my help_? and of the answer, _My help is from the Lord, that made heaven
and earth_.

We need not wish to fix a locality or a date to this Psalm. It is enough
that the singer had a mountain skyline in view, and that below in the
shadows, so dark that we cannot make out their features, lay God's church
and people. They were threatened, and there was neither help nor hope of
help among themselves.

Perhaps it was one of those frequent periods in the life of Israel, in
which the religious institutions of the people were so abased that the
Psalmist could see in them no pledge nor provocation of hope. Indeed, these
institutions may have been altogether overthrown. There was no leader on
whom God had set His seal, and the national life had nothing to raise the
heart, but was full of base thoughts and paltry issues that dissipate
faith, and render the interference of God an improbable thing. So the
Psalmist lifted his thoughts to the sacraments which God has fixed in the
framework of His world. He did not identify his help with the hills--no
true Israelite could have done that,--but the sight of them started his
hope and filled his heart with the desire to pray. This may have happened
at sunrise, when, even more than at other hours, mountains fulfil the
ministry of hope. Below them all was in darkness; it was still night, but
the peaks saw the morning, and the signal of its coming fell swiftly down
their flanks. In this case the Psalm is a matin-song, a character which
the rest of the verses carry out. Or at any other hour of the day, it may
simply have been the high, clear outline of the hills which inspired the
Psalm--that firm step between heaven and earth, that margin of a world of
possibility beyond. A prophet has said, _How beautiful upon the mountains
are the feet of them that bring good tidings!_ But to our Psalmist the
mountains spread a threshold for a Divine arrival. Up there God Himself