^ " Pity lies at the core of all the great religions." The chapters of the Koran, all of them, begin with these words : " In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful." The vast religion of Buddha numbers five hundred million votaries, and pity is the keynote to it all,^
3. The sense of God's fatherly compassion grows out of man's deepest experience. The Psalmist is face to face with his own life, and with the life of Israel. He looks back in his history, and counts up the " benefits " he has received from the Lord : forgive- ness and healing, solace and renewal, quickening and uplift. He is swayed by the spirit of praise and adoration and love ; and out of his own growing affection there leaps up irresistibly this thought of God. It must be so. The God who meets his sin with such pity and pardon, bears with his errors and guilty ignorance so patiently, must have the heart of a father. These are the gifts of love. They reveal wisdom, intelligence, adaptation of means to an end, but chiefly they show the same sort of care for the soul of man as a loving father shows for his child; they disclose the Divine heart. God forgives as a father does the mistakes and follies and sins of his son. He delivers from peril, He crowns with loving-kindness and tenderness. He satisfies 1 M. J. McLeod, Heavenly Harmonies for Earthly Living, 99.
3o8 THE FATHER'S PITY
the soaring desires of the spirit ; He renews the springs of life. " Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him."
But the most vital element in the Psalmist's experience is the forgiveness of his sins. It is to that he recurs again and again. God forgives as only a father-heart in its fullest flow of pity and compassion can forgive. For it is not easy to forgive. Brothers have been known to pursue one another in a spirit of retaliation for years, and some fathers and mothers have shown hardness of heart towards their own offspring ; but God forgives with a gener- osity and completeness which show that no father has a love so large as His.
Who is a pardoning God like Thee, Or who has grace so rich and free!
It seems impossible to exaggerate in describing it. Listen to the singer as, with soul bursting with thankfulness, he says, God does chide — but not always; nor does He keep His anger for ever. Take your measuring-glass and look up into the heavens. Let your gaze reach out to the farthest depths of the infinite blue, soar and still soar, and still you do not reach the boundaries of His forgiving love : " He hath not dealt with us after our sins ; nor rewarded us according to our iniquities. For as the heaven is high above the earth, so great is his mercy toward them that fear him."
^ Years ago when death came to me first and took a child, the anguish was great. Watching her while she lay dying, I learnt for the first time what is meant by the words, " Like as a father pitieth his children." Only so could I be taught the pity of God. Aud I learnt too, at the same time, what God must feel at the loss of His children. What are all these passionate affections but parables of Divine things ? Shall God suffer and not we ? ^
My little Son, who look'd from thoughtful eyes
And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,
Having my law the seventh time disobey'd,
I struck him, and dismiss'd
With hard words and unkiss'd.
His Mother, who was patient, being dead.
^ Life of B. W. Dale of Birmingham, 621.
PSALM cm. 13, 14 309
Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep,
I visited his bed,
But found him slumbering deep.
With darken'd eyelids, and their lashes yet
From his late sobbing wet.
And I, with moan,
Kissing away his tears, left others of my own;
For on a table drawn beside his head,
He had put, within his reach,
A box of counters, and a red-vein'd stone,
A piece of glass abraded by the beach
And six or seven shells,
A bottle with bluebells
And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,
To comfort his sad heart.
So when that night I pray'd
To God, I wept, and said :
Ah, when at last we lie with tranced breath,
Not vexing Thee in death,
And Thou rememberest of what toys
We made our joys.
How weakly understood.
Thy great commanded good,
Then, fatherly not less
Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,
Thou'lt leave Thy wrath, and say,
" I will be sorry for their childishness." ^
4. The New Testament discloses the fact that the pity of God is the sympathy of One who associates Himself with us and under- takes for us. When we speak of the Incarnation we think of the Divine in the human. But there is another side to that great truth. There is the human in the Divine — what Eobertson of Brighton used to call the humanity of Deity, and what the late Principal Edwards of Bala called " the humanity of God." That is something which makes Him one with us, so that He identifies Himself with us, and, in a word, pities us. Now nobody resents that kind of pity, the pity of a genuine sympathy, which makes a man suffer because you suffer and compels him so to identify himself with you as to enter into your experience. That comes to you like balm ; there is healing in it. It stands by your * Coventry Patmore, The UnJcnoum Eros.