sides--of wild beasts and birds--of grass and corn, and wine and
oil--of the sun and moon, night and day--the great sea, the ships,
and the fishes, and all the wonderful and nameless creatures which
people the waters--the very birds' nests in the high trees, and the
rabbits burrowing among the rocks,--nothing on the earth but this
psalm thinks it worth mentioning. And all this, which one would
expect to find only in a book of natural history, is in the Bible,
in one of the psalms, written to be sung in the temple at Jerusalem,
before the throne of the living God and His glory which used to be
seen in that temple,--inspired, as we all believe, by God's Spirit,--
God's own word, in short: that is worth thinking of. Surely the
man who wrote this must have thought very differently about this
world, with its fields and woods, and beasts and birds, from what we
think. Suppose, now, that we had been old Jews in the temple,
standing before the holy house, and that we believed, as the Jews
believed, that there was only one thin wall and one curtain of linen
between us and the glory of the living God, that unspeakable
brightness and majesty which no one could look at for fear of
instant death, except the high-priest in fear and trembling once a-
year--that inside that small holy house, He, God Almighty, appeared
visibly--God who made heaven and earth. Suppose we had been there
in the temple, and known all this, should we have liked to be
singing about beasts and birds, with God Himself close to us? We
should not have liked it--we should have been terrified, thinking
perhaps about our own sinfulness, perhaps about that wonderful
majesty which dwelt inside. We should have wished to say or sing
something spiritual, as we call it; at all events, something very
different from the 104th psalm about woods, and rivers, and dumb
beasts. We do not like the thought of such a thing: it seems
almost irreverent, almost impertinent to God to be talking of such