If we were thus to dwell and linger on the thought of God and His care for us, to insist on it to ourselves, to repeat and vary our expression of it, to hark back to it again and again ; if we could but rise and settle into the conviction of a tender fatherly Providence that covers our whole life, and extends through all time ; we too might feel the swell and sacred glow of the Hebrew pilgrims who sang the praise of Jehovah, their Keeper and ours.^
II.
The Peril of the Common Eound.
It was much for the folk of an early time to say that as they went forth the Lord went with them, but it is more for men to say and know that same thing to-day. The " going out " has come to mean more age after age, generation after generation. It was a simpler thing once than it is now. "Thy going out" — the shepherd to his flocks, the farmer to his field, the merchant to ^ S. Cox, The Pilgrim Psalms, 44.
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his merchandise. There are still flocks and fields and markets, but where are the leisure, the grace, and the simplicity of life for him who has any share in the world's work ? Men go out to-day to face a life shadowed by vast industrial, commercial, and social problems. Life has grown complicated, involved, hard to under- stand, difficult to deal with. Tension, conflict, subtlety, surprise, and amid it all, or over it all, a vast brooding weariness that ever and again turns the heart sick.
1. There is peril ingoing out. — What does this going out involve ? Surely it means a great exchange — an exchange of peace for war- fare, passing from privacy into publicity, leaving those who know us so intimately and love us so well, and going amongst the many, perhaps unknowing and unloving. On the one side of the line we share with others, on the other side we are claiming for our- selves. Here we find our greatest joy in giving ; there, usually, our greatest joy is in getting. Here we love and work for one another ; there the common aim is to work for ourselves. Within the doorway, on this side of the threshold, life is common, but there, outside, it is individualistic to a degree. Competition rages, fierce and unabating, every day changing its detail, its methods, and its scope. There are slow, grinding changes in the common life which crush the sluggard to the wall, and there are quick sudden surprises which overwhelm even the wary.
There are elements of danger in modern life that threaten all the world's toilers, whatever their work may be and wherever they may have to do it. There is the danger that always lurks in things — a warped judgment, a confused reckoning, a narrowed outlook. It is so easily possible for a man to be at close grips with the world, and yet to be ever more and more out of touch with its realities. The danger in the places where men toil is not that God is denied with a vociferous atheism ; it is that He is ignored by an unvoiced indifference. It is not the babel of the market-place that men need to fear ; it is its silence. If we say that we live only as we love, that we are strong only as we are pure, that we are successful only as we become just and good, the world into which we go forth does not deny these things, but it ignores them. And thus the real battle of life is not the toil for bread. It is fought by all who would keep alive and fresh in their
54 GUARDIANSHIP IN DAILY LIFE
hearts the truth that man doth not live by bread alone. For no man is this going out easy ; for some it is at times terrible, for all it means a need that only this promise avails to meet — " The Lord shall keep thy going out." He shall fence thee about with the ministry of His Spirit, and give thee grace to know, every- where and always, that thou art in this world to live for His kingdom of love and truth and to grow a soul.
^ Put before your mind a man who is fully exposed to real life ; imagine him with all the complications of his character : his defects of will, his disadvantage of temperament, his imperfect balance of thought and feeling. What is to happen to him in his going out and coming in ? Look at him going out from church for instance. Even on the Sunday night he cannot leave these doors but more or less he finds himself in miscellaneous circum- stances at once. And he will soon be waking up to Monday morning, and all the calls and all the undertakings of the week. He will not spend the week — we shall not spend it — under a sanctuary roof ; he will have to engage in the business of the hour, to attend, like most of us, to things which in themselves are of the earth, earthy. He will have to do, as we shall, possibly in close personal intercourse, time after time, with those who know not our hope and love not our Lord, and are thinking of anything in the world but of helping us on for heaven. Look at this man in his " going out " — out to all the countless circum- stances that make up life for him ; and he cannot keep himself ! Look at him in his " coming in." He comes into the home circle ; and home is too often the place where man is most off his guard. Or perhaps he is away from home life, living by himself ; he comes into the privacy of his study, to his college rooms, to his lodgings in the town. However, he " comes in " ; and the enemy will be waiting for that man ; some snare, be sure, will be set for his feet, within or without, in the regions of thought, of imagination, of habit, all alone. Ah, what shall he do ? How shall he face the perpetual effort, to watch always, to meet and to conquer every- thing in the going out and the coming in ? ^