A dry place, as well as a dangerous place--have not you found it so? I
believe that every soul of man has, if he will be honest with himself,
and that there is not one among us who would not, if he were to look
into the deepest facts and real governing experience of his life,
confess--I thirst: 'my soul thirsteth.' And oh, brethren, why not go on
with the quotation, and make that which is else a pain, a condition of
blessedness? Why not recognise the meaning of all this restless
disquiet, and say 'My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God'?

And then there is the other idea also underlying these words, yet
another phase of this sad life of ours--not only danger and drought, but
also weariness and languor. The desert stretches before us again, where
there is no shelter from the blast and no trickling stream amid the
yellowing sand; where the fierce ball above beats down cruelly, and its
hot rays are flung up cruelly into our faces, and the glare blinds us,
and the stifling heat wearies us, and work is a torture and motion is
misery, and we long for nothing so much as to be quiet and to hide our
heads in some shade.

I was reading recently one of our last books of travel in the wilderness
of the Exodus, in which the writer told how, after toiling for hours
under a scorching sun, over the hot, white, marly flat, seeing nothing
but a beetle or two on the way, and finding no shelter anywhere from the
pitiless beating of the sunshine, the weary travellers came at last to a
little Retem bush only a few feet high, and flung themselves down and
tried to hide, at least, their heads, from those 'sunbeams like swords,'
even beneath its ragged shade. And my text tells of a great rock, with
blue dimness in its shadow, with haply a fern or two in the moist places
of its crevices, where there is rest, and a man can lie down and be