The Education of the Heart I THE PROCESSIONAL OF LIFE Thy statutes have been my songs in the house of my pilgrimage.-Ps. 119:54. T HE New Year will be good throughout if we step to this music. There are strong reasons why the statutes of God, His laws, and His commandments should be highly prized in the house of our pilgrimage. They show the true path. Elsewhere the psalmist pleads: "I am a stranger in the earth; hide not Thy commandments from me." Life is strange to us, and at every step we need counsel. The divine statutes amid a thousand false tracks show the royal pathway leading straight to rest. If we strike out paths for ourselves, there will be little singing. The statutes of God constitute our complete defense: "The house of my pilgrimage." A world of danger is pictured in this image of human life; but from the manifold peril we find immunity in the great leading thoughts and signals of God's most holy word. Despite ambushed banditti, ravenous beasts, mirage and simoom, drought and famine, we shall be absolutely safe in the highway of law. "No lion shall be there, nor any ravenous beast shall go up thereon, it shall not be found there; but the ransomed shall walk there: and the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads." The statutes of God discover the secret of blessedness: "Thou art the blessed God: teach me Thy statutes." The sacred law is the condition of blessedness, not its limitation. The subordination of our will to the order of the material universe is obviously the condition of physical health and happiness; and the submission of our will to the order of the eternal universe is not less assuredly the secret of fulfilled and perennial joy. We gather the flowers of Paradise on the austere slopes of Sinai; the gate called Beautiful is the strait gate; the narrow path of self-denial is the golden street in which the angels walk. The statutes of God assure us of the glorious goal. The precept is a promise; the divine law is full of the sense of eternity: "To them who, by patient continuance in welldoing, seek for glory and honor and immortality, eternal life." We are not doomed to be buried in the wilderness; in every act of obedience to the spiritual commandment we blessedly taste The statutes the powers of the world to come. of God are then subjects for legitimate and boundless gladness; indeed, our essential joy is bound up with their observance. It may seem hard, as Faber reminds us, to Treat our loves, joys, hopes, as flowery things but the white and red roses are plucked fullblown only here. "Praise the Lord with harp: sing unto Him with the psaltery and an instrument of ten strings." An "instrument of ten strings." What instrument is that? The ten commandments. These are the golden chords of the harp of life; and the song of one who can play well on this instrument is "a very lovely song," indeed the music of heaven on earth. Note the process by which law becomes music. The statutes as first realized by us are no songs at all. "We break His bands, and cast His cords from us." Then, perhaps, ensues a period of submission. We keep within the limits of the law; there is, however, perpetual friction, as when the waves of the sea fret against the shore. If the statutes are songs, they are in the minor key. But when grace continues to reign through righteousness the final stage supervenes in which obedience passes into essential delight. Holiness becomes to the soul what beauty is to the eye, sweetness to the taste, music to the ear. This is the highest state of life. Philosophers never weary of descanting upon the sublimities of natural law; and the perception and appreciation of this law they regard as the test and sign of supremest intellectual quality and force: but to recognize the moral law as holy, and the commandment holy and just and good, and to delight in them as such, is the crowning glory of the human spirit. The ideal Man expressed His sovereign perfection in the rapturous confession: "I delight to do Thy will, O My God." What, then, is the process through which law trembles into music? First, through clearer knowledge. "His commandments are not grievous," though in our ignorance of them they seem so. Fuller knowledge shows them to be reasonable, gracious, and delightful. More than a century ago Edmund Burke wrote: "It is our ignorance of natural things that causes all our admiration." And those who held this philosophy prophesied that as science grew admiration of nature would abate;-understanding the causes of its glory, the rainbow would fade in our eyes; comprehending the structure of the flower, the rose would smell less sweet; penetrating the secret of the stars, the heavens would be robbed of romance. But has this been the effect of a fuller knowledge of nature? Certainly not. During the last century science advanced im |