with ourselves that His eyes are on us, yet how hopeful that He counts us
worth protecting! When we realise, that not only many of the primal forces
of character, but its true balance and proportion, are thus due to so
simple a faith in God, we understand the insistence laid upon this by the
prophets and by Christ. There is no truth which the prophets press more
steadily upon Israel than that all their national life lies in the sight
and on the care of God. The burden of many prophetic orations is no more
than this--you are defended, you are understood, you are watched, by God.
And in the Sermon on the Mount, and in that address to the disciples now
given in the tenth of Matthew, there is no message more clear or frequent
than that God cares for us, has to be reckoned with by all our enemies, is
aware of everything that befalls us, and while He relieves us from
responsibility in the things that are too great for us, makes us the more
to feel our responsibility for things within our power--in short, that the
Lord is our Keeper.

Of course we shall be able to realise this, according as we realise life.
If we have a heart for the magnitudes of life, it will not seem vain to
believe that God Himself should guard it.

If we keep looking to the hills, God shall be very clear upon them as our
Keeper.

But this distant view of God upon the skyline, full as it is of discipline
and of peace, does not satisfy the Psalmist. To him the Lord is not only
Israel's Keeper or Sentinel, but the Lord is also _thy shade on thy right
hand: the sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night._ The
origin of these expressions is vague, but their application here is vivid
enough. A sentinel is too far away, and is, physically, too narrow a figure
to fulfil man's imagination of God. The Psalmist requires something near