How marvellous is the vehemence of David’s utterances when we consider the dimness with which God revealed Himself in the time of twilight before the coming of Christ! He was not altogether the hidden God. Throughout His dealings with His people we are struck by the mingling of light and darkness, distance and nearness, terrific chastisement and the tenderest blandishments of love. There was wonderful condescension and approach in the tabernacle of the wilderness, in the revelations to the prophets, in the interventions of mercy that times without number succoured the stiff-necked people. There are words of love in the Old Testament unsurpassed perhaps in tenderness by any in the New. Yet when His presence is nearest, when His reproaches are most touching, His words most endearing, we are conscious of the measureless difference between God’s manifestation in the past and the intimacy and familiarity brought into our relations with Him by the Incarnation. We who live in the full illumination of that day which kings and prophets desired to see, cannot but feel how little earth’s most enlightened men knew the God Who made them, before “the Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us”. Yet so powerfully were they drawn to Him, that their words are the fittest exponents of every human heart when by desire, praise, affection, thanksgiving, it leaps up to God. They give expression to our every need. But, alas! they give too much matter also for self-reproach. “_My eyes are always towards the Lord_,” said David. God revealed Himself with special intimacy to the man according to His own Heart, that spoke in his own person of the sufferings and the glories of Him Who was to delight in the name of the Son of David. Yet after all what did David know of the Lord compared with the knowledge vouchsafed to the least enlightened of the Church’s children! He had the memory of past mercies to the “seed of Abraham His servant, the sons of Jacob His chosen”.[122] He had the shadowy presence of God in the Ark of the Covenant. And he had the dim foreknowledge of One to come, of the root of Jesse, “beautiful above the sons of men,”[123] yet “a worm, and no man, the reproach of men, and the outcast of the people,”[124] of “a Holy One Who should not see corruption,”[125] but “sit on the right hand of God till all His enemies be made His footstool”.[126] This was all. But it was enough to keep the eyes of David fixed on God: “_My eyes are always towards the Lord_.”