I.
Broken Hearts and Countless Stars. ^
1. The Psalmist brings together here countless stars and broken hearts. It is not easy for us to get these two thoughts into our minds at the same time. Still harder is it for us to think them as one thought. It seems such a far cry from all the jj
i86 TENDERNESS AND POWER
stars of heaven to one poor bleeding heart, from those myriad points of fire to a few human tears. We see the sweep of the stars, and we walk in the shadow of pain ; but in the bitter things we suffer, how little use we make of the great things we see ! One idea excludes another that really belongs to it. We have not a large enough mental grasp. We look up at the stars and we forget our little world ; we look out upon our little world and we forget the stars. We lose the years in the thought of the hour, and the hour in the thought of the ages. We seem unable to hold on to a great thought when we are in one of life's narrow places ; yet it is just in that narrow place that the great thought can do most for us. We live by hours, and so we count by hours. We are pilgrims, so our standard of measurement is a step. In our fragmentary thinking we draw dividing lines across the un- divided, and fail to see that the limited and the illimitable are not two things but one. But the Psalmist brought stars and broken hearts together.
^ I think I am not far wrong in saying that, whatever science or revelation may have to tell us about God's relation to the sun and to the stars, there are many points in men's and women's lives when such things lose all their interest in the presence of personal anxieties that will take no denial. There are moments — we all, or most of us, know them too well — when even one slight physical pain obtrudes itself upon our attention and suc- ceeds in spoiling our work, ap a grain of sand might stop some delicate machine, or a little nft spoil the music of a lute. How much more, then, when the frame of a strong man is bowed down with utter and uncontrollable grief, or the woman's heart stands still at news of loss that so long as sun shall roll or stars give forth their shining shall never, never be forgotten ! The heart does not measure things by algebra, or weigh such things in the balance of a cool and reasonable computation. The affections live, as it were, outside of time, and dwell in eternity alone with God. You may tell me, therefore, the number of the stars ; but under bereavement I am not comforted. You may catalogue them all by their names ; but my bitter pain refuses to be assuaged thereby, my broken heart refuses to be interested.^
2. But the Psalmist brings stars and broken hearts together, because to him heart-break is not to be regarded as a rare and
* Canon Curteis.
PSALM cxLvii. 3, 4 187
tragic episode in the human story. This world knows sorrow only as an incident. It is, for it, a cloud upon the sun, sometimes darkening all the after day. It is a voice of weeping or a choked silence in the shadow dusk of the river's edge. But, the last true sorrow of life is not on this wise. It is not dealt out to one here and another there as a bitter judgment or a wholesome discipline. It is inwoven into life. To miss it is to miss life. It is the price of the best. It is the law of the highest. When, after what we sometimes call the long farewell, you have seen a sorrow -stricken man bearing a bleeding heart out to the verge of the world, beyond the last outpost of earthly sympathy and beyond the kindly king- dom of human help, you have seen something for which earth has no healing, but you have not learned anything approaching the whole truth concerning heart-break. There is the broken and the contrite heart, the heart that is seeking sainthood, and fainting and falling and aching in the quest. There is the broken and the yearning heart, that strains and throbs with lofty longings and the burden of the valley of vision. And to find healing for such sorrow a man must find God. And He must be the God who counts the stars.
^ Perhaps no man ever stood in the presence of a great trouble without being driven by his own deepest instincts to seek strength and comfort from a Being mightier than himself. Many a hitherto godless mariner, battling with the wild waves, has called with simple and fervid faith on the God whose name the child had loved to reverence before the man had learned to profane. Many a poor burdened woman, whose heart was well-nigh breaking in the presence of a sorrow she could not bear alone, has grown calm and strong as her agony rose into a great cry after God. Instincts like these, characteristic of man the wide world over, tell that the Creator has planted within the human spirit the faculty to which, when danger from within or without threatens, the faith is native that He who healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds, also delighteth to hear and answer the prayer of His afflicted creatures.^