Psalms 90

1. LORD, thou hast been our dwelling place In all generations. 2 Before the mountains were brought forth, Or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, Even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God. 3 Thou turnest man to destruction [or, dust]; And sayest, Return, ye children of men. 4 For a thousand years in thy sight Are but as yesterday when it is past, And as a watch in the night. 5 Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep: In the morning they are like grass which groweth up. 6 In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; In the evening it is cut down, and withereth. 7 For we are consumed in thine anger, And in thy wrath are we troubled. 8 Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, Our secret sins in the light of thy counte- nance. 9 For all our days are passed away in thy wrath: We bring our years to an end as a tale that is told [or, a sound or sigh]. 10 The days of our years are threescore years and ten, Or even by reason of strength fourscore years; Yet is their pride but labour and sorrow; For it is soon gone, and we fly away. 11 Who knoweth the power of thine anger, And thy wrath according to the fear that is due unto thee? 12 So teach us to number our days, That we may get us an heart of wisdom. 13 Return, O LORD; how long? And let it repent thee concerning thy ser- vants. 14 O satisfy us in the morning with thy mercy; That we may rejoice and be glad all our days. 15 Make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us, And the years wherein we have seen evil. 16 Let thy work appear unto thy servants, And thy glory upon their children. 17 And let the beauty of the LORD our God be upon us: And establish thou the work of our hands upon us; Yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.

The Eternal God the only Refuge for Mortal Man.

THE Fourth Book, according to the ancient traditional division of the Psalter, opens with the oldest Psalm in the collection; or rather the author of the present arrangement, who was probably no other than Ezra, placed this sublime composition by itself, between the two great divisions of the book, containing respectively the earlier and later Psalms. It may therefore be regarded as the heart or centre of the whole collection, and indeed as the model upon which even David, “the sweet Psalmist of Israel,” formed that glorious body of psalmodic literature or hymnology, which, with its later but inspired and authoritative imitations, constitutes the present Book of Psalms. The date of the composition, though uncertain because not recorded, may with most probability be fixed near the close of the Error in the Wilderness, when the dying out of the older generation on account of their transgressions, and the threatened exclusion of Moses himself from the Promised Land, were exactly suited to produce such views of man’s mortality and sinfulness as are here presented, but without destroying the anticipation of a bright futurity, such as really ensued upon the death of Moses, and is prospectively disclosed in the conclusion of this Psalm. Its great theme is the frailty and brevity of human life, considered as the consequence of sin, and as a motive to repentance and obedience. He first contrasts the eternity of God with the mortality of man (vs. 1-6), which is then described as the effect of the Divine wrath on account of sin (vs. 7-11), and made the ground of a prayer for the speedy restoration of the Divine favor (vs. 12-17). A.

The Fourth Book of the Psalms begins with a prayer of Moses, the man of God, which comes out of the dying off of the older generation during the march through the wilderness. There is scarcely any memorial of antiquity which so brilliantly justifies the testimony of antiquity concerning its origin as does this Psalm. Not alone with respect to its contents, but with respect to the form of its language, it is perfectly suitable to Moses. Even Hitzig can bring nothing against this view; for the objection that the author, in v. 1, glances back upon past generations, while Israel was only born in the time of Moses, is removed by the consideration that the existence of Israel reaches back into patriarchal times. Delitzsch.

The correctness of the title which ascribes the Psalm to Moses is confirmed by its unique simplicity and grandeur; its appropriateness to his times and circumstances, as already stated; its resemblance to the Law in urging the connection between sin and death; its similarity of diction to the poetical portions of the Pentateuch, without the slightest trace of imitation or quotation; its marked unlikeness to the Psalms of David, and still more to those of later date; and finally the proved impossibility of plausibly assigning it to any other age or author. The arguments against its authenticity have commonly been framed by a preposterous inversion of the evidence, converting into proofs of later date the very points of similarity which prove that this was the original and model Psalm, the primeval basis upon which even David reared a noble superstructure of his own. A.

There are important internal reasons which may be urged in favor of the composition of the Psalm by Moses, as announced in the title. The poem bears throughout the stamp of high antiquity; there is no other Psalm which so decidedly conveys the impression of being the original expression of the feelings to which it gives utterance. There is, moreover, no other Psalm which stands so much by itself, and for which parallel passages furnish so little kindred matter in its characteristic peculiarities. On the other hand, there occurs a series of striking allusions to the Pentateuch, especially to the poetical passages, and above all others to Deut. 32, allusions which are of a different kind from those which occur in other passages in the Psalms, and which do not appear, like them, to be borrowed. Luther remarks in the Psalm another peculiarity: “Just as Moses acts in teaching the Law, so does he in this prayer. For he preaches death, sin, and condemnation, in order that he may alarm the proud who are secure in their sins, and that he may set before their eyes their sin and evil, concealing, hiding nothing.” The strong prominence given to the doctrine of death as the wages of sin is characteristic of the Psalm a doctrine of not frequent occurrence in Holy Scripture, and especially not in the Psalms, and which is proclaimed as distinctly and impressively as it is here only in the Pentateuch (Gen. 2, 3) and in those ordinances of the ceremonial law which threaten death. Hengstenberg.

This Psalm, which some one has called “a Psalm for every age,” and of which Herder testified that it is “a wonderful, a striking poem, dating from the oldest part of Israel’s history, pervaded by a deep and startling earnestness, stately and slow, but free from everything that savors of despair”—this is a Psalm which well might bear the name of Moses. In this poetic prayer it is as impossible to mistake the earnest spirit of the lawgiver as the faithful spirit of the mediator; and though there are particular expressions here and there which would be quite as suitable for other lips, and equally appropriate to other circumstances, yet the whole poem, which is quite inimitable, and in which there is a touching interchange of complaint and questioning, could, we believe, have arisen only in a heart like that of Moses, and in such a period as has been named. Van O.—The contents of the Psalm, its profound earnestness, and solemn treatment of the theme of man’s weakness and misery through sin, are worthy of Moses, and suitable to the close of his life in the desert. Hupfield.—There is something in the Psalm that is wonderfully striking and solemn, acquainting us with the profoundest depths of the Divine nature. These awful thoughts may well have occurred to Moses at the close of his wanderings; and the author, whoever he may be, is plainly a man grown gray with a vast experience, here taking his stand at the end of his earthly course. Ewald.

It is the oldest of stories, sung in this oldest of Psalms; of human weakness, turning in dismay from the change and decay about it, to find refuge in the eternity of God. The Psalm belongs to the nineteenth century no less than to Moses’ time. It deals with universal and not with temporary and local truths. Let us not be repelled from it because its undertone is sad and solemn; for its lesson is wholesome if sad, bracing if bitter, and leading up to conclusions full of comfort and rest. In this Psalm we are not suffered to waste time in the attempt to comprehend the abstract truth of God’s eternity. The truth itself is plainly shown to have a practical bearing upon our mortal life, and this is the chief end for which it is presented. We are lifted for the moment, in order that we may descend; suffered to grasp a few of the treasures of the Divine glory, that we may carry them back to glorify our earthly life. V.

