XVIII.

THE MIGHTINESS OF REDEMPTION.

'Stir up Thy strength, and come, and help us.'-PSALM 1xxx. 2.

WHETHER we regard the system of this visible universe either simply with the eye of a philosopher, as the multitudinous result of a few great laws, or with the devouter sentiments of piety, as the silent witness of an Eternal Power and Godhead, it alike impresses itself upon the musing mind as illimitable and incomprehensible. Go forth on some star-lit night, and gaze upward on the spangled canopy of heaven, and the thoughts of the eighth and nineteenth Psalms spontaneously fill the mind. Look round upon the varied landscape of nature, consider the evidence of power, contrivance, forethought, adaptation, goodness, that it displays, and if there is any warmth of piety in our heart, we find the language of the glorious 104th Psalm more in harmony with our deep emotions than the cold theories of the geologist, or even the accurate descriptions of the physical geographer.

Not that science-true, honest science, is not the handmaid of theology, and the telescope and microscope may not help the spiritual eye as truly as the natural; but the thoughts which a survey of the universe raises in a rightly-educated mind are religious, rather than philosophical. David's utterances, as he considered the heavens, the work of God's fingers, "the moon and the stars which He had ordained," sound more congenial to our ears, more accurately express our own best moods of mind, than the profound demonstrations or subtle analyses of Laplace or even of Newton. They are evidences of Divine Power, or rather of a Divine Personality, that we delight to find—not merely indications of a system or traces of a law.

Yet there is something in the Psalmist's heart that, as often as his mind was in danger of being lost in the immensities of space, or merely occupied with a barren admiration of the physical world, brings it back, by a strange and generally sudden revulsion of feeling, to dwell upon the mystery of its own being; to ponder the unfathomable marvels that encompass and penetrate the mechanism of man.

In each of the Psalms to which I have referred the transition is remarkable for its spontaneity and instinctiveness. It is so sudden as to make it hard to catch the train of thought, the association of ideas, with which the religious philosopher passes from the contemplation of the moon and stars which God has ordained, to the thought of the son of man whom He visits "and crowns with glory and worship." It is hard to trace the subtle thread of feeling by which the mind, one moment

gazing upward on the sun "coming forth as a bridegroom out of his chamber, and rejoicing as a giant to renew his course;" the next returning to muse upon that law of God, not which prescribes the course of the planets, or governs the music of the spheres, but "which converts the soul" and gives light to the eyes-a strain of feeling and thought which breaks forth into an ecstatic adoration of the strength of the Lord, not as his Creator, but as his Redeemer, with power to cleanse him from his secret faults and to keep him from the dominion of "presumptuous sins."

If we can analyse the state of mind which found its relief in the utterances of the nineteenth Psalm, we shall have gained the key to much that is dark and difficult not only in revelation, but in nature; and perhaps be able to understand why it was Redemption, rather than Creation, that filled the poet's mind with a sense of Divine majesty, strength, and power.

Let me approach the subject through a familiar, but apt, illustration. Paley, in the opening of his wellknown treatise on Natural Theology, adduces a watch as one of the most obvious instances of artistic contrivance and design. From the examination of its parts, and the observation of their mutual action and adjustment, we should at once, he says, infer power and skill in the maker. It were difficult to find a plainer proof of human ingenuity. Now dash that curious piece of mechanism to the ground; crush it under your foot into a hundred fragments. Where is the workman who can put together those broken springs and wheels? He could make it; but he cannot restore. He could

adjust the parts into harmonious action when each was entire; but their reconstruction now is beyond his power.

And is not man a shattered mechanism? Do not body, soul, and spirit bear marks of some deep-scathing influence having passed over them? Is not disease unnatural, and death a sort of rival of the Lord of Life? Are not the appetites sensualized, and the affections degraded, and the understanding darkened, and the will impaired, and the reason enfeebled, and the conscience shaken on her throne ? And will not man's lofty spirit, that should pierce the clouds, and gaze undaunted on the things that angels even have not seen, bow down to stocks and stones, and accept the most monstrous and revolting creeds, and worship fetishes, and prostrate itself before the wheels of Juggernaut, and, even in enlightened England and America, believe in Mormonism, and pretend, through the medium of table-rapping and the ridiculous rites of modern necromancy, to hold-what it feels it needs-an intercourse with the invisible world?

Now we have reached the problem. Can this wreck of what was once so fair and perfect be restored? Can the body triumph over sickness and over death? Can the soul recover its purity, the will its strength, the reason its clearness, the conscience its ascendency? Can the spirit break the bonds of superstition and fanaticism, and rise once more to heaven with a pure and holy worship, and assert its divine birth, and claim anew that privilege of approach to its Maker which it felt that it had forfeited when "Adam and Eve hid themselves

from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden"?

David felt that it could. His whole heart rested on the hope that restoration was possible, but possible only to Omnipotence: nay, in the words of the text, that Omnipotence Himself must "stir up His strength" if He would "come and help us." He cries, as out of the great deep, "O Lord, my strength and my Redeemer!" He who had not merely philosophised on the nature of man, who had not merely drawn cold, scientific conclusions from the pathology of disease, whether of the body or mind, but who had felt in the depths of his moral nature the dominion of sin-" the mystery of iniquity -had found all past watchfulness, the self-formed habits of years, the discipline of a life of trial, utterly unable, alone and by themselves, to stand him in stead in the hour of overmastering temptation. He who has presented to scoffers of every age the sad and perplexing spectacle of a "man after God's own heart," given over, apparently without compunction, to a deadly sin; bound hand and foot by Satan; steeped in a lust which for a time dried the fount of feeling and drowned the reproaches of cor science; he, by an experimental sense, knew what a mighty strength that must be which should redeem one so loved, and yet so fallen!

The greatest of all helps to realise the magnitude of the work of Redemption is the experimental sense, the inwrought consciousness, of "the exceeding sinfulness of sin." It was when St. Paul had felt the powerlessness of his own unassisted moral nature, witnessing though it did to the authority of the Divine law, to