THE SHORT COURSE SERIES

Edited by Rev. John Adams, B.D.

A Mirror of the Soul

Short Studies in the Psalter

By Rev. John Vaughan, M.A.

Chapter 4 THE FACE OF NATURE

1. THE DIVINE IN NATURE.

A MOST attractive aspect of the Psalter, and one that appeals strongly to many minds, is the deep appreciation of nature that runs throughout it. The great Humboldt declared that the Psalms " afford unquestion able evidence of a profound sensibility to Nature." It may be admitted that the Psalmist loves nature, not so much for its own sake, as because it contained for him a revelation of God. His view of nature is distinctly religious. That personification of nature, so familiar to us, was unknown to him. He knew, as Professor James Robert son well puts it,1 " no Nature with a capital letter. He could not think of the visible universe and the phenomena of the world apart from the direct guidance of the divine hand; he saw no beauty that was not the manifestation of the divine glory." The " glamour of the earth " appealed to him, not by its own inherent inspiration, but because it spoke to him of God's power and glory. "The Hebrew odes are never merely descriptive," says Bishop Perowne.2 "There are pictures in them of extreme beauty and vividness, but the picture is never painted for its own sake. Nature is never regarded, whether in her aspect of terror or of peace, whether in her tumult or her repose, as an end in herself. The sense of God's presence is that which gives its glory and its meaning to the natural world." The position of the Psalmist is that of Keble in his familiar poem for Septuagesima Sunday —

"There is a Book, who runs may read,

     Which heavenly truth imparts,

And all the love its scholars need,

     Pure eyes and Christian hearts.

The works of God above, below,

      Within us and around,

Are pages in that Book to show

      How God Himself is found."

2. SOME NATURE-PSALMS.

Now while this beautiful appreciation of nature is noticeable throughout the Psalter as a whole — the wealth" of metaphors from natural phenomena is alone remarkable — certain psalms are in a special sense Nature-Psalms. They are found, not in any one division of the book only, but scattered throughout the collection. The chief Natureo Psalms are those numbered 8, 19, 29, 65, 104, and 148, in our Psalter. It will be well to glance briefly at these separately.

'Psalm viii. — The Glory of the Night.

This psalm, as Fuller calls it, is "A Nocturnal," and when, he says, " I cannot sleep, may I with this Psalmist entertain my waking with good thoughts." It is "a night-piece," and as Bishop Alexander says,3 " the world has never let it die. Those who look at the original, in a language where almost every substantive is a picture, will find ample poetical treasure to reward their search." It is clearly of the sky at night that the poet is thinking —

"When I consider thy heavens, even the works of thy fingers:

The moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained."

He does not mention the sun. And the deep blue vault of heaven, "fretted with golden fire," in the clear transparency of an Eastern night, is indeed suggestive of the illimitable majesty and mystery of the universe. In comparison with that unutterable glory, "What is man — man born of a woman, man in his frailty, his weakness, his insignificance? " The poet on the downs of Bethlehem might well feel overwhelmed at the reflection. But a truer estimate of man's position immediately follows—

"Thou hast made him but a little lower than the angels :

To crown him with glory and honour."

"A thousand years later," as Dr. Perowne4 beautifully remarks, " other shepherds were keeping watch over their flocks by night, on the same hills at Bethlehem, while the same stars looked down upon them from heaven. But a brighter glory than the glory of the stars shone round about them; and they knew better than David himself the meaning of David's words, 'What is man? ' For to them it was said by the angel, " Unto you is born this day in the city, of David a Saviour which is Christ the Lord." In the light of that revelation, we can say with a confidence denied to the Hebrew poet that —

" Heaven lies about us in our infancy,"

that,

"Trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God who is our home."

Psalm xix. — The Heavens above.

This psalm, as we have it, consists of two distinct parts, in which are celebrated respectively the revelation of God in Nature, and the revelation of God in His Word. Kant said that there were two things which filled his soul with awe — the starry heavens above and the moral law within. With Dr. Arnold5 of Rugby, this psalm was a favourite, and Ruskin regarded it as one of those " parts of the Bible we are intended to make specially our own." "This Psalmist," writes Dr. Maclaren of Manchester in his illuminating commentary, " knew nothing about solar spectra or stellar distances, but he heard a voice from out of the else waste heavens which sounded to him as if it named God. . . . Dull ears do not hear these voices. . . . Carlyle said that the sky was 'a sad sicht.' The sadness and awfulness are taken away when we hear the heavens telling the glory of God. The unscientific Psalmist who did hear them was nearer the very heart of the mystery than the scientist who knows everything else about them but that."6 In this connection the last verse of Addison's noble paraphrase may be quoted—

"What though in solemn silence all

Move round the dark terrestrial ball?

