d our hearts to receive, what is really the central
blessing of the Gospel, the communication through the same faith as
Habakkuk exercised when he said, 'I will rejoice in the God of my
salvation,' of an actual divine strength to dwell in and manifest itself
majestically and triumphantly through, our weakness. 'The Lord is my
strength,' and if we will rejoice in the Lord we shall find that
Habakkuk's experience was lower than ours, inasmuch as he knew less of
God than we do; and we shall be able to surpass his saying with the
other one of the Prophet: 'The Lord is my strength and song; He also is
become my salvation.' That is the first blessing that this ancient
believer, out of the twilight of early revelation, felt as certain to
come through communion with God.

II. The second is like unto it. Such rejoicing communion with God will
give light-footedness in the path of life.

'He makes my feet like hinds' feet.' The stag is, in all languages
spoken by people that have ever seen it, the very type and emblem of
elastic, springing ease, of light and bounding gracefulness, that clears
every obstacle, and sweeps swiftly over the moor. And when this singer,
or his brother psalmist in the other psalm that we have referred to,
says, 'Thou makest my feet like hinds' feet,' what he is thinking about
is that light and easy, springing, elastic gait, that swiftness of
advance. What a contrast that is to the way in which most of us get
through our day's work! Plod, plod, plod, in a heavy-footed, spiritless
grind, like that with which the ploughman toils down the sticky furrows
of a field, with a pound of clay at each heel; or like that with which a
man goes wearied home from his work at night. The monotony of trivial,
constantly recurring doings, the fluctuations in the thermometer of our
own spirits; the stiff bits of road that we have all to encounter sooner
or later; and as days go on, our diminishing buoyancy of nature, and the
love of walking a little slower than we used to do; we all know these
things, and our gait is affected by them. But then my text brings a
bright assurance, that swift and easy and springing as the course of a
stag on a free hill-side may be the gait with which we run the race set
before us.

It is the same thought, under a somewhat different garb, which the
Apostle has when he tells us that the Christian soldier ought to have
his 'feet shod with the alacrity that comes from the gospel of peace.'
We are