The Thirst of Human Beings in All Ages

“My soul is athirst for God, yea, even for the living God: when shall I come to appear before the presence of God?”—Psalm xlii, 2 (Prayer-book Version).

It has been often said that the Psalms are out of place in our common daily service. All are invited to take part in that service. Numbers come to Church, at least on Sundays, whose minds cannot be especially devout. Yet language is provided for their use which expressed the most fervent longings of the most devout men. Such language may meet, now and then, the aspirations of the private suppliant. Even he must often find the Psalms far above the measure of his thoughts, so high that he cannot attain to them. How, then, can we offer them month after month to an ordinary English congregation, as if they could possibly speak what it was feeling?

Complaints of this kind are never to be lightly dismissed. They indicate a sense of the sacredness of words, which we should honour in others and try by all means to cultivate in ourselves. No men have so much need as clergymen to be reminded that they may become merely mechanical repeaters of sounds; that the most holy utterances may at last mean almost nothing to them. No men have so much need to rouse themselves, or should be more thankful for being roused, even by rough rebukes, out of a habit of mind which may pass into lethargy and death.

But if so, they at all events cannot draw a line around those who ought and who ought not to adopt the prayers and Psalms of holy men as their own. The boundary, fairly marked, might very often exclude them. A minister cannot dare to plead, “This or that man is very liable to use these expressions idly or irreverently; I am in no such peril.” He knows that he is in the most extreme peril. He knows that, in judging another, he should be condemning himself. He may have positive proof that passages from the Sacred Book have quickened hearers for whom he might have been tempted to pronounce them unfit when they have not touched him at all, or have touched him and left him cold.

Many, I have no doubt, will readily accept this statement as a proof that a caste or order cannot safely be trusted with the custody of the Divine Oracles, or with the determination of the persons who may claim them as the expression of their own feelings—and will say that the true distinction is the stronger and clearer for this admission. That distinction, they will say, is not between clergymen and laymen, but between those who believe and those who do not believe. To the one division, such passages as that I have taken for my text, will be profoundly significant. For the other, it will have no significance at all. What can they know of the thirst which the Psalmist speaks of? How can they care to come into the presence of the living God? Will they not wish to put Him at the greatest distance from them? Will they not thirst for some potion that may make them forget Him?

There is great force in these questions. And who will feel the force of them? Do those persons who call themselves believers not understand what that unwillingness to think of God, what that estrangement from Him, is, which they describe so vividly? Are they only reporting what they have seen in other persons, not what they have been conscious of in themselves? Did the consciousness belong to another stage of their existence? Are they not liable to the continued repetition of it? Do they mean then to say that the feeling after God, the thirst for Him, may not co-exist with another feeling of exactly the opposite kind? When they speak of a conflict within them, do not they intend to affirm that those deadly enemies are dwelling very near to each other? Do they give themselves credit for anything but being aware of the strife, and knowing where the strength is which may make the better side victorious? If they are calling themselves believers upon some other ground, in some other sense than this, I should wholly dispute the claim which they put forward to be in sympathy with those who trusted in God and thirsted for Him in other days. I should fancy there were none who would drink into the spirit of David’s Psalms so little as they.

But if this is the nature and character of their belief, then I do not see how they can possibly exclude any from participation in these prayers and hymns; how they can find fault with the Church for adopting them into her worship, and giving them, with the most utter indiscrimination, to all her children. It is not merely that we do not know whether our next neighbour may not find something in them which we do not find, whether they may not be expressing more to him than they are expressing to us. It is not merely our ignorance which is the excuse for our not venturing to decide who shall or who shall not find the Singer of Israel as his spokesman. It is the discovery we have made why and when he refuses to be our spokesman. In so far as we are occupied with special interests; in so far as we are wrapped up in our special feelings; in so far as we disdain fellowship with that which is common to us and the other members of our kind; in so far the Psalms are written for us in an unintelligible dialect, we cannot enter into them, and they will not enter into us. It is when the minister confesses his union with his congregation; when the members of the congregation feel that they have relations with each other; it is then that David’s harp gives out its music, and we in this distant land and age can accompany it. No doubt it has been the charm of those who are in closets or on sick-beds; but for this reason, that they are longing there for fellowship with the Church of God; that they want an expression not of their solitary, but of their united, human thoughts. The Psalms, like the historical and prophetical books, may be Jewish, may be national to the very core. But if that nation was set apart from all others that it might realize the common wants of human beings, that it might exhibit the common tendencies of human beings; if it fulfilled that function all the more because it was not artistic like the Greek, or conquering like the Roman,—because it wanted the qualities which raised them above other people,—those who were most Jewish may also show us best what we are as men. Certainly they would not show us Englishmen what we are as men, if they gave us no type of those national feelings, the loss of which would be the loss of all our manhood.

