SMITH

ASSURANCE IN GOD

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

GEORGE ADAM SMITH, divine, educator and author, was born at Calcutta
in 1856, and educated at New College, Edinburgh, Scotland. He is at
present professor of Old Testament Language, Literature and Theology
in the United Free Church College, Glasgow. He is author of "The
Historical Geography of the Holy Land," "Jerusalem, the Topography,
Economics and History from the Earliest Time to A.D. 70" (1908). He is
generally regarded as one of the most gifted preachers of Scotland.

SMITH

Born in 1856

ASSURANCE IN GOD

_Preserve me, O God._--Psalm xvi., 16.

The psalmist lived in a period when belief in the reality of many gods
was still strong, and when a man who would follow the one true God
had to prefer to do so against the attractions of other deities and
against the convictions of a great number of his fellow countrymen
that these deities were living and powerful. That stage of religion is
so distant from ourselves that we may imagine the psalmist's example
to be of no practical value for our faith, yet in such an imagination
we should be very much mistaken indeed, for, to begin with, consider
how much you and I to-day owe to those believers who so many centuries
ago rejected all the gods that offered themselves to the hearts of men
except the true God, and who chose to cleave to Him alone with all
that passionate loyalty which breathes through these verses. But for
them you and I could not be standing where we are in religion to-day.
As the eleventh of Hebrews reminds us, we are the spiritual heir of
such believers. It is to their struggles and their faith and their
victories that we greatly owe it that we have been born into an
atmosphere in which no religious belief is possible to us save in one
God who is Spirit and Righteousness and all Truth.

That, then, was the great choice that the psalmist's faith was turning
to--a choice that was no mere assent to a creed that had been fought
for and established by previous generations of believers. It was the
man's own proving of things unseen and his own preference of those
against the crowd and a system of things seen, palpable, and very
powerful in their attraction for the senses of humanity. But we are
not to suppose that the rival deities, from which this man turned to
the unseen God, were to his mind or to the mind of his day the heap
of dead and ugly idols which we know them to be. They were not dead