Chapter 3

No man with such habits stops there. This big man _strengthened himself in his wickedness_ and in all manner of guile and cruelty. It is a natural development. The heart which finds life in material wealth is usually certain to go farther and seek for more in the satisfaction of base and sullen appetites. We hear, it is true, a great deal about the softening influence of wealth, and moralists speak of luxury as if its bad effects were negative and it only enervated. But if riches and the habit of trusting to them, if the material comforts of life and complacency in them, only made men sleek and tame--if luxury did nothing but soften and emasculate--the world would have been far more stupid and far less cruel than it is to-day.

They are not negative tempers, but very positive and aggressive ones, which the Bible associates with a love of wealth, and we have but to remember history to know that the Bible is right. Luxury may have dulled the combative instincts in man, but it has often nursed the meanly cruel ones. The Romans with the rapid growth of their wealth loved the battlefield less; but the sight of the arena, with its struggling gladiators, and beasts tearing women and children, became more of a necessity to their appetites. Take two instances. Titus was a rough, hardened soldier; but he wept at the horrors which his siege obliged him to inflict on Jerusalem. Nero was an artist, and fiddled while Rome was burning. Coddle your boys; you may keep them from wishing to fight their equals, but you will not cure them of torturing animals. Idleness means not only sluggishness, but a morbid and criminal desire for sensation, which honest industry would have sweated out of the flesh. Money often renders those who have it unconsciously impatient with the slowness of poorer men, and unconsciously insolent about their defects. Everywhere, on the high places of history, and within our own humble experience, we perceive the same truth, that materialism, and the temper which trusts in wealth or in success, does not turn men into fat oxen, but into tigers. Hence the frequency with which the Old Testament, and especially the Psalms, connect an abundance of wealth with a strength of wickedness, and bracket for the same degree of doom the rich man and the violent one. Our Psalm is natural in adding to the clause, _trusting in the abundance of riches,_ that other about _strengthening himself in wickedness_. This is the very temper of a prosperous and pampered life: which seeks lust or cruelty not to forget itself, as a stunted and tortured nature may be forgiven for doing, but in order to work off its superfluous blood.

Observe, too, how much sins of the tongue are mentioned,-, lying, backbiting and the love of swallowing men's reputations whole. _Thou lovest all words of voracity, thou tongue of deceit_. We are, too, apt to think that sins of speech most fiercely beset weak and puny characters: men that have no weapon but a sharp and nasty tongue. Yet none use their words more recklessly than the strong, who have not been sobered by the rebuffs and uncertainties of life. Power and position often make a man trifle with the truth. A big man's word carries far, and he knows it; till the temptation to be dogmatic or satirical, to snub and crush with a word, is as near to him as to a slave-driver is the fourteen-feet thong in his hand, with a line of bare black backs before him.

These things are written of ourselves. In his great book on 'Democracy in America,' De Tocqueville pointed out, more than fifty years ago, the dangers into which the religious middle classes fall by the spread of wealth and comfort. That danger has increased, till for the _rich_ on whom Christ called woe, we might well substitute the _comfortable._ At a time when a very moderate income brings within our reach nearly all the resources of civilisation, which of us does not find day by day a dozen distractions that drown for him the voice of conscience: a crowd of men to lose himself in from God and his best friends: half a dozen base comforts, in the lap of which he forgets duty and dreams only of self? Comfort makes us all thoughtless, and thoughtlessness is the parent of every cruelty.

The Psalm makes no attempt to turn this tyrant whom it challenges; it invokes the mercy of God, not to change him, but to show how vain his boasts are, and to give heart to those whom he oppresses. God's mercy endureth for ever; but he must pass away. The righteous shall see his end, and fear and laugh: their satire will have religion in it. But though the Psalm does not design this sinner's conversion, its very challenge contains an indication of the means by which he and all selfish people who are like him may be changed to nobler lives. In this respect it has a gospel for us all, which may be thus stated.

There are poor invalids who ought to get their health again by seeking the open air and sunshine, but who keep between their bed and their hearthrug, cowering over their fire with the blinds pulled down;--to whom comes the wise doctor, pulls up the blinds, shows them that it is day outside, with the sun shining and the trees growing, and men walking about, and tells them that the health they are trying to get inside, and thereby only making themselves worse invalids, they will get out there. This big man was such a moral invalid, seeking strength within his own riches and qualities. And so doing he had developed the nasty indoor tempers, till it seemed pleasant and satisfactory to him to be spiteful, slanderous and false. Meantime, outside the darkened windows of his selfishness, the mercy of God, in which other men gloried and grew strong, rose every day. With one sweep the Psalmist tears the curtains down and lets in the sunshine. _The leal love of God is every day_. There, in that commonplace daily light: in that love which is as near you as the open air and as free as the sunshine, are the life and exultation which you seek so vainly within yourself.

