In Nature? Yes: for here too the goodness of God leadeth to repentance.
There is nothing which the fifth verse so readily brings to mind as the
grace of the Divine hospitality in nature. _Thou spreadest a table before
me in the presence of mine enemies_. How these words contrast the fever
and uncertain battle of our life with the calmness and surety of the
Divine order! Through the cross currents of human strife, fretted and
stained, the tides of nature keep their steady course, and rise to their
invariable margins. The seasons come up undisturbed by crime and war.
Spring creeps even into the beleaguered city; through the tents of the
besiegers, across trench and scarp, among the wheels of the cannon, and
over the graves of the dead, grass and wild flowers speed, spreading
God's table. He sendeth His rain upon the just and the unjust. And even
here the display is not merely natural, nor spread only in the sight of
our physical enemies; but God's goodness leadeth to repentance, and Nature
is equipped even for deliverance from sin. Who has come out upon a great
landscape, who has looked across the sea, who has lifted his eyes to the
hills and felt the winds of God blowing off their snows, who has heard
earth's countless voices rising heavenwards, but has felt: What a wide
place this world is for repentance! Man does find in Nature deliverance
from himself, oblivion of his past, with peace and purity! And yet the
provision, though real, is little more than temporary. The herdsmen of the
desert are not obliged to furnish to their fugitive guest shelter for more
than two nights with the day between. Little more than two nights with the
day between is the respite from conscience and habit which Nature provides
for the sinful heart. She is the million-fold opportunity of repentance;
she is not the final or everlasting grace of God. And, therefore, whatever
may have been the original intention of our Psalmist, the spiritual
feeling of the Church has understood his last two verses to sing of that
mercy and forgiveness of our God which were spoken to men by the prophets,