"Praise Him all ye creatures of His! Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord."
And all the time he sang the wolf bayed at intervals.^
4. Did He not look upon them as sharers in the curse He had come to remove ? — Did He not see in their eyes an appeal from, their misery ? Was He not quick to behold the earnest expectation of the creatures waiting for the manifestation of the Son of God ? Did He not long for the day which Esaias saw in vision, when the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and
1 A. J. Barafoid.
^ Charles Eeade, The Cloister and the Hearth, chap, xciii.
6o THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
the leopard shall lie down with the kid, when the lion shall eat straw like the ox, and the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child put his hand on the basilisk's den, and they shall not hurt nor destroy in all God's holy mountain, — that day when the knowledge of the Lord shall cover the earth as the waters cover the sea ? We cannot tell; but surely the wild beasts were to Him as they will be to all in the regeneration. Even yet some men exercise strange powers over them ; and when He, the creating Word, the second Adam, the Lord from heaven, beheld them in His dumb agony, did they not cease one moment to groan and to travail, as if they saw their hope in His grief ? ^
5. The wild beasts are with us in all our temptations. — ^We need to take into account the magnitude of our exposure to the wild beasts. The tendency is to make a careless reckoning. St. Mark's term " wild beasts " is a strong one, but none too strong to represent the facts. The unfriendly agencies that are about us are pitiless as the wild beasts. How often we find them destructive, dark, revolting, cruel, and deadly ! The error of youth is to clothe the lion in sheepskin and the wolf in lamb's wooL
What have the Scriptures to say concerning the "wild beasts " ? The Book of Genesis opens the first account. Our first parents had to wage war with the serpent. Innocency was defeated by a wild beast. None of the heroes of the far-off ages of Abraham and Moses were free from the conflict. Daniel had his exposure to the wild beasts ; but the lions in the den were as lambs compared with those that had their shelter in the king's palace in the hearts of the king's courtiers. Isaiah's prophetic vision was interrupted by the growl of " the wolf, the leopard, the young lion and the bear " ; but he saw the eternal highway called Holiness along which no ravenous beast should walk. And if we turn to the New Testament and have a moment's interview with such men as St. Peter, we shall hear them say, " Your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour." And St. Paul's experience is the same. Even in his beautiful Philippian Epistle he com- * "W, Robertson NicoU.
ST. MARK 6i
mands the saints to "beware of the dogs." And lastly the Saviour, when sending forth His seventy disciples, did not forget to warn them with the words, " Go your ways : behold, I send you forth as lambs among wolves."
IT J. M. Barrie has a beautiful chapter in Margaret Ogilvy, entitled, " How my Mother got her Soft Face." It is a suggestive exposition of a sweetness of life that came through suffering and bereavement. The "wild beasts" tear our life and strive for the mastery, but we have the angel ministry to keep the soul in perfect peace. And in our day we have a great example in General Booth. What has he not suffered from the "wild beasts " ? What shall we say of the hate and malice and per- secution that he has borne ? He has been in the wilderness with the foes and come out more than conqueror. It is the same story in each case, and apostles, martyrs, saints, humble mothers, and all sacrificial and sainted lives are proof of it.^
V.
The Ministering Angels.
"And the angels ministered unto him."
One hardly thinks of the angels as indigenous to the wilderness, as are the hyenas and jackals, the lions and serpents. These heavenly ministrants were there because Jesus was there. It was He that peopled the wilderness with angels. They were there to minister to Him. And if there, where may they not be ? The devil and the wild beasts and the angels followed our Lord into the Temple and along the hillsides and by the shore of the sea. He had ever to reckon with the hostility of those who understood enough to see that their gains were imperilled. He had ever to endure the keen grief of being incomprehensible to many whom He pitied, loved, and sought to serve, upon whose feelings His enemies could play, making them the tools of their enmity. He had ever to feel the chill of the cold indifference of those who neither knew nor cared. But He rejoiced ever in the truth of the words which the devil had sought to make the means of His destruction: —