because, instead of lifting our eyes to the big things around us, we busy
and engross ourselves with trifles, that the practical enthusiasm which
beats through this Psalm is failing among us, and that we have so little
faith in God's readiness to act, and to act speedily, within the circle of
our own experience. Trifles, however innocent or dutiful they may be, do
not move within us the fundamental pieties. They reveal no stage worthy for
God to act upon. They give no help to the imagination to realise Him as
near. A church which never lifts her eyes above her own denominational
details, petty differences in doctrine or government, petty matters of
ritual and posture, cannot continue to believe in the nearness of the
living God. The strain on faith is too great to last. The reason recoils
from admitting that God can help on such battle-fields as those on which
the churches are often so busy, that He can come to help such causes as
the sects, neglectful of the real interests of the world, too often stoop
to champion. And so the churches insensibly get settled in far-off,
abstract views of God, and are sapped of the primal and practical energies
of religion. Whereas it is evident that in the religious communities which
lift their eyes above their low hedges to the high hills of God--to the
great simple outlines of His kingdom, to the ideals and destiny which God
has set before mankind--in such churches faith in His nearness to the world
and in His readiness to help must always abound. To men who have an eye for
the big things of earth, God will always seem to be afoot upon it. They
are conscious of an arena worthy for Him to descend upon, and of causes
worthy for Him to interfere in. It is no shock to their reason, no undue
strain upon their imagination, to feel the Almighty and the All-loving come
down to earth, when earth has such horizons and such issues.

Turning to ourselves as individuals, we may ask why we have such distant
notions of God, so shy a faith of His coming within the circle of our own
life and work? Why are our prayers so formal, so empty of the expectation