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