THIS little “Psalm of Degrees,” or “of Ascents,” is one of the sweetest and tenderest utterances of faith in the whole Old Testament. From the first of its few words to the last it is the voice of the child of God, deep at rest in the Father’s mother-like arms, and only looking outward to say to others, to Israel, just at the end, “hope in the Lord.” As if the thought were, “Here am I, in the place of peace; it is a good place; the peace that passeth understanding; dear brethren, dear fellow-pilgrim, you cannot too simply, nor too long, trust the Giver of that peace.”
Let us look a little closer at this happy witness to the deep and blissful content to be found within the mighty Hands of God. This possessor of repose indicates to us, in a very instructive way, certain conditions of that repose, which have suggestions of their own for us, full of heart-searching, and of love. We observe at once an allusion to a state which, has preceded the present sacred happiness; “I have stilled and quieted my soul.” So the soul, with its consciousness, its emotions, its depths and currents of feeling, had needed stilling and quieting. It had been in agitation. A storm had swept it, with a tumult, with strong crying. The present calm had come on by way of a contrast; in some wonderful way, the unrest had heard a voice saying, “Peace be still,” and had obeyed. The quiet was heightened by the reminiscence of distress.
Still further, we find an indication of the kind of disturbance which had come—and gone. This is given us in that exquisitely tender simile, “like a weaned child.” The trouble of the weaned child is the trouble of a deprivation; the loss, the unexplained loss, for it is too young to understand explanations, of the sacred sustenance of its new-born life. It is the pain and grief of having to do without. And the stillness and the quiet, the silent rest, “the low beginnings of content,” are the results and symptoms of learning to do without.
Here is a simple but very fruitful lesson for thee and me, Christian reader. Very various are life’s troubles; but a large class under that large variety comes to just this the troubles occasioned by “having to do without.” They meet us everywhere. They range from the brightest, the smallest, to the deepest and most dark. Quite possibly your example of the species just now may be a thing in itself very small. It may be the call to do without some innocent pleasure of the hour, an eagerly expected but frustrated holiday, or interview, or visit, or the like. It may be some looked-for letter which the postman will not bring. It may be the schoolboy’s, or schoolgirl’s, missing of the prize; a pain to parents as well as child.
But then it may be something very much graver in kind and in results. Perhaps you have to “do without” health. Some mischief of our mortality has touched you, and you cannot get well. The spring and buoyancy of life are gone, and there has come to you, perhaps, in the place of them, the presence of a stern incessant pain, or what some sufferers know to be even worse, an incessant exhaustion, a chronic inward failure. It seems but yesterday that your step was strong, and your spirits young; today you have, for the season at least, to “do without.”
Perhaps you have to “do without” scenes and surroundings so dear that they seemed to be part of your heart. Your old landscape is in sight no more. If you went now to the familiar and beloved door, you would have to ring the bell.
“Children, not thine, have trod my nursery floor,” says the orphan poet to “his Mother’s Picture”; realizing afresh what it is to have to do without the dear scenes which cradled life in their love and beauty.
Aye, and for William Cowper, it was not the nursery, after all, but the mother that it was so hard to have to “do without.” His immortal elegy over that precious portrait does but put into perfect words the unutterable sighs of numberless hearts which have tasted deep bereavement. You know all about it, you, dear orphan child, and you, childless parent, and you, widowed wife, or husband in your desolation, and you, O friend, to whom the world can never be the same since you have had to “do without” that “half of your soul in the other body,” Already upon you all has come the skirt of the great shadow, or rather, perhaps, the heaviest folds of it are wrapt about your heads. You are called to a sore and heavy experience of this mysterious “weaning,” this “having to do without.”
Beloved friends; experienced in loss, may I point you, with a sort of silence (for print is very quiet), to the loss-stricken Psalmist’s testimony? Do we not gather that he had just been called to some mysterious trial, akin to yours, and was just learning to be quiet about it, not to “exercise himself in great matters,” seeking to look behind the holy Will of God, and to understand it all before the time? He was just getting a glimpse of the secret blessedness to be found, under certain divine conditions, in “learning to do without.” He was tasting a strange sweetness in the cup of grief. Palling back quite simply on a Father’s love in the unexplained sorrow, he found himself, he knew not how, getting to rest; not to sleep, but to rest; a rest out of which he could say to others, like one who had a right to say it, “O Israel, hope in the, Lord.”
One little touch of suggestion tells us where the secret of the blessed change was to be found. He compares his soul to a child weaned, not from but “WITH his mother.” The loss is there. The joy is taken away, and he must do without it. But the parent is there, more profoundly, more fondly loving than ever. And that is a guarantee that ultimate happiness lies deep within the sorrow; nay, it has begun already, in the simple consciousness of the beloved presence. And even so it is with the “weaned” mourners and their God, “As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you” (Isa. 66:1313As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you; and ye shall be comforted in Jerusalem. (Isaiah 66:13)). — By the late Dr. Moule, Bishop of Durham.