The Power of an Endless Life, and Other Sermons

Excerpt from The Power of an Endless Life, and Other Sermons

There is no other portion of the Old Testament that has so much endeared itself to human hearts as the Twenty-third Psalm, - "The Lord is my shepherd." The dearest verse in this, no doubt, is that which runs, "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil;" but hardly less dear to many tired and overborne with life's intolerable day, and to many others, however generally happy, in special moods of weariness and languor and disgust, the verse which reads, "He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters." The psalm in its entirety is one that sentiment has yielded, or will yield, to criticism very grudgingly. If sentiment could keep one word, one psalm, and but one, for the Shepherd King, it would be this, its tender words a reminiscence of the time his father's tinkling sheep were round about him in gray dawns and purple eves, and beneath the stars that gave to him another psalm, or when the noon lay broad and clear on the Judean hills. But the psalm loses nothing of its beauty when its Davidic authorship is successfully impeached. The freebooter David never could have written it; only a poet into whose heart had passed the beauty of the shepherd's life and grown into a symbol there of eternal guidance and almighty love and care.

The summer which is ending as we gather here to-day has been such a summer of green pastures as few of us had ever seen before.

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