VII.

THE SANCTUARY OF GOD.

"Then thought I to understand this, but it was too hard for me; Until I went into the Sanctuary of God; then understood I the end of these men."- PSALMS lxxiii. 16, 17.

THIS is called one of the psalms of Asaph. About Asaph nobody knows very much: only that he was a friend of David, the master of his music, and evidently, from his writings, a man of very beautiful religious and poetic spirit. If we can distinguish between his psalms and those of his mightier friend, we should say that Asaph's were more calm and even and tranquil, more pensive and placid, with less of triumphant exultation or of profound depression than David's.

But in this psalm Asaph is sorely perplexed and troubled. How old the bewilderments of the world are! I think it makes our own difficulties harder and easier at once to bear when we think how many longforgotten souls have struggled in them too in the years that are past. Here almost three thousand years ago is a poor man who can make nothing out of the same fact, precisely, which has kept thousands of people wondering and questioning this last week. You recognize it the moment that you open the psalm. "I was envious at the foolish," he says, "when I saw the prosperity of the wicked." The prosperity of the

wicked! that critical puzzle of all times, the apparent absence of justice in this life of ours. "They are not in trouble like other folk, neither are they plagued like other men." And they say, "How doth God know, and is there knowledge in the Most High? Behold, these are the ungodly; these prosper in the world; they increase in riches. Verily, I have cleansed my heart in vain and washed my hands in innocency." That is the puzzle; as old as Asaph, as young as some struggling child of God who knows that his uprightness is keeping him poor and that his unscrupulous neighbor is growing rich by his side to-day.

And then comes Asaph's escape from the puzzle: "I thought to understand this," he says, "but it was too hard for me; until I went into the Sanctuary of God; then understood I the end of these men." The escape perhaps is not so familiar as the puzzle. He goes into the sanctuary of God, he goes to church, and there he finds a light that makes the dark things clear, and the cloud scatters, and he understands it all. At once we feel that we are talking with the Hebrew. Here is the man to whom the temple was the centre of everything. There, not merely in burning shekinah, but in the deep-felt spiritual sympathy, his God abode, and there with his deep, strong, trustful love, and fear for his God, he was used to go to find Him. It was different from the way we go to church. There was nothing hard, dull, or routinelike in it. We cannot read the Psalms without seeing what a spring and life and freshness, what a holy curiosity and eagerness and affection

there was in the hearts of the men who went up to the temple. "I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go up to the house of the Lord. Our feet shall stand in thy courts, O Jerusalem." Nobody can read the Old Testament without seeing something very beautiful and grand, almost awful. In the midst of all the pettiness and wickedness, the small intrigues and quarrels that show us the littleness of that wonderful Hebrew people, one sight never loses its sublimity. It is the yearly gathering of the people from every corner of the land to the sacred festival meeting at Jerusalem. The land swarms and hums with movement. The men of the seashore and the desert and the hills; they are all stirring. Judah among his peaceful hills, the wild Simeonites from their home in the desert, Zebulon and Issachar from the rich plain-country, Asher from his abode along the bays and creeks, the Reubenites and Gadites from beyond the Jordan, and the sons of Naphtali from the far north, about the very roots of Lebanon, they are all coming to appear before God. Every pass is full, every hill-side is alive. I think we cannot estimate the power in a nation's life of such a great annual symbolic pilgrimage. Every man brought his own burden, his own sorrow, his own sin. The problems of the year, the things that had perplexed them as they worked in the fields alone, or debated with their brethren, or met the troubles of the household — all these they brought to offer to the Lord, to seek solution for them in the higher, calmer atmosphere of the temple. There was the place

where their darkened and frightened understandings would find light and peace.

It is an old-time picture. We do not go to church so now. Indeed it is not well that we should, altogether. There is a certain amount of localizing and narrowing of the idea of Deity about it which is not good. But there is much in it which it is good to keep,-at any rate impossible to make light of or despise. It is the longing for some sacred and secluded place in this low beset world. Luther dreamed of it when as a young monk he went up to Rome as if he were going up to heaven. As you go through the old cities of Europe or the East to-day, you see the weary man or woman turn aside into the cool, deep door of the great cathedral to say a prayer, or the more abstracted Oriental drop his shoes from his feet and fall prostrate, with the crowd all around him, before the city shrine as if he were far off in the desert or on some lonely hill. I am sure we cannot help being glad for all the good it surely does them, for all the light they get, however dim, upon the hard questions of their lives. Woe to us if our more rational belief, instead of lifting all the earth up to heaven, only crowds down the hill-tops and leaves no heaven, and makes our whole earth earthly. It is sad indeed if our churches have no light to give to the problems that perplex our houses and our stores.

But having said thus much, I want to speak of the subject that these verses will suggest this morning, not in the ancient Hebrew, but in the modern Christian way. What made Asaph see clearer in the temple was that he met God there. We have been

taught that not alone in temples made with hands, but everywhere in this great world of God the devout and loving soul may meet with God. We have been taught to see already in the distance that world where there shall be no temple except the present God. "God Almighty and the Lamb the temple of it." Not only to the temple, then, but to the present God, everywhere and always; not only to the church, but to the divine presence by our side the problems of life may be carried. I want to speak of the new clearness that comes into many difficult questions, and especially into this question of the unequal lots of men when we survey them in connection with the thought of God. How does the bringing of life into God's presence make it intelligible?

There are, then, two persons I think to whom life seems pretty clear: the man who does not think or feel at all, and the man who thinks and feels very deeply. It is just like any complicated piece of machinery. The factory girl who sits at her loom and feeds it day by day learns just how the machine takes up the thread she offers it and seems to understand the whole. The engineer who has the plans of all the engineering, from the boiler out to the thinnest and subtlest steel finger that it moves; he, too, is troubled by no problems, but has grasped the working of the whole. Between the two come all the different degrees of intelligence and knowledge which see the mysteries more than the work-girl so as to be puzzled by them, but do not see them as much as the engineer so as to understand them. Just so it is with this world. The sluggish creature who just