^ David had lived a full life. He had known the extremes of want and wealth. He had endured the tortures of physical hunger and thirst, and had moved amid all the splendours of an Oriental court. He had mingled freely with the affairs of State, and knew all its ambitions and temptations, its plots and counter- plots. He had proved the despiritualizing effects of a voluptuous court life, and the necessity for restoration of soul ; for, like the body, the soul runs down. And David had found that there was but one way of recovering spiritual tone, and that was in fulfilling personal relations with a personal God. He — Jehovah — and He
^ J. D. Frecniau, Lift on the Uplands, 51.
PSALM XXIII. 2, 3 417
alone could reinforce him on the moral side, and so brace him up that he could say " No " to the clamour of unholy desire.^
(1) First among the means of "restoring" is God's Word, read, heard, meditated upon, hidden in the heart, conversed about, prayed over, loved, opened and applied by the Holy Spirit ; with its revealings, instructions, records of experience, saintly examples, consolations, mighty spiritual energies, exceeding great and precious promises.
^ The Bible is not a book that has guided only the lives of fools and women and babes. It has moulded the lives of the noblest, and made wise men like Carlyle, Bright, Gladstone, Tennyson, Shakespeare, and Milton as vessels of power and grace. It was for many generations the chief if not the only text-book of our Scottish sires ; and those whose praises are in all the churches were made brave enough to live and strong enough to die, drawing deep draughts of grace and power from the stream of Holy Scripture. In the enfolding universalness in which its unity is found ; in its deep power of truth-revealing, its uplifting and guiding grace, its ocean-song of majestic phrase and captivating words, the irresistibleness of the Divine within and about it, it vindicates its claim to be Literature, and the greatest utterance of Literature in the language of men.^
(2) Then there is the blessed intercourse of prayer, whereby the creature-spirit comes into immediate communion and fellow- ship with the Infinite Spirit. There is restoring for our souls in the very contact with God, and in the answer that He sends. Let experience declare. We have gone into our closets, and bowed our knees or cast ourselves on the floor, under an over- whelming sense of feebleness and prostration, like Elijah under the juniper tree, or David when he cried out, " My soul cleaveth unto the dust " ; and, through the Divine intercourse of prayer, we have come forth strong and gladdened : and, through prayer as a daily habit (growing into a necessity of our being), we have found our life deepening and expanding, and filling with joy from year to year.
^ Prayer is a spiritual exercise, and its results are spiritual. The men who know its fullest exercise are the men who are in a condition to talk about it. Cuique stid arte credendum est. Says
1 H. Howard, The Shepherd Psalm, 39. ' L. MacLean Watt, Literature and Life, 70. JOB-PS. XXX. — 27
4i8 REST. REFRESHMENT, RESTORATION
Bagehot, and with entire truth : " The criterion of true beauty is with those — they are not many — who have a sense of true beauty ; the criterion of true morality is with those who have a sense of true morality; and the criterion of true religion is with those who have a sense of true religion." It is so, emphatically, with prayer.^
^ How constantly through my life have I heard testimony of the power that answers prayer. History everywhere confesses its force. The Huguenots took possession of the Carolinas in the name of God. William Penn settled Pennsylvania in the name of Grod. The Pilgrim Fathers settled in New England in the name of God. Preceding the first gun of Bunker Hill, at the voice of prayer, all heads uncovered. In the war of 1812 an officer came to General Andrew Jackson and said, " There is an unusual noise in the camp ; it ought to be stopped." The General asked what this noise was. He was told it was the voice of prayer. " God forbid that prayer and praise should be an unusual noise in the camp," said General Jackson. "You had better go and join them." ^
(3) Then there is praise — the praise of the " great congrega- tion " ; the praise of the fireside, with the sweet child-voices chiming in ; the praise of solitude, ringing through the wood or rising from the lonely fisherman's boat ; the unheard praise of the workshop or street, when we " carry music in our heart." And its restoring efficacy is not less wonderful. When Israel chanted that lofty song on "the shore of deliverance," when Paul and Silas sang aloud in the dungeon at midnight, the very singing uplifted their spirits, doubtless, into a higher region.
^ Song lies nearer the centre of life than we think ; and the words were spoken from a true insight, " Give me the making of a nation's songs, and I care not who makes its laws." In the great revival of religion in New England last century, Jonathan Edwards mentions, as a sign of the Spirit's work and an instru- mentality He employed, " the great disposition to abound in the Divine exercise of singing praises, not only in appointed solemn meetings, but when Christians occasionally met together at each other's houses." He even gives his approval, under certain limitations, to the practice of singing psalms on the way to or from public worship, and says it " would have a great tendency to enliven, animate, and rejoice the souls of God's saints, and greatly