It is in the main a Psalm of mortality; and yet its primary thought is not mortality, but eternity. It opens with the note of eternal being. The idea of the eternal stands as a great light in front of the darkness. Man is mortal, but God is; and God is the Eternal, the home, the dwelling-place, of all generations. This is the grand peculiarity of Hebrew and of Christian thought, that God is first, man only second; that the eternal Being is the true Being, the present visible or transitory being only the derivative being, appearing and then vanishing away, according to the direction of the other. But there is more in this brief word than the general assertion of eternal being, and of a great primary power directing, controlling, all nature and all life. The character of this Being is further so far defined. He is a Being full of affection, and care, and thoughtful and deliberate love. He is not only Creator; He is Father. The assurance is that we have a supreme Heart above us, responsive to our hearts; that there is a spiritual home encompassing us, a life that changes not with the varying pulses of our thought and feeling. J. Tulloch.

The ninetieth Psalm might be cited as perhaps the most sublime of human compositions, the deepest in feeling, the loftiest in theological conception, the most magnificent in its imagery. True is it in its report of human life as troubled, transitory, and sinful. True in its conception of the Eternal, the Sovereign, and the Judge, and yet the refuge and the hope of men who, notwithstanding the most severe trials of their faith, lose not their confidence in Him; but who, in the firmness of faith, pray for, as if they were predicting, a near-at-hand season of refreshment. Wrapped, one might say, in mystery, until the distant day of revelation should come, there is here conveyed the doctrine of immortality; for in this very plaint of the brevity of the life of man, and of the sadness of these his few years of trouble, and their brevity and their gloom, there is brought into contrast the Divine immutability; and yet it is in terms of a submissive piety; the thought of a life eternal is here in embryo. No taint is there in this Psalm of the pride and petulance, the half-uttered blasphemy, the malign disputing or arraignment of the justice or goodness of God, which have so often shed a venomous color upon the language of those who have writhed in anguish personal or relative. There are few, probably, among those who have passed through times of bitter and distracting woe, or who have stood the helpless spectators of the miseries of others, that have not fallen into moods of mind violently in contrast with the devout and hopeful melancholy which breathes throughout this ode. Rightly attributed to the Hebrew Law-giver or not, it bespeaks its remote antiquity, not merely by the majestic simplicity of its style, but negatively by the entire avoidance of those sophisticated turns of thought which belong to a late, a lost age in a people’s intellectual and moral history. This Psalm undoubtedly is centuries older than the moralizings of that time when the Jewish mind had listened to what it could never bring into a true assimilation with its own mind, the abstractions of the Greek philosophy. With this one Psalm only in view, if it were required of us to say, in brief, what we mean by the phrase, “The Spirit of the Hebrew Poetry,” we find our answer well condensed in this sample. This magnificent composition gives evidence not merely as to the mental qualities of the writer, but as to the tastes and habitudes of the writer’s contemporaries, his hearers, and his readers; on these several points, first, the free and customary command of a poetic diction, and its facile imagery, so that whatever the poetic soul would utter, the poet’s material is near at hand for his use. There is then that depth of feeling, mournful, reflective, and yet hopeful and trustful, apart from which poetry can win for itself no higher esteem than what we bestow upon other decorative arts, which minister to the demands of luxurious sloth. There is, moreover, as we might say, underlying this poem, from the first line to the last, the substance of philosophic thought, apart from which, expressed or understood, poetry is frivolous, and is not in harmony with the seriousness of human life; this Psalm is of a sort which Plato would have written, or Sophocles, if only the one or the other of these minds had possessed a heaven-descended theology. Isaac Taylor.

1. In the first place, this splendid thought of the Divine eternity is made to touch the shifting and inconstant character of our earthly state, by the single word “dwelling-place.” “Lord, a home hast Thou been to us, in generation and generation.” V.—Our dwelling-place; or, “a place of refuge for us.” The word, which occurs Deut. 33 : 27, would have a peculiar force of meaning for the Israelites in the wilderness; for Israel was without a country and without a home, finding here and there only a brief resting-place beside the well and under the palms of the desert. And Israel was without a refuge, exposed to enemies and a thousand perils. P.

“Our dwelling-place,” our home (so the Hebrew) or place of rest. Ranging this houseless desert; ploughing these trackless sands; clambering these stony hills; threading these treeless valleys, with never a place of rest anywhere to the soles of our weary feet—such is our life; and it is only when our eye rests on the pillar of Thy glory standing above our sacred tent that we get the first idea of a home. In a wilderness, if God dwells in it, there may be a home, but it must be in God only. So it was with our fathers, the patriarchs, in their wanderings. Their God was their dwelling-place through all their generations. Apart from God there was no sense of home in their souls. C.

How far back into the past may the patriarch have been looking when he spake these words? The burning bush, the fiery furnace of Egypt, the Red Sea, Pharaoh with his chariots of war, and the weary march of Israel through the wilderness, were all before him; and in all of them he had experienced that “God is the Rock, His work perfect, all His ways judgment” (Deut. 32 : 4). But Moses was looking beyond these scenes of his personal history when he said,

“Thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations.” He was casting in his mind how God had been the refuge of Jacob and Isaac, of Abraham, Noah, and all the patriarchs. Moses could take a retrospect of above a thousand years, which had all confirmed the truth. I can look back to the days of Moses and Joshua and David, and descending thence to the days of the Son of God upon earth, and of Paul and Peter, and all the saints of the Church down to the present hour; and what a thousand years avouched to Moses, three thousand now avouch to me: the Lord is the dwelling-place of those that trust in Him from generation to generation. And to Him who was the refuge of a Moses and an Abraham, I too in the day of trouble can lift my hands. Delightful thought! That great Being who, during the lapse of three thousand years, amid the countless changes of the universe, has to this day remained unchanged, is my God. Tholuck.—This exordium breathes life and pertains to a certain hope of the resurrection and of eternal life, since he calls God our place of refuge, to whom fleeing we may be in safety. For if God is our dwelling-place, and God is life, and we dwellers in Him, it necessarily follows that we are in life, and shall live forever. For who will call God the dwelling-place of the dead? Who shall regard Him as a sepulchre? He is life; and therefore they also live to whom He is a dwelling-place. Luther.

In this verse he is the spokesman and representative of all that is good and great in the past annals of mankind. He is speaking for the living; he is speaking also for the dead. The spiritual experience which these words represent is continually deeper and wider; and they are repeated at this moment by more souls in heaven and earth than ever before, souls which have found in them the motto and the secret of life, whether in struggle or in victory. H. P. L.—In God there is scope for the widest excursions of the mind, the highest elevations of thought and feeling; in His favor and friendship there are unknown possibilities of bliss. “He is the dwelling-place” of all His people in all ages; there is room in Him for all. He who supplies all with natural good here below, fills, at the same time, all the heavenly beings with the eternal effluxes of His light, and love, and joy! He is an immense, and therefore an adequate good to all. R. Hall.

God did not make us for death, but for life. If He has appointed a tent for our sojourn, He has reared a building for our dwelling. Moses, in that old Psalm, voices the truth. There is nothing eternal but God. There is no warrant of man’s eternity but God. There is no eternal home for man but in God. The old lawgiver looked forth from the tent where a generation was dying out in the wilderness; looked away from the purple mountains, the most impressive symbol of stability which the earth furnishes; looked away into what would have been vacancy to many another eye, and saw the eternal home there. . . . Thought has tended too much to the violent separation of the mortal life from the eternal life; has tended to set them in contrast and opposition instead of in harmony; has tended to regard them as representing different economies, instead of as being included in one and the same economy. We draw the line sharply between life and death; and yet many a scientist will tell you that death is the beginning of life; and Christ and Paul (2 Cor. 5 : 1) tell you that in unmistakable terms. And what we want clearly to apprehend with reference to this mortal, transitory tent-life of ours, is that it has a definite relation to the permanent spiritual life of the future; that it serves a purpose of preparation and development toward that life; that it furnishes a basis, a soil in which the seeds of the spiritual life are sown; and that, therefore, instead of being despised and neglected because it is temporary and destined to dissolution, it is to be cherished and cultivated as the real and effective ministrant of the eternal life. “He that wrought us for this very thing is God.” If God made us merely to die, and if death is the end, why, then, life has very little significance. If He made us to live forever, and if our life here fits into that life beyond, and prepares us for it, then life is not only significant, but gets its chief significance from that other thing for which God hath wrought us, the building of God eternal in the heavens. V.

