feeble to direct or to restrain.' Trust is reliance, and reliance is
always blessedness.

II. Notice, secondly, the steadfast peacefulness of trust.

Now there are difficulties about the rendering and precise significance
of the first verse of my text with which I do not need to trouble you.
The Authorised Version, and still more perhaps the Revised Version, give
substantially, as I take it, the prophet's meaning; and the margin of
the Revised Version is still more literal and accurate than the text, 'A
steadfast mind Thou keepest in perfect peace, because it trusteth in
Thee.' If this, then, be the true meaning of the words, you observe that
it is the steadfast mind, steadfast because it trusts, which God keeps
In the deep peace that is expressed by the reduplication of the word.

And if we break up that complex thought into its elements, it just comes
to this, first, that trust makes steadfastness. Most men's lives are
blown about by winds of circumstance, directed by gusts of passion,
shaped by accidents, and are fragmentary and jerky, like some ship at
sea with nobody at the helm, heading here and there, as the force of the
wind or the flow of the current may carry them. If my life is to be
steadied, there must not only be a strong hand at the tiller, but some
outward object which shall be for me the point of aim and the point of
rest. No man can steady his life except by clinging to a holdfast
without himself. Some of us look for that stay in the fluctuations and
fleetingnesses of creatures; and some of us are wiser and saner, and
look for it in the steadfastness of the unchanging God. The men who do
the former are the sport of circumstances, and the slaves of their own
natures, and there is no consistency in noble aim and effort throughout
their lives, corresponding to their circumstances, relations, and