I have said that this might be so. We have most certain proofs that it is so. Divines and philologers may dispute till they are weary about the origin of the Psalms, or of any other part of the Bible; they may call each other heretics and bigots as long as they find it healthy and profitable for their minds to bandy such epithets. But the book established itself into a human book before the questions about which they are disputing were raised. It will remain a human book whichever way those questions are settled. By all means let those who have leisure fight them out. There are other questions which human beings must fight out, and in which they will get what aid they can from philologers and divines, if they have aid to give; from the cries and yearnings of these old kings and warriors, if those allies should fail them. Their help is given certainly under strange conditions. There is no stipulation that the man who receives it shall be in a comfortable, harmonious, satisfied state of mind. He is not called to make out his claim as a believer. Often it seems as if unbelief were to be his main characteristic. He need not be walking on firm ground; he may be in deep mire, where no ground is. He need not be able to make it evident to the world that he has a God, and that they have none; he may be surrounded by those who think they have assurances of the Divine favour, and who are asking him, Where is now thy God? To such people, so cast down, so disquieted within them, the old Psalmist stretches out a hand. Their sorrows and necessities he understands. He is used to the misery in which he finds them; he is used also to all the more ordinary forms of misery, poverty, sickness, the vigour of enemies, the neglect and desertion of friends. He does not expect to find men bearing up under these calamities as if they were nothing. He knows them to be real. He affects no indifference to them. He does not the least pretend that what hurts his body and his outward estate, does not reach to his mind or his soul. He wishes, coward as he is, that he had the wings of a dove, that he might fly away and be at rest. He finds that he has been foolish and ignorant, a very beast before God, prizing outward felicity above that which is substantial and abiding. He does not conceal this or any confusion into which he has fallen. He cares only to show that there is a way out of confusions into clearness, for all that will put their trust in God.

I. When he says, in this Forty-second Psalm, “My soul is athirst,” he certainly describes no rare or peculiar state of feeling. The thirst of the soul is as generic as the thirst of the body. All men have it, because they are men. The cravings of human beings no doubt take innumerable directions. There is the thirst for pleasure, the thirst for wealth, the thirst for distinction. But we are so certain that men’s desires have a common object, however much they may be distinguished and may seem to be opposed, that we rather submit to the use of a peculiarly vague, indefinite, unsatisfactory name, than not find some way of indicating this object. We say that all men pursue happiness. We do not well know what we mean or what they mean. We have to resolve our generalization again into particulars, before we can make ourselves intelligible. Nevertheless we must retain the word till we can get some equivalent for it, an equivalent which will not fit a few men or a certain class of men, but the race.

II. The Psalmist said, “My soul is athirst for God.” He knew that all men in the nations round him were pursuing gods. Pleasure was a god, wealth was a god, fame was a god. It was impossible for living souls to follow after abstract notions. Everything which man pursued embodied itself; it must be contemplated as a reality, not as a fancy of the mind, or there could be no ardour in hunting after it. Therefore, as these gods began to fade away into certain notions of the mind, as men began to suspect that they had called the objects of their worship into existence, not only the worship became insincere, but the worshipper became cold and lifeless in the ordinary work to which he had devoted himself. He became the slave of his own schemes or imaginations. He must follow them whithersoever they led him, but there was no choice or affection in his service of them. He had no hope of their bringing him to any result. His heart testified that they were finite, and that he was thirsting for the infinite. And the infinite seemed a mere impersonal, dreary void. If he was to dwell in it, all forms and feelings must be abandoned.

