Do you fancy these people were specially comfortable, prosperous folk,
who had no sorrows, and lived safe from all danger, and therefore knew
that God protected them from all ill?

Nothing less, my friends, nothing less. There was hardly a man who
joined in that psalm, but knew that he carried his life in his hand from
year to year, that any day might see him a corpse--drowned at sea. Hardly
a woman who sang that psalm but had lost a husband, a father, a brother,
a kinsman--drowned at sea. And yet they believed that God preserved
them. They were fishers and sailors, earning an uncertain livelihood, on
a wild and rocky coast. A sudden shift of wind might make, as I knew it
once to make, 60 widows and orphans in a single night. The fishery for
the year might fail, and all the expense of boats and nets be thrown
away. Or in default of work at home, the young men would go out on
voyages to foreign parts: and often never came back again, dying far from
home, of fever, of wreck, of some of the hundred accidents which befal
seafaring men. And yet they believed that God preserved them. Surely
their faith was tried, if ever faith was tried. But as surely their
faith failed not, for--if I may so say--they dared not let it fail. If
they ceased to trust God, what had they to trust in? Not in their own
skill in seamanship, though it was great: they knew how weak it was, on
which to lean. Not in the so-called laws of nature; the treacherous sea,
the wild wind, the uncertain shoals of fish, the chances and changes of a
long foreign voyage. Without trust in God, their lives must have been
lives of doubt and of terror, for ever anxious about the morrow: or else
of blind recklessness, saying, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we
die." Because they kept their faith in God, their lives were for the
most part lives of hardy and hopeful enterprise; cheerful always, in bad
luck as in good; thankful when their labours were blest with success; and