We too can despise our birthright, by living far below our privileges, and far below our spiritual opportunities. We have our birthright as sons of God, born to an inheritance as joint-heirs with Christ. We belong by essential nature not to the animal kingdom, but to the Kingdom of Heaven; and when we forget it and live only with reference to the things of sense and time, we are disinheriting ourselves as Esau did. The secular temptation strikes a weak spot in all of us, suggesting that the spiritual life, God's love and holiness, the Kingdom of Heaven and His righteousness, the life of faith and prayer and communion are dim and shadowy things, as in a land that is very far off. "What profit shall this birthright do to me?"

What shall it profit? seems a sane and sensible question, to be considered in a businesslike fashion. It is the right question to ask, but it has a wider scope and another application. What profit the mess of pottage if I lose my birthright? What profit the momentary gratification of even imperious passion if we are resigning our true life, and losing the clear vision and the pure heart? What profit to make only provision for the flesh, if of the flesh we reap but corruption? What profit the easy self-indulgence, if we are bartering peace and love and

holiness and joy? "What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world [and not merely a contemptible mess of pottage] and lose his own soul?" What profit if in the insistence of appetite men go like an ox to the slaughter, knowing not that it is for their life?" Thus Esau despised his birthright."

XII

AN UNFINISHED LIFE

I said, O my God, take me not away in the midst of my days. -PSALM cii. 24.

THE inscription of this Psalm is unique. It is not like the other inscriptions of the Psalms, with reference to musical instructions or to the supposed author or the historical circumstances of their composition. In this case it describes the inner subject of the Psalm, and makes a very beautiful heading, "A prayer of the afflicted when he is overwhelmed, and poureth out his complaint before the Lord." The afflictions are those of the nation and of the Psalmist himself, who added to his own sorrows the sorrow of his people. It seems to have been written towards the close of the exile in Babylon. The author has known sorrow and tears as one of the homeless people, and has shared all the misery that came upon Israel. The keenest pang is that the city of God sits like a widow with her hair in the dust.

It is not possible to disentangle the elements of personal sorrow of which the Psalmist speaks from

this general sorrow which he has with all who loved Zion. The elegy moves with mournful strains as he describes the bitterness of his pain. He has eaten ashes like bread and mingled his drink with weeping. His days are shortened; his strength wasted, and death has crept up close to him, so that he is withered like grass. It seems to him so untimely, so premature that he should be taken; for he is assured that God is about to remember Zion and have mercy upon her. He feels that the deliverance is at hand. God will hear the groaning of the prisoner and regard the prayer of the destitute. The time is near when those who take pleasure in the stones of Zion and love her very dust will have glorious opportunity for rejoicing.

For himself, however, his strength is ebbing out as the expected consummation approaches; and there breaks from him the pathetic cry, "O my God, take me not away in the midst of my days." To have gone through all the pain and tribulation without tasting the ultimate joy, to have borne all the toil and the burden without sharing in the harvest and in the joy of the harvest-home, to have taken part in the long and weary strife and to fall in the hour of victory; that eyes which had seen all the desolation and been salt with tears through many a sorrow

should be closed in death as the new era breaks —that is the dreadful pathos of the situation. It is untimely thus to be balked of the true fruitage of life, to be prematurely cut short ere he has truly lived out his days. We can enter with sympathy into the pitiful prayer, "O my God, take me not away in the midst of my days." He feels his life is unfinished. The winter has come before there has been any autumn. He has sown in tears but not for him to reap in joy.

We

We, too, have often a similar feeling about what we call unfinished lives and untimely deaths. have this sense of pathos not for the victor of a hundred fights, but for the soldier who falls in his first campaign; not for the statesman who passes away laden with years and honours, but for the promising novice who was just earning his first laurels; not for the man who can say after a strenuous and long life, “I have fought a good fight; I have finished the course." Pity to him is an insult. He has lived out his life, and done his work, and entered into his rest. It may be hard for those who loved such a man and leant on him for wisdom and direction, but for himself it is a blessed and expected end. We do not feel this pity at the passing away of the old in the fulness of time, rich with the spoils of life, a golden