Church of England -- Sermons; David, King of Israel; Sermons, English
little book of Psalms ascribed to the shepherd outlaw of the Judaean
hills. It is such utterances as these which have sent the sound of
his name into all lands, and his words throughout all the world.
Every form of human sorrow, doubt, struggle, error, sin; the nun
agonising in the cloister; the settler struggling for his life in
Transatlantic forests; the pauper shivering over the embers in his
hovel, and waiting for kind death; the man of business striving to
keep his honour pure amid the temptations of commerce; the prodigal
son starving in the far country, and recollecting the words which he
learnt long ago at his mother's knee; the peasant boy trudging a-
field in the chill dawn, and remembering that the Lord is his
shepherd, therefore he will not want--all shapes of humanity have
found, and will find to the end of time, a word said to their inmost
hearts, and more, a word said for those hearts to the living God of
heaven, by the vast humanity of David, the man after God's own
heart; the most thoroughly human figure, as it seems to me, which
had appeared upon the earth before the coming of that perfect Son of
man, who is over all, God blessed for ever. Amen.
It may be said, David's belief is no more than the common belief of
fanatics. They have in all ages fancied themselves under the
special protection of Deity, the object of special communications
from above.
Doubtless they have; and evil conclusions have they drawn therefrom,
in every age. But the existence of a counterfeit is no argument
against the existence of the reality; rather it is an argument for
the existence of the reality. In this case it is impossible to
conceive how the idea of communion with an unseen being ever entered
the human mind at all, unless it had been put there originally by
fact and experience. Man would never have even dreamed of a living
God, had not that living God been a reality, who did not leave the
creature to find his Creator, but stooped from heaven, at the very
beginning of our race, to find his creature.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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