^ An astronomer, known to me, divides his heart between the stars and his home — in the latter a dying boy ; both know that the God of the stars has knit their hearts together and binds them up. The spiritual man is apt to come among scientists as into an ice-house, the scientist into church as into a tropical
* A. M. Fairbairn, Christ in the Centuries, 209.
i88 TENDERNESS AND POWER
house. The recognition of God's presence and work in both is necessary to worthy thought of Him.^
3. Broken hearts appeal to God in a way that the most brilliant stars cannot do. The planets whirl through space, but do not know it. They are safe but blind, deaf, inert masses. They respond to the will of their Creator, but they are not con- scious of a Father's love. Amid those vast glories our Father can find no room for His pity, no response to His love, nothing that He can bend over to heal and to bless. The stars are not the true sphere of God, but the heart. The heart is the sphere of His love, the realm of His pity. What God does is seen among the stars, but what God is, that only the broken heart can know.
^ From a purely speculative and intellectual point of view, I defy any man to preach a gospel of comfort from the text, " He telleth the number of the stars." Many a man has felt his help- lessness and his loneliness beneath the stars. He has said, God is immeasurably remote from my little life down here among the shadows. Is it likely that amid the vast and intricate calcula- tions of the universe He will take account of an insignificant fraction like my life ? How should He think upon me when He has all the stars to count ? How should He miss me from the fold when He is shepherding all the heavenly hosts ? Thus for some the greatness of God has been made to spell the loneliness of man. That is the shivering logic of an intellectual conception of the Deity. The Psalmist who spoke of star-counting and heart-healing in the same breath had got beyond that. The deep, persistent needs of his life had brought him there. It was not by a mere chance that he chose to speak of heart-break when he sought to link earth with heaven and to lift the fretful mind of man up to the thought of God's eternal presence and power. Heart-break is not an idea ; it is an experience. Yes, and it is an experience that only the stars can explain and only Divinity can account for.*
^ In Luke Fildes' well-known picture of " The Doctor," we see the physician in the cottage seated by the bedside of a sick child, watching with a tender and painful solicitude. All his ex- perience, all his skill, and all his patience are concentrated upon that little child. His whole heart, mind, and soul are drawn out to it. God is more at home with the broken heart than with the stars.*
* Morlais Jones. ^ P. 0. Ainsworth, The Pilgrim Church, 30.
* H. Ford, Sermons with Analyses, 63.
PSALM cxLvii. 3, 4 189
II.
Heart-healing and Star-counting.
The singer of this song linked together the healing of man's broken heart with a profound and transcendent conception of God. There was a time when the preacher used to give out for his text, " Behold, the nations are counted as the small dust of the balance : behold, he taketh up the isles as a very little thing." He preached the glory and the wisdom and the power of God until men saw the universe as but one ray of all that glory, one word of all that wisdom, one deed of all that power. And with that tremendous background he preached the effectual comfort of the everlasting Father. Some are getting afraid of that back- ground. And we require to remind ourselves that the human heart needs it and demands it, and will never be truly satisfied with anything else. There is nothing else large enough for us to write upon it the meanings and the sanctions and the purposes of God's healing mercy. But to look at it from man's side, the gospel that is to bring availing and abiding comfort to a world like ours needs a tremendous background : it needs a transcendent sweep. If we have a doctrine of the Divine immanence that veils the stars, that seems to make the truth of God a more familiar and compassable thing, that silences the challenge of God's lonely sovereignty and His transcendent and mysterious glory, we have not the doctrine that will meet your deepest needs or win a response from the depths of other hearts. This shame-stricken, yearning world needs the glory of God as much as it needs His mercy.
^ You know quite well that the greater the power, the more arresting does gentleness become. As might advances and energy increases, so always the more notable is gentleness. It is far more striking in a mailed warrior than in a mother with her woman's heart ; far more impressive in the lord of armies than in some retired and ineffectual dreamer. The mightier the power a man commands, the more compelling is his trait of gentleness. If he be tyrant of a million subjects, a touch of tenderness is thrilling. And it is when we think of the infinite might of God, who is King of kings and Lord of lords, that we realize the