5. There is something better than looking back with longing to the days of youth. It is this — to realize that true life, the life of the soul, never grows old, although it grows up. Our true home never is, never was, amid the symbols and shadows of time, but in the grand reality of eternity. The well of Bethlehem in the morning — there is no turning back to it in the afternoon. There is a farther, a more glorious morning, a deeper, a nobler, a purer draught from the waters of God, the waters of rest. The soul in growing older is not farther from God than in the days of sweet innocence. To turn in simplest, most childlike trust to God, truth, heaven, wherever you are and however you are, is to drink deep of the water of ageless life.
^ Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
2 SAMUEL XXIII. 15 377
Gray distance hid each shining sail, By ruthless breezes borne from me;
And, lessening, fading, faint and pale, My ships went forth to sea.
Where misty breakers rose and fell
I stood and sorrowed hopelessly; For every wave had tales to tell
Of wrecks far out at sea.
To-day, a song is on my lips :
Earth seems a paradise to me: For God is good, and lo, my ships
Are coming home from sea ! ^
* George Arnold.
Hewing and Building.
379
Literature.
Brown (A. G.), God's Full-Orbed Gospel, 216, 229.
Burrell (D. J.), The Gospel of Gladness, 281.
Dawson (G.), Sermons on Daily Life and Duty, 242.
Evans (E. H.), True and False Aims, 64.
Granger (W.), The Average Man, 47.
Hutton (W. E.), Low Spirits, 88.
Maclaren (A,), Expositions : 2 Samuel and Kings, 172.
Macleay (K. A.), ITie Never-Changing Creed, 165.
Matheson (G.), Moments on the Mount, 187.
Potter (H, C), Sermons of the City, 325.
Roberts (R.), My Jewels, 42.
Rowland (A.), The Burdens of Life, 175.
Stevens (W. B.), Sermons, 123.
Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), vi. No. 630.
Williams (T. R.), Belief a/nd Life, 344.
Woodford (J. R.), Sermons : Old Testament Series, 80.
Christian World Pulpit, xxxvi. 310 (Rawnsley) ; 1. 299 (Ormsby) ; Ixxvii.
347 (Yates). Contemporary Pulpit, Ist Ser., iv. 1 (Body) ; vi. 190 (Burn). Treasury (New York), xv. 921 (Chapin) ; xxii. 952 (Hallock).
380
J
Hewing and Building.
And the house, when it was in building, was built of stone made ready at the quarry : and there was neither hammer nor axe nor any tool of iron heard in the house, while it was in building'. — i Kings vi. 7.
1. The erection of the Temple was, it is felt instinctively, the great event of Solomon's reign. Not that midnight cry for wisdom ; not the marvellous insight which, as the reward of that petition, God gave him into the secrets of the universe ; not the wealth and honour in which, by an unasked blessing, he excelled all his contemporaries ; none of these has made him so essential a part of the world's history as the fact that he was the man who raised up the first sanctuary for the worship of the true God.
2. As the House of God, the Temple was the chief joy of Israel and the glory of the Jewish Economy. St. Paul, in his Epistles, frequently alludes to that Temple, and employs it as a figure or type or symbol to set forth some great Christian truth. Sometimes he speaks of the individual Christian being the temple of God. He admonishes the Corinthians not to degrade or pollute the body, for the reason that " the body is the Lord's." " Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you ? " (1 Cor. vi. 19). Sometimes he speaks of the Church col- lectively as the temple of God. " Ye are the temple of the living God ; as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them " (2 Cor. vi. 16 ; 1 Cor. iil 16, 17).
3. In the heart of the chronicle, in the midst of architectural
details, which we pass with little interest, is this verse which
captures the imagination and shapes before the mind the picture
of a temple growing silently into shape and beauty, with no
sound of hammer or axe or any tool of iron heard while it is
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382 HEWING AND BUILDING
building. It is a verse which suddenly frees the fancy in the midst of the completely prosaic. It reads like an interruption in the narrative, and the Biblical critic tells us that it has either become misplaced or is an addition by a later hand. It matters little whether the hand that wrote it was the earliest chronicler or a later commentator. It was the hand of a genius. It added a touch which turns a builder's table of specifications into a poem and a parable. " The house was threescore cubits long and twenty cubits broad and thirty cubits high. The porch was twenty cubits long and ten cubits broad. The inner chamber was five cubits broad and the middle was six cubits," and so on ; and the only person interested is the architect, who has the plans of a far finer building pigeon-holed at home. The rest of us are not wildly excited by cubic measures. This is the prose of the building trade. But here is poetry and mystery : " The house when it was in building," etc. This verse comes like a touch of magic, and you feel the silence and the mystery as of the city which the Apostle saw coming down from God out of heaven.