June 14

"This poor man cried."—Psalms 34:6.

THIS poor man cried. Sometimes my prayer must be a cry—sad, wild, importunate.

It may be the ill-desert of my sin that is pressing on me, the knowledge of what it merits, the sense of the divine displeasure which hangs over me like a thunder-cloud. Or it may be the shame of my wrong-doing, so that I hate to think of what I have been and blush to lift my face to the pure and radiant Presence. Or it may be the onslaught of subtle and frightful temptation: I am ready to sink in cheerless gulfs of doubt, in awful abysses of positive iniquity, in masterful currents of worldliness. Or it may be another's need which haunts me as though it were my own, and all my soul goes out in that old, old yearning, Oh that Ishmael might live before Thee! Storms are sudden and waters deep, and frequently my little boat is in danger of sinking, and I can do nought else but cry.

But when this poor man cried, the Lord heard him, and saved him out of all his troubles. "There is no justice," Olive Schreiner asserts; "all things are driven about by blind chance." Mr. John Davidson rings out the same hopeless strain—"The years went slowly by; but still to me the universe was dumb." But their dismal creed is not true. God lives. God listens. God answers me.

Blessed be His name, His arm is not shortened, and His ear has not grown heavy. The revolution of centuries makes no change in Him. The enrichment of multitudes leaves His grace as full and victorious as before. There is nothing that touches Him, nothing that sets in motion the machinery of His omnipotence, nothing that prevails with His tender heart, like a cry.