It was in the sunshine that the Psalmist felt himself growing:

_But I am like an olive-tree, green in God's house. I trust in the leal love of God for ever and aye_.

This open-air figure suggests (though we have no confirmation of the fact) a tree growing in the high temple precincts, as trees to this day grow upon the Haram around the great mosque in Jerusalem, open to the sunshine and washed by the great rush of wind from the west. The Old Testament as much as the New haunts the open air for its figures of religion--a tree in full foliage, a tree planted by a river, a river brimming to its banks, the waves of a summer sea. Now this is not only because there is nothing else that will reflect the freedom of God's grace and the lavish joy it brings upon the world, but still more because the Bible feels the eternal truth, that to win this joy and freedom a man has got to go outside himself, outside his selfishness and other close tempers, outside his feelings and thoughts about himself, and receive the truths of religion as objective to him, taking the knowledge of God's pardon and peace as freely as he takes the sunshine of heaven, the calm of earth in summer, and the cool, strong winds from off the hills. To those old founders of our faith, religion was never man's feelings about religion: it was the love of God. God was not man's thoughts about God, but God Himself in His wonderful grace and truth, objective to our hearts. Therefore those ancient saints moved to the Spirit as the tree rustles to the wind, and as in summer she is green and glad in the sunshine that bathes her, so they rejoiced in the Lord, and in His goodness. _I will give thanks, for_ THOU _hast done it_.

But this getting out of self does not only bring a man into the open air, and to gladness in a God who worketh for him. It gives him the company of all good and noble men. I _will wait on Thy name, for it is good, in the presence of Thy saints_. What a fellowship faith and unselfishness make a man aware of!

* * * * *

Let us turn back for a moment to the man, to whose close character this open air is offered as a contrast. Is it really difficult for us to imagine him? There is not one of us who has not tried this kind of thing again and again,--and has succeeded in it with far less substance than the great man had to come and go upon. He trusted in the abundance of his riches: he lost God for the multitude of his temptations. But for us there is no such excuse. There has been no pleasure too sordid, no comfort too selfish, no profit too mean, no honour too cheap and vulgar, but we have sometimes preferred it, in seeking for happiness, to the infinite and everlasting mercy of our God. We may not be big men, and deserve to have psalms written about us; but in our own little ways we exult in our selfishness and the tempers it breeds in us just as guiltily as he did, and just as foolishly, for God's great love is as near to us, and could as easily chase these vapours from our souls, if we would but open the windows to its air.

Take one or two commonplace cases that do not require the great capital which this fellow put into his business of sinning, but are quite within reach of your and my very ordinary means of selfishness.

You have been overreached in some business competition, or disappointed in getting a post, or foiled along some path of public service. You come home with a natural vexation in your heart: sore at being beaten and anxious about your legitimate interests. It is all right enough. But sit down at the fire for a little and brood over it. Shut God out as care and anger can. Forget that your Bible is at your elbow. Think only of your wrong, and it is wonderful how soon you will find spite rising, and envy and the cruellest hate. It is wonderful how quickly plans of revenge will form themselves in your usually slow mind, and how happy they will make you. Malice is like brandy to a man's brain, and will send him back with a beaming face to the work he left with scowls. Ah, _why boast thyself in mischief, O man? God's leal love is all day long!_ The Bible is within reach of you. The lustre is as fresh on the promises as the rain-drops were under the glints of sun this morning. Walk there with God in His own garden: all God's steps are comfort and promise to the meek who will walk with Him. God is full of gentleness, and His gentleness shall make you great. _I will be as the dew unto Israel_. Or seek with the Master the crowds of men. Keep near Him in the dust and the crush: watch how He endures the contradiction of sinners, how patient He is with men, how forgiving. Watch most of all how He prays. Bow the knee like Him, and He shall lift thee up a sane and a happy man. To think of it--all that Divine fellowship and solace may be ours by opening the pages of a Book which lies on every table. _God's love is all the day_.

Let the other case be for young men and young women. For you the fresh air and sunshine are not yet shut out by the high walls of success or the thick ones of material prosperity. The dust of strife for you has not yet hidden heaven. But we all know that passion can build as solidly as wealth, and that a young heart may be as closely prisoned in a sudden temptation as an old one among the substantial accumulations of a lifetime. What is Temptation?

I turned to her: she built a house And Thought was her swift architect, And Falsehood let the curtains fall, And Fancy all the tables deck'd.

