\ There was a time in Scotland when the Church stood immediately behind the King's throne as counsellor, when the Church regulated the homes of men, and their habits, when the Church conducted commercial treaties, when the Church granted charters to boroughs. All that is now changed in Scotland. It is so much changed that some say the Church has become little more than a mere relic in this laud. It is so much changed that some declare the province of the Church is so limited as to be on
* Alixander Tomory, Indian Missionary, 77.
PSALM cxxii. 1 73
the point of disappearing altogether ; but I think I read the signs of the times sufficiently accurately when I declare that again in our time the conviction is deepening and growing apace that a nation can be strong in the various aspects of its life, its social life, its commercial life, its political life, only as it is infused with those ideals and eternal verities that are summed up in the name of religion.^
III.
The Spieit of Woeship.
" I was glad when they said unto me. Let us go unto the house of the Lord."
The Hebrew poet was sure of one thing — that it did him good to go into the House of God. For though God is always near us, so that we cannot get away from Him though we may close our hearts and lock our doors, yet in public worship we are drawn closer to God. We come into His very presence, we seek to look into His face, we desire to enter into His pavilion and into the secret of His tabernacle. Our hearts are stirred, and, like the disciples of old, we feel that the flame of love is fanned as He talks to us and allows us to talk to Him.
^ Oliver Wendell Holmes does not hesitate to bear witness to the need, in his own case, of the weekly " means of grace." He says : " I am a regular church-goer. I should go for various reasons if I did not love it, but I am fortunate enough to find pleasure in the midst of devout multitudes, whether I can accept all their creed or not. For I find there is in the corner of my heart ' a little plant called Eeverence,' which wants to be watered about once a week."
^ Better known, perhaps, than that of any other Christian household, is the domestic life of Gregory Nazianzen, the poet of Eastern Christendom, and one of the greatest of its orators and theologians. Gregory's mother, Nonna, a woman of ardent piety, born of a Christian family, and carefully trained in the faith, was " a housewife after Solomon's own heart " — so her son describes her — " submissive to her husband, yet not ashamed to be his guide and teacher." It was Nonna's constant prayer that her husband, Gregory, should become a convert, for, though a man of high
1 A. B. Scott.
74 THE HOUSE OF THE LORD
character and exemplary life, he was a pagan. A dream inspired by a psalm helped her to gain her heart's desire. Pagan though he was, her husband seems to have known the Psalms, for he dreamed that he was singing the words, " I was glad when they said unto me, We will go into the House of the Lord " (Ps. cxxii.). The impression was too deep to pass away when he awoke. After a short preparation, he was baptized, and eventually became, and for forty-five years remained, Bishop of Nazianzus (329-74).^
1. If we take the psalm as referring to the return from the Captivity we may imagine how the pilgrim would express his delight at finding himself once more in sight or in prospect of home. The psalms and prophecies of the time describe the delight with which the travellers started on their westward journey ; how they mounted ridge after ridge, and caught the first view of their own country ; how the beacon-fires flashing from their native hills welcomed them onwards ; how at last their feet stood fast " within thy gates, 0 Jerusalem." This is one part of the feeling of the return of the exiles, and it became the root of that patriotic senti- ment which flourished henceforth in the Jewish nation with a vigour never known before.
There is another feeling in the background, which gives additional force to this passionate home-sickness and patriotic fervour. They had not merely been absent from home. They had been sojourning in a mighty empire wholly unlike their own. They had seen the splendours of Babylon ; they had mixed with the princes and potentates of Chaldea, Persia, and Media ; they had drunk in all the influences of those far-off seats of Oriental wisdom. Their ideas of religion, of history, and of science had become enlarged. If in some respects they were a lesser nation than they were before the Exile, in some respects they were much greater. For they had received a new and serious impulse which ended in nothing less than the greatest event of the world's history — the advent of Christianity.
^ There has not been a generation of men for the last three thousand years, there will not be a generation of men to the end of time, in which some will not read with sympathy that story on which the greatest master of ancient poetry has spent all his art — which tells of the return of Ulysses after his long absence ;