d

b

great banker; the painter, whose genius has made the animal world so familiar to us, and whose name is a household word in many an English household; the young statesman of high promise, who died a fortnight since—a martyr, they say, to conscientious work-on a foreign soil. It would take long to complete the list; but we cannot, at least, forget to-day that, one short week ago, one of our brethren, who for forty-four years had led the service of God in the choir of this Cathedral Church, passed away from us; and if, as was natural, he represented the traditions of a past generation rather than the hopes of our own, we shall long remember him for his simplicity of character, for his fearless honesty, for his unaffected benevolence. Oh! how difficult is it to realize, and yet how certainly is it true, that they have really left us; that they are no more to this world and to its active interests than are those who belong to the earliest ages of man's history. Truly, we need not look far around us to see that "the grass withereth, the flower fadeth."

And in private life, how many, how great, how irreparable in some cases, are the losses! Here it is a parent; there a wife or a husband; in another case an only child; in another, some gentle and gifted friend, whose bright and unselfish life was the warmth and illumination of our own. Sometimes the blow has fallen suddenly; sometimes it has been foreseen for months or years; but as we think of a short year ago, when our home was still unvisited by the Angel of Death, when our heart was still unlacerated by the wound which has made it bleed so

Thomas Baring, Esq., M.P., died Nov. 18, 1873.

Sir Edwin Landseer died Oct. 1, 1873.

Mr. Henry Selfe Winterbotham, M.P., Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, died at Rome, Dec. 13, 1873.

d The Rev. James Lupton, M.A., Minor Canon of St. Paul's Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, died Dec. 21, 1873.

continuously-how vast is the difference! How great are those sorrows; great as revealers of the true conditions of existence, great as teachers of the highest truths! "The grass withereth, the flower fadeth;" but life would be unendurable were it otherwise. "The Word of our God shall stand for ever."

And, therefore, on a day like this, the question for all of us is, What is the object of my thoughts, hopes, affections, conduct? Is it this perishing life, which must so soon have vanished like a dream, and which is perpetually changing; or is it the unchanging, eternal Word, which liveth and abideth for ever? Let each ask himself, Am I groping after shadows which dissolve under my very touch, or am I grasping, or at least trying to grasp, the Alone Imperishable? Am I laying up for myself “ treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal; "a or am I laying up for myself, through the Atoning Blood and the Mighty Grace of the Redeemer, "treasures in Heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal"? That great question between the temporal and the Eternal, between the fascinations of this world and the solid claims of the next, between the grass which withers and the Word which endures, must be answered, and can only be answered by every man in the sanctuary of his own heart and conscience. But it is the question which ought to take precedence of any other on a day like this; a day which marks for every one of us the close of another stage in our brief journey across the fields of time towards the gate of the Eternal World.

a St. Matt. vi. 19.

↳

b Ib. 20.

SERMON XV.

THE LORD OUR REFUGE.

(SUNDAY AFTER CHRISTMAS.)

Ps. XC. I.

Lord, Thou hast been our Refuge from one generation to another.

THIS

HIS is, beyond doubt, the oldest Psalm in the Psalter; it is the work, not of David, but, as the inscription in the Bible Version tells us, of Moses, the great Lawgiver. The contents of the Psalm, closely examined, bear out the inscription; we have here the old language, and many of the peculiar phrases, of the Books of Moses, and especially of Deuteronomy. Moreover, the spirit of the Psalm recalls Moses, the man of God. The awe at God's greatness contrasted with man's insignificance; the deep insight into the meaning of God's chastisements; the pathetic, sorrowful sense of the shortness of man's average life; the passionate prayer for more light, more spiritual wisdom, while contemplating the work and ways of God; these are all what we might expect from Moses, as we know him in his own books. Especially like Moses is the union of melancholy and fervour which meets us here; the fervour of the intrepid servant of God tinged by the melancholy which followed on his great disappointments. Do we not hear the voice of

Israel's leader, at the close of the long and penal wanderings in the desert, in such words as these?—

"We consume away in Thy displeasure,

And are afraid at Thy wrathful indignation.
Thou hast set our misdeeds before Thee,

And our secret sins in the light of Thy countenance.
For when Thou art angry all our days are gone:

We bring our years to an end, as a tale that is told.” a

с

Is it not Moses who, almost within sight of Canaan, prays, "Comfort us again after the time that Thou hast plagued us, and for the years wherein we have suffered adversity;" and then, in view of the Divine sentence of exclusion from the promised land, checks himself—" Show Thy servants Thy work, and their children Thy glory "? And are not the opening words of the Psalm, which are before us in the text, such as we might expect from this mighty soul, turning away from the checkered scenes of a career full of triumph and of failure; turning resolutely towards the One Eternal Being, before Whom all earthly things are poor and insignificant: "Lord, Thou hast been our Refuge from one generation to another. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever the earth and the world were made, Thou art God from everlasting, and world without end ”? a

Moses is not thinking of himself alone; he associates with himself all true servants of God around him. “Lord, Thou hast been our Refuge." He is not, for the moment, within the frontiers of Israel. God had been served in ages when Israel as yet was not. Upon all the earliest fathers of the human race, whose names had or had not been preserved in the Sacred Books as servants of the Most High; upon all the lonely, hard, heroic lives which had been lived in those earliest days, true to the faint

a Ps. xc. 7-9.

b lb. 15.

c lb. 16.

d Ib. I, 2. Q

light of the earliest revelation;-upon these, too, the Lawgiver's thought is resting. Associated with these, not less than with the Israel of his own day, he places himself in the Presence of the All-merciful. The Lord had been the Refuge of these ancient souls from one generation to another. Moses is the representative and spokesman of all that is good and great in the past annals of mankind; he is speaking for the living; he is also speaking for the dead. And his words do not die with himself. One after another the generations take them up, first in Israel, and then in Christendom. As the centuries pass, the chorus which repeats them is ever becoming more numerous and varied; the spiritual experience which they attest is continually wider and deeper; they are repeated at this hour by more souls in earth and Heaven than ever before; by happy souls which have found in them the secret of strength and peace, whether in struggle or in victory: "Lord, Thou hast been our Refuge from one generation to another."

Many of us will chiefly remember this Psalm in connection with some of the most solemn moments of our lives. It is one of the two Psalms used in the Order for the Burial of the Dead. And of the two, we may dare to say that it pierces more completely to the inmost springs of feeling; it unveils more of the meaning and awfulness of life and death. Those moments, sooner or later, await us all when we are committing to the dust the form which we have known and loved best on earth, and when the trivialities, which, during so large a part of our existence, shroud from us the seriousness of life, have fallen away, and we are standing face to face with life's real conditions. At such moments the words may have a meaning unperceived before: "Lord, Thou hast been our Refuge from one generation to another."