2. From everlasting.** Would you gather some idea of the eternity past of God’s existence? Go to the astronomer, and bid him lead you with him in one of his walks through space; and, as he sweeps outward from object to object, from universe to universe, remember that the light from those filmy stains on the deep pure blue of heaven, now falling on your eye, has been traversing space for a million of years. O. M. Mitchell.—The earth, from her deep foundations, unites with the celestial orbs that roll through boundless space to declare the glory and show forth the praise of their common Author and Preserver; and the voice of natural religion accords harmoniously with the testimonies of revelation, in ascribing the origin of the universe to the will of one eternal and dominant intelligence, the Almighty Lord and supreme First Cause of all things that subsist; the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, before the mountains were brought forth, or ever the earth and the world were made, God from everlasting and without end. Buckland.

Moses was surrounded by the unchanging mountains, and before him was the Land of Promise, to which he was leading the people; and so there came to him the thought of the everlasting God, whose covenant of mercy is as unchangeable as the mountains. The personal and absolute existence of Jehovah, His perpetual providence over the world, and His eternal power and glory in the creation, are here asserted as strongly as in the first chapter of Genesis. This thought of God’s eternity, while it inspires awe and humility, is the true ground of confidence and hope. We can trust in the Word and the grace of the unchanging Jehovah. He can give permanence to our feeble aims, and hopes of good; and, if we apply our hearts to His ways, we shall find in Him the life everlasting. J. P. T.

3. Thou turnest man even to dust, and sayest, Return, sons of Man (or, Adam)!** The evident allusion to Gen. 3 : 19, which is also found in Job. 10 : 9; 34 : 15, and reappears in Psalm 104 : 29, may serve to determine the meaning of the word translated dust in the first clause, but which is properly an adjective signifying crushed, broken to pieces, ground to powder, and is figuratively applied, in Psalm 34 : 18, to brokenness of heart. The shortness and fragility of human life is thus brought into the strongest contrast with the eternity of God. A.—Return is put here as a second fiat of the Almighty; the first (ideally) summoning man forth from dust into organized body instinct with life; the second, remanding him back again: Return to your primeval dust, ye sons of men! It is in point here to recall the words of the Lord to Adam, then representing the race: “Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.” C.

Ye children. Two of the greatest lessons which Christ came to teach us were the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. Look at man in himself, look at man as he makes himself by yielding to and aiding in the fraud and malice of the devil, and hardly any language can be too bitter to describe his baseness and his degradation. But look at man in the light of revelation; look at him under the triple, overarching rainbow of faith, hope, and love; look at him ransomed and ennobled into filial relationship with God, and you will see at once where men have learned their high faith in their own being and the dignity of God’s image upon them, and who it is that has taught them to speak in such noble accents about themselves. Farrar.

4. Even the patriarchal measure, which so often approximated to a thousand years, was in God’s sight like a single day in man’s, or rather like a mere subdivision of it, a third part of the night, which was divided by the ancient Hebrews into three watches. That this division was as old as Moses may be seen from Ex. 14 : 24. When it is past, or passing. It might also be translated, for it passes, i.e., no less hastily and swiftly. This verse is quoted and amplified, but without any change of meaning (2 Pet. 3 : 8). A.

A watch in the night. The night was anciently divided into three, later into four watches. There is a climax; for the past day, short as it seems, was, while it was passing, capable of measurement; it had its hours and its minutes, its thoughts and its acts, and its memories. But the night-watch “is for us as though it were not; we sleep through the watch of the night, living, but observing nothing.” “In those words, ‘a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday,’ etc., the Psalmist has thrown a light upon the nature of God such as a volume of reasoning could not have kindled. With God there are no measures of time. With us time is the name we give to the duration of a certain succession of thoughts and efforts, each of which for a moment held full possession of us.” P. —“This present time,” especially as restricted to the life of individuals, when compared with endless duration, resembles an atom compared with the universe! With the eternal God the most distant periods of time coalesce; they meet in the same point, the creation and the last judgment, the beginning and the end of time, succeed to each other as the morning succeeds to the night, while the whole intervening lapse of duration passes as merely a watch in the night! R. Hall.

5. Thou carriest them away as with a flood.** Journeying oft amid mountains penetrated by deep and narrow valleys, Moses knew what a mountain torrent was in those pent-up defiles, a boiling, roaring flood, filling a valley sometimes to the depth of four hundred feet, carrying down huge boulders of rock as though they were so many pebbles, and sweeping whole families to destruction. Remember that a single thunder-storm, with a heavy shower of rain, falling on the naked granite mountains, is sufficient to convert a dry and level valley into a roaring river in a few short hours, and you have some faint idea of the intensity with which the swiftness of man’s passage from time to eternity appealed to the mind of Moses. V.

They are as a sleep. The comparison of human life to a sleep or dream is common in all languages. The morning is mentioned as the time of waking, the time when we are most impressed with the unsubstantial nature of our dreams. A.—Sleep is but short, and the sweeter it is the shorter it seems to be. And as it is but short of itself, though it should last the full swing of nature, so the soundest sleep is easily broken, and a number of means and occasions there be to interrupt and break it off. And is it not so with the life of man? Is not the longest life short? Is it not the shorter, the sweeter and fuller of contents it is? And is it not easily taken away? Are there not many means to bring us unto our end? even as many as there are to waken us out of sleep. W. Bradshaw.

As grass that springs in the morning. For all the days that are past of our life, death hath them rather than we, and they are already in its possession; when we look back on them, they appear but as a shadow or dream, and if they be so to us, how much more short are they in the sight of God? So says David, When I look on Thee and Thy eternity, mine age is as nothing before Thee; what is our life, being compared to God, before whom a thousand years are but as one day, and less, like yesterday, when it is past, and that is but a thought! The whole duration of the world is but a point in respect of eternity; and how small a point is the life of man, even in comparison with that! Leighton.

6. Moses had seen the whole generation that came with him out of Egypt perish in the wilderness. In looking back over the forty years of the wandering, they seemed as a dream. A nation had vanished like the grass that springs up along the scanty water-courses of the desert, and withers beneath the scorching sun. It was as if a swift torrent from the gorges of the mountains had flooded their encampment and carried them away. Such is the littleness, the brevity of human life, when measured by itself; and such has been the ceaseless ongoing of the tide of destruction since first death entered the world by sin. Through all the bustle and enterprise, the gayety, and ambition of the world, is still heard the sad refrain, “Return to dust, ye children of men.” J. P. T.—The sense of the nothingness of life is much deepened when we contrast it with the capabilities of us who live it. Our earthly life gives promise of what it does not accomplish. It promises immortality, yet it is mortal; it contains life in death and eternity in time, and it attracts us by beginnings which faith alone brings to an end. Newman.

7-12. Such is the striking and significant contrast with which this ancient Psalm opens. On one hand, the eternal years of God; on the other, man, who is a dream, a night watch, a fading flower. But the author is not a mere poet; he does not waste time in sentimental reflections upon life’s brevity as compared with God’s eternity, but proceeds to give the reasons for human frailty. Chambers.

