the sun shining and the trees growing, and men walking about, and tells
them that the health they are trying to get inside, and thereby only
making themselves worse invalids, they will get out there. This big man
was such a moral invalid, seeking strength within his own riches and
qualities. And so doing he had developed the nasty indoor tempers, till it
seemed pleasant and satisfactory to him to be spiteful, slanderous and
false. Meantime, outside the darkened windows of his selfishness, the mercy
of God, in which other men gloried and grew strong, rose every day. With
one sweep the Psalmist tears the curtains down and lets in the sunshine.
_The leal love of God is every day_. There, in that commonplace daily
light: in that love which is as near you as the open air and as free as
the sunshine, are the life and exultation which you seek so vainly within
yourself.

It was in the sunshine that the Psalmist felt himself growing:

_But I am like an olive-tree, green in God's house.
I trust in the leal love of God for ever and aye_.

This open-air figure suggests (though we have no confirmation of the fact)
a tree growing in the high temple precincts, as trees to this day grow upon
the Haram around the great mosque in Jerusalem, open to the sunshine and
washed by the great rush of wind from the west. The Old Testament as much
as the New haunts the open air for its figures of religion--a tree in full
foliage, a tree planted by a river, a river brimming to its banks, the
waves of a summer sea. Now this is not only because there is nothing else
that will reflect the freedom of God's grace and the lavish joy it brings
upon the world, but still more because the Bible feels the eternal truth,
that to win this joy and freedom a man has got to go outside himself,
outside his selfishness and other close tempers, outside his feelings and