2. " The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple." It is a definite voice, a voice addressed to the child in the man,
^ A. P. Pealiody, King's Chayel Sermons, 96.
332 THE PERFECT LAW
and therefore capable of being understood by all men. It speaks to the conscience in the prohibitory form in which law speaks to the child : " Thou shalt ; thou shalt not." It gives no reason for its command beyond the fact that it has commanded ; it is what Kant grandly calls " the categorical imperative " ; it speaks as the ultimate authority from which there can be no appeal. It is this that makes its testimony so sure, and that renders it so powerful in "making wise the simple." It realizes the fine image of the poet Cowper when he says that the words " Believe and live " are legible only by the light which radiates from them. The child-life is not perplexed by an effort to find the reason of the thing; this thing is itself the reason; it shines by its own light.
^ A well-informed writer in the Kilmarnock Standard states tliat Thomas Carlyle, not long before his death, was in conversa- tion with the late Dr. John Brown, and expressed himself to the following effect: "I am now an old man, and done with the world. Looking around me, before and behind, and weighing all as wisely as I can, it seems to me there is nothing solid to rest on but the faith which I learned in my old home, and from my mother's lips." ^
Sometime when all life's lessons have been learned.
And sun and stars for evermore have set; The things which our weak judgment here has spurned,
The things o'er which we grieved with lashes wet, Will flash before us out of life's dark night,
As stars shine most in deeper tints of blue; And we shall see how all God's plans were right.
And how what seemed reproof was love most true.
3. " The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart." Nature is a revelation of many things which are very nearly allied to morality : it is a revelation of the beautiful ; it is a revelation of the useful ; it is, in some sense, a revelation of the true. But while beauty, utility, and truth are all included in the conception of the moral consciousness, neither any of them singly nor all of them united would suffice to give that conscious- ness. A moral action is more than beautiful, more than useful, more than intellectually true ; it is right. The difference 1 The Treasury of Religious Thovijld, Oct. 1903, p. 487.
PSALM XIX. 7-9 333
between right and wrong is fundamentally distinct from the difference between beauty and deformity, expediency and inex- pediency, intellectual truth and intellectual error. It cannot be ascribed to any other sense than the moral consciousness, just as light cannot be ascribed to any other sense than the eye. The physical universe cannot implant the moral idea in one who is not already in possession of that idea. Therefore it is that, according to the implication of the Psalmist, the physical universe cannot "rejoice the heart." If a heart is already joyful it can minister to that joy; but it cannot put joy into a sad heart ; it has no power to make glad. And it has no power for this reason, that it cannot say to the soul of its own sadness, " It is right " ; it cannot tell a man in the season of his calamity that his calamity is a moral ordinance designed to make him spiritu- ally strong. It can tell him that the calamities of life are forces of Nature ; it may even promise him that they will be found to be in harmony with the symmetry of the universe : but it cannot say to him the one thing which alone can give him peace, that they are the will of God for his salvation.
In Conscience he finds that personal comfort in calamity which he lacked in the voice of Nature — something which tells him to be still and know that the Judge of all the earth does right. It is not the mere testimony to a future symmetry of all things ; it is not the mere prophecy of a completed harmony which shall vindicate the minor chords of the universe : such testimonies speak beautifully in favour of the universe, but they say little in favour of man. If my individual life is to be begun, con- tinued, and ended in sorrow, it is small comfort to me that the completed harmony of creation will make use of my discord. But when in the hour of my calamity I hear a voice saying, " This is right for you : this is good for you as an individual man," I hear something which can rejoice the heart. 1 am no longer forced to come out of my private sorrow to contemplate the eternal harmonies to which my groans are an unconscious and an unwilling contribution. I am allowed to look into my private sorrow itself and to see in it a Divine statute given to my soul, a species of sacramental bread administered to my spiritual being which is bitter in its appropriation, but certain in its promise of nourishment ; and I am able with some appreciation to echo the