Expositions of Holy Scripture: PsalmsMaclaren, Alexander
Religion
Expositions of Holy Scripture: Psalms
Maclaren, Alexander
Bible. Psalms -- Commentaries
Yes! if we have said all, when we have said that men pass as a fleeting
shadow--if my life has no roots in the Eternal, nor any consciousness of
a life that does not pass, and a light that never perishes, if it is
derived from, directed to, 'cribbed, cabined, and confined' within this
visible diurnal sphere, then it is all flat and unprofitable, an
illusion while it seems to last, and all its pursuits are folly, its
hopes dreams, its substances vapours, its years a lie. For, if life be
thus short, I who live it am conscious of, and possess whether I be
conscious of them or no, capacities and requirements which, though they
were to be annihilated to-morrow, could be satisfied while they lasted
by nothing short of the absolute ideal, the all-perfect, the
infinite--or, to put away abstractions, 'My soul thirsteth for God, the
living God!' 'He hath put eternity in their heart,' as the book of
Ecclesiastes says. Longings and aspirations, weaknesses and woes, the
limits of creature helps and loves, the disproportion between us and the
objects around us--all these facts of familiar experience do witness,
alike by blank misgivings and by bright hopes, by many disappointments
and by indestructible expectations surviving them all, that nothing
which has a date, a beginning, or an end, can fill our souls or give us
rest. Can you fill up the swamps of the Mississippi with any cartloads
of faggots you can fling in? Can you fill your souls with anything which
belongs to this fleeting life? Has a flying shadow an appreciable
thickness, or will a million of them pressed together occupy a space in
your empty, hungry heart?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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