^ There must be a daring determination, if need be, to be singular ; not a preference for standing alone, not an abstinence from conventional signs of worldliness simply because they are conventional ; but there must be first of all close-knit strength, which refuses to do what men round about us are doing. The characteristics of religious men must be, as the first thing that strikes one, that they are "a people whose laws are different
1 Joseph Parker, TJie City Temple, v. 289. 2 ji^a., 290.
PSALM I. 1 173
from all the people that be on the face of the earth." If you have not learned to shelter your positive goodness behind a barrier of negative abstinence, there will be little vitality and little fruit in the weakling plants that are trying to blossom in the undefended open, swept by every wind.^
^ The free man is he who is loyal to the Laws of this Universe ; who in his heart sees and knows, across all contradictions, that injustice cannot befall him here ; that except by sloth and cowardly falsity evil is not possible here. The first symptom of such a man is not that he resists and rebels, but that he obeys. As poor Henry Marten wrote in Chepstow Castle long ago :
Eeader, if thou an oft-told tale wilt trust, Thou'lt gladly do and suffer what thou must.
Gladly ; he that will go gladly to his labour and his suffering, it is to him alone that the Upper Powers are favourable and the Field of Time will yield fruit.^
How happy is he born and taught
That serveth not another's will ; Whose armour is his honest thought,
And simple truth his utmost skill !
Whose passions not his masters are;
Whose soul is still prepared for death, Untied unto the world by care
Of public fame or private breath;
Who envies none that chance doth raise,
Nor vice ; who never understood How deepest wounds are given by praise;
Nor rules of state, but rules of good;
Who hath his life from rumours freed ;
Whose conscience is his strong retreat ; Whose state can neither flatterers feed,
Nor ruin make oppressors great;
Who God doth late and early pray More of His grace than gifts to lend;
And entertains the harmless day With a religious book or friend ; ^ A. Maclaren. " Carlyle, Latter-Day Pamphlets, 213.
174 THE MAN THAT IS BLESSED
This man is freed from servile bands
Of hope to rise or fear to fall ; Lord of himself, though not of lands,
And having nothing, yet hath all.^
6. Now in this abstinence there is a certain progress. It is quite clear that there is an advance in the permanence of association with evil expressed by the three attitudes, walking, standing, sitting. It is also clear that there is an advance in the intensity of evil expressed by the progress from " counsel " to " way " ; from thought, purpose, plan, to its realization in a course of action, and that there is a further progress from " the way of sinners" to "the seat" — by which is meant, not a thing to sit upon, but an assembly seated — or the " session of the scorners."
^ There is a perilous progress in sin.
At first I content myself with walking in the counsel of the wicked. It is an occasional companionship. It is a meeting only now and again. For a little while I am with them, and then some better influence calls me away — a remembrance of my mother's prayer, a sentence in a letter from a friend, a verse of the Bible shot suddenly into my mind.
But by and by I am found standing in the way of sinners. They have gained a greater power over me and a completer fascination. I have learned to love them too well. I linger much longer in their society, and it is hard almost to impossibility for me to tear myself from them. The poison is working ; the leaven is spreading ; my condition is more fixed and more hopeless by far.
And, at last, where do you see me ? I am sitting in the seat of the scornful. I am at home among those who laugh at God and Christ and heaven and hell. You cannot discriminate me from them ; I have joined their ranks ; I am one of their number. Their resorts are mine ; their sneers and sarcasms are mine ; their seared conscience and withered heart are mine. Oh dreary ending of a dreary journey !
As I would escape that lowest depth of all, let me not look over the precipice or set my feet on the fatal slope. Blessed is the man who says, " I cannot ; I will not," to the first allurements of sin. Blessed is the man who will not so much as walk in the Enchanted Ground.^
^ In the great Psalm of life, we are told that everything that a man doeth shall prosper, so only that he delight in the law of
^ Sir Henry Wotton, "Reliquiae." ^ A. Smellie, In the Hour of Silence, 326.
PSALM I. I 175
his God, that he hath not walked in the counsel of the wicked, nor sat in the seat of the scornful. Is it among these leaves of the perpetual Spring, — helpful leaves for the healing of the nations, — that we mean to have our part and place, or rather among the " brown skeletons of leaves that lag, the forest brook along " ? For other leaves there are, and other streams that water them, — not water of life, but water of Acheron. Autumnal leaves there are that strew the brooks, in Vallombrosa. Eemember you how the name of the place was changed: "Once called * Sweet water ' (Aqua bella), now, the Shadowy Vale." Portion in one or other name we must choose, all of us, — with the living olive, by the living fountains of waters, or with the wild fig trees, whose leafage of human soul is strewed along the brooks of death, in the eternal Vallombrosa.^