SERMON XVI. THE CEDARS OF LEBANON.
Psalm civ. 16.
The trees of the Lord are full of sap; the cedars of Lebanon, which He hath planted.
Let me say a few words this afternoon about the noble 104th Psalm, which was read this afternoon, as it is now in many churches, and most wisely and rightly, as the Harvest Psalm. It is a fit psalm for a service in which we thank God for such harvest as He has thought best to send us, whether it be above or below the average. But it is also a fit psalm to be thought earnestly over just now, considering the turn which men’s minds are taking more and more in these times in which it has pleased God that we should live. For we have lost, all of us, unlearned as well as learned, the old superstitious notions about this world around us which our forefathers held for many hundred years. No rational person now believes that witches can blight crops or cattle, or that evil spirits cause storms. No one now believes that nymphs and fairies live in fountains or in trees; or that the spirits of the planets rule the fates of men. That
old belief is gone, for good and for evil, and it was good that it should go; for it was false: and falsehoods can do no good, but only harm, to any man, in body and in soul alike. It has died out quickly and strangely. Some say that modern science has destroyed it. I can hardly agree to that: for it has died out—and that almost since my own recollection and under my own eyes—in the minds of country people, who know nothing of science. I had rather say—as I presume the man who wrote the 104th Psalm would have said—The Lord has taken the belief out of men’s hearts and minds. And I cannot but hope that He has taken it away, and allows us to believe no more in demons and fairies ruling the world around us, in order that we may believe in Him, and nothing but Him, the true Ruler of the world; in Him of whom it is written, “Him shalt thou worship, and Him only shalt thou serve;” even God the Father, of whom are all things, and God the Son, by whom are all things, and God the Holy Spirit, who is the Lord and Giver of life, alike to sun and stars over our heads, and to the meanest weed and insect under our feet; the Lord and Giver of life alike to matter and spirit, soul and body, worm and man, and angel and archangel before the throne of God. I hope it is so. I trust it is so. For we never had more need than now to believe with all our hearts in the living God; to take into all our hearts the teaching of the 104th Psalm. For now that we have given up believing in superstitions, we are in danger of going to the other extreme, and believing in nothing at all which we cannot see with our eyes, and
handle with our hands. Now that we have given up believing in the fabled supernatural; in ghosts, fairies, demons, witches, and such-like: we are in danger of giving up believing in the true and eternal supernatural, which is the Holy Spirit of God, by whom the whole creation is kept alive and sound. We are in danger of falling into a low, stupid, brutish view of this wonderful world of God in which we live; in danger of thinking of nature—that is, of the things which we can see and handle—only as something of which we can make use—till we fall as low as that poor ruffian, of whom the poet says:
A primrose on the river’s brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more.
Lower, that is, than even our own children, whom God has at least taught to admire and love the primroses for their beauty—as something precious and divine, quite independent of their own emotions about them. Men in these days are but too likely to fall into the humour of those poor savages, of whom one who knows them well said to me once—bitterly but truly—that when a savage sees anything new, however wonderful or beautiful, he has but two thoughts about it; first—Will it hurt me? and next—Can I eat it? And from that truly brutish view of God’s world, we shall be delivered, I believe, only by taking in with our whole hearts the teaching of the 104th Psalm; which is indeed the teaching of all Holy Scripture throughout.
The Psalmist, in the passage which I have chosen, is
talking of the circulation of water on the earth; how wisely and well it is ordered; how the vapours rise off the sea, till the waters stand above the mountain-tops, to be brought down in thunder-storms—for in his country, as in many hot ones, thunder was generally needed, at the end of the dry season, to bring down the rain; how it forms springs in the highland, and flows down from thence in brooks and rivers, making the whole lowland green and fertile. Well—all very true, you may say. But that is simply a matter of science, or indeed of common observation and common sense. It is not a subject for a psalm or for a sermon.