He reraembereth that we are dust. — Ps. ciii. 13, 14.
1. " Like as a father." The history of religion shows that it has not been easy for men to think of God in that extremely simple and human fashion ; and yet, to Christians, no other way of thinking appears so obvious or so natural. It met us in our childhood, grew into the thinking of our youth, and has swayed the conceptions we have formed of that august and invincible power that works for righteousness and peace for evermore. We lisped it in our earliest hymns. It had a place in the first prayers w^e offered at our mother's knee. It was set out in many winsome forms in the Sunday school; and when we realized something of the joy of the Divine pardon, we felt more deeply than ever the entire appropriateness and unsurpassed charm of the poet's words. God is like a father. It saturates the Christian atmosphere. It is shaping the thought and the life of the world.
And yet it is a matter of historic fact that men were thinking and inquiring for ages before they were able to interpret God in the terms of human fatherhood. Groping after God, if haply they might find Him, they sought their symbols first of all in the many-leaved picture book of nature, and said, God is like the sun, shining in its strength, and filling the world with its radiance. The moon is His symbol as it casts its light on the path of the pilgrim in the night. " God is like the rock," they exclaimed ; " His work is perfect." He abides amid the storms and stress of life, stable as the everlasting hills.
Quite late in history did men come to the human in their quest for the terms in which they might express God ; and when they reached this point, they seized at first only upon the more PS. xxv.-cxix. — 20
3o6 THE FATHER'S PITY
arresting qualities of the animal in man, and said, " God is like Hercules " in the invincible strength with which He crushes the evils in the world, and makes an end of them. Later still, Plato advanced to the suggestion that God was like a "geometer," a thinker and fashioner, full of ideas and ideals ; and, latest of all, in one of the youngest portions of the Old Testament, not in Genesis, not in any part of the Pentateuch, but in this wonderful and most gracious lyric, the 103rd Psalm, possibly one of the last contributions of Hebrew Psalmody, the seer surpasses all the great historical religions, and pictures God to us as a pitiful, compassionate, sin-forgiving, and soul-healing Father, and thus supplies the basis for the most true, most worthy, and most inspiring conception of God.
^ There was once a group of friends standing at the house door, gazing in wonder at an eclipse. It was a cloudless night ; and, as they saw the shadow of the earth gliding so punctually over the face of the brilliant moon, a solemn emotion of awe fell upon every mind, and in absolute silence they watched the magnificent phenomenon. Everything connected with their daily lives seemed for a season to be forgotten ; they were citizens of infinitude; all their thoughts were swept into the regions of immensity. But suddenly the silence was broken by a cry from the nursery where a child had been laid to sleep. In that company, how soon you could tell who was the mother; in a moment she had left the scene, had rushed upstairs, and was clasping the baby in her embrace ! What were the wonders of nature compared to the needs of a suffering child ? More sacred than the music of the spheres was that feeble appeal for pity ; more powerful than the sweet influence of the Pleiades was the attraction of love which at once absorbed that woman's soul. Then was she most like God, not when she was exalted into amazement at the marvels of the sky, but when she was soothing pain and chasing fear by tenderness and pity.^
2. In depicting the milder and kindlier aspect of God's character the Old Testament writers make pity the ground quaUty on which everything is based. With the Psalm writers it is a standing description of God on this side of His nature that He is " gracious and full of compassion." His compassion for the perishable life and oppressed state of Israel is expressly assigned
» F. Walters.
PSALM cm. 13, 14 307
by the prophets as His reason for " redeeming " His people and forgiving their rebellions with long-suffering mercy. When He withdraws locusts from the wasted fields of Palestine, it is because He pities His people's sufferings. The repentant city of Nineveh is spared because its helpless myriads touched in God's great heart such ruth as Jonah had for his withering gourd. And after Jerusalem's fall, the patriot-poet who mourned so exquisitely over its ruin finds the explanation of all disaster in these plaintive, half-reproachful words, " Thou hast not pitied." It reads as if the Almighty's long-suffering patience with men. His gracious kindness to His people. His relenting, even His mercy in pardoning sin, were all felt by these old Hebrews to root themselves in that beautiful sentiment of compassion with which a Being so immense and self-contained in blessedness must look down on the fragile and sorrowful creatures whose origin, whose habitation, and whose end are all of them in the dust.