say, "Praise thou the Lord, O my soul, praise the Lord," as if
rebuking and stirring up himself for being too cold-hearted and
slow, for not admiring and honouring enough the infinite wisdom, and
power, and love, and glorious majesty of God, which to him shines
out in every hedge-side bird and every blade of grass. Truly I said
that man had a very different way of looking at God's earth from
what we have!

Now, in what did that difference lie? What was it? We need not
look far to see. It was this,--David looked on the earth as God's
earth; we look on it as man's earth, or nobody's earth. We know
that we are here, with trees and grass, and beasts and birds, round
us. And we know that we did not put them here; and that, after we
are dead and gone, they will go on just as they went on before we
were born,--each tree, and flower, and animal, after its kind, but
we know nothing more. The earth is here, and we on it; but who put
it there, and why it is there, and why we are on it, instead of
being anywhere else, few ever think. But to David the earth looked
very different; it had quite another meaning; it spoke to him of God
who made it. By seeing what this earth is like, he saw what God who
made it is like: and we see no such thing. The earth?--we can eat
the corn and cattle on it, we can earn money by farming it, and
ploughing and digging it; and that is all most men know about it.
But David knew something more--something which made him feel himself
very weak, and yet very safe; very ignorant and stupid, and yet
honoured with glorious knowledge from God,--something which made him
feel that he belonged to this world, and must not forget it or
neglect it, that this earth was his lesson-book--this earth was his
work-field; and yet those same thoughts which shewed him how he was
made for the land round him, and the land round him was made for