The Selah at the end of ver. 4 does not here seem to mark a logical pause in thought nor to coincide with the strophe division, but emphasises by some long-drawn, sad notes the teaching of the words. The thought runs on unbroken, and ver. 6 is closely linked to ver. 5 by the repeated "surely" and "breath" as well as in subject. The figure changes from breath to "shadow," literally "image," meaning not a sculptured likeness, but an _eidolon_, or unsubstantial apparition.
"The glories of our birth and state Are shadows, not substantial things";
and all the movements of men coming and going in the world are but like a dance of shadows. As they are a breath, so are their aims. All their hubbub and activity is but like the bustle of ants on their hill--immense energy and toil, and nothing coming of it all. If any doubt remained as to the correctness of this judgment of the aimlessness of man's toil, one fact would confirm the psalmist's sentence, viz., that the most successful man labours to amass, and has to leave his piles for another whom he does not know, to gather into his storehouses and to scatter by his prodigality. There may be an allusion in the words to harvesting work. The sheaves are piled up, but in whose barn are they to be housed? Surely, if the grower and reaper is not the ultimate owner, his toil has been for a breath.
All this is no fantastic pessimism. Still less is it an account of what life must be. If any man's is nothing but toiling for a breath, and if he himself is nothing but a breath, it is his own fault. They who are joined to God have "in their embers something that doth live"; and if they labour for Him, they do _not_ labour for vanity, nor do they leave their possessions when they die. The psalmist has no reference to a future life, but the immediately following strophe shows that, though he knew that his days were few, he knew, too, that, if his hope were set on God he was freed from the curse of illusoriness and grasped no shadow, but the Living Substance, who would make his life blessedly real and pour into it substantial good.
The effect of such convictions of life's brevity and emptiness should be to throw the heart back on God. In the third part of the psalm (vv. 7-9) a higher strain sounds. The singer turns from his dreary thoughts, which might so easily become bitter ones, to lay hold on God. What should earth's vanity teach but God's sufficiency? It does not need the light of a future life to be flashed upon this mean, swiftly vanishing present in order to see it "apparelled in celestial light." Without that transforming conception, it is still possible to make it great and real by bringing it into conscious connection with God; and if hope and effort are set on Him amid all the smallnesses and perishablenesses of the outer world, hope will not chase a shadow, nor effort toil for very vanity. The psalmist sought to calm his hot heart by the contemplation of his end, but that is a poor remedy for perturbation and grief unless it leads to actual contact with the one enduring Substance. It did so with him, and therefore "grief grew calm," just because "hope was" not "dead." To preach the vanity of all earthly things to heavy hearts is but pouring vinegar on nitre, unless it is accompanied with the great antidote to all sad and depreciating views of life: the thought that in it men may reach their hands beyond the time-film that enmeshes them and grasp the unchanging God. This psalm has no reference to life beyond the grave; but it finds in present communion by waiting and hope, emancipation from the curse of fleeting triviality which haunts every life separated from Him, like that which the Christian hope of immortality gives. God is the significant figure which gives value to the row of ciphers of which every life is without Him made up. Blessed are they who are driven by earth's vanity and drawn by God's fulness of love and power to fling themselves into His arms and nestle there! The strong recoil of the devout soul from a world which it has profoundly felt to be shadowy, and its great venture of faith, which is not a venture after all, were never more nobly or simply expressed than in that quiet "And now"--things being so--"what wait I for? My hope"--in contrast with the false directions which other men's takes--"to Thee it turns."