I need, all I require, in sickness and health, in joy and in sorrow, in life and in death, in time and through eternity. The snow-clad hills may cease to feed the brooks;-that sun may cease to shine, or nature grow weary of his loving beams;-that moon may cease on her silver lyre, night by night, to discourse to the listening earth;-the birds may become mute at the voice of the morning;— flowers may droop, instead of ringing their thousand bells at the jubilant step of summer;-the gasping pilgrim may rush from the stream, and prefer the fiery furnace-glow of the desert sands,-but this God shall be my God for ever and ever;' and, even when death is sealing my eyes, and the rush of darkness is coming over my spirit, even then will I take up the old exile strain-the great sigh of weary humanity-and blend its notes with the song of heaven-' AS THE HART PANTETH AFTER THE WATER-BROOKS, SO PANTETH MY SOUL AFTER THEE, O GOD.'" III. The Living God. "Hear me ! To Thee my soul in suppliance turneth; "Oh, it is His own self I pant after. Fellowship-living, constant, intimate fellowship with Him, is the cry He often hears from the desolate void of my unloving heart. How do I loathe the sin which makes the atmosphere so misty-the clouds so thick and dark!"-Life of Adelaide Newton, p. 246. "My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when shall I come and appear before God?"-Verse 2. III THE LIVING GOD. IN the two former chapters, we listened to the first sigh of the exile—the first strain of his plaintive song. It was the groping and yearning of his soul after God, as the alone object of happiness. You may have watched the efforts of the plant, tossed amid rack and weed in some dark cellar, to climb to the light. Like the captive in the dungeon longing to cool his fevered brow in the air of heaven, its sickly leaves seem to struggle and gasp for breath. They grope, with their blanched colours, towards any chink or crevice or grated window, through which a broken beam is admitted. Or garden flowers choked amid rank luxuriance, or under the shade of tree or wall, how ambitious to assert their freedom, and pay homage to the parent sun, lifting their pendant leaves or petals as a target for his golden arrows! The soul, away from the great Sun of its being, frets and pines and mourns! Every affection droops in languor and sadness when that light is away. Its abortive efforts to obtain happiness in other and meaner joys, and its dissatisfaction with them, is itself a testimony to the strength and loftiness of its aspiration-a manifesto of its real grandeur! The human affections must be fastened on something! They are like the clinging ivy which creeps along the ground, and grasps stones, rocks, weeds, and unsightly ruins, if it can find nothing else on which to fix its tendrils; but when it reaches the root of the tree, or base of the castle wall, it spurns its grovelling existence, and climbs its upward way till it hangs in graceful festoons from the topmost branch or turret. We are to contemplate, now, a second breathing of this exiled supplicant-a new element in his God-ward aspiration. My soul thirsteth for God, FOR THE LIVING GOD: when shall I come and appear before God?" This is no mere repetition of the former verse. It invests the believer's relationship to the object of his faith and hope with a new and more solemn interest. |