Just what the Jew had been taught was, that the Lord his God was one Lord. He was not to pursue a god of pleasure, a god of wealth, a god of fame. He was not to worship any work of his own hands, any conception of his own mind. He was made in the image of the God. The God was not far from him. He was about his path and about his bed, ordering all his ways. He was personal; yet He was infinite. He was an actual Ruler, an actual Judge; but His Majesty was not visible. He did not judge after the sight of the eyes or the hearing of the ears. He had a Name which men were not to take in vain; but He was not in the likeness of anything in the Heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth. How often, then, did it seem as if there were no such Being! With what effect, with what bitterness, might the worshippers of definite idols say to the Israelite, “Where is thy God?” What answer could he make? To what place could he point, and say, “He is there”? If he said, “It is with the mind I behold Him, and not with the eye,” how often would his conscience tremble as he made that profession, how often would the mocking fiend say, “And dost thou really behold Him with thy mind? Does He present Himself to that, as these outward forms do to the senses?” What, I ask again, could he say? This Psalm tells you what he said. “My tears have been my meat day and night, while they daily say unto me, Where is now thy God? Now when I think thereupon, I pour out my heart by myself. For I went with the multitude and brought them forth into the house of God, in the voice of praise and thanksgiving, among such as keep holyday.” He does not pretend that he is not disturbed by these taunts. He does not say that his mind is all clear and bright. He recurs to old times and experiences. But he is quite aware that they do not restore to him what he has lost, that they do not assure him of a present God. All he can do is, to ask that if He is, He will reveal Himself. And that he does ask courageously. “I will say unto the God of my strength, Why hast Thou forgotten me? Why go I thus heavily, while the enemy oppresseth me?” And then he was able to say to his vexed soul, “O put thy trust in God, for I will yet thank Him which is the help of my countenance and my God.”

What a baptism of fire was this! What a plunge into atheism, that he might know God! What a loss of all the privileges of an Israelite, that he might find the ground upon which Israel was standing! For thus he learnt that the thirst for God is the thirst of man. The thirst for happiness means this, ends in this. The thirst for those particular finite things which try to sum themselves up in the thirst for happiness, have here their true centre, their final explanation. The holy day and the solemn assembly testified of this God. In the absence of all holy days and all solemn assemblies, He offers Himself to the solitary despairing seeker, as the foundation of all human fellowship, as the Being without Whom all things, all thoughts, must be scattered and endless. The thirst of his soul could not be satisfied with any thing but Him, Who both kindles and satisfies the thirst of all human souls.

III. The Psalmist goes on, “Even for the living God.” It is no idle addition to the former words. The gods which the Israelite had been taught that he was not to worship, were dead gods; “eyes had they, but they saw not; hands, but they handled not; feet, but they walked not.” The complaint of them was, not that they performed the acts of men, but that they were unable to perform those acts. They seemed to have the organs of sense, but they had no use of the senses. Those who bowed to them had imputed to them their own gifts and faculties, but could not impart any gifts and faculties. There is a thirst of the soul to create something in its own likeness; but the first and deepest thirst is, to find in what likeness it is itself created; whence all its living powers are derived; who has fixed their ends; who can direct them to their ends. It is this thirst by which the Psalmist is now possessed. He has been told of a living God. Priests, lawgivers, warriors, have all turned to the God of their fathers as the God of life. It is in vain to tell him of a Being Who is not this. It is in vain to remind him of congregations, holy days, forms of worship, sacrifices, if they are not directed to such a Being, if they have not Him for their Author, if they are not the continual witnesses of His presence. They too, he has found, may become dead things. They may become mere portions of a religion, of an idolatry. And then they cannot quench, in the very least degree, his thirst. They hold out the cup of water to him, and then withdraw it. They promise a divine manifestation, and tell the worshipper that no such manifestation is intended for him; perhaps, that they are to preserve him from beholding it and being consumed by it.