And so we shut the world out, Soul and Temptation face to face, And perfumed air and music sweet, And soft desire fill'd all the place.

O brothers, in such an hour, and it comes to every one of us, think upon the vast world outside, and the walls so magically built will as magically fall. God's sunshine is there, and God's fresh air, to think upon which, with the companies of men and women who walk up and down in it and are fair, is the most sovereign charm against temptation that I know. _Why glory in this evil_? Put that challenge to your heart in the crisis of every evil passion. _God's mercy is all day long_. Think of the love of the Father: of His patience with thee, of His trust of thee; think of the Love of the Redeemer, Who gave Himself for thy life; think of the great objective truths of religion--righteousness, joy and peace in the Holy Ghost. Or if these seem unsubstantial thoughts, that flash and fade again like clouds on the western sky at evening, come out among the flesh-and-blood proofs of them which walk our own day. Frequent the pure, strong men and women who are in sight of us all, fair on every countryside, radiant in every city crowd. Hearken to the greater spirits who by their songs and books come down and speak with the lowliest and most fallen. And do not forget the holy dead, nor doubt that though unseen they are with us still.

_I will wait on Thy name, for 'tis good, in face of Thy Saints._

PSALM CXXI

THE MINISTRY OF THE HILLS AND ALL GREAT THINGS

We catch the key-note of this Psalm if we read the words _whence cometh my help_ not as a statement but as a question. Our older version takes them as a statement; it makes the Psalmist look to the hills, as if his help broke and shouted from them all like waterfalls. But with the Revised Version we ought to read: _I will lift mine eyes unto the mountains--from whence cometh my help?_ The Psalmist looks up, not because his help is stored there, but because the sight of the hills stirs within him an intense hope. His heart is immediately full of the prayer, _Whence cometh my help_? and of the answer, _My help is from the Lord, that made heaven and earth_.

We need not wish to fix a locality or a date to this Psalm. It is enough that the singer had a mountain skyline in view, and that below in the shadows, so dark that we cannot make out their features, lay God's church and people. They were threatened, and there was neither help nor hope of help among themselves.

Perhaps it was one of those frequent periods in the life of Israel, in which the religious institutions of the people were so abased that the Psalmist could see in them no pledge nor provocation of hope. Indeed, these institutions may have been altogether overthrown. There was no leader on whom God had set His seal, and the national life had nothing to raise the heart, but was full of base thoughts and paltry issues that dissipate faith, and render the interference of God an improbable thing. So the Psalmist lifted his thoughts to the sacraments which God has fixed in the framework of His world. He did not identify his help with the hills--no true Israelite could have done that,--but the sight of them started his hope and filled his heart with the desire to pray. This may have happened at sunrise, when, even more than at other hours, mountains fulfil the ministry of hope. Below them all was in darkness; it was still night, but the peaks saw the morning, and the signal of its coming fell swiftly down their flanks. In this case the Psalm is a matin-song, a character which the rest of the verses carry out. Or at any other hour of the day, it may simply have been the high, clear outline of the hills which inspired the Psalm--that firm step between heaven and earth, that margin of a world of possibility beyond. A prophet has said, _How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of them that bring good tidings!_ But to our Psalmist the mountains spread a threshold for a Divine arrival. Up there God Himself may be felt to be afoot.

Now to a pure heart and a hungry heart this is always what a mountain view effects. 'A hill-top,' says a recent writer, 'is a moral as well as a physical elevation.' He is right, or men would not have worshipped on hill-tops, nor high places have become synonymous with sacred ones. Whether we climb them or gaze at them, the mountains produce in us that mingling of moral and physical emotion in which the temper of true worship consists. They seclude us from trifles, and give the mind the fellowship of greatness. They inspire patience and peace; they speak of faithfulness and guardianship. But chiefly the mountains are sacraments of hope. That high, steadfast line--how it raises the spirits, and lifts the heart from care; how early it signals the day, how near it brings heaven! To men of old its margin excited thoughts of an enchanted world beyond; its clear step between heaven and earth made easy the imagination of God descending among men.

So it is here. At the sight of the hills our Psalmist's hope--instead of lying asleep in confidence of a help too far away to be vivid, or dying of starvation because that help is so long of coming--leaps to her feet, all watch and welcome for an instant arrival. _Whence cometh my help? My help cometh from the Lord, that made heaven and earth_. This is not fancy; it is an attitude of real life. This is not a poet with a happy phrase for his idea: it is a sentry at his difficult post, challenging the signal, and welcoming the arrival, of that help which makes all the difference to life.

