> H. C. G. Moule, Thy Keeper, 8.
• D. Burns, The Song of the Well, 66.
» 0. H. Morrison, The Return of the Angels, 98.
PSALM cxxi. I, 2 35
I The Call of the Hills.
" I will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains."
1. The hills that the Psalmist was thinking about were visible frem no part of that long-extended plain where he dwelt ; and he might have looked till he wore his eyes out, ere he could have seen them on the horizon of sense. But although they were unseen, they were visible to the heart that longed for them. He directed his desires farther than the vision of his eyeballs can go. Just as his possible contemporary, Daniel, when he prayed, opened his window towards the Jerusalem that was so far away; and just as Mohammedans still, in every part of the world, when they pray, turn their faces to the Kaaba at Mecca, the sacred place to which their prayers are directed ; and just as many Jews still, north, east, south or west though they be, face Jerusalem when they offer their supplications — so this Psalmist in Babylon, wearied and sick of the low levels that stretched endlessly and monotonously round about him, says, " I will look at the things that I cannot see, and lift up my eyes above these lownesses about me, to the loftinesses that sense cannot behold."
^ The eyes that the Psalmist speaks of are the eyes of the soul, and the hills to which he looks are the hills of help for the soul. Our souls relate us to the world of the soul, as our senses relate us to the world of the senses. The soul's faculty of faith is to our eternal nature what our senses are to our temporal nature. And as the evidence of the senses puts an end to all strife about the things presented to them, so faith gives restful assurance with respect to the objects of belief. Faith is that faculty of pure reason with which the soul of all the senses is endowed. The assurance of faith is, therefore, not the assurance of one but of all our faculties in that ground of our nature which unites all our powers. The assurance of faith is the assurance of seeing, of hearing, of tasting, of handling — all in one and at once. The Psalmist is fully assured as to the hills of help to which he lifts up his eyes. He only speaks of what he sees with " the eyes of his heart " ; for it is " with the heart man believes " and looks at spiritual things.^
> W. Pulsferd.
36 HELP FROM BEYOND THE HILLS
^ Euskin, in his Modern Painters, has called attention to a suggestive fact. It is that the greatest painters of the Holy Family have always a hint of the mountains in the distance. You might have looked for cornfield or for vineyard, or for some fine pleasant garden sleeping in the sunshine; but in the greatest painters ifiat you never find ; it is " I to the hills will lift mine eyes." What they felt was, with one of these intuitions which are the birthright and the seal of genius — what they felt was that for a secular subject vineyard and meadow might be a fitting background ; but for the Holy Family, and for the Child of God, and for the love of heaven incarnate in humanity, you want the mystery, the height, the depth, which call to the human spirit from the hills. It is not to man as a being with an intellect that the hills have spoken their unvarying message. It is to man as a being with a soul, with a cry in his heart for things that are above him. That is why Zeus in the old Pagan days came down to speak to men upon Mount Ida. That is why Genius painting Jesus Christ throws in its faint suggestion of the peaks.^
2. The hills were associated with the greatest events in the history of Israel. The Old Testament is the record of the soul, and it is written against a background of the hills. It is true that it does not open in the mountains. It opens in the luxuri- ance of a garden. Its opening scene is an idyllic picture in the bosom of an earthly paradise. But when man has fallen, and sounded the great deeps, and begun to cry for the God whom he has lost, then are we driven from the garden scenery and brought amid the grandeur of the hills. It is on Ararat that the ark rests, when the judgment of the waters has been stayed. It is to a mountain-top that Abraham is summoned to make his sacrifice of Isaac. And not on the plain where the Israelites are camped, but amid the cloudy splendour of Mount Sinai, does God reveal Himself, and give His law, and enter into covenant with man. Do we wonder that the exiled Psalmist said, " I will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains " ? They were dyed deep for him with sacred memory, and rich with the precious heritage of years. Nor was it merely a heritage of home ; it was a heritage of God and of the soul. Among the hills Israel had learned everything that made her mighty as a spiritual power.