Stanley (A. P.), Sermons in the East, 123.
Thomas (J.), Myrtle Street Pulpit, iii. 19.
Christian World Pulpit, xxxvii. 355 (M. Bryce) ; 1. 121 (E. King).
Preacher's Magazine, ii. 220 (W. Hawkins).
Sunday Magazine, 1891, p. 171 (S. A. Tipple).
Treasury (New York), xxi. 675 (H. C. Swentzel).
446
Liberty in God's Law.
I have seen an end of all perfection ;
But thy commandment is exceeding broad. — Ps. cxix. 96.
This psalm throbs throughout with true reh"gion, and is evidently the production of some venerable father in Israel who had endured greatly and had not fainted; who had been divinely taught and chastened by the toils, the troubles, and the tempta- tions of life ; who had striven to live in loyalty to the law revealed to him, and was left at once ardent about right doing, and devoted to meditation ; at once sadly conscious of infirmity and weakness, and joyfully trustful in God's goodness and mercy. Nevertheless, though thus confident, the writer of the psalm confesses, " I have seen an end of all perfection." There is a sound of weariness and depression in the words ; we can hear speaking in them a man who had suffered disenchantments and disappointments, who had tried things that looked inviting to find them less charming than they looked, void of what they had promised ; a man who had aimed sanguinely in vain, and had sorrowfully learned that it must always be in vain ; who had nursed bright expectations that had not been fulfilled, although again and again he had felt sure that they were going to be, and who knew now they never could be.
^ This was the favourite text of Dean Stanley, a choice characteristic alike of the man and of his work : " I see that all things come to an end ; but Thy commandment is exceeding broad." [Prayer-Book Version.] These words are inscribed on his own and his wife's tomb in Henry vii.'s chapel in Westminster Abbey.
I.
The Unsatisfactoriness of Our ExrEBiENCE.
1. It was no young man who spoke the words of the text; young people have not seen " an end of all perfection," have not
448 LIBERTY IN GOD'S LAW
arrived at the conclusion that every radiance is stained by the shadow of defect, that the fullest is not full, the most complete incomplete. On the contrary, they are setting out to climb to the top of delectable mountains descried in the distance, where they shall build their tabernacle and stay. They have visions of the perfect, and count on realizing them — would infallibly realize them, they say to themselves, if only such or such circumstances were granted them; and what is there to which they may not attain with all the world before them ? No ; he who uttered the exclamation of the text must have been a comparatively old man — a man, at all events, who had lived much, who had passed through many vicissitudes ; who had found out with oft-repeated trial how much he could not do of what he once thought him- self capable of doing, the delusiveness of many an apparent possibility.
^ There was much in 1850 to sadden Watts ; the want of response, except amongst his own personal friends, to all the enthusiasm with which he had returned to England, full of faith in a revival of great art, was making itself felt with chilling effect year by year. In a moment of depression he writes : " I do not expect at most to have the opportunity of doing more than prepare the way for better men — and not that always; more often I sit among the ruins of my aspirations, watching the tide of time." No wonder that in such a mood he once signed " Finis " in the corner of one of his pictures. But the challenge to despair was given by Mr. Kuskin, who, on reading the word, took up the charcoal and added beneath, " et initium." If the end, then a beginning ; and so it proved to be.^
2. Perhaps the disillusion which depressed the Psalmist, and for which he had found an antidote in the permanence and magnitude of the Divine law, was not limited to the religious aspect of life only. By his own simple pathway he had reached the conclusion, familiar to modern thinkers, that the present world is not of unimpeachable perfection, but a chaos of knotted problems, amazing anomalies, clashing interests, contending principles. He set out with other views, but he reminds himself that moral processes go on working themselves out upon a scale of immeasurable greatness, when the secular movements which ' Ucorgt Frederic Waits, i. 126.
PSALM cxix. 96 449
once promised amelioration are threatened with arrest and defeat. God's inward law, larger than the designs appearing in the history of contemporary nations, forms the centre round which his baffled and faltering faith rallies. Spiritual ends are con- tinued in that larger kingdom of the unseen. God's changeless and ever-enlarging law of right satisfies that sense of moral greatness which the course of secular events so often seems to mock.
^ I am old enough to be done with work, only that I feel that my best words have not been said after all, that what has been said is not its full expression. All is incomplete, and I must wait for the fresh, strong life of immortahty, in the hope that through the mercy of Him who " knoweth our frame " and our weaknesses, I may be enabled to do better with the talent He has given me than I have done.^