But we may widen the application of the Psalmist's words far beyond the hills. This is a big thing to which he lifts his eyes to feed his hope. God is unseen; so he betakes himself to the biggest thing he can see. And therein is a lesson which we need all across our life. For it is just because, instead of lifting our eyes to the big things around us, we busy and engross ourselves with trifles, that the practical enthusiasm which beats through this Psalm is failing among us, and that we have so little faith in God's readiness to act, and to act speedily, within the circle of our own experience. Trifles, however innocent or dutiful they may be, do not move within us the fundamental pieties. They reveal no stage worthy for God to act upon. They give no help to the imagination to realise Him as near. A church which never lifts her eyes above her own denominational details, petty differences in doctrine or government, petty matters of ritual and posture, cannot continue to believe in the nearness of the living God. The strain on faith is too great to last. The reason recoils from admitting that God can help on such battle-fields as those on which the churches are often so busy, that He can come to help such causes as the sects, neglectful of the real interests of the world, too often stoop to champion. And so the churches insensibly get settled in far-off, abstract views of God, and are sapped of the primal and practical energies of religion. Whereas it is evident that in the religious communities which lift their eyes above their low hedges to the high hills of God--to the great simple outlines of His kingdom, to the ideals and destiny which God has set before mankind--in such churches faith in His nearness to the world and in His readiness to help must always abound. To men who have an eye for the big things of earth, God will always seem to be afoot upon it. They are conscious of an arena worthy for Him to descend upon, and of causes worthy for Him to interfere in. It is no shock to their reason, no undue strain upon their imagination, to feel the Almighty and the All-loving come down to earth, when earth has such horizons and such issues.

Turning to ourselves as individuals, we may ask why we have such distant notions of God, so shy a faith of His coming within the circle of our own life and work? Why are our prayers so formal, so empty of the expectation of an immediate and divine answer? Why is our attitude at our work so destitute of practical enthusiasm? Because we, too, are not lifting our eyes to the hills. We are looking for nothing but little things, and therefore we see nowhere any threshold or field worthy of God. How can the sense that the living God is near to our life, that He is interested in it and willing to help it, survive in us, if our life be full of petty things? Absorption in trifles, attention only to the meaner aspects of life, is killing more faith than is killed by aggressive unbelief. For if all a man sees of life be his own interests, if all he sees of home be its comforts, if all he sees of religion be the outlines of his own denomination, the complexion of his preacher's doctrine, the agreeableness and taste of his fellow-worshippers--to such a man God must always seem far away, for in those things there is no call upon either mind or heart to feel God near. But if, instead of limiting ourselves to trifles, we resolutely and 'with pious obstinacy' lift our eyes to the hills--whether to those great mountain-tops of history which the dawn of the new heavens has already touched, periods of faith and action that signal to our more forward but lower ages the promise of His coming; or to the great essentials of human experience that at sunrise, noon and evening remain the same through all ages; or to the ideals of truth and justice; to the possibilities of human nature about us; to the stature of the highest characters within our sight; to the bulk and sweep of the people's life; to the destinies of our own nation that still rise high above all party dust and strife--then we shall see thresholds prepared for a divine arrival, conditions upon which we can realise God acting. Our hope will spring, an eager sentinel, as if she already heard upon them all the footfalls of His coming.

These lines may meet the eyes of some who have lost their faith, and are sorry and weary to have lost it. Whether the blame be outside yourselves, in the littleness of many of the prevailing aspects of religious life, and the crowding of our religious arenas with the pettiest of interests, or within yourselves, in your own mean and slovenly views of life, your indolence to extricate details and discriminate the large eternal issues among them--there is for you but one way back to faith. Lift your eyes to the hills. Let your attention haunt the spots where life rises most near to heaven, and your hearts will again become full of hopes and reasons for God being at work upon earth.

Let those who, still in their youth, have preserved their faith and fullness of hope, keep looking up. Amid all the cynicism and the belittling of life, strenuously take the highest views of life. Amid all the selfishness and impatience, which in our day consider life upon its lowest levels, and there break it up into short and selfish interests, strenuously lift your eyes and sweep with them the main outlines, summits and issues. May no man lose sight of the hills for want of looking up, till at the last he is laid upon his back,--and then must look up whether he has done so before or not--and in the evening clearness and evening quiet those great outlines stand forth before his eyes--stand forth but for a few moments and are lost for ever in the falling night.

Many men have bravely lifted their eyes to the hills, who have felt nothing come back upon them save a vague wonder and influence of purity. They have been struck with an awe to which they could give no name, with a health and energy which they could only ascribe to physical infection. But to this Psalmist the hope and worship which the hills excited were satisfied by the revelation of a Person. Above earth and her hills he saw a Character.