of trampled sand, with the ragged black mouths above it, mean not only
food and rest, but dear life itself. There, by the golden law of the
desert's hospitality, he knows that he may eat in peace, that though his
enemies come up to the very door, and his table be spread as it were in
their presence, he need not flinch nor stint his heart of her security.

That was the landscape the Psalmist saw, and it seemed to him to reflect
the mingled wildness and beauty of his own life. Human life was just this
wilderness of terrible contrasts, where the light is so bright, but the
shadows the darker and more treacherous; where the pasture is rich, but
scattered in the wrinkles of vast deserts; where the paths are illusive,
yet man's passion flies swift and straight to its revenge; where all is
separation and disorder, yet law sweeps inexorable, and a man is hunted
down to death by his blood-guiltiness. But not in anything is life more
like the Wilderness than in this, that it is the presence and character of
One, which make all the difference to us who are its silly sheep; that it
is His grace and hospitality which alone avail us when we awaken to the
fact that our lives cannot be fully figured by those of sheep, for men are
fugitives in need of more than food--men are fugitives with the conscience
and the habit of sin relentless on their track. This is the main lesson of
the Psalm: the faith into which many generations of God's Church have sung
an ever richer experience of His Guidance and His Grace. We may gather it
up under these three heads--they cannot be too simple: I. The Lord is a
Shepherd; II. The Lord is my Shepherd; and, III. if that be too feeble a
figure to meet the fugitive and hunted life of man, the Lord is my Host
and my Sanctuary for ever.

I. _The Lord is my Shepherd_: or--as the Greek, vibrating to the force of
the original--_The Lord is shepherding me; I shall not want_. This is the
theme of the first four verses.

Every one feels that the Psalm was written by a shepherd, and the first
thing that is obvious is that he has made his God after his own image.

There are many in our day who sneer at that kind of theology--pretty,
indeed, as the pearl or the tear, but like tear or pearl a natural and
partly a morbid deposit--a mere human process which, according to them,
pretty well explains all religion; the result of man's instinct to see
himself reflected on the cloud that bounds his view; man's honest but
de