II.

THE VALLEY OF BACA.

"Who passing through the valley of Baca make it a well; the rain also filleth the pools."-PSALMS lxxxiv. 6.

THE prayer-book version of these words, you will remember, is a little different: "Who going through the vale of misery use it for a well; and the pools are filled with water." Let us try to keep both versions in mind while we are speaking of it.

The verse gathers its beauty from the circumstances of the Psalm. It is drawn out of the richness of that picture-land of Palestine. The more we read the Psalms, and indeed all the Bible, we are impressed with the remarkable value which belongs to the Holy Land as representing in a continual map or picture not merely the localities of certain historical events, but also by a higher association the geography of the spiritual life of man and the relations of spiritual truths to one another. The sacred names have passed from being merely the titles of hills and rivers and cities, and belong to principles and moral verities. In the world's great heart there will forever be a holy land besides that to which pilgrims travel halfway round the globe. Though the historic land which lies between the Mediterranean sea and the Asiatic deserts should be blotted from the surface of

the earth to-morrow; though some strange miracle should roll the whole rough surface of the country smooth, and mix in indistinguishable confusion hill and valley, upland and river-bed, still there would be eternally a holy land. Still all over the world, whereever sacred associations had transfigured the old names, the Jordan would roll down its rocky bed to the Dead sea; still the hills would stand about Jerusalem; still the desert would open between Judea and Galilee; still Egypt must mean captivity, and the Red sea deliverance, and Gilgal providence, and Bethany domestic piety, and Calvary redeeming love, although the visible places to which those names belong should cease to be forever. We little know how much we owe to this eternal picture drawn in the hearts of men, this mapped-out Palestine of the inner life.

Our text is one of the passages which have contributed to draw this picture. "Who passing through the vale of Baca use it for a well." Students have not been able to identify and locate the valley Baca, but it evidently refers either generally or specially to those difficult ravines which the people had to cross in coming up to Jerusalem to the feasts. The Psalm was probably written by David at some time when he was kept in exile and could not go up to Jerusalem. It is the yearning of a loving and devoted heart for the privilege of worship. "O how amiable are thy dwellings, thou Lord of hosts. My soul hath a desire and longing to enter into the courts of the Lord; my heart and my flesh rejoice in the living God. Yea, the sparrow

hath found her an house and the swallow a nest where she may lay her young, even thy altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God." Then mounting up to the height of his sorrow (that height from which so often the best and widest visions come to men) a vision comes to him. He sees the multitude, whom he may not join, going up to worship. He watches their winding line from hill to hill as they draw nearer to Jerusalem. "Blessed is the man in whose heart are thy ways, who going through the vale of misery use it for a well; and the pools are filled with water. They will go from strength to strength," he cries, exulting in their progress, "and unto the God of gods appeareth every one of them in Zion." Then he falls back upon his own need, "O Lord God of hosts, hear my prayer, hearken, O God of Jacob. I had rather be a door-keeper in the house of my God than to dwell in the tents of ungodliness."

The lesson of the vale of Baca, the vale of misery, evidently is, the turning of sorrow into joy. Let us try to read the parable and understand it. Notice, then, it is the turning of sorrow into joy; the turning into, not merely the supplanting, the succeeding of sorrow by joy. There are two theories about this thing: One we may call the theory of compensation, the other the theory of transformation. The compensation theory is the commonest, the one most easily and so most generally understood. Even Christians are found continually confusing it with and so substituting it for the higher and better truth. Its idea is that the world is full of

evil and discomfort, and that discomfort is to be borne only by the assurance that it is not universal or perpetual, that it is varied and mixed up with pleasure, and that if we can only set our lips tight and walk on over the sorrow we must come to the happiness by and by. We are told that if it storms to-day the sun will be out to-morrow; if this week's speculation fails, the market is still open and to-morrow's investment or the next day's or the next day's may succeed; if our country is down in the depths of trial, another somewhere else is sunning itself on the summit of success. There is this poise and balance and make-up all through life. This is a favorite doctrine of our philosophy. I do not find it anywhere more strikingly stated than in these words of Emerson: "Polarity, or action and reaction," he declares, "we meet in every part of nature, in darkness and light; in heat and cold; in the ebb and flow of waters; in male and female; in the inspiration and expiration of plants and animals; in the systole and diastole of the heart; in the undulations of fluids and of sound; in the centrifugal and centripetal gravity; in electricity, galvanism, and chemical affinity. If the south attracts, the north repels. To empty here you must condense there. An inevitable dualism bisects nature so that each thing is a half, and suggests another thing to make it whole; as, spirit, matter; man, woman; odd, even; subjective, objective; in, out; upper, under; motion, rest; yea, nay." This endless up and down is the law which this philosophy assumes to be the great consoler.

And far-sighted faith, hunted and tried by suffer

ing, carries this philosophy out far beyond the limits of this world. To how many Christians Heaven and the eternal happiness present themselves under the guise of this compensation theory. This world is the great down. The next world is to be the great up which is to make it good. The bad prosper here, the good prosper there. The Christian suffers now to be rewarded then. This world is miserable, we must wait for our happiness, and struggle on with tight lips and torn feet to find it in the next. The deeper the misery, the more complete the future joy. It would be easy to point out passages in Scripture which seem to confirm this doctrine; passages in which the superior bliss of the perfect life casts the miniature experiences of this state of being into a darkened shade; but he who accepts it as the general rule of existence has to do it against the general tone of the Bible and the general verdict of experience, both of which declare the possibility of happiness this side of the grave. It is the idea under whose strange tyranny some very earnest and conscientious souls have been made morbidly miserable because, forsooth, they could not help being happy. This would be the idea under which the pilgrim through the vale of Baca would not turn it into a well, but only be kept up through it by far-off visions of the waters of salvation which, when he got to Jerusalem, he should find flowing out of the mount of God. It would make earth not a foretaste, an earnest, but only a discipline of Heaven. Whatever truth there may be in it, it evidently is not the whole or the best truth. Such a faith, with all honor to its exaltedness and