VI.

THE LORD IS MY LIGHT AND MY SALVATION.

"The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life, of whom shall I be afraid."— Ps. xxvii.

I THINK that this is the Psalm of Psalms. All the elements of vital force with which these Psalms are charged, are here in their highest power. When it was written, or why it was written, we know not. But we know that David, when he wrote it, must have been lifted into the sphere of the purest and most intense experience of which the human spirit can be the subject; and yet-and this is the mystery of the Psalms, and the secret of their spiritual powerit is a region into which the aspiration of the poorest, the weakest, the most burdened human heart can follow him, nor is it closed against the most trembling human step. Reading these words, or rather singing them, for they were made to be our songs in this house of our pilgrimage,-we seem to be borne up, as the Prophet says, "on eagle's wings" into this upper firmament, which David calls the pavilion, the tabernacle of the Most High. We catch the glow of the Psalmist's inspiration; his joy in God enters into us, and stirs a kindred passion. "The Lord is

my light and my salvation," we, too, find ourselves singing, "The Lord is the strength of my life, of whom shall I be afraid?" A poor, stammering, trembling mortal, the creature of a day, crushed before the moth, who thought himself yesterday but as a worm or as a beast before God, is caught up as he hears the Psalmist singing in the height. Something within expands and glows as he soars he feels that he, too, can bear part in this blessed music; that this God is his God as well as David's; that he also is the child of Christ and of the resurrection, a free citizen of the eternal celestial world.

If they are our best and most blessed helpers who lift us into a world which lies beyond and above the round of our common tasks, and the dusty paths along which we daily plod, who give to us a new sense of things unseen, open for us new springs of faith and hope, and teach us to "count them blessed which endure," what shall we say of these Psalmists, who, through thousands of years, have furnished an unfailing fountain of strength and inspiration to some of the strongest, the noblest, and the most aspiring children of our race? These Psalms are like the cells of a battery of vital force, which generate the current that is always permeating the tissues and the nerves of Christian society-conductor of a throbbing, thrilling, exuberant, victorious life. The life is not in them; they are as the cells which store and transmit it. To open one of David's Psalms when we are sad and weary, overpressed in life's battle, or overworn by its pain, is like touching a stream of

magnetic force; it bathes all the being with its soft, tender, yet stimulating and energising flood. The strain is relaxed, the pain is soothed, the nerveless arm is braced again, the fainting heart grows strong and glad; something has entered into us from a Divine fountain, which makes us sharers of the strength, the joy, and the hope of God.

I have spoken of exuberant, victorious life. Who does not catch in this Psalm the note of exultation? It is the word of a man who, at the moment at any rate, felt that his joy was over-abounding. "More than conqueror," is the cry that rings through these triumphant words. He felt that there was with him, within him, a strength which all the malignant forces in the universe were powerless to cope with-and to an oriental the malign element in nature always seems fearfully strong; he knew that his foot was firm on the everlasting rock, against which the gates of hell must rage in vain.

The man who wrote this Psalm was no novice in the school of discipline. The cry of a soul in anguish was to him no unfamiliar utterance. Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of Thy waterspouts ; all Thy waves and Thy billows are gone over me," had often broken from his lips. But from the rock to which his God had lifted him, he could watch the great sweeping billows shatter themselves in foam and perish, while he sang, "And now shall mine head be lifted up above mine enemies round about me, therefore will I offer in His tabernacle sacrifices of joy, I will sing, yea I will sing praises

unto the Lord." There breathes through this Psalm just that sense of the over-mastering power, the over-abounding fulness of God's grace and love, which rings out in the exulting language of St. Paul, "The law entered that the offence might abound. But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound; that as sin hath reigned unto death, even so should grace reign, through righteousness, unto eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord."

I have said that in these Psalms, and in this most especially, David enters into the very loftiest region of experience which can be reached by a human spirit. He climbs to heights beyond which man cannot pass; he becomes partaker of the strength, and enters into the joy of God. But it is the peculiar glory of the Bible, that these heights do not seem to place men like David beyond the sympathy of the poorest and the weakest of their human brethren. There is nothing, here or anywhere, in the Bible which cuts off the humblest and the feeblest human soul from the very noblest and loftiest of our race, in their most exalted moments of vision and of joy. High as these men may soar, the world of the common daily life of the great mass of mankind is not cut off from them. They are not by themselves in a heavenly region, while the great world beneath them grovels, according to its nature, in the dust.

Men like Moses, Isaiah, David, Paul, and John, draw men to them, and with them, as they rise. They speak of heavenly things, they behold the heavenly vision, they pass within the shrine

where they gaze on the splendour of the Uncreated Light, and see with open face the unveiled glory of the Lord. But the most lowly and undisciplined human intellect finds their thoughts within the range of its comprehension, and their vision not altogether beyond its sight. Lofty as are the themes with which this Psalm is conversant, profound as is the human experience which it unveils, it has yet been the pilgrim-song through ages of multitudes of the poorest, the lowliest, the most oppressed and downtrodden of our race. From how many a house of bondage, from how many a prison cell, from how many a den of human suffering and toil, from how many a hospital ward, from how many a pauper's death-bed, from how many a rack of torment or blazing pile has the song gone up to heaven, " The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life, of whom shall I be afraid?"

And this is the distinguishing glory of Christianity, that its poor have the Gospel preached unto them, and are as much within reach of the understanding of its mysteries, as much within the clasp of the arms of its love, as the wisest, the noblest, the most instructed of mankind. The bread which nourished its Prophets, Psalmists, and Evangelists, is the bread of God which cometh down from heaven," and it is freely offered as the gift of God's grace and love to the poorest and hungriest prodigal who tramps the wilderness, or gathers husks from the troughs of swine. It is the bread of the Father's