e down; He made
darkness pavilions round about Him, dark waters, and thick clouds of
the skies." And again, "Thy mercy, O Lord, is in the heavens, and Thy
faithfulness reacheth unto the clouds." And again, "His excellency is
over Israel, and His strength is in the clouds." And again, "The
clouds poured out water, the skies sent out a sound, the voice of Thy
thunder was in the heaven." Again, "Clouds and darkness are round
about Him, righteousness and judgment are the habitation of His
throne; the heavens declare His righteousness, and all the people see
His glory." In all these passages the meaning is unmistakable if they
possess definite meaning at all. We are too apt to take them merely
for sublime and vague imagery, and therefore gradually to lose the
apprehension of their life and power. The expression, "He bowed the
heavens," for instance, is, I suppose, received by most readers as a
magnificent hyperbole, having reference to some peculiar and fearful
manifestation of God's power to the writer of the psalm in which the
words occur. But the expression either has _plain_ meaning, or it has
_no_ meaning. Understand by the term "heavens" the compass of infinite
space around the earth, and the expression "bowed the heavens,"
however sublime, is wholly without meaning: infinite space cannot be
bent or bowed. But understand by the "heavens" the veil of clouds
above the earth, and the expression is neither hyperbolical nor
obscure; it is pure, plain, accurate truth, and it describes God, not
as revealing Himself in any peculiar way to David, but doing what He
is still doing before our own eyes, day by day. By accepting the words
in their simple sense, we are thus led to apprehend the immediate
presence of the Deity, and His purpose of manifesting Himself as near
us whenever the storm-cloud stoops upon its course; while by our vague
and inaccurate acceptance of the words, we remove the idea of His
presence far from us, into a region which we can neither see nor know:
and gradually, from the close realization of a living God, who "maketh
the clouds His chariot," we define and explain ourselves into dim and
distant suspicion of an inactive God inhabiting inconceivable places,
and fading into the multitudinous formalisms of the laws of Nature.
All errors of this kind--and in the present day we are in constant and
grievous danger of falling into them--arise from the originally
mistaken idea that man can, "by searching, find out