George Adam Smith

“ Yea, though I walk in a valley of deep darkness, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me. Thy rod and Thy staff are not synonymous, for even the shepherd of to-day, though often armed with a gun, carries two instruments of wood, his great oak club, thick enough to brain a wild beast, and his staff to lean upon or to touch his sheep, while the ancient shepherd without firearms would surely still more require both. They will comfort me—a very beautiful verb, the literal meaning of which is to help another, choked with grief or fear, to breathe freely, and give his heart air. ”

“ But it is not profession which reveals where a man puts his trust. It is the practice and discipline of life, betraying us by a hundred commonplace ways, in spite of all the orthodoxy we boast. It is sorrow and duty and the call to self-denial. When this man's feelings got low, when he was visited by touches of melancholy—those chills sent forward from the grave to every mortal travelling thither,—when conscience made him weak and fearful, then he made not God his strength, but trusted in the abundance of his riches. ”

“ Nor is the influence of a Personality sufficient if that Personality remain far off. Reverence alone never saved any human soul in the storm of life. It is One by our side Whom we need. It is by the sense of trust, of sympathy, of comradeship, of fighting together in the ranks, that our strength is thrilled and our right hand preserved in freshness. Without all this between us and bare heaven, we must in the end weary and wither.
Twofold is the experience in which we especially need such compassion and fellowship—in the time of responsibility and in the time of temptation. ”

“ It is not only darkness that the poet is describing, but the darkness where death lurks for the poor sheep,—the gorges, in whose deep shadows are the lairs of wild beasts, and the shepherd and his club are needed. It stands thus for every dismal and deadly passage through which the soul may pass, and, most of all, it is the Valley of the Shadow of Death. There God is with men no less than by the waters of repose, or along the successful paths of active life. ”

“ These are the two great Lonelinesses of life—the Loneliness of the Height and the Loneliness of the Deep—in which the heart needs to be sure of more than being remembered and watched. The Loneliness of the Height, when God has led us to the duty of a great decision, or given us the charge of other lives, or sent us on the quest of some truth, or lifted us to a vision and ideal. The king, the father, the thinker, the artist, all know this loneliness of the height, which no human fellow can share, no human heart fully sympathise with. ”

“ But not in anything is life more like the Wilderness than in this, that it is the presence and character of One, which make all the difference to us who are its silly sheep; that it is His grace and hospitality which alone avail us when we awaken to the fact that our lives cannot be fully figured by those of sheep, for men are fugitives in need of more than food—men are fugitives with the conscience and the habit of sin relentless on their track. ”

“ So only do the conscience and the habit of sin pursue a man. Our real enemies are not our opponents, our adversities, our cares and pains. These our enemies! Better comrades, better guides, better masters no man ever had. Our enemies are our evil deeds and their memories, our pride, our selfishness, our malice, our passions, which by conscience or by habit pursue us with a relentlessness past the power of figure to express. We know how they persist from youth unto the grave: the sting of death is sin. ”

“ Sheep do not choose their shepherd, but man has to choose—else the peace and the fulness of life which are here figured remain a dream and become no experience for him.
Do not say that this talk of surrender to God is unreal to you. Happiness, contentment, the health and growth of the soul, depend, as men have proved over and over again, upon some simple issue, some single turning of the soul. Lives are changed by a moment's listening to conscience, by a single and quiet inclination of the mind. We must submit ourselves to God. ”

“ 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? ”

“ There, by the golden law of the desert's hospitality, he knows that he may eat in peace, that though his enemies come up to the very door, and his table be spread as it were in their presence, he need not flinch nor stint his heart of her security.
That was the landscape the Psalmist saw, and it seemed to him to reflect the mingled wildness and beauty of his own life. Human life was just this wilderness of terrible contrasts, where the light is so bright, but the shadows the darker and more treacherous; where the pasture is rich, but scattered in the wrinkles of vast deserts ”

“ This is the figure which the Psalmist sees his help assume upon the skyline to which he has lifted his eyes.
Compared with other experiences of God, this outline of Him may seem bare. Yet if we feel the fact of it with freshness of heart and imagination, what may it not do for us? Life may be hallowed by no thought more powerfully than by this, that it is watched: nor peace secured by any stronger trust than that the Almighty assumes responsibility for it; nor has work ever been inspired by keener sense of honour than when we feel that God gives us freedom and safety for it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honourable, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. It is, once more, the Greater Realism. But behind Paul's crowd of glorious facts let us not miss the greatest Reality of all, God Himself. God's righteousness and love, His grace and patience toward us, become more and more of a wonder as we dwell upon them, and by force of their wonder the most real facts of our experience. ”

“ We must feel that the Universe is pervaded by this: that it is the atmosphere of life, and that the whole visible framework of the world offers signals and sacraments of its real presence. We may not, we shall not, be able to reconcile this goodness with the cruel facts about us; but at least we shall have reduced these to a new proportion and perspective; we shall have disengaged our wills from the horrid influence of evil, and received a new temper for that contest, in which it is temper far more than any knowledge which overcomes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ Let us tell men who exhibit sin and wickedness apart from God and from man's power of penitence, apart from love and from the realised holiness of our human race, that they are working in a vacuum, and their experiment is therefore the most un-real that can be imagined. We may not be able to eliminate the cruel facts of sin from our universe, but do not let us therefore eliminate the rest of the Universe from our study of sin. ”

“ And even here the display is not merely natural, nor spread only in the sight of our physical enemies; but God's goodness leadeth to repentance, and Nature is equipped even for deliverance from sin. Who has come out upon a great landscape, who has looked across the sea, who has lifted his eyes to the hills and felt the winds of God blowing off their snows, who has heard earth's countless voices rising heavenwards, but has felt: What a wide place this world is for repentance! ”

“ Who has assumed responsibility for our life as Christ has? Who has taken upon himself the safety and the honour, not of the little tribe for whom this Psalm was first sung, but of the whole of the children of men! He called about Himself our weariness, He lifted our sorrow, He disposed of our sin—as only God can call or lift or dispose. Nothing exhausted His pity, or His confidence to deal with us; nothing ever betrayed a fault in His character, or belied the trust His people put in Him. He suffers not thy foot to be moved; He neither slumbers nor sleeps. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The problem of Israel's faith was the existence of evil in its most painful form of the successful and complacent sinner, the oppressor of good men. This problem our Psalm takes, not, like other Psalms, in its cruel bearing upon the people of God, but in its mysterious growth in the character of the wicked man. Through four verses of vivid realism we follow the progress of sin. Then, when eye and heart are full of the horror, the Psalmist steps suddenly back, and lifts his gaze beyond and above his study of evil to God's own world that stretches everywhere. ”

“ He who owned the simple trust of the first four verses, saying, 'Thou art right, I am the Good Shepherd,' so that since He walked on earth the name is no more a mere metaphor of God, but the dearest, strongest reality which has ever visited this world of shadows—He also has been proved by men as the Host and Defender of all who seek His aid from the memory and the pursuit of sin. So He received them in the days of His flesh, as they drifted upon Him across the wilderness of life, pressed by every evil with which it is possible for sin to harry men. ”