7. For; explanatory, not argumentative. The reason of all this transitoriness is to be found in Israel’s sin, which has provoked God’s heavy displeasure against His people. The use of the first person and the past tenses shows that the writer is dealing with the facts of his own history and that of his people. P.

8. Thou hast set our iniquities before Thee, our secret (sins) in the light of Thy countenance. As man’s mortality is the effect of God’s wrath, so this wrath itself is the effect of sin. And this sin becomes the cause of death. The verse before us represents God in the act of shortening man’s life, and gives the necessary explanation of what might otherwise have seemed at variance with His infinite benevolence. The Bible, as an eminent interpreter has well said, throws the blame of death entirely on man himself. When God slays man, He puts his sins before him, looks directly at them; not only those which are notorious, but those which are concealed from every eye but that of omniscience. The precise sense seems to be that God holds our sins to the light of His own countenance, and therefore cannot fail to see them. A.—The light of God’s countenance is everywhere else spoken of as a light of love and approbation. Here it is a revealing light. The “light” or rather “sun” of God’s countenance shines down into the dark abysses of the human heart, bringing out its hidden evils into strong and painful relief. P.

God sees our iniquities. They are “before Him.” When they are committed, they are committed before His face; not in His presence merely, but directly in His sight. He consequently sees them distinctly, clearly, thoroughly. None of them can escape Him, none deceive Him. This truth the Psalmist most forcibly expresses. He bids us look on our sins as arrayed “in the light of Jehovah’s countenance.” And who can tell us what that light is? The sun which is shining in the heavens throws around us day by day a glorious splendor; it discovers to us more iniquity on the earth than we can sometimes bear the sight of without a pang; but what is the light of yonder sun compared with the brightness of the Almighty’s face? It is utter darkness. And yet in the brightness of that face are all our sins committed, all seen. The follies of our childhood, the iniquities of our youth, the misdeeds of our riper years; the sins of our hands, the sins of our lips, the sins of our hearts; our sins in company, our sins alone; our sins in our business, our sins in our pleasures; our sins at home, our sins abroad; our light-heartedness and pride in our prosperity, and our impatience, and murmuring, and rebellion in our troubles; our stifled convictions, our forgotten resolutions, our broken vows; our contempt of the wrath of God, our abuse of His mercy; above all, the little value we have set on the great salvation of His dear Son—it is of all these, in all their multitude and all their enormity, of which Moses here speaks. He calls them ours. Not satisfied with laying them on our heads, he bids us look on them as altogether our own. C. Bradley.

9. For all our days are gone in Thine anger; we spend our years like a thought. The all in the first clause is emphatic. What he says is true of our whole life. Are gone, literally, turned away, as an act preparatory to departure. The word we translate thought is elsewhere applied to audible sound as the spontaneous expression of thought or feeling to one’s self. A.—We are still losing and spending life as we enjoy it; yea, our very enjoying it is the spending it; yesterday’s life is dead to-day, and so shall this day’s life be to-morrow. We spend our years, says Moses, as a tale, or as a thought, so swift and vanishing is it. Each word helps a tale toward its end, and while it lasts it is generally vanity, and when it is done it vanishes as a sound in the air. Leighton.

As a tale that is told. As we listen to the attractive story of friend or stranger, with mind and heart so absorbed that the very consciousness of continued existence for moments or hours is utterly lost, so under the unbroken spell of swiftly succeeding events and experiences, days, months, years are unconsciously spent and gone. To him that meditates upon a life of forty, fifty, sixty years, how like a tale that is told are all that he has spent! How strangely, as by a force he could not resist, set on a path of life he has not planned, has he been hurried along through the shifting scenes of childhood, youth and manhood! Startling, indeed, piercing to the quick of the sensitive soul, is the realized thought of this pauseless, onward movement of time! Alas! who does think upon, who has realized it? As each day has risen out of and sunk again into eternity, who of us has heard its solemn questioning voices, one as the day has risen, asking, “What will you do with the work set before you of God?” the other, as the day has departed, inquiring, “What have you done, toiled, and achieved for God and man, or idled, slept, and so wasted opportunities never to return?” B.

However long it may appear in looking forward, when counting the years of which it may consist, the longest life seems short in the retrospect; except, indeed, in some cases, where there may have been great activity, many changes, and much sorrow. To our consciousness, time takes its measurement from what we do or endure. With the busy man time is quick in its passage, but protracted to memory, from the number of links which go to make up what can be recalled. To the indolent and inactive it is slow and wearisome, but seems as nothing when it is past, for there is nothing to be remembered. The hearing of a story is attended by a rapid and passing interest; it leaves behind it a vague impression, beyond which comparatively but few incidents may stand out distinctly in the afterthought. The story ended; and then came the sense of shortness, brevity, the rapid flight of the period employed by it, with something like a feeling of wonder and dissatisfaction at the discovery of this. Another thought in relation to those who live only for excitement. They are just like the men habitually devoted to listening to a story-teller. No sooner is one tale done, than they want another. They think of nothing but the impression of the moment. They want the pleasure repeated, though they know very well that they may have only to listen to an old story, or that even a new one will but feebly reproduce the pleasurable excitement which attended their entrance into the charmed circle. It is the same with those who live for enjoyment rather than work. They cry out for the repetition of that which has ceased to satisfy; and they go on, trying to prolong or to vary excitements which they perfectly well know have come to be to them as “a thrice-told tale.” For a final and more important thought. It is for each of us to remember that life is no fiction, no mere tale, though it may look like one. It is something inexpressibly serious, something terribly and grandly real. It is to be spent, subject to the action of those universal and eternal laws under which God has placed us, and which, in the end, will have momentous issues, whether men now think so or not. By reason of sin, the whole aspect of things is broken and confused; derangement and dislocation are everywhere; yet, through the grace of God and the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, our poor, weak, guilty nature can be so restored and purified, so raised and helped, that life, instead of being like a tale told by an itinerant story-teller, shall put on the appearance of a sublime epic, of which the substance and the song shall be alike Divine. We may so spend our threescore years and ten that, at the end of them, instead of feeling that they have passed like a poor story that comes to nothing, or stooping to take up the splenetic complaint of the remorseful and disappointed—“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity”—we may be able to adopt the noble and lofty language of one who was conscious that, by God’s help, he had really lived to some purpose: “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course. I ran, not as uncertainly; I fought, not as one that beateth the air. I am now ready to be offered. Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will give me at that day; and not to me only, but unto all them also that love His appearing.” T. Binney.

Death comes as a flood, violently and suddenly; we are as a sleep; we are as grass; our life is like a dream; we spend our days as a tale that is told. All these similitudes Moses hath in this Psalm, as if he wanted words and examples to express the vanity, frailty, and shortness thereof. Samuel Smith.

10. This dark shadow extends over the whole of life, and not only its close. “All our days” bear the same stamp, and even when they stretch out into years, still they fly away “as a thought,” a comparison used by Homer and Theognis, yet without the underlying thought of Moses that the flight is retributive. This conception is here expanded with great force and beauty. The poet exclaims as in amazement, The days of our years! What are they, or what do they amount to? Threescore and ten is the usual limit, but even when that is exceeded there is small room for glorying, for “their pride” (as the literal rendering is), that which causes us to be proud, health, strength, honor, riches, etc., all—all is mere toil and emptiness. Chambers.

