1 G. Calthrop. « Stopford A. Brooke.
PSALM cxxii. I ^>^
be our joy in communion with God, we ought to be reverent when we come before Him.
One cannot help wondering that some people who do go to the House of God should go at all, they show so little interest in the services. You see their want of interest even in the manner in which they go to their pews ; and you see it further in their habit of gazing around them at the gathering worshippers before the services begin, and in their vacant look during the time the services are going on. With them, church-going is a mere religious form. They resemble the Northern Farmer of whom Tennyson tells us in one of his poems, who said about his minister — •
An' I hallus coom'd to 's chooch afoor moy Sally wur dead. An' 'card 'um a bummin' awaay loike a buzzard-clock ower
my 'ead. An' I niver knaw'd whot a mean'd but I thowt a 'ad summut
to saay. An' I thowt a said whot a owt to 'a said an' I coom'd awaay.
\ One of the best men whom I have ever known, a man of great intellectual gifts and acquirements, who had cherished through life the most exalted views of God, and much of whose time was spent on his knees in prayer, as he drew near the close of his life felt a sense of awe almost amounting to fear — though he had no doubt of his safety — as he thought of entering into the presence of God. Yes, and the more holy anyone really becomes — the more anyone knows about God — the more like to God any- one becomes, the greater will be his reverence for God, the more solemnized will he feel when in God's presence.^
4. The Psalmist's gladness was inspired by the feeling that he was a member of a goodly fellowship. He has his eye upon the past. He is regarding the days that are gone, as he mounts up this road to Jerusalem ; as his own feet trace the way that leads up to Zion he finds there footprints of vanished generations of God's own pilgrim people, and in his mind's eye he finds himself enrolled in the august procession of God's own people that, going up this road before him in past days, have found it the road of duty, the road of salvation, the road of their soul's peace ; and so he says " I have joy." He had the joy which is begotten in us by
^ W. Duncan, God's Book : God's Day : God's Rouse, 84.
78 THE HOUSE OF THE LORD
the communion of saints ; he had the gladness which is engendered in us by what the writer to the Hebrews calls being " compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses."
^ To this house we come, drawn not by arbitrary command which we fear to disobey; not by self-interest, temporal or spiritual, which we deem it prudent to consult ; not, I trust, from dead conventionalism, that brings the body and leaves the soul ; but by a common quest of some holy spirit to penetrate and purify our life ; by a common desire to quit its hot and level dust, and from its upland slopes of contemplation inhale the serenity of God ; by the secret sadness of sin, that can delay its confessions, and bear its earthliness no more; by the deep though dim consciousness that the passing weeks do not leave us where they find us, but plant us within nearer distance, and give us a more intimate view, of that fathomless eternity wherein so many dear and mortal things have dropped from our imploring eyes. It is no wonder that in meditations solemn as these we love and seek each other's sympathy. It is easy, no doubt, to- journey alone in the broad sunshine and on the beaten highways of our lot : but over the midnight plain, and beneath the still immensity of darkness, the traveller seeks some fellowship for his wanderings. And what is religion but the midnight hemisphere of life, whose vault is filled with the silence of God, and whose everlasting stars, if giving no clear light, yet fill the soul with dreams of immeasur- able glory ? It will be an awful thing to each of us to be alone, when he takes the passage from the mortal to the immortal, and is borne along — with unknown time for expectant thought — through the space that severs earth from heaven : and till then, at least, we will not part, but speak with the common voice of supplicating trust of that which awaits us all.^
^ When religious worship has become a customary social act, a man who sympathizes with the religious idea is right to show public sympathy with it; he ought to weigh very carefully his motives for abstaining. If it is indolence, or a fear of being thought precise, or a desire to be thought independent, or a contempt for sentiment that keeps him back, he is probably in the wrong; nothing but a genuine and deep-seated horror of formalism justifies him in protesting against a practice which is to many an avenue of the spiritual life. A lack of sympathy with certain liturgical expressions, a fear of being hypocritical, of being believed to hold the orthodox position in its entirety, justifies a man in not entering the ministry of the Church, even