What though no real voice or sound,

Amidst their radiant orbs be found?

In Reason's ear they all rejoice,

And utter forth a glorious voice;

For ever singing, as they shine,

'The hand that made us is divine.' "

Psalm 29. — The Thunder-Storm.

This psalm is a magnificent description of a thunder-storm.7 The thunder was to the Hebrew poet " the voice of God," and the phrase, seven times repeated, represents, as it were, successive peals of thunder. But the fury of the storm is to him full of magnificence and delight. Like Sir Walter Scott, in his childhood, — so Lockhart tells us and Dean Stanley8 calls the passage to remembrance — " at each flash of lightning, he looked up from the heather, and clapped his hands, and cried ' Bonnie! bonnie! ' " so, at each successive peal, does the Psalmist clap his hands in innocent pleasure. It is a revelation to him of the glory and majesty of Jehovah, "whose chariot-wheels roll in the thunder, and whose darts are the lightning." The striking poem is rendered the more beautiful by the contrast at the close. It began, as Delitzsch finely says, with Gloria in excelsis, it ends with Pax in terris. " The Lord will give his people the blessing of peace."

Psalm 65. — A Harvest Psalm.

This psalm was clearly written with reference to some particular season when the harvest had been unusually plentiful.

" Thou hast visited the earth, and made it to overflow; thou greatly enrichest it."

The Psalmist's use of the term " visited " in connection with God is worth noticing. It is not employed, as usually among our selves when we speak of a "visitation of God," in a bad, but in a beneficent sense. We speak of plague, pestilence, and famine as " visitations " of God. If a person is struck dead by lightning he is said to have died by a visitation of God. The inspired Psalmist, on the other hand, attributes the exceptional richness of a magnificent harvest to the visitation of God. He holds with the author of the Book of Ruth that " God has visited his people in giving them bread " (i. 6). That is the Psalmist conception of divine visitation.

" Thou hast crowned the year with thy goodness;

And thy paths drop fatness."

Nature herself joins in the prevailing gladness. The little hills rejoice on every side. The poet Wordsworth speaks of the hootings of the wood-owls at evening when the earliest stars began to move along the edges of the hills —

"They would shout

Across the watery vale, and shout again,

. . . With quivering peals,

And loud halloos, and screams and echoes loud,

Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild

Of mirth and jocund din! "

In the concluding verse of this psalm the Hebrew poet represents the pastures and valleys as shouting one to another in their gladness. " Nothing," as Dr. Perowne says, "can be more beautiful, or more truly poetical, than the figure by which the valleys waving with corn are said themselves to shout and sing."

Psalm 104. — The Great Hymn of Creation.

Of all the Nature-psalms the 104th stands supreme. Great writers have vied with one another in praising this masterpiece of Hebrew poetry. The naturalist, A. von Humboldt, writes : " A single psalm, the 104th, may be said to present a picture of the entire Cosmos. . . . We are astonished to see, within the compass of a poem of such small dimension, the universe, the heavens and the earth, thus drawn with a few grand strokes." "With what an eye for gladness," says Herder,9 " does the poet survey the earth! It is a green mountain of Jehovah, which He lifted above the waters; a paradise which He established for the dwelling-place of so many living creatures above the seas. The series of pictures which the poet here displays is in fact the natural history of the earth." Bacon rendered it into verse, and so did Henry Vaughan the Silurian poet. The author has been well called " the Words worth of the ancients, penetrated with a love for nature, and gifted with the insight that springs from love."10 But he loves nature, because it speaks to him of God. He begins and ends his poem with the words, " Praise then the Lord, O my soul."

The general arrangement of the psalm is no doubt suggested by the story of its creation in Genesis; but the treatment of the subject presents one conspicuous difference. " The creation of Genesis is a creation of the past; the creation of the psalm is a creation of the present." The Creator is ever working. The world is not a machine wound up at creation once and for all, and then started to go of itself. It is not " a dead universe ungoverned by an absent God." The Lord God Omnipotent reigneth.

"Thou sendest forth thy breath, they are created;

And thou renewest the face of the ground."