The time of our life is threescore years and ten (saith Moses), or rack it to fourscore, though not one in every fourscore arrives to that account, yet can we not be said to live so long ; for take out ten years for infancy and childhood, wherein we scarce remember what we did, or whether we lived or no ; and how short it is then ? Take out of the remainder a third part for sleep, wherein we lie senseless, and how short is it then ? Take out yet besides the time of our worldly care, wherein we seem both dead and buried in the affairs of the world, and how short is it then ? So short is that life which nature allows, and yet we sleep away part, and play away part, and the cares of the world have a great part, so that the true spiritual and Christian life hath little or nothing in the end. Robert Wilkinson.

11. The entire sentiment of the verse is : Who has ever fully comprehended the power and the results of God’s displeasure against sin, as we see them in the universal mortality of the race, and in all the pains and woes which fill this earthly life ? Who estimates this with such fear of God as the facts inspire ? C. — So far as one can see from the present arrangements of the world, it is God’s way to withdraw for the most part from our view the sterner features of His character, while He puts forward and emphasizes everywhere His gracious and fruitful goodness. The mere power or strength of God is itself rather concealed than thrust upon us. It hides itself behind the order within which He is pleased to exert it. The extent to which God’s strength might come to be at the service of His anger, and be used by Him to destroy, is still more closely veiled from us by the uniform beneficence of His creation. Only occasionally does nature suggest wrath. Her deliberate arrangements are all inspired by goodness. The experience which we have had of God in our own lives is to the same effect ; our bitter days we count upon our fingers, our happier ones by years. Judgment is God’s strange work ; but His tender mercies are over all His works. Seeing that God intends His latent wrath to remain as yet concealed from us and hath Himself been at pains to conceal it, by what means shall we search it out ? The writer of this Psalm puts into our hand a standard of comparison which, though insufficient, is at least approximative. The wrath of God, he says, is “according to His fear ;” to His fearfulness, that is, or His fitness for inspiring in the bosoms of men an awful and sacred dread. Whatever suggests to our minds the enormous strength of God as against our weakness suggests how terrific His wrath may be if He will. But in order to estimate the capacity of wrath in the Almighty we need to know more than His strength, more than His material terribleness. One event in history expresses to the full the moral terribleness of God. The Passion of Jesus Christ is the crown of all terrible things, and the supreme measure not only of God’s mercy, but quite as really of God’s severity. According to His fearfulness, so is His wrath. Dykes.

12. The eternal being of God is used to convict us of delusion. We measure life by false standards. The Psalm brings us back to the true rule of measurement. “A thousand years, in Thy sight, are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night. Teach us to number our days by Thy standard, that we may be wise.” That old delusion, older than Moses, is woven into man’s very nature, and is fed and flattered with every gilded cheat that his fancy can devise ; the delusion which leads him to think seventy years a long time. We need Moses to call to us out of the desert, and tell us that even the patriarchs’ lives of centuries are represented to God’s eye by a vanished yesterday, or a brief night-watch. What life is long, measured by an eternal standard ? Well said Bengel, “As to a rich man, a thousand pounds are as a penny, so to God, a thousand years are as a day.” Evidently we are poor reckoners when life is a factor of the problem. We need eternal wisdom to teach us to number our days, so as to apply our hearts unto wisdom. V.

There is nothing in eternity but what springs out of time ; all the good which eternity has in store and all the evil, all the promises and all the threatenings of God in Scripture, all will be realized in consequence of and in proportion to the improvement or abuse of the present time of our probation. The less there remains of this precious article, the more valuable it should appear ; the narrower becomes the isthmus that separates us from eternity, the more time seems to enlarge itself in moral magnitude ; in a word, to squander time is to squander all. R. Hall. — There is no saying shocks me so much as that which I hear very often, that a man does not know how to pass his time. It would have been but ill spoken by Methuselah, in the nine hundred and sixty-ninth year of his life. Cowley. — The hours of a wise man are lengthened by his ideas, as those of a fool are by his passions. The time of the one is long, because he does not know what to do with it ; so is that of the other, because he distinguishes every moment of it with useful or amusing thoughts ; or, in other words, because the one is always wishing it away, and the other always enjoying it. Addison.

Every day is a little life; and our whole life is but a day repeated. And hence it is that Jacob numbers his life by days, and Moses desires to be taught this point of holy arithmetic, “to number not his years but his days, and these so as to apply his heart unto wisdom.” Anon.—Of all arithmetical rules, this is the hardest, to number our days. Men can number their herds and droves of oxen and of sheep, they can estimate the revenues of their manors and farms, they can number and tell their coins, and yet they are persuaded that their days are infinite and innumerable, and therefore do never begin to number them. We can number other men’s days and years, and utterly forget our own, therefore this is the true wisdom of mortal men, to number their own days. Tymme.—Your greatest responsibility is yourself. The gravest charge you have to keep is the charge of your own soul. Life weaves us into the fabric of society. We are knitted and knotted with other lives. But death unthreads us from our connections. In the last day you will be responsible for yourself. Search, then, and see how you stand. W. H. Murray.

It is evident that the great thing wanted to make men provide for eternity is the practical persuasion that they have but a short time to live. They will not apply their hearts unto wisdom until they are brought to the numbering of their days. The most surprising thing in the text is, that it should be in the form of a prayer. It is necessary that God should interfere to make men number their days. What! is there not enough to make us feel our frailty? Are there not lessons enough of that frailty without any teaching from above? Melvill.—To number our days is to take the measure of our days as compared with the work to be performed, with the provision to be laid up for eternity, with the preparation to be made for death, with the precaution to be taken against judgment. It is to estimate human life by the purposes to which it should be applied, by the eternity to which it must conduct, and in which it shall at last be absorbed. T. Dale.—The depth of the individual life must be counted, as well as its length, its intensity as well as its duration, ere we can come to any real appreciation of its true value. The whole shallow life of the unwise or the sensual does not count for as much as a single day in a life filled with high thinking and pure achievement. The measurement by quality is therefore more important in this matter of human life than the measurement by quantity. Intensity, not attenuation, is the true measure of being. It is with God to decide how many suns shall rise upon us, how many wanings of the moon we shall see. It is left to ourselves to decide whether we shall live while we live, and whether our days shall be those which the Lord lengthens, or our years those which His wrath shortens. We can choose that course in which the great end of life is attained, or that other course which ends in the dreariness and emptiness of dead souls. For time is not the true measure of life; but that life is a long life which attains life’s great end; which has been made rich with pure thoughts, lofty purposes, worthy enthusiasms; and which has been filled with the deeds of Christ. S. S. T.

The Bible wastes no time in sentimental condolence over the brevity of life and the swift coming of death. It is a fact to be dealt with, and not merely bemoaned. The Bible speaks to man as to one that must be saved. “Thou art a sinner, O man! Thou art swept away like a flood because of sin. Thou art frightened because death draws nigh. Thou mayest well be frightened, but not at death. That which is behind death, that which propels it so swiftly and resistlessly is more terrible than death, the wrath of a holy God against sin.” God has no easy good-nature or false tenderness which lead Him to conceal the terrors of sin. It is the Comforter who convinces of sin and of judgment. His face beams with tenderness upon man, His voice calls him to find his home and his rest in the eternal God; but the very brightness of His face, which lights up the way to eternal rest, brings out with terrible distinctness the outlines of human iniquity, and the secret sins which lurk in the deepest heart. True it is that the Bible is an evangel of love and pardon and compassion; true that God knoweth our frame and remembereth that we are dust; true that, “like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him;” but also true that the Bible, from beginning to end, blazes like Sinai with God’s hatred of sin, resounds with warnings of man’s danger from sin, and sets forth as in letters of fire that man is responsible for sin, and liable to its penalties; true that history and prophecy and Psalm and Gospel and epistle are grouped round one definite purpose, to save him from the power, dominion, and consequences of sin. In view of these terrible facts, and of men’s persistent blindness to the power of God’s anger then as now, is it strange that Moses prayed, is there not good cause for us to pray, “Teach us to number our days”? Teach us how short our life is; teach us the true meaning of its brevity, as a punishment and not as an unhappy accident; teach us how we may use its brief hours to escape the consequences of God’s wrath; teach us to number our days, until, as Thy humble pupils, we bring a heavenly wisdom to bear upon the conduct of our lives. V.

