and will leave us all grey and bare, which makes me cling so tenaciously to the truth which breathes its music through this Psalm. Man was made for Divine communion. Christ is the root which bears man's regenerate, celestial life. Cut the communications of the soul with the spiritual world, or let them wither and snap, and then through the trailing tendrils the very life-blood of the spirit will drain away. Cast off fear, that fear which makes us men restrain prayer before God, turn from Christ as your great exemplar, close the eye to His beauty, harden the heart to His love-it is the suicide of the spirit. The current of life is choked at the fountains, the light is quenched in the everlasting night.

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But "The Lord is my life and my salvation, whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life, of whom shall I be afraid?" He is the strength of the life, for we live in Him. Jesus said unto Martha, I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die." Our life is hid with Christ in God, and when Christ who is our life shall appear, we also shall appear with Him in glory.' Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoiceth; my flesh also shall rest in hope." Why should a living man complain ? What on earth or in hell shall he fear, when, after all is torn from him, he has life, an eternal future, and God? Here is strength to endure; here is strength to overcome. The endurance may be hard; the discipline may be long, and terribly sharp and

K

stern.

But life abides through it, life grows by it; life has royal prerogatives and compels its tributes. They will but enrich and adorn the child of discipline, the heir of promise, when he passes up to sing the song with new exultation, where there streams all round him, and glows within him, the sunlight of the celestial and eternal world. "Wait on the Lord, then, and be of good courage, and He shall strengthen thine heart; wait I say on the Lord." "When my father and my mother forsake me," when all earthly helps must fall from me, "then the Lord will take me up." Even into the valley of the shadow of death, I can pass with a song, "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin, the strength of sin is the law; but thanks be to God who giveth us the victory, through our Lord Jesus Christ."

"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?"

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VII.

GOD'S GREAT WORLD.

"He brought me forth also into a large place."-II. Sam. xxii. 20.

A SOUL in anguish is a soul in straits, in narrows; in a place too small for it, in which it strains and writhes and beats against the bars, in vain. That is anguish the prison bars tight about us, while we pant for freedom, light and joy. Man is a large being, and he needs a wide world to live in. Sin shuts him up in a small world; a prison-house, and iron-barred. It is a grand, free outline which God sketched at the first of a human being. So grand, so free, that there is but one hitherto who has been able to fill it up to its full form-Himself.

David was a man of this royal proportion. Such men need the universe and eternity to live out their lives. If the all of David was the little span of his mortal life, and the square inches of his kingdom, his life is one of the saddest sights that the sun ever shone upon. A glorious wealth of faculty, trained under the strain of terrible trials and sufferings, and trained for the dust. The lives of such men are the grandest arguments for immortality. If a malignant demon be not the Lord and Master of the universe, such a life as

David's must one day be brought out into a larger world than this.

caves.

David as a youth had roamed on the mountains. He had fed his flocks on the wolds of Canaan. He had lain many a night under the canopy of the solemn Syrian sky, burning with stars. He had lived, too, the life of an outlaw in the mountain fastnesses. He had made his lair, like a hunted beast, in their murky He had watched the gates of the hills when the dawn began to flush the pallid sky; he had seen from some lofty crag the sunlight flash in one glorious moment over a slumbering world. I picture him shut up night-long in some close rocky cavern with his bandit troop around him: men of rude lips and rude life,1 vexing the weary hours with their coarse oaths and jests. The air foul, stifling; the moral atmosphere of the outlaws' den fouler and more stifling still.

But

I think that I see him stealing out in the first cool gleam of the morning, faint, sad, weary— shut up with such comrades to such a life. the fresh breath of the morning wind stirs his languid pulses; the blood bounds through his throbbing veins. He treads the well-known path to some rugged peak which shoots up into the calm, clear air above him. As he climbs he sees the mists seething in the valleys beneath. The horizon around him widens. Peak beyond peak in the dim distance begins to blush under the kiss of the coming sun.

1 I. Sam. xxii. 1-2.

A glorious sense of freedom possesses him. A baptism of power descends. His soul expands with his horizon. Life seems larger; its trials dwindle; its powers and destinies grow. As he rises above the mists and shadows in which his lair is buried, and climbs to the clear summit, the sun kindles a cold, dead world to vivid and glorious life. He sweeps his flashing glance over the broad landscape. The mists retire their routed masses from the plains beneath him; the broad, soft uplands, and now the valleys are unveiled. The blue ocean gleams softly in the distance, and melts into the violet mist which encompasses all.

He realises with a kind of rapture how wide the world is, how glorious. He knows that there is something yet larger, more glorious, stirring within. We can imagine the shepherd poet as he grasped all this, as he drank in new strength and courage, new joy and hope, from the vision of the infinite wealth and splendour of the world, bursting into strains of lofty exultation, and pouring forth his most splendid and joyous psalms. With what intense passionate fervour would he bless the name of the Lord, his shepherd, his friend, the man of his counsel, the guide of his pilgrimage, who had led him up to that mountain summit to unveil to him the glorious vision, and to kindle within him a glad hope of the future of his being, when he should emerge at last from a darker night on to a loftier summit, lit by the glow of a brighter dawning, and sweep the horizon of a wider world. "Therefore