A SHORT ESSAY ON THE 148TH PSALM.
BY REV. C.A. BARTOL.
Surrounded as we are with the art and handicraft of man—almost everything we see bearing the mark of his finger, the house and the street, the market and exchange, every instrument and utensil—it is well, occasionally, to look forth from this little world of custom and convenience we ourselves have constructed, into that which bears the impress of the Almighty's hand—is still as it was left from His forming strength, and brings us into immediate communion with His Infinite mind. Let us, at least, listen to the notes of David's lyre on the creative Majesty.
After an invocation to the heavenly host, the Psalmist calls first on the forms of inanimate and inorganic existence. These things, of which he enumerates a few, praise the power of God. The crags and headlands, jarred and worn by the billows they breast; the granite peaks, bald and grey, under light and tempest, with the silent host of rocky boulders, swept, we know not by what convulsions, from their native seat, stand up as the first rank in the choir of the Maker's worship; and infidelity and atheism are hushed and abashed by their lofty praise.
Organized, but still unconscious existence takes the next station in this universal chorus. The solemn grove lifting its green top into the heavens, beside that motionless army of ancient stones, adds a sweeter note than they can give to the great harmony. It is a note, speaking not alone of the Creator's power, but of His wisdom too. Here is life and growth. Here are adaptations and stages of progress. From the minutest germination, from the slenderest stem, from the smallest trembling leaf to the hugest trunks and the highest overshadowing branches, this vegetable organization, verdant, pale, crimson, in changeable colors, runs; stopping short only with Alpine summits or polar posts, swiftly and softly clothing again the rents and gashes in the ground made by the stroke of labor or the wheels of war—blooming into the golden and ruddy harvest on the stalk and the bough, even overpassing the salt shore, to line the dismal and unvisited caves of the deep with peculiar varieties of growth; and forth into our hands from the foaming brine delicate and strangely beautiful leaves and slight ramifications of matchless tints and proportions.
But the Psalmist summons a third order of beings to contribute its melodious share to this hallelujah; and that is the living and conscious, though irrational tribes. This sings not of power and wisdom alone, but more complex and rich in adoration, sings of goodness also. God has not made the world for a dead spectacle and mere picture for His own eye. How full and crowded with life, and happy life, His creation is! Go forth from inclosing city walls, and, in the summer noontide, stop in solitude and apparent silence and listen; and soon the sounds of this joyous life shall come to your ear: the chirp of the insects—the rustle of wings—the crackling of the leaves, as the blithesome airy creatures pass—the short, thick warble of the bird by your side, or its varied tune, clearer than viol or organ, from the thicket beyond—while, from time to time, the deep low of cattle reverberates from afar. Or if you are where the still and speechless creatures inhabit, open your eye to gaze and examine, and it shall be filled with the visible, as the ear with the vocal signs of living enjoyment. Walking at the edge of the ebbing tide, you tread on life at every step—shelly tribe on tribe of fish pressing together, while in the clear water, other tribes noiselessly swim and glide away. Every vital motion speaks of pleasure, whether in that restless current below, or in the air above, as the feathered songster passes, darting up and down his element, delight gushing from his throat at every buoyant spring—silence and sound, with double demonstration, declaring to the Creator's praise the great and limitless boon of life.
But there is one accent more, that of love, without which the hymn is not complete; and there is another human order of Being to speak that accent. Man includes in himself all the preceding orders of Being, with all the notes of their praise: the material clod, for is he not made of dust; the plant, for he has an outward growth and circulation—the animal, for he has instinct and feeling; while reason and conscience and spiritual affection he has peculiarly and alone; so that Power, Wisdom, Goodness and Love, all concentrated in him, complete the ground of his praise.
Yet, as we look out upon this mighty sum of things in the external universe, the level earth stretching off to some ascending ridge in the horizon's blue distance—the boundless deep spread afar, till, at the misty edge of vision it bends, in mingling threefold circles, to embrace the globe, the impenetrable below and the infinite above him, how slight and insignificant a creature he seems! like a fly that clings to the ceiling, or a mote that swims in the sunbeam, one of the mere mites of nature, easily lost by the way or a frail figure ready to be crushed by any stroke of the ponderous machinery mid which he moves. When he reflects on his condition—his brief date, his speedy doom—how inconsiderable his existence appears! Or when he regards himself as not a compound of matter merely, but as a living soul, how easy it seems, as his contemplation runs out absorbed into the wondrous glory of the world, for all the vital energy which is for a moment insulated in his frame, when his frame dissolves, to pass into the general substance from which it came, the thinking creature ending as it began! But a voice from heaven cries to him and says, "Because he hath set his love upon me, therefore will I deliver him. I will set him on high because he hath known my name; with long life will I satisfy him and show him my salvation."
