. This alone persisted and was infallible. It crossed the
world; it lasted through generations. The fear of it never died down in
the heart of the hunted man, nor the duty of it in the heart of the hunter.
The holiest sanctions confirmed it,--the safety of society, the honour of
the family, love for the dead. And yet, from this endless process, which
hunted a man like conscience, a shelter was found in the custom of
Eastern hospitality--the 'golden piety of the wilderness,' as it has been
called. Every wanderer, whatever his character or his past might be,
was received as the; 'guest of God'--such is the beautiful name which
they still give him,--furnished with food, and kept inviolate, his host
becoming responsible for his safety.
That the Psalmist had this custom in view, when composing the last
two verses of the Psalm, is plain from the phrase with which these open:
_Thou spreadest before me a table in the very face of mine enemies_;
and perhaps also from the unusual metaphor in verse 6: _Surely
goodness and mercy shall follow,_ or _hunt, me all the days of my
life._
And even if those were right (which I do not admit) who interpret the
enemies and pursuers as the mere foes and persecutors of the pious, it is
plain that to us using the Psalm this interpretation will not suffice. How
can we speak of this custom of blood-revenge and think only of our
material foes? If we know ourselves, and if our conscience be quick,
then