Here, too, the Psalmist is, in the strictest sense, the man. The heart and flesh of all human beings, whether they know it or not, are crying out for the living God. And they do give a thousand indications everywhere, that they cannot be contented with dead gods, or with any religious notions and forms which try to put themselves in the place of a living God. Viewed in this light, the phenomena of what are called sceptical ages are almost as startling evidences of the truth of the Bible, as they are of the falsehood of some who have professed to believe in it. Those ages are protests against the substitution of death for life; solemn declarations, coming out of the deepest heart of humanity, that shadows are not substances, and that unless there is a substance answering to the shadow, that must fade away. “My soul is athirst for God, even for the living God;” this cry might be heard, a deeper undertone, in the midst of those cries for the destruction of all that bore the name of religion and God in the last century. If it had not been so,—if God had not purposed to answer that cry as men could not answer it,—I believe He would not have permitted any of those destructive processes to take effect. We may be confident that He will answer it at last, if any still more sweeping ruin should be ordained for our own times.

IV. Finally, the Psalmist says, “When shall I come to appear before God?” A bold petition! ought he not rather to have prayed, “O God, prepare me for the day when I must appear before Thee?” That is the modification which we who live under the New Testament generally give to words, which those who lived before the Incarnation and Epiphany of Jesus Christ could utter in simple fulness. Let us not fancy that they had a feebler sense of the necessity of preparation for meeting God than we have. What they believed was, that they could not prepare themselves for what assuredly would come to pass, that God Himself was preparing them. What they held was, that He prepared them for His appearing by teaching them to hope for it. If they did not expect it, did not hope for it, they would be startled and confounded by it; if they did, every step in their history, every struggle, every joy was an education for it. The Psalm we have been considering records one of the most severe passages in this education. A certain man, probably by the absence of all the tokens and witnesses of his country’s faith, probably by the presence of the symbols of idolatry, perhaps by poverty or sickness which made the outward world look gloomy to him, certainly by a terrible darkness and doubt in his inner self, is led to discover what he needed and could not be without; what must be, though all things in earth and heaven were to be shaken and to perish. He found a living God beneath all things, beneath himself. He had felt that the loss of Him was the fulness of misery. He was sure that His presence would be the fulness of joy.

Here too, I think, his experience was human, not solitary. He learned in himself how God was training multitudes besides himself. May we not believe, brethren, that that training is for our time as well as his; that Englishmen as well as Jews are subject to it? We often hear the epithet “heathenish” affixed to great masses of our population. Of late very vigorous efforts have been commenced, in London especially, for the purpose of bringing these masses to hear sermons, and to take part in Christian services. Our churches and chapels, it is said, have been regarded as belonging to the upper or middling class of society; the humblest class has felt itself excluded from them. Numbers, it is further said, from this and other causes, have become not passively ignorant, but actively infidel. Religious men, clergymen especially, are urged to remove the first scandal, by addressing themselves directly to the poor, and by opening buildings, sacred or secular, especially for their spiritual instruction. We are called upon to combat their objections to the authority of the Scriptures, and, if they should reach so far, to the existence of a God, with arguments old or new.

I have no doubt that the acts of mercy to which I have alluded will ultimately bless even more those who give than those who take. The blessing perhaps may come in a way that we do not expect. We may find, to our shame, that the name “heathenish” is not exclusively, or even most appropriately, to be conferred on those whom we have not had the opportunity of instructing. Heathenish does not mean irreligious; Heathens, in old times and now, have made religion a principal occupation of their lives. It means idolatrous religion; the worship of visible, or false or evil gods, the direction of the soul’s thirst to unworthy or unreal objects. The impulse to this Heathenism lies in us all; who shall say that he has not yielded to it? who shall say that he has found the habits and maxims of an artificial society—those habits and maxims by which one class is distinguished from another—any adequate protection against it? Who shall say that the Goddess of Pleasure is worshipped in St. Giles’s more than in Belgravia; the God of Money more in cellars and garrets than on the Exchange; the God of Fame more among those who can only hope to die in the ranks than among the members of professions, legal, military, ecclesiastical? If the Jew, under the name of Jehovah, worshipped Remphan and Moloch, who shall deny that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is often clothed with the attributes of these divinities by those who kneel in churches and profess to pray in His name? No; Heathenism is not the title with which to stamp a class. The more earnestly we seek to rid others of it, the more shall we know what need we have to ask the God of our Salvation that He would set us free from it.