With a visible world so enthralling, so bewildering, so deceiving; with an invisible world so near, so secret, so capable of being wholly unnoticed and forgotten, how thoughtfully should Christians step, as from year to year their remaining time of trial grows shorter, their end nearer, their judgment surer! How should they learn to feel prayer, their constant, their blessed, their certain, their only safety! How should their whole lives be prayer! How should they link their private devotions with their momentary thoughts and words of supplication through their day; their momentary words of supplication with the ever-present faith, which regulates every little act and movement of their hearts to the honor and devotion of God! For die we sooner or later, live we smoother or rougher lives on earth, visitations of God in Christ come to us all in great abundance; and happy only are they whom He findeth watching, watching in prayer, that they may know and not misuse the times of their visitation. G. Moberly.—Oh, that I could inscribe upon your souls the legend round the clock: “They pass away, but they are laid to our account!” Count up the many days already gone, the few that still remain. Thank God if you have found the only true reply to the great question, “What is life?” and urge this in your turn on other men. “Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation;” but above all, like Moses, “continue instant in prayer.” A short time longer and then your death, too, shall confirm the truth of Moses’ view of life; and one who has observed your faith and your departure from this world will point aloft as he declares, “His true life has begun!” Van O.

13-17. The prayer which follows springs from the deep source of the preceding meditation. God is everlasting, man transitory and sinful. Man does not consider his sin aright, even when God lays His hand upon him. He needs Divine instruction that he may take to heart the lesson both of his sinfulness and his transitoriness. But Moses does not forget that, in spite of all, God has been and still is the home of His people. He is a compassionate God, as well as a God that punisheth transgression. And therefore he asks not only that he and his people may learn the lesson of Divine wisdom, but that the God who had chastened them would visit them with His loving-kindness, that the night of sorrow may flee away, and the morning of gladness dawn. God’s love, God’s personal manifestation of Himself, His blessing descending upon them as they enter upon their new life in the promised inheritance—for this, and not for anything less, he prays. P.

The last five verses bring us back to the starting-point of the Psalm. Whither shall a sinful, short-lived man flee but to a holy and eternal God? Thither turns the prayer of these last five verses, and turns with hope and confidence. Man is the subject of God’s wrath, but there is mercy with Him to satisfy him who flees from the wrath to come. Man is a pilgrim and a stranger, with no continuing city, but there is gladness and rejoicing in God for all his brief days. Man’s beauty consumes as the moth, but “the beauty of the Lord our God” shall be upon him, and that beauty is immortal, untouched by time and change. Man’s work is fragmentary, his plans often disconcerted, his grandest enterprises nipped in the bud by death, but God’s touch upon human work imparts to it the fixedness of eternity; and if He establish the work of our hands, it shall abide, though the world pass away and the lust thereof. He will make good the sufferings of sin by the joys of holiness. Glory, beauty, establishment. A strange ending of this wail from the desert; and yet not strange in the Gospel light in which we read it to-day. It is only the prophecy of the saved man’s triumph over mortality and sin and death; of the victim of the down-sweeping flood snatched from its fury, and landed safely in the eternal dwelling-place in “the everlasting arms;” of the mown grass garnered, of the sleeper awaking, satisfied, in God’s likeness. It is the foreshadowing of that blessed story of the wandering son brought home at last, and seated at the Father’s table, to go no more out forever. V.

15. The time of our pilgrimage upon earth is a time of sorrow; these are “the days wherein God afflicted us; these the years wherein we see evil;” but he will hereafter “make us glad according to them;” in proportion to our sufferings, if rightly we bear those sufferings, will be our reward; nay, “these light afflictions, which are but for a moment, work for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.” Then shall our joy be increased, and receive an additional relish, from the remembrance of our former sorrow; then shall we bless the days and the years which exercised our faith and perfected our patience; and then shall we bless God, who chastised us for a season, that He might save us forever. Bishop Horne.

We have to serve and help our neighbors, we who ourselves stand in such bitter need of help! We have to contend with the spiritual wickednesses which are in them, we who are so often overcome! Everywhere around us there is the same heavy task, the same unremitting and deadly conflict, which we find within. And how can we achieve or contribute to that task save by manifold and exhausting labors? how be always in the thick of that conflict without taking as well as giving many wounds? If there were no interior contest, no constant toil at home, the sheer force of sympathy with our neighbors is at times enough to break our hearts, if at least we have our Master’s spirit of love and pity. Think how many sorrows there are in the world, what deep and wide miseries, what innumerable and incurable evils! Nay, think how many even in our own narrow circles are at this very moment weeping bitter tears of regret, anguish, despair; how many faint in languor and pain; how many, and these the most pitiable of all, eat and drink, and laugh and swear, while the very soul is dying out of them, oppressed and strangled by the lusts of the flesh. If we are Christian in spirit as well as in name, if we have any share of our Master’s purity, and tenderness, and grace, all these miseries and evils are as thorns in our crown. We cannot, we dare not, be indifferent to them. At times they tear and sting us well-nigh into despair, till, like Moses and Paul, we could wish ourselves blotted from the book of life, if only these poor souls might be healed and saved. It is through such pains and toils as these that we grow strong in spirit.

Christ’s crown of thorns broke into flower long ago; its sweet healing odors float through the heavenly temple, and are wafted over the earth by every wind that blows. Let us but be patient, steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, always showing a good courage in the wars of the Lord; and in due time our crowns, of which we should hardly be conscious now but for the thorns, will also blossom into flower, and will make us glad according to the days wherein they have afflicted us. Cor.

16. The prayer of the Psalmist is the prayer of one who looks forward, of one who would fain build what will be continued by them that come after. “Show Thy servants Thy work, and their children Thy glory.” Amid all that is fleeting and perishable, make us to know what Thou doest; and for our children we can ask no richer gift. The work of God is the glory of God. Once let us believe in our hearts that God is working in the world, and then it becomes an axiom that we, too, in our humble measure, have a work to do, a work lofty and ennobling because it is done for Him and with Him, because we are in truth admitted to very co-operation with God. H. M. Butler.

17. And let the beauty of Jehovah our God be upon us, and the work of our hands establish upon us, and the work of our hands, establish Thou it. While the glory of Jehovah is expected to be fully revealed only in His dealings with the next generation, He is still besought to grant their fathers the experimental knowledge of His beauty, loveliness, or all that renders Him an object of affection. The work of our hands is a favorite Mosaic phrase for all that we do or undertake, all our affairs and interests. To establish or confirm it is to prosper and succeed it, to bring it to a favorable issue. A.—The closing verse of the Psalm comprehends both the Divine and the human side of the work given to God’s people. First, the Psalmist prays for the beauty of Jehovah; that is, all that which renders Him an object of affection, His wondrous graciousness, to be revealed to them in the way of experience. But this, so far from superseding rather implies their own activity. Hence the next petition mentions “the work of our hands,” a favorite Mosaic phrase for all that we do or undertake, which God is requested to establish; i.e., to confirm and bring to a favorable issue. Chambers.