The psalm deeply appealed to Charles Kingsley, who preached a large number of sermons upon it. The great botanist Bauhinus chose a verse of it — "O Lord, how manifold are thy works; in wisdom hast thou made them all; the earth is full of thy riches " — as the motto of his monumental work Historia Plantarum. The last stanzas of Henry Vaughan may be quoted —

"Therefore as long as Thou wilt give me health

     I will in songs to Thy great name employ

That gift of Thine, and to my day of death

     Thou shalt be all my joy.

I'll spice my thoughts with Thee, and from Thy Word

     Gather true comforts; but the wicked liver

Shall be consum'd. O my soul, bless Thy Lord!

     Yea, bless thou Him for ever."

Psalm 148. — An Anthem.

In this grand liturgical psalm the author calls upon all creation, animate and inanimate, to praise the Lord. On it is based the 'Benedicite or " Song of the Three Children," which, as Kingsley says, in his Preface to Westminster Sermons,11 - "is the flower and crown of the Old Testament, the summing up of all that is most true and eternal in the old Jewish faith, and which . . . is the charter and tide-deed of all Christian students of those works of the Lord, which it calls on to bless Him, praise Him, and magnify Him for ever." In after ages it doubtless inspired St. Francis of Assisi in composing his beautiful " Song of the Creatures "; and it was beyond question in the mind of Cardinal Newman when he wrote —

"Praise to the Holiest in the height,

And in the depth be praise;

In all His works most wonderful;

Most sure in all His ways."

It is difficult to believe that the poet who wrote Psalm 148, or indeed any of the Nature-psalms, could have possibly held the mediaeval notion that the earth was cursed on account of man's sin. To him and to all the Psalmists, the earth is a grand and noble place, " the work of God's hand, the likeness of God's countenance, the shadow of God's glory."

3. THE CHRISTIAN APPLICATION.

Such is the sympathy with nature which is so striking a feature of the Book of Psalms. It finds a parallel in the New Testament in the teaching of our blessed Lord. Did He not, exclaims one, consecrate anew the wonders and beauties of the world? "Nothing," as Dr. Geikie said, "escaped the eye of Jesus."12 The poor, despised sparrows, the raven and her callow brood, the scarlet anemones of the hills, the reed shaking in the wind, the sobbing of the night wind, the sky flushed crimson on early dawn, the dogs so common in Eastern cities, the foxes and their holes on the hillside — all are noticed with evident appreciation. In all literature there is nothing more exquisitely beautiful than the passage in which Christ illustrated the love of God by pointing to the flowers and the birds.

And it is interesting to notice that of all the writings of the New Testament the one which shows the deepest appreciation of nature is the little treatise we call the Epistle of St. James, the author of which is usually identified with the Lord's brother. And it can hardly be doubted that the love of nature which breathes throughout it was learned and cherished in the village home of Nazareth in company with Him of whom it was afterwards said that " the winds and the sea obey him."13

It cannot be said that this appreciation of nature, which is so striking a feature in the Hebrew Psalter, has been conspicuous in the teaching of the Christian Church. The antagonism of religion to science, from the days of Galileo to those of Darwin, is a melancholy chapter in her history. And yet many of Christ's best and truest servants have been deeply in sympathy with nature. Did not St. Anthony say, "My Bible is the green book of created things "? Think of St. Cuthbert among the wild-fowl in the Isle of Fame; and of St. Guthlac in the fens of Lincolnshire. Did not St. Francis of Assisi, the most lovable of all of the saints, call all living creatures his brothers and sisters? Or read the Table-Talk of Martin Luther, and see how he loved the birds and flowers, for " these too," he used to say, " are God's Bibles." The Catholic St. Francis and the Protestant Luther would alike have endorsed the teaching of the Anglican poet —

"He prayeth well, who loveth well,

Both man, and bird, and beast;

He prayeth best, who loveth best,

All things both great and small,

For the dear Lord who loveth us,

He made and loveth all."

A deeper recognition of this aspect of the Psalter will enlarge our outlook on the world, and will add dignity and cheerfulness to life. With the Hebrew poets we shall see God in everything and everything in God. We shall learn to associate all the beauty and wonder of creation with God. With the gentle and heavenly-minded Silurist, we shall feel that

" Every tree, herb, flower

Are shadows of His wisdom and His power."

With Mungo Park in the desert the humblest form of vegetation will speak of God's providence and care. We shall recognize with Charles Kingsley that "beauty is God's handwriting, God's image," that "it is a wayside sacrament, a cup of blessing," and so " welcome it in every fair landscape, and every fair flower, and drink it in with all our eyes, and thank Christ for it, who is Himself the well-spring of all beauty, who giveth all things richly to enjoy."14 With Robert Browning we shall say —