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That has always been the way. This Psalmist is no exception to the devout souls of his time. For though, as I have said, externalisms and ritualisms filled a place then, that it is an anachronism and a retrogression that they should be supposed to fill now, still beneath all these there lay this one ancient, permanent relation, the relation of trust.
So that Divine Spirit is limited by no human conditions or laws, but dispenses His gifts in superb disregard of conventionalities and externalisms.
That precept found an echo in her heart. Whatever part in her religious development may have been played by the externalisms of ceremonial, she had pierced to the core of religion. Advanced modern critics admit the antiquity of Deborah's song, and this closing stanza witnesses to the existence, at that early period, of a highly spiritual conception of the bond between God and man.
We can see gleaming through all their words, though only gleaming through them, the same truth which Jesus Christ couched in the immortal phrase the charter of the Church's emancipation from all externalisms 'neither in this mountain, nor yet in Jerusalem, shall men worship the Father. To 'dwell in the house of the Lord' is not only to be present in bodily form in the Temple the Psalmist did not think that it was only that but to possess communion with Him, of which the external presence is but the symbol, the shadow, and the means.
It blows 'where it listeth, sovereignly indifferent to the expectations and limitations and the externalisms, even of organised Christianity, and touching this man and that man, not arbitrarily but according to 'the good pleasure' that is a law to itself, because it is perfect in wisdom and in goodness.
This Psalmist, nourished amidst the externalisms of an elaborate ceremonial, and compelled, by the stage of revelation at which he stood, to localise worship in an external Temple, in a fashion that we need not do, had yet attained to the conviction that, in the desert or in the Temple, God was near; that no weary pilgrimage was needed to reach His house, but that with one movement of a trusting heart the man clasped God wherever he was.
Therefore we can extend the principle here to all externalisms of worship, in all forms, in all churches, and say that in comparison with the essentials of an inward Christianity they are nothing and they do nothing. They have their value. As long as we are here on earth, living in the flesh, we must have outward forms and symbolical rites.
He had a truer insight into what active men needed for vigorous working days, and what devout men needed for healthy religion, than many moderns who smile at his eagerness about 'mere externalisms. It is easy to ridicule the Jewish Sabbath and 'the Puritan Sunday. No doubt there have been and are well-meant but mistaken efforts to insist on too rigid observance.
Transfer this, then which is the bond of perfectness between man and man to our relation to God, and you get to the very heart of the mystery. Not by externalisms of any kind, not by the clear dry light of the understanding, but by the outgoing of the heart's confidence to God, do we come within the clasp of His arms and become recipients of His grace. Trust knits to the unseen, and trust alone.
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