1. THE Prayer-book version of Psa_116:10 may not be the most accurate version (it is a difficult verse to translate), but it is full of suggestion: “I believe, and therefore will I speak; but I was sore troubled: I said in my haste, All men are liars.”
The Psalm is the cry of a man torn by doubts, but not conquered by them. It is the voice of one who has been down into the deep waters and for a time has lost his footing. “The snares of death compassed me round about: and the pains of hell gat hold upon me. . . . O Lord, I beseech thee, deliver my soul. I shall find trouble and heaviness, and I will call upon the name of the Lord.”
And then, as the clouds begin to break, and the light begins to dawn, “Gracious is the Lord, and righteous: yea, our God is merciful: the Lord preserveth the simple: I was in misery, and he helped me. Turn again then unto thy rest, O my soul.” Come back, O tempest-tost wanderer, seeking peace and shivering in the dismal sense of loneliness and doubt, “turn again unto thy rest, for the Lord hath rewarded me. And why? thou hast delivered my soul from death: mine eyes from tears, and my feet from falling!” And then, as the whole consciousness of the man wakes up out of the hideous dream of distrust and despair in which he has been walking, he breaks forth into that sublime assertion of his faith and trust, “I will walk before the Lord, in the land of the living. I believed, and therefore will I speak; but I was sore troubled: I said in my haste, All men are liars!”
In discovering God the Psalmist discovered man. It is always so. “I have found,” says James Smetham, [Note: Letters of James Smetham, 88.] “the Art of Finding how to get thought out of books, out of men, out of things. I have learned the art of Appreciation. I am nearer to my kind. And I have learned—blessed knowledge!—the philosophy of Life, as it respects me and mine. Eureka! I have found Him of whom Moses and the prophets did write; I have found how He comes to man’s soul, how He dwells, rules, guides, consoles, how He suffices. I have found the Way, the Truth, the Life.” He puts the discovery of man first, but with him as with us all the discovery of God’s faithfulness came first, then the discovery of the truthfulness of men.
2. Faith in the personal Christ is essential to faith in man. It is significantly said of the Master that He knew what was in man, and yet He loved man, and even trusted man. It is esteemed in these days the highest achievement, if not the necessary completion, of a man’s training, that he should learn to distrust men in order that he may manage men. The world of business and, to a large extent, the world of science and letters, of politics and professional life, is divided into two classes—the sharp and critical and hard men, and the so-called weak and confiding men whom the world treads down with its iron heel, or passes by with supercilious neglect. The sharp men make it a rule to criticize and distrust everybody: the confiding men learn, by being often deceived, in their turn to distrust and to hate. The tendency of our times is to idolize sharpness and criticism, and to sacrifice at their altar the generosities and charities and graces of life, as also the Divine sweetness of that charity which believeth all things, and endureth all things. There is no force that will fill the heart of an individual with courage and self-reliance on the one hand, and with sweetness and light on the other, that will bind man to man in the noble magnanimity of a wise but generous faith, except a living faith in the living Christ.
Faith in man is a duty as well as faith in God; in fact, our general conduct every day in our intercourse with our fellow-beings depends at every turn on our faith in our fellow-beings. When that faith ceases, society ceases with it, and a rule not of men with moral natures, but of tigers and foxes in the guise of men, commences with it. [Note: The Day-Book of John Stuart Blackie, 116.]
There are a few quiet places in England that are in a national sense holy ground, and one of these is Stoke Poges Churchyard, among whose yews and graves Gray wrote the beautiful “Elegy.” It is a point for pilgrimage; though the pilgrim must not allow himself to be shown round. A place in which to sit and rest and be calm, and not one in which to use the eyes “to botanise,” as it were, upon a mother’s grave. There once sat the poet Gray and forgot that he was Gray, and spoke for England—let the rich earth speak for him.
Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire ;
Hands, that the rod of empire might have swayed,
Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.
The great faith in the human being, above all in the English human being, is what that poem breathes. It is written to anonymous England, to the Hampdens, Cromwells, Miltons, hidden under the common life and ordinary aspect of the people who never come to the front. All that is noble in the annals of England has been done not simply by accidental people that the race threw up, but by the rate itself, by “the happy breed” of England. [Note: Stephen Graham, Priest of the Ideal, 296.]
