The second boy said, " Yes, father, I will tell you what I did with mine ; I picked up the stone my little brother threw away,
^ B. Jowett, in Life and Letters, ii. 402.
PSALM XXXIV. 8 1 15
broke it, and ate the kernel ; I enjoyed that exceedingly ; but T did not eat my peach, I sold it. I could buy a dozen peaches with what I got for it." The father said, " That may be right, but I think it was a little covetous."
Then he said to the third boy, " Well, Edward, what did you do with your peach ? " Edward came forward reluctantly ; but in answer to his father, he replied, " I took it to poor little George, who is sick down the lane. He would not take it, so I left the peach on his bed and ran away."
Which of the four peaches was sweetest ? " Taste and see " the way to enjoy anything.^
* James Vaughan, Sermons to Children, i. 67.
God of Nature and God of Grace.
"7
Literature.
Davies (J. A.), Seven Words of Love, 165.
Dearden (H. W.), Parochial Serynons, 68.
Gray (W. A.), The Shadow of the Hand, 198.
Hanks (W. P.), The Eternal Witness, 142.
Maclaren (A.), A Year's Ministry, ii. 211.
Christian World Pulpit, xxxiv. 188 (W. G. Horder) ; xl. 169 (L. Abbott) ;
Ixxv. 60 (E. E. Newell). Church Times, July 28, 1911 (J. W. Horsley). Preacher's Magazine, vii. 439 (R. Brewiii). Twentieth Century Pastor, xxviii. (1911) 201 (J. E. Flower).
»«
God of Nature and God of Grace.
Thy loving-kindness, O Lord, is in the heavens; Thy faithfulness reacheth unto the skies. Thy righteousness is like the mountains of God ; Thy judgements are a great deep.— Ps. xxxvi. 5, 6.
The landscape from which the Psalmist has borrowed his lessons in all probability lay beside him while he mused. We imagine him at the time a fugitive from Saul. He is hid in some desert- retreat, with the everlasting hills round about him, and the gleams and the shadows of a summer noon overhead. He had been cast out from the comforts of an earthly home, but God was his dwelling-place and his refuge. Hunt him as men might, they could not drive him where Jehovah's righteousness did not environ him, and the wings of His lovingkindness stretch to shadow and protect. Out there, amidst the silence and restfulness of nature, God's breath was about him to cool and to strengthen, and His voice spoke comfort and peace. So the Psalmist speaks little of himself. He mentions his trials and perils only for the sake of dismissing them. From the wickedness and the craft of men he is fain to turn to the goodness and the faithfulness of God, of which all things around were eloquent.
^ I was struck with the fact that Scripture is adapted to every laud, on Sunday week, as I sat in the little English Church at Zermatt, right under the shadow of the gigantic Matterhorn, and read such passages as these on its walls: "Ye frost and cold, bless ye the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him for ever." " " Ye mountains and hills, bless ye the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him for ever." And as day after day I moved about in a land where in every direction the eye rested on gigantic peaks, whose crests were often lost in the clouds, these words were ever rising in my mind : " Thy righteousness is like the moim tains of God"i
* W. Garrett Horder,
I20 GOD OF NATURE AND OF GRACE
I.
The Lovingkindness of God.
"Thy lovingkindness, O Lord, is in the heavens."
The " mercy " or " lovingkindness " of which the Psahnist speaks is very nearly equivalent to the New Testament " grace." Both mean substantially this — active love communicating itself to creatures who are inferior, and who might have expected some- thing else to befall them. Mercy is a modification of love, in- asmuch as it is love to an inferior. The hand is laid gently upon the man, because if it were laid with all its weight it would crush him. It is the stooping goodness of a king to a beggar. And mercy is likewise love in its exercise to persons that might expect something else, being guilty. As a general coming to a body of mutineers with pardon and favour upon his lips, instead of with condemnation and death, so God comes to us forgiving and bless- ing. All His goodness is forbearance, and His love is mercy, because of the weakness, the lowliness, and the ill desert of us on whom the love falls.
1. As the heavens are high above the earth, so God's loving- kindness evermore transcends man. Far above the towers that men's hands have reared, the waves that the tempests uplift, the peaks that the earth has heaved, the heaven stretches its distant curtain, embracing but surmounting them all. And so with the mercy of our God. It is the one all-enfolding, all-trausceudiug fact in God's moral universe, lifting itself far above the region of human experience and analogy. It is high ; we cannot attain to it. It is far above man's mercies, for our " goodness extendeth not to God's," and while " greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends," God " commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.'' It is far above man's deserts, for we are " not worthy of the least of all the mercies, and of all the truth " which He showeth to His servants. It is far above man's sins, for high as he has heaved the mountains of his provocations, God's mercy can transcend t he loftiest. It is far above man's prayers and conceptions, for