know how a figure looks upon a skyline. We see just the outline of it--a
silhouette, as it were: no details, expression, voice nor colour, but only
an attitude. This is all the Psalmist sees of God on that high threshold
against the light--His attitude. The attitude is that of a sentinel. The
Lord is thy Keeper--thy watchman. The figure is familiar in Palestine,
especially where the tents of the nomads lie. The camp or flock lies low
among the tumbled hills, unable to see far, and subject, in the intricate
land, to sudden surprise. But sentinels are posted on eminences round
about, erect and watchful. This is the figure which the Psalmist sees his
help assume upon the skyline to which he has lifted his eyes.

Compared with other experiences of God, this outline of Him may seem bare.
Yet if we feel the fact of it with freshness of heart and imagination, what
may it not do for us? Life may be hallowed by no thought more powerfully
than by this, that it is watched: nor peace secured by any stronger trust
than that the Almighty assumes responsibility for it; nor has work ever
been inspired by keener sense of honour than when we feel that God gives
us freedom and safety for it. These are the fundamental pieties of the
soul; and no elaborateness of doctrine can compensate for the loss of fresh
convictions of their truth.

_The Lord is thy Keeper_. If men had only not left this article out of
their creeds when they added all the rest, how changed the religious life
of to-day would have been!--how simple, how strenuous, how possibly heroic!

_The Lord is thy Keeper_. What sense of proportion and what tact does the
thought of those sleepless thoughts bring upon our life! How quickly it
restores the instinct to discriminate between what is essential and what is
not essential in faith and morals; that instinct, from the loss of which
the religious world of to-day suffers so much. How hard does it make us