i86 THE BURDEN-BEARING GOD
and the saintliest soul feels the mystery and greatness of human life most of all. To the Greek, life is sunshine and joy ; beauty swims in upon tlie soul ; his spirit is glad and he carries no care; but the Hebrew, with his stern, inexorable rigliteousness, his awful sense of stewardship, his solemn knowledge of a " covenant with the Eternal," cries out for deliverance from the taint of guilt and the burden of perplexity ; and of all the Hebrews it is the man of widest culture, maturest thought, and loftiest aspiration who exclaims, " 0 wretched man that I am ! who shall deliver me from this body of death ? "
^ Who can tell us of the power which events possess — whether they issue from us, or whether we owe our being to them ? Do we attract them, or are we attracted by them ? Do we mould them, or do they mould us ? Are they always unerr- ing in their course ? Why do they come to us like the bee to the hive, like the dove to the cote ; and where do they find a resting- place when we are not there to meet them ? Whence is it that they come to us ; and why are they shaped in our image, as though they were our brothers ? Are their workings in the past 'or in the future ; and are the more powerful of them those that are no longer, or those that are not yet? Is it to-day or to- morrow that moulds us ? Do we not all spend the greater part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come to pass ? I have noticed the same grave gestures, the footsteps that seemed to tend towards a goal that was all too near, the pre- sentiments that chilled the blood, the fixed, immovable look — I have noticed all these in the men, even, whose end was to come about by accident, the men on whom death would suddenly seize from without. And yet were they as eager as their brethren, who bore the seeds of death within them. Their faces were the same. To them, too, life was fraught with more seriousness than to those who were to live their full span. The same careful, silent watchfulness marked their actions. They had no time to lose ; they had to be in readiness at the same hour ; so completely had tliis event, which no prophet could have foretold, become the very life of their life.^
Here in our little island-home we bide
Our few brief years — the years that we possess.
Beyond, the Infinite on every side
Holds what no man may know, though all may guess.
1 M. Maeterlinck, The Treasure of the Humble, 61.
PSALM Lxviii. 19 187
Earth, that is next to nothing in the sum Of things created — a brief mote in space,
With all her aeons past and yet to come. How we miscalculate our size — our place !
Yet are we men — details of the design,
Set to our course, like circling sun and star;
Mortal, infinitesimal, yet divine
Of that divine which made us what we are.
And yet this world, this microscopic ball, This cast-up grain of sand upon the shore,
This trivial shred and atom of the ALL, Is still our Trust, that we must answer for.
A lighthouse in the Infinite, with lamps That we must trim and feed until we die;
A lonely outpost of the unseen camps
That we must keep, although we know not why.
Maker of all ! Enough that Thou hast given This tempered mind, this brain without a flaw,
Enough for me to strive, as 1 have striven,
To make them serve their purpose and Thy law.^
IL
The Burden-Bearkk.
The Psalmist employs here that name of God which most strongly expresses the idea of supremacy and dominion. Rule and dignity are the predominant ideas in the word "Lord," as, indeed, the English reader feels in hearing it ; and then, side by side with that, there lies the thought that the Highest, the Euler of all, whose absolute authority stretches over all mankind, stoops to this low and servile office, and becomes the burden- bearer for all the pilgrims who put their trust in Him. This blending together of the two ideas of dignity and condescension to lowly offices of help and furtherance is made even more emphatic if we glance back at the context of the psalm. For there is no
* Ada Cambridge, The Hand in the Dark, 12.
i88 THE BURDEN-BEARING GOD
place in Scripture in which there is flashed before the mind of the singer a grander picture of the magnificence and the glory of God than that which glitters and flames in the previous verses. The majestic greatness of God described in its earlier part seems purposely intended to heighten our sense of the wonder and blessedness of this God stooping from heaven to take on Himself the burdens which rest on His children on the earth.
And if we look deeper, this is not a case of contrast. It is not that there are sharply opposed to each other these two things, the gentleness and the greatness, the condescension and the magnificence, but that the former is the direct result of the latter ; and it is just because He is Lord, and has dominion over all, that, therefore. He bears the burdens of all. For the responsi- bilities of the Creator are in proportion to His greatness, and He wlio has made man has thereby made it necessary that He should, if we will let Him, be Burden-bearer and our Servant. The highest must be the lowest, and just because' God is high over all, therefore is He the Supporter and Sustainer of all. So we may learn the true meaning of elevation of all sorts, and from the example of the loftiest may draw the lesson for our more insignificant varieties of height, that the higher we are, the more we are bound to stoop, and that men are then likest God, when their elevation suggests to them responsibility, and when he that is chiefest becomes the servant