There is, and very near himself. As prominent a feature in the wilderness
as the shepherd is the shepherd's tent. To Western eyes a cluster of
desert homes looks ugly enough--brown and black lumps, often cast down
anyhow, with a few loutish men lolling on the trampled sand in front of
the low doorways, that a man has to stoop uncomfortably to enter. But
conceive coming to these a man who is fugitive--fugitive across such a
wilderness. Conceive a man fleeing for his life as Sisera fled when he
sought the tent of Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite. To him that space
of trampled sand, with the ragged black mouths above it, mean not only
food and rest, but dear life itself. There, by the golden law of the
desert's hospitality, he knows that he may eat in peace, that though his
enemies come up to the very door, and his table be spread as it were in
their presence, he need not flinch nor stint his heart of her security.

That was the landscape the Psalmist saw, and it seemed to him to reflect
the mingled wildness and beauty of his own life. Human life was just this
wilderness of terrible contrasts, where the light is so bright, but the
shadows the darker and more treacherous; where the pasture is rich, but
scattered in the wrinkles of vast deserts; where the paths are illusive,
yet man's passion flies swift and straight to its revenge; where all is
separation and disorder, yet law sweeps inexorable, and a man is hunted
down to death by his blood-guiltiness. But not in anything is life more
like the Wilderness than in this, that it is the presence and character of
One, which make all the difference to us who are its silly sheep; that it
is His grace and hospitality which alone avail us when we awaken to the
fact that our lives cannot be fully figured by those of sheep, for men are
fugitives in need of more than food--men are fugitives with the conscience
and the habit of sin relentless on their track. This is the main lesson of
the Psalm: the faith into which many generations of God's Church have sung
an ever richer experience of His Guidance and His Grace. We may gather it