enough to express both intimacy and shelter. So he calls God the Comrade as
well as the Sentinel of His people; their Champion as well as their
Watchman. The _shade upon thy right hand_ is of course the shade upon the
fighting or working arm, to preserve it from exposure, and in the full
freedom of its power.

Now it is never ideas about God, nor even aspirations after Him, which in
the real battle of life keep us fresh and unexhausted. Ideas, and even
aspirations, strain as much as they lift. They give the mind its direction,
but by themselves they cannot carry it all the way. Nor is the influence of
a Personality sufficient if that Personality remain far off. Reverence
alone never saved any human soul in the storm of life. It is One by our
side Whom we need. It is by the sense of trust, of sympathy, of
comradeship, of fighting together in the ranks, that our strength is
thrilled and our right hand preserved in freshness. Without all this
between us and bare heaven, we must in the end weary and wither.

Twofold is the experience in which we especially need such compassion and
fellowship--in the time of responsibility and in the time of temptation.
These are the two great Lonelinesses of life--the Loneliness of the Height
and the Loneliness of the Deep--in which the heart needs to be sure of more
than being remembered and watched. The Loneliness of the Height, when God
has led us to the duty of a great decision, or given us the charge of other
lives, or sent us on the quest of some truth, or lifted us to a vision and
ideal. The king, the father, the thinker, the artist, all know this
loneliness of the height, which no human fellow can share, no human heart
fully sympathise with. Then it is that, with another Psalmist, the heart,
exposed to the bare heaven, cries out for something higher than itself to
come between the heaven and it: _What time my heart is overwhelmed do Thou
lead me unto the rock that is higher than I_; and God answers us by being