Times of political decadence are times of spiritual growth. It is out of the inner experience of hidden lives, in ages when statesmen saw little hope, that such priceless contributions have been made to the devotional treasury of humanity as the hymn of Cleanthes, the Meditations of Aurelius, the Confessions of Augustine, and the Imitation of Christ. But first and foremost among these products of the ages of the hidden life is the great Psalm of which the text is the summary. To the literary critic it has all the notes of a silver age. Its structure is artificial, its language stereotyped, its length excessive, its thought monotonous. It might be almost the latest utterance of the dying voice of Hebrew psalmody. And yet the words of this nameless sufferer epitomise exhaustively the religious aspirations and joys and sorrows of the human soul, and have remained, and will remain, without doubt, to the end of time, the great manual of Christian devotion. And at a time like the present it would be well to strengthen our wavering faith by looking as boldly as did the psalmist at the spiritual fruitfulness of sorrow, and to ask ourselves whether we are making our own sorrows bear their fruit.
I. The earliest form of trouble is for most of us physical pain, and our instinctive tendency is to view pain as an unmitigated evil. But such a view of pain is not in accordance with the facts of life. Pain is beyond question the great educator of the soul. Pain makes men real. It indurates their character. It endows them with spiritual insight. But, beyond all this, pain invests a man with a mysterious attractiveness for others. There is a heroism in the very fact of suffering which lifts the sufferer above us, and makes us feel that he is moving in a realm of being to us unknown, till our sympathy is hushed into something of awe-struck admiration, and from the blending of sympathy with awe comes love.
II. But pain is, after all, but the beginning of troubles. There is the pain which does not unite, but separates the pain which ends in death. Look below the surface, and death is everywhere. But if it is good for us to have been in the trouble of pain, still more is it good for us to have been in the trouble of parting. The use of death and parting is not to end our human ties, but to translate them into that region where alone they can be everlasting.
III. There is yet another trouble which casts a shadow upon death itself the trouble of doubt. Many men who are willing enough to believe other troubles good and God-sent shrink back cowardly from the pain of doubt, as if that alone were devil-born. But it is not so. From the moment when the cry, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" went up out of the deep of the midday midnight upon Calvary, doubt was for ever consecrated as the last trial of the sons of God, and a trial needed for their purification, no less than pain or parting.
J. R. Illingworth, Sermons in a College Chapel,p. 18.
Reference: Psalms 119:71. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxvii., No. 1629.