The child, that to its mother clings, Lies not all safely on her breast, Till she her arm around it flings, Sweetly caressing and caressed:
Ev'n so, my God, Thy mighty arms.
Not my poor Faith, shield me from harms.
I bless Thy Name for every grace,
Wherewith Thou dost enrich Thine own; Yea, I would seek each day to trace Myself more like my Master grown: Yet, 0 my God, Thy mighty arras. Not my faint Love, shield me from harms.^
(2) But, on the other hand, let us not forget that the movement from man to God is as needful as the movement from God to man. The one, like the other, is a movement of love; yet with a difference. Divine pity moves down to all men ; but only from filial hearts does human trust move up to God. The Fatherhood is universal; but only where the sonship is con- sciously realized can the spirit cry, "Abba, Father!" His loving-kindness falls on us like incense by night.
If The Divine Father is not the same to all devout men ; He is to some more of a daily Presence, more of a permanent Friend ; and this larger sense of God rises from a larger need and conscious use of Him in the soul. Vacancies made in the heart are often only rooms in it swept and beautified for God ; and His presence at once glorifies the chamber thus prepared, sheds a mellow light back upon the past, and splendid hopes forward upon the future. Were it possible to reduce a pious soul to a consciousness of only two beings — first and pre-eminently of God, next and feebly of self — then it were possible to endow that soul with the supremest happiness possible to a creature ; and the more nearly any man approaches to that consciousness the more blessed will he be. Of a truth, he is happy who can say, " As for me, I shall behold thy face in righteousness ; I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness."^
* W. Armstrong.
' A. B. Groaart, Songs of the Lay and Night, 12,
* A. M. Fairbairn,
DEUTERONOMY xxxiii. 27 67
2. God is a dwelling-place (1) to the nation, and (2) to the individual.
(1) The words were spoken, as all the greatest utterances of the Old Testament were spoken, to a people. The hope of the Israelite was a national hope. His fathers had known God and done their work and passed to their rest. He in his turn was allowed to know God and do his share of work and be buried with his fathers, leaving children and children's children to carry the work still further forward till at last it should reach its glorious consummation. The nation lived on and expanded and developed, blessed when it feared the Lord, punished when it forgot Him. Thousands and tens of thousands of its sons and daughters passed, but the nation still Hved on, and learned to look for its perfect glory in the future, when the king Messiah should reign in righteousness over the whole earth, sitting on David's throne in Jerusalem. This was the ideal of the great poets and prophets of the Jewish people. It was a national and not an individual hope.
In times of critical strain and trial to civilization and the State, amid great political and social troubles and changes, let us not fail to remember and realize that the eternal God is our refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms. It is not our decrees and institutions that are upholding the world, but the ever- lasting laws — another name for the everlasting arms. Our refuge in times of distress is not parliaments and governments and compromising politicians, but the eternal God. Our rulers and governors may help or hinder progress, but they do not decide the supreme and final issue of things. There is another Providence in affairs than the human providence. This world is, after all, God's world. Let us not, therefore, lose courage and hope because in the complications of disintegration and change we do not see what is to follow. In all ages, men, bewildered by the vision of great changes, have pronounced the doom of the world because they were not able to see or understand the process of its salvation. Let us not be fearful even if the worst happens. The worst that can happen is often the best for the world. Jerusalem destroyed is better than Jerusalem saved, and the fall of the Eoman Empire better for the moral health of the peoples of the earth than its continuance.
68 GOD WHO IS OUR HOME
^ The children of Israel had no other, and therefore if God were not their dwelling-place, they were houseless. Pilgrims of the weary foot, they found no city to dwell in ; at eventide they pitched their tents, but they struck them again in the morning ; the trumpet sounded and they were up and away ; if they were in a comfortable valley for one day, yet that relentless trumpet bade them resume their wearisome march through the wilderness in the morning; and perhaps they thought they lingered longest where an encampment was least desirable. Nevertheless they always had a dwelling-place in their God. If I might use such a description without seeming to be fanciful, I would say that the great cloudy canopy which covered them all day long from the heat of the sun was their roof-tree, and that the blazing pillar which protected them by night was their family fireside.^