the
plain. There is no question of duty here, of a task to be performed in
heaviness, but a simple tide of joyfulness such as filled the heart of
the poet who wrote:--

"God's in His Heaven;
All's right with the world."

I take it that these verses draw into themselves, as the sea draws the
streams, all the rivers of joy and beauty that flow, whether laden with
ships out of the heart of great cities, or dropping and leaping from
high unvisited moorlands. All the sweet joys that life holds for us
find their calm end and haven here; all the delights of life, of
action, of tranquil thought, of perception, of love, of beauty, of
friendship, of talk, of reflection, are all drawn into one great flood
of gratitude and thankfulness; the thankfulness that comes from the
thought that after all it is He that made us, and not we ourselves;
that we are indeed led and pastured by green meadows and waters of
comfort; in such a mood all uneasy anxieties, all dull questionings,
die and are merged, and we are glad to be.

Then suddenly falls a different mood, a touch of pathos, in the thought
that there are some who from wilfulness, and vain desire, and troubled
scheming, shut themselves out from the great inheritance; to them comes
the pleading call, the sorrowful invitation:--

"To-day if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts; as in the
provocation, and as in the day of temptation in the wilderness.

"When your fathers tempted me: proved me, and saw my works."

And then rises the gathering wrath; the doom of all perverse and
stubborn natures, who will not yield, or be guided, or led; who live in
a wilful sadness, a petty obstinacy:--

"Forty years long was I grieved with this generation, and said: It is a
people that do err in their hearts for they have not known my ways."

And then the passion of the mood, the fierce indignation, rises and
breaks, as it were, in a dreadful thunderclap:--

"Unto whom I sware in my wrath that they should not enter into my rest."

But even so the very horror of the denunciation holds within it a
thought of beauty, like an oasis in a burning desert. "My REST"--that
sweet haven which does truly await all those who will but follow and
wait upon God.

I declare that the effect of this amazing lyric grows upon me every
time that I hear it. Some Psalms, like the delicate and tender cxix.,
steal into the heart after long and quiet use. How dull I used to find
it