On the other hand, we shall find, I think, that a thirst for God, even for the living God, may be dwelling very deep in the hearts of those, not only who are without what we call religious instruction and information, but who have turned from it with disgust, and have become nominally—nay, in one sense really atheists. God’s education of suffering—we must repeat this commonplace to ourselves continually, for we are continually forgetting it—is a preparation for His Gospel which is like no other; it does sweep away trust in a great many gods whom comfortable men make for themselves, or accept by tradition from their fathers; it does testify that the God who reveals Himself in suffering, Who meets men at a Cross, is the One they have need of and are thirsting for. The discovery that we have not simply and broadly enough presented such a Being to the faith of poor men; and that till we do that, the most elaborate machinery to awaken in them or keep alive in them what is called a “sense of religion,” will utterly fail to raise them out of the degradation into which they have sunk,—this I think, will be one of our great rewards, if we engage with any sincere and deliberate purpose in these experiments to evangelize them.

And I am certain that we cannot meet the most resolute and passionate atheism by any method so effectual as this. How come such epithets as these, resolute and passionate, to associate themselves with that which seems so untenable and so cold as the denial of God? You know that it was so in the most earnest, the most enthusiastic, of Roman poets. The frightful thought of gods who were tyrannizing over the race of men, who were holding down all its aspirations and hopes, made him embrace a scheme of philosophy the most uncongenial to his ardent nature, because it promised him deliverance from their yoke. He could not bear dead gods, for his heart and flesh were crying out for a Living God. He could not bear cruel and false gods, for his soul was thirsting for a God of Love and Truth. It is not altogether different now. The notion has gone forth,—it has spread further and gone deeper than we like to confess,—that the upper and middle classes of society are upholding a system of belief which is not really and heartily their own, for the sake of preserving their ascendency over their inferiors. False as the suspicion may be, you will not remove it by producing a long array of evidences, to prove that your system rests on Divine authority. You will find that all these evidences play about the surface of the mind, that there is a suppressed premiss, a secret conviction within, which they do not reach, and which would repel them, were they as logical and powerful as they often are incoherent and weak. Oh! why not say to the cities of England, as the prophets of old said to the cities of Judah, “Behold your God”? Why not answer the calumny that we worship a tyrant on the throne of heaven by saying: “This Jesus, the deliverer of captives, the opener of sight to the blind, the friend of the poor, is He in Whom we see the Father: for such a Being we know that there is an infinite thirst in your souls, because we have it in our own, and we are even such as you are”?

Yes, brethren, it must come to that; and mighty will be the recompense to the more easy and affluent members of society, if their exertions for those who are shut out from some of their advantages bring them to this conviction of a common nature and common necessities. I do not say that there is not a message to be carried to the poor, specially as poor. That message comes through the improvement of their dwellings, through all the efforts which you make that their existence may be less degrading, that they may not sink into a condition which makes a Gospel of God sound as a contradiction and an impossibility to them. Whatever you do of this kind, is surely as much a part of the manifestation of Christ to men as His own acts of healing when He was upon the earth were a part of it. But the good news concerning God Himself is only for poor men because they are men. It is brought to them, because it has been and is still the means of enabling all of us to assert and to maintain our human dignity and rights. We forfeit that dignity, we lose those rights, when any accidents of position, any of the fruits of civilization, make us forget that we belong to a race which God has claimed as His offspring; that we are citizens of His kingdom; that we must have an infinite and unquenchable thirst, till it is satisfied out of the fulness of a Living God.