PSALM xci. 1 243
that our moral nature, even the reh'gious, is too often shallow and poverty-stricken ? It is because we do not pursue the growing knowledge of God on our own account. We are religious, or at least we are always in danger of being religious, without spiritual growth, and spiritual growth surely means spiritual insight. We cease to become sensible of spiritual enrichment. We come to a time of life when we are content to say, " I get no secrets from God now." Eevelations do not arrive ; doors are not opened in Heaven ; new vistas of faith do not spread away before the soul. Faith runs on upon the level, and it does not mount, and it does not soar, God becomes by habit a uniform Presence to us. He is not denied. We do not venture to deny Him. I was almost going to say we had not the courage to deny Him. But, at any rate, we do not deny Him. We only disregard Him, like the air and the sky. We do not give our minds seriously and deliberately to realizing Him. We do not pore upon Him until fold after fold removes, and depth after depth opens, and we look into His hearc. The secret, the secret of the Most High is not with us.^
2. While this is the general idea, it is possible that the immedi- ate figure of " the secret place " may have been borrowed from the arrangements and appointments of the Temple. There was the vast outside world stretching on every side beyond the Temple walls ; then the outer courts of the Temple; then the inner chambers and precincts ; then the Holy Place with its golden candlestick and table of shewbread; and last of all, the Holy of Holies, the secret place, the mystic abiding-place of the eternal God. And every Jew thought reverently and almost awfully of that secret, silent place where God dwelt between the cherubim. He turned towards it, he worshipped towards it, his desire moved towards it; it was the mysterious centre of his adoration and service. And that arrangement and apportionment of the Temple became to the Psalmist the type and the symbol of human life. Life could be all outside, or it could spend itself in outer courts, on the mere fringe of being, or it could have a secret place where every- thing found significance and interpretation and value in the mysterious fellowship of God. That seems to be the primary meaning of life " in the secret place " ; it is life abandoning the mere outside of things, refusing to dwell in the outer halls and passages of the stately temple of being, and centralizing itself in
1 P. T. Forsyth.
244 GOD'S INNER CIRCLE
that mysterious interior of things where " cherubim and seraphim continually do cry, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty."
^ The necessity of an inward stillness hath appeared clear to my mind. In true silence strength is renewed, and the mind is weaned from all things, save as they may be enjoyed in the Divine will; and a lowliness in outward living, opposite to worldly honour, becomes truly acceptable to us. In the desire after outward gain the mind is prevented from a perfect attention to the voice of Christ ; yet being weaned from all things, except as they may be enjoyed in the Divine will, the pure light shines into the soul. Where the fruits of the spirit which is of this world are brought forth by many who profess to be led by the Spirit of truth, and cloudiness is felt to be gathering over the visible church, the sincere in heart, who abide in true stillness, and are exercised therein before the Lord for His name's sake, have knowledge of Christ in the fellowship of His sufferings ; and inward thankfulness is felt at times, tliat through Divine love our own wisdom is cast out, and that forward, active part in us is subjected, which would rise and do something without the pure leadings of the spirit of Christ.^
^ Don't be too much taken up with excitements social and intellectual. The depths of life are still and ought not to be ruffled by every wanton breei;e, else they lose the capacity which they ought to possess of being that centre of rest, and peace, and content, to which we can withdraw when wearied of the world which is too much with us. Life to be worth anything at all must have a moral basis. After all, it is the root of the matter, unless the universe was made in jest.*
3. The Church is, in God's idea, a home where we recover from the fatigue of effort, when we take a new hold of high purposes from which our hand had slackened ; a place of compensations ; a place from which we see our life more truly, for we see more than itself. Here, in this house, we may feel something, some one, even God, in the form and manner of Jesus Christ, coming between us and the things which would dishearten us and work despair. Here we may sit under a shadow, under the shadow of thought and faith. Here we may come under the rebuke and deliverance of high and unworldly considerations ; here we niay receive the emancipation which comes the moment we adopt the