They were content to live and to die as pilgrims, provided only they could feel that in His sterner dealings with them God was, however slowly, preparing the way for that display of glorious blessedness which should be the lot of their descendants. In a similar spirit they ask God to establish the work of their hands, though they reckoned not that they should behold its results. Their comfort in sowing was the belief that their children would reap. Thruyp.

The beauty of the Lord our God. What an eye and ear these Psalmists had for beauty! But in how much truer a light than either the meagre realism of our day or the pagan worship of beauty for its own sake! Their holy art could not content itself with the forms and pictures about them; they must come into communion with the Divine Artist, and see Him at His work. It is the presence of the Good Shepherd which makes the fields bright. It is the Lord of glory who gives the storm its voice of majesty. It is of Him that the days speak, and the nights show starry knowledge. It is He who curiously wrought our bodies and fashioneth our hearts. And before the work of our hands can be established, the beauty of the Lord our God must be upon it. F. N. Zabriskie.

What is the beauty of God? The excellence of His character. The meaning of all beauty is to image the holiness and excellence of God. The perception of beauty has been given us not, as some suppose, for enjoyment merely, but to bind us to the infinite, to make it more difficult for man to lose himself in time and sense, and to woo him to a heavenly perfection. The beauty of God is His love, mercy, patience, faithfulness. The justice of God, too, which may well appear to sinful man only terrible, has truly a grand beauty. Viewed from a higher point, the terrible in God is the beautiful, for it is seen to be a form of love. Once in the history of this sinful world infinite beauty appeared. Once God contracted Himself into the limits of our nature and walked the earth. Divine loveliness spoke and acted among us, shone through the eyes and lived in the actions and sufferings of Jesus of Nazareth. It is a perception of the beauty of God, a delight in it, a desire after it, which distinguish the spiritual man from others. They may feel that God is great and right; he feels that God is beautiful. A sense of the Divine beauty gives an elevation to all life, and clothes it with a certain infinite halo of gladness. Nothing can greatly afflict a soul that has a steady vision of the Divine beauty. Such a soul rises freely above temptation, heaven has entered into it, and it finds it easy to keep the road to heaven. J. Leckie.

Heart-purity is the glory of all loveliness. The heart makes the life. The inner fashions the outer. So, above all things, be pure-hearted. That you may be pure-hearted, let Christ more and more into your life, that He may fill all your soul, and that His Spirit may permeate all your being. That the beauty of the Lord may be upon you, that the winning charm of God’s loveliness may shine in your features, you must first have the beauty of Christ within you. The transfiguration must come from within. Only a holy, beautiful heart can make a holy, beautiful character. J. R. M. — In the present state, the least part of a saint’s worth is visible. As the earth is fruitful in plants and flowers, but its riches are in mines of precious metal and the veins of marble hidden in its bosom, true grace appears in sensible actions, but its glory is within. The sincerity of aims, the purity of affection, the impresses of the Spirit on the heart, the interior beauties of holiness, are only seen by God. Salter.

There is spiritual light, so beauty-inspiring that the plainest face within which it is born is illuminated with singular loveliness, which wins its way into many a heart. Who of us has not marvelled at an unexpected light in what we had always thought an uninteresting face? Who has not beheld a light Divine irradiate the human countenance, giving joy, and prophesying perfection, where we had least thought to find beauty? May we not take these facts as emblems, albeit faint and imperfect, of what the “Beauty of the Lord” does for us and our work? You know what the natural light can do for material objects; you know what mental and moral light can work for human faces; rise from these, and know what spiritual light, Divine light, can do for immortal beings and immortal works. Jessie Coombs. — God is glorified and His work advances when His Church is beautiful. “The beauty of the Lord” is the beauty of holiness, that beauty which in the Lord Jesus Himself shone with lustre so resplendent, and which ought to be repeated or reflected by every disciple. And it is toward this that all among us who love the Saviour, and who long for the extension of His Kingdom, should very mainly direct their endeavors. Nothing can be sadder than when preaching or personal effort is contradicted and neutralized by the low or unlovely lives of those who pass for Christians; and nothing can go further to insure success than when prayer is carried out and preaching is seconded by the pure, holy, and benevolent lives of those who seek to follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth. Hamilton.

If the common mind has awakened to the perception of the tender, the beautiful and sublime in the dew-drops and flowers, in the strength of the everlasting hills, in the calm majesty of the moon walking in brightness; to the sense of the infinite in the great and wide sea and the depths of the open heaven, it owes much of the feeling, and even of the expression, to the great Book which has unclosed the spirit’s eye. But far beyond these are the forms of the moral and spiritual with which the Bible is so filled, and which it is its supreme aim to present to men, what it terms emphatically “the beauty of the Lord,” the pure and merciful, the heroic and self-devoted, singly and in groups, flaming up into great deeds, or flowing on in the calm current of a life; and among these, those transformations the most wonderful, from the impure to the holy, from the meanest human mould to the loftiest shapes of magnanimity and self-devotion. Does any book, or do all other books together, present such scenes of moral grandeur and tenderness with such everlasting freshness in them? Ker.

How will it seem in the heavenly world, when the beauty of the Lord our God is upon us, when every form and every face is angelic; nay, more than this, like Christ’s, for “we shall be like Him;” when our dwelling-place is the metropolis of suns and stars, where the God of creation has lavished the exceeding riches of His power and skill; “where angels walk and seraphs are the warders;” where we shall have music, and society, and friendships, and homes, and friends restored to each other; and the walls, and foundations, and gates, and pavements of our place of habitation shall be of prodigal affluence, but forgotten by us in the incomparable joys of the heart and mind? N. Adams.

The work of our hands. Another expression which runs all through Deuteronomy. The order deserves notice. God’s work is first to appear, His majesty to be revealed; then man’s work, which is God’s work carried out by human instruments, may look for His blessing. Referring to the use of this Psalm in the burial of the dead, Mr. Housman observes: “It is remarkable how not only this but the thirty-ninth Psalm, as well as 1 Cor. 15, all close with the same thought—work; as though the one great use of the shortness of life and the coming on of death were to stir us up to use the very utmost of the time that is left.” P.—Correct sad thoughts by the thought of the permanence of work. “Prosper Thou the work of our hands.” Feelings pass, thoughts and imaginations pass; dreams pass; work remains. Through eternity, what you have done, that you are. So, then, amid the solemn lessons taught to the giddy traveller as he journeys on by a nature hastening with gigantic footsteps down to a winter grave, and by the solemn tolling of the bell of time, which tells us that another, and another, and another is gone before us, we will learn, not the lesson of the sensualist—enjoy while you can; not that of the feeble sentimentalist—mourn, for nothing lasts; but that of the Christian—work cheerfully. F. W. R.