This love of God makes the society of all human affection. "God made the country, and man made the town," is an oft quoted line; and not seldom it is implied that the open or thinly-peopled landscape is somehow a better and holier place for the soul than the thronged city. But let it not be forgotten that man himself is God's work and His highest work on earth. Would we sing our psalm now or hereafter with the sweetest relish, we must go forth from any little circle we may have drawn around us, of private ease and personal comfort, in friendly intercourse to hear the cry of the unfortunate, the sighing of the prisoner, the sob of the mourner, the groan of the sick, the appeal of the injured and oppressed. By our aid, consolation and succor, we must gather their voices into the chorus, before, with perfect satisfaction, we can mingle in it our own.
Upon a Sabbath day, I walked amid all those charms and fascinations, in which nature can bind us as in a spell. I passed through green aisles of woods, that were ever-shadowed and made fragrant with every various vegetable growth of this temperate northern clime; while the morning beam of the sun in heaven fell brightly aslant the leaves and branches; and the birds, that my lonely step startled from their perch or nest, flew from glen to glen, making with their song, save the murmur of the breeze in the boughs, the only sound I could hear. At length, the high-arched avenues of this immense forest-cathedral let me out upon the broad, open shore, where I saw and heard wave after wave break on the rocks, with shifting splendor and that mellow thundering music which so saddens while it delights. Solitude, verily, was stretched out asleep in the sun upon the length of sandy beach and beetling promontory; and I sat and gazed now over the boundless waters, now into the devouring abysses opened by the bending crests of the billows, and anon into the gloomy depths of the forest or the serene and measureless openings of the sky. What grandeur in every line transcendent! Yet what impenetrable mystery too, what menacing ruin to the small remnant of human life still spared from the generations in ages past, already swallowed up! Peering around in this pensive mood, in which the joy of being mixed with the uneasy doubt of its tenure, my eye fell at last on the spire of a little church, rising like a pencil of light to heaven, out of the fathomless waste. And there my soul alighted and found rest. Like some sea mark to the voyager, that slender shaft, reared by the social religion of the world, stood to tell me where in the universe I was; the common Christian consciousness reinforced my own, and dark queries and agitating uncertainties subsided from my spirit, as the deluge from the dove that Noah sent out to pluck the green branch of promise. From the illimitable reaches of the huge, but dimly responding creation around, the slight, frail temple for God's praise drew me to its welcome and peaceful embrace. As I approached it, the tolling of the bell struck on my ear in a touch of gladder tidings than I had received from all the melody of the great wind-harp of the trees, with all the soft accord of the tossing billows. Stroke after stroke, distinctly falling, seemed to bring to me the echoes of a million holy telegraphic towers all over the surface of the globe; and when I came to stand under the eaves of the small sanctuary, the measured turning, in the belfry, of the wheel, by revolutions such as I had seen long years ago in my childhood, filled my eyes with gracious tokens, that were not drawn from me by the sublime circling of the sun and moon, then moving east and west in their spheres. The final tone of praise in the great ascription to God is, in its fullness, supplied by a revelation greater than blessed the times of David. A new and sweeter string is strung upon the lyre his royal fingers so nobly swept, and the voice of thanksgiving is more highly raised for an "unspeakable gift." The kingdoms of nature are the chords on the harp we may sound to the Creator of all. There has been of late much discussion as to the place nature should hold among religious influences and appeals, some super-eminently exalting her, and others putting her in contrast and almost opposition with all spirit, beauty and truth. This is no place, nor has the present writer inclination, here, to take part in the grand debate, infinitely interesting as it is, on either side. He would only catch, or repeat and prolong the strain of an old and sacred ode—he would contribute a meditation. He would run the matchless ancient verse into a few particulars of fresh and modern illustration, content if he can make no melody of his own, to recall for some, perhaps not enough heeding it, the Hebrew music that has lingered so long on the ear of the world.