Otherwise this beautiful name, this name Shepherd, must remain to you the emptiest of metaphors: this Psalm only a fair song instead of the indestructible experience which both Name and Psalm become to him who gives himself to God. Men and women, who in this Christian land have grown up with this Psalm in your hearts, in all the great crises of life that are ahead shall this Psalm revisit us. In perplexity and doubt, in temptation and sorrow, and in death, like our mother's face shall this Psalm she put upon our lips come back to us. Woe to us then, if we have done nothing to help us to believe it! As when one lies sick in a foreign land, and music that is dear comes down the street and swells by him, and lifts his thoughts a little from himself, but passes over and melts into the distance, and he lies colder and more forsaken than before--so shall it be with us and this Psalm. But if we do give our hearts to God and His Will, if day by day of our strength we work and serve, live and suffer, with contented hearts--then I know what we shall say when the day of our darkness and loneliness comes down, whether it be of temptation, or of responsibility, or of death itself. In that day we shall lift our faces and say: _Yea, though I am walking in the Valley of the Shadow of Death I do fear no evil, for Thou art with me, and Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me_! III. But some one may turn round upon all this and say: 'It is simple, it is ideal, but the real man cannot reach it out of real life. For he is not the mere sheep, turned easily by a touch of the staff. He is a man: his life is no mere search for grass, it is a being searched; it is not a following, it is a flight. Not from the future do we shrink, even though death be there. The past is on our track, and hunts us down. We need more than guidance: we need grace.' This is probably what the Psalmist himself felt when he did not close with the fourth verse, otherwise so natural a climax. He knew that weariness and death are not the last enemies of man. He knew that the future is never the true man's only fear. He remembered the inexorableness of the past; he remembered that blood-guiltiness, which sheep never feel, is worse to men than death. As perchance one day he lifted his eyes from his sheep and saw a fugitive from the avenger of blood crossing the plain, while his sheep scattered right and left before this wild intruder into their quiet world,--so he felt his fair and gentle thoughts within him scattered by the visitation of his past; so he felt how rudely law breaks through our pious fancies, and must be dealt with before their peace can be secure; so he felt, as every true man has felt with him, that the religion, however bright and brave, which takes no account of sin, is the religion which has not a last nor a highest word for life.