Wise work is briefly work with God; foolish work is work against God. And work makes a difference, whether you serve Him who has on vesture written, “King of kings,” whose service is perfect freedom, or him on whose vesture is written, “Slave of slaves,” whose service is perfect slavery. Ruskin.—Moses prays for a share in the work and glory and beauty of God. This is the deepest prayer of every true man and woman. We long to leave something behind us which shall last, some influence of good which shall be transmitted through our children, some impress of character or action which shall endure and perpetuate itself. There is only one way in which we can do this, only one way in which our lives can receive any lasting beauty and dignity; and that is by being taken up into the great plan of God. Then our work is established, because it becomes part of His work. H. Van Dyke.—The different sides of our nature, like the different periods of our life, should be bound each to each by natural piety. Work should be prayerful, and prayer true work; all life a Psalm, and praise the breath of life, for the Christian’s life is love, and love is the only sufficient source of happiness. Grant.

Christian life consists of work sustained by worship. Mary’s warm heart must be joined to Martha’s busy hand. Christian work is rooted to worship, as the strong, wide-reaching branches of the tree above are fed by the great roots below. Christian toil must depend on the secret roots of prayer. Worship simplifies work, unifies work, skims work of its fuss and fret. It calms the spirit, makes us uncomplaining, and carries everything in the right spirit to the Master. E. Judson.—It is not by enthroning religion on Sunday in the sanctuary, but it is by bringing religion into the counting-house, the exchange, and the market, that we really honor her. It is not by studied service, by early matins, by twilight vespers, by chimes of holy bells that summon us three times a day to come to worship, that we do homage to Christ. It is a grand mistake in the world to think that you can only be religious when engaged in religious work. That is not true. You may be religious when you are building, or ploughing, or sowing, or reaping. If anything were to go wrong, or any temptation urged to do wrong, you would fall back upon the grand governing motive, “Serve the Lord Christ;” but for the time you are engaged wholly in the work; and it is not irreligious to do it with all your might, when the motive for which you do it and the end to which you do it is a Divine one. It is not true that doing religious work is necessarily being religious. It is not the work that makes the workman holy, but it is the workman’s heart that consecrates the toil, and makes all he does to be serving the Lord Christ. To be truly religious is to bring the motives, the hopes, the precepts, the spirit of religion into all our walks and ways in the world, till our whole life becomes religious. Cumming—Holiness was meant for every-day use. It is home-made and home-worn. Its exercise hardens the bone, and strengthens the muscle in the body of character.

Holiness is religion shining. It is the candle lighted, and not hid under a bushel, but lighting the house. It is religious principle put into motion. It is the love of God sent forth into circulation on the feet and with the hands of love to man. It is faith gone to work. It is charity coined into actions, and devotion breathing benedictions on human suffering, while it goes up in intercessions to the Father of all piety. F. D. H.

While, on the one hand, there is no more certain means of enjoying God than of humbly seeking to walk in the ways of His commandments, on the other hand, there is nothing more evanescent in its nature than the emotion of religious joy, faith, or the like, unless it be turned into a spring of action for God. Such emotions, like photographs, vanish from the heart unless they be fixed. Work for God is the way to fix them. Joy in God is the strength of work for God, but work for God is the perpetuation of joy in God. A. M.—There is a conscious gladness in doing the work of God on earth, in cooperating with Him, in our small measure, in our limited circle, yet with a true consecration of the spirit to Him, which He accepts and blesses, and the result of which He secures and furthers by His providence and the energy of His Spirit. So it is that the grandest workers have been the happiest Christians. Luther, how he sings in his conversations and in his letters! In his sermons he was sometimes sad undoubtedly, looking at the apparent triumph of evil and of errors against the truth, but in himself rejoicing and triumphant because he felt himself co-worker with God, even as did Paul beforetime. So with all those who, by great endeavor and by long-continued endurance, not merely by generosity of gift, but by self sacrifice in effort, have wrought for God. According to their pains has been the blessedness that followed; according to the heroic character of their work has been the rich and royal character of their reward. And it has come from this; not from the sense of blessing future ages merely, though that has come to them oftentimes; not from the sense of exerting grand powers of will merely, but from the sense of being in co-operation with the Almighty Himself. The soul has felt itself crowned by this Divine permission to labor for a Divine end; has felt itself exalted and inspired by the secret impulse given it from above, pushing it into grand and Divine enterprise. R. S. S.

The ninetieth Psalm utters the experience of one of the grandest, but at the same time sadsedest and most burdened men who has ever trodden the pathways of our world. There is a deeper solemnity in it, and a stronger sense of the awfulness of life and of God, than in the Psalms of David. It is a song of the desert; it breathes its atmosphere; it is penetrated with its awe—an awe which was nursed among the solemn, sterile silences, as the lonely leader watched the sunset glow, or the wheelings of the troops of stars, over the waste. But his hope lies deeper than his despondency. The dominant note in the Psalm is hope, and it ends on the ruling tone. “Establish Thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands, establish Thou it.” And it is our pilgrim Psalm. Like him in the wilderness we spend what, but for faith, would be our weary days. In its hot, dusty arena we march under command, and we work under compulsion, as we gather its scant, uncertain supplies; and we are destined thus to work, to march, to be fed, until we drop, and its sods grow green over our graves. Yet, God-led like them, we journey; an angel in the midst, a fiery pillar in front, and with the hills of our Canaan gleaming in the distance, touched by the light of the celestial sun. J. B. Brown.

There is a mingled blessedness and awfulness in our life. To live here at all as a human being, to possess or rather to be the centre of self-reflecting thought and of self-determining will, a centre of life which under some conditions will be perpetuated indefinitely—this, when we think of it steadily and in good earnest, is, next to the spiritual sight of God Himself, the most solemn, the most chastening, the most stimulating consideration that can open upon us. Let us make much of it, in the interests both of the present and the future, for the sake of God and truth and humanity, as well as of our own lasting happiness. H. P. L.

Life is short, yet this short life is long enough to honor God, to be a source of blessing to others and for ourselves, to seek the one thing needful, which maintains its value throughout eternity. Life is uncertain; but just this uncertainty calls us to have always our loins girded, our lamps burning, and we ourselves as those who wait their Lord. Life is full of trouble; for the sinner it must be so, since he must wean his heart from much that he holds dear, but cannot keep. To the Christian it may be so; yet in the deepest pain he merely casts into the field his heart, a

seed for heaven. Reconciled with God in Christ, we are content with all that here menaces and casts us down. Yea, how can it harm us to reach the boundary line which Moses marked? We fly away, but, God be praised! we know the better land, and in our holiest hours would seek for nothing more. And this is certain, when we reach that place where we shall see God face to face, nothing would tempt us to return. Our Psalm is only for the wilderness; in Canaan our songs shall be of triumph. What are the seventy or eighty fleeting years (and few reach even that boundary; years spent on earth in toil and trouble, too) when we compare them with the glory of the sons of God, which then shall be revealed? Then, in the morning of eternity, He satisfies His people with the full enjoyment of His goodness; He makes them glad according to the days of evil they have seen on earth. Then all His work appears unto His servants’

eyes; and it is shown to heaven and earth that there was absolute necessity for even that weary warfare in this life, to fit them for the wearing of the everlasting crown. Then comes—what higher blessedness can faith conceive?—then comes the beauty of the Lord our God, in its entirety, on all who loved Him in sincerity; and the work of their hands, begun in weakness to His praise, is perfected in power. Once more He overwhelms them, but with streams of everlasting bliss; the brief—yea, and the longest—life of pain has now passed by, as if it were a watch by night; and God’s eternity, God’s blessedness, God’s glory now are theirs, as far as creatures can receive. They mount up hence, always, like eagles, straight toward the sun. Christians! if the Psalm of life, even here, gives such encouragement to faith, what shall it be when, up in heaven, the song of all eternity ascends? Van O.