It is the perfection of man's blessedness. Then the joyous exclamation
of our first text, which we have often had to strive hard not to
disbelieve, will be no more a truth of faith but a truth of experience.
Here we have had to trust that it was so, even when we could scarce
cleave to the confidence. There, memory will look back on our wanderings
through this great wilderness, and, enlightened by the issue of them
all, will speak only of Mercy and Goodness as our angel guides all our
lives. The end will crown the work. Pure unmingled consciousness of
bliss will fill all hearts, and break into the old exclamation, which we
had sometimes to stifle sobs ere we could speak on earth. When He says,
'Come in! ye blessed of My Father,' all our tears and fears, and pains
and sins, will be forgotten, and we shall but have to say, in wonder and
joy, 'Blessed are they that dwell in Thy house; they will be still
praising Thee.'

It is the perfection of God's praise. We may possibly venture to see in
these wonderful words of our text a dim and far-off hint of a
possibility that seems to be pointed at in many parts of Scripture--that
the blessings of Christ's mighty work shall, in some measure and manner,
pass through man to his dwelling-place and its creatures. Dark shadows
of evil--the mystery of pain and sorrow--lie over earth and all its
tribes. 'We look for new heavens and a new earth wherein dwelleth
righteousness.' And the statements of Scripture which represent creation
as suffering by man's sin, and participant in its degree in man's
redemption, seem too emphatic and precise, as well as too frequent, and
in too didactic connections, to be lightly brushed aside as poetic
imagery. May it not be that man's transgression

'Broke the fair music that all creatures made
To their great Lord, whose love their motion swayed,'