Unceasingly they creep. When silver moonlight floods the nights —
0 hark ! across the sea These roads, the wanderer's delights,
Are calling you and me. Singing their challenge sweet and clear
For wanderers to roam ; But, all at once, I only hear
The road that leads me home.^
3. While they are paths of righteousness they are something more. For a man may say, " I acknowledge that the great thing is to keep a good conscience, to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with my God. But I may do that, and yet miss my way. My life may be a succession, not of sins, but of blunders. I may
^ G. A. Smith, Four Psalms, 19. * W. Canton, Children'' s Sayings, 114.
' Alice Gary.
438 GOOD GUIDANCE
be misled through my own fault or the fault of other people, or through accident and misadventure. I may make nothing of my life ; or, at any rate, I may make much less of it than I might have made. The great thing is to be righteous ; but, without any moral blame, through defective information or defective judgment, I may make a wrong decision in one or two critical moments, and my whole life comes to be a miserable failure." But the Psalmist means that if a man is under God's guidance he will be protected from making a wrong decision in critical moments ; he will not take the wrong track; he will be kept in the right path — the righteous path, no doubt ; but also the path which will lead him to the successful achievement of the great ends of life. God's guidance keeps a man from sin ; but it also keeps him from wasting his strength and failing to make the most of all his powers and opportunities.
^ St. Paul in his Epistles and spirit is more than ever clear and dear to me. As soldiers cried once, " Oh, for one day of Dundee ! " so do I feel disposed to cry, " Oh, for one day of Paul ! " How he would puzzle and astonish and possibly pain our Churches, ay, us all, for he is far in advance of us all yet ! But as Max Piccolomini, when wishing for an angel to show him the true and good, said, why should he wish this when he had his noble Thekla with him to speak what he felt ; so much more surely you and I and all who seek the truth may have peace, with the loving, patient, and wise Spirit and Guide, who will search us and lead us into all truth ! ^
•[j I suppose that in all projects for doing service to mankind, a devout man may trust God to guide him in right paths. How much time and strength and thought and money and earnestness have been spent on schemes which were well meant, and which seemed full of promise, but which have come to nothing ; schemes of religious and philanthropic work ; schemes of moral, social, and economical reform ; schemes which had very modest though very excellent aims; schemes which it was hoped might confer en- during good on great communities ! WitFi some men nothing seems to succeed. They have a genuine desire to serve God and man ; and they work hard at the methods of service which they have chosen ; but somehow they always miss their way ; they achieve nothing ; or, if now and then they have a success, their successes are only an occasional break in a monotonous procession
^ Memoir of Norman MacLeod, ii. 193.
PSALM XXIII. 3 439
of failures. Other men hit on the right path and have the joy of seeing all they hoped for. The end is not yet ; and it may be that the apparent failures of some men were necessary to the success of others ; in any case, self-sacrificing to do good will not be forgotten in heaven. But for myself, I am less and less inclined to soothe my own disappointments by taking optimistic views of human life. I cannot resist the conviction that in the plain sense of the words a great deal of good work is wasted. It was well intended ; God accepts it and thinks kindly of the man who did it ; what was meant to be a " cup of cold water " given to a brother of Christ will not lose its reward, even though, through the clumsiness of the hand that offered it, the watett- was spilt before it reached the parched lips ; but it would have been better if it had not been spilt; in the plain sense of the words, the water was wasted.^
4. These paths of righteousness to the righteous, led of God in them, are also in the highest sense paths of " pleasantness." In the highest sense — for to the selfish heart they are irksome, and oftentimes intensely disagreeable. But to one who has tasted the joy of walking with God and doing His will, the paths of righteousness have a delight which cannot be expressed. It is, indeed, a common thought, and has done much mischief, that the ways of the Lord are ways of gloom. In part it is the whisper of the devil in the heart ; in part it is a deduction from the lives of some good men who, instead of " rejoicing in the Lord alway," have thought it their duty to " hang down the head like a bulrush, and to spread sackcloth and ashes under them " ; and in part we have mistakenly embodied it in our religious teaching.