For ourselves it is perhaps most useful to fasten upon the poet’s description of his own position in the midst of the years, and like him to take heart, amid our very similar circumstances, from the glorious story of God’s ancient revelation, in the faith that He is still the same in might and in purpose of grace to His people. We, too, live among the nameless years. We feel them about us, undistinguished by the manifest workings of God, slow and petty, or, at the most, full of inarticulate turmoil. At this very moment we suffer from the frustration of a great cause, on which believing men had set their hearts as God’s cause; Christendom has received from the infidel no greater reverse since the days of the Crusades. Or, lifting our eyes to a larger horizon, we are tempted to see about us a wide, flat waste of years. It is nearly nineteen centuries since the great revelation of God in Christ, the redemption of mankind, and all the wonders of the Early Church. We are far, far away from that, and unstirred by the expectation of any crisis in the near future. We stand _in the midst of the years_, equally distant from beginning and from end. It is the situation which Jesus Himself likened to the long double watch in the middle of the night—_if he come in the second watch or in the third watch_—against whose dulness He warned His disciples. How much need is there at such a time to recall, like this poet, what God has done—how often He has shaken the world and overturned the nations, for the sake of His people and the Divine causes they represent. _His ways are everlasting._ As He then worked, so He will work now for the same ends of redemption. Our prayer for _a revival of His work_ will be answered before it is spoken. It is probable that much of our sense of the staleness of the years comes from their prosperity. The dull feeling that time is mere routine is fastened upon our hearts by nothing more firmly than by the constant round of fruitful seasons—that fortification of comfort, that regularity of material supplies, which modern life assures to so many. Adversity would brace us to a new expectation of the near and strong action of our God. This is perhaps the meaning of the sudden mention of natural plagues in the seventeenth verse of our Psalm. Not in spite of the extremes of misfortune, but just because of them, should we exult in _the God of our salvation_; and realise that it is by discipline He makes His Church to feel that she is not marching over the dreary levels of nameless years, but _on our high places He makes us to march_.