THE SONG AND THE SOIL.

Psalm CXXXVII.

This cry "How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" came from the deep places of the human soul; it was wrung out of the hearts of men who were in great pain; it comes as an apology for solemn silence and tells the story of a lost song. In an exposition our first duty is to revert to the original and restore to the text the personal name of Israel's God. "How can we sing Jehovah's song in a foreign land?" Why is this necessary? Because, on account of the present translation, the question loses its keen edge; the historical reference so necessary to a true understanding of this particular passage is largely hidden. To us, "Lord" means the eternal and ever present God, the ruler of the universe in the fullest sense. The song of this God can be sung in any land and at all times; it is now a question of religion in the personal sense and not of geography, a matter of the spirit and not of the soil.

"Where'er they seek Thee Thou art found

And every place is hallowed ground."1

These beautiful words are commonplace to us, that is they express a theory of God and worship that we have come to regard as self-evident But that only shows that one of our religious needs is a quickening of the historical imagination, so that we may realise how much toil of brain and pain of heart the saints in the past have had to endure that this great inheritance might be ours. This is a much larger question than it seems to be when we are looking merely on the surface; it is not simply that a few obscure people by the rivers of Babylon find that tearful silence, not joyful song, suits the mood of that particular hour. When we translate the pathetic cry into the larger language for which it craves it means: Can our religion take root in this foreign soil; can we truly worship the God of Israel in this strange land that is under the sway of arrogant magnificent idols? Thus stated, the question is seen to be of more than personal or parochial significance. Already there comes to us a suggestion that we have a concern in it; that these men are wrestling with a problem that relates to the life of humanity.

1. The Commonplaces of Life.

One keen critic has made the remark that the Psalter is, on the whole, a commonplace book.2 We, because of our intense reverence for this noble collection of sacred songs, are apt to resent the statement as manifesting a cold, cynical spirit of criticism. But, rightly taken, taken no doubt in the spirit in which it was meant, there is a fine suggestiveness in it. As a matter of fact, the greatness of the Psalter consists rather in its spiritual quality than in its literary character. It contains, even from this point of view, great poems: the twenty-third, forty-second, fifty-first, seventy-third, and many; more with their plaintive confession of sin and piercing cries for help. Some of the Pilgrim Psalms are real gems, remarkable for their many-sided beauty, a beauty that shines the more clearly because the light is condensed into small space. The less passionate hymns and the calm reviews of history have a fine, liturgical quality. All this is true, but it is also true that if in the Old Testament we would seek the grand style, glorious rhetoric, gorgeous imagery, organ-like music, passionate poetry, we must turn to Job and Isaiah rather than to the Psalter. But the common is not necessarily the commonplace in a poor sense. Many of the psalms deal in simple language, in plain, poetic parallelism, with the daily joys and sorrows, the common hopes and fears, of struggling men. While we find in the New Testament3 one clear quotation from the great dramatic poem that wrestles so fiercely with the problem of suffering, the writings of evangelists and apostles are saturated with the thoughts and language of this great book of praise. A book that has so mightily influenced the public worship and private devotion of Judaism and Christendom does not depend for its reputation or its power upon our literary appreciation; fearless criticism cannot harm it but may help us to come nearer to its heart; of it, as a whole, we may say that it lifts our common affections and needs into the light of that divine presence from which there streams the healing rays of mercy and forgiveness.

Another careful scholar4 has said that, after the period of silence, when the harp was taken down from the willow, the first note was a discord. We all know what that means. We have read the psalm in a spirit of sympathy, we have been deeply moved by its pathetic cry, and then, as we come to the close, we shivered as this jarring note struck our souls —

"O daughter of Babylon, that art to be destroyed;

Happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee

     As thou hast served us.

Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little

     ones against the rock."

It is not that we do not ourselves cry to Heaven against cruel oppression; it is not that we do not feel bitter resentment against wrong; it is not that we ourselves have grown quite out of sympathy with natural revenge. That which causes the shock is that we realise so keenly, especially when the words are read in the calmness of the sanctuary, the sharp contrast with the Christian ideal. We think at the same time of Him Who, on the cross, prayed for His enemies, and we acknowledge that vengeance belongeth unto the Lord.

In music and in life the discord has its uses, and here it reminds us that the poem is not a mere literary creation, that it is the expression of real passion, suffused with agonised feeling, stained with blood and tears. War must always be a cruel thing; if ever a necessity, then a hateful necessity. The feature of it suggested here, that the lives of the weak and innocent were with ruthless cruelty sacrificed in cold blood, belongs to the conduct of war in ancient times as well as in days not so very remote from our own. The Hebrew patriot invoked against his powerful foe "the law of like"; he prayed that the horrors that had come upon his country and his friends might, in God's providence, fall upon the proud enemy. Now it is our duty as Christian disciples to purge our hearts from hatred, and leave vengeance to public justice and to the God of heaven. But we are not called to judge severely those who stand at an earlier stage and who express the elemental passions in a less disciplined form. The varied moods of men represented in our Bible are interesting and instructive to us, but they do not express an absolute infallible standard; it is when we see the great differences in tone and temper at different periods of the history that we understand the phrase "progressive revelation" not as a mere dogma, but as a fact of life.

2. The Exile.

The exile, so fateful in the history of the Hebrew people and their religion, and through it in the life of humanity, was, in a sense, only one of the cruel incidents of ancient warfare. The Israelites of the Northern kingdom had, in the eighth century B.C., suffered a similar experience. After the fall of Samaria, many of them had been deported and settled in various regions of the Assyrian empire; they were "lost" in that they were scattered and had not attained to sufficient distinctness of religious character to maintain their separate life. The Jews who were carried away to Babylon before and at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem, were able to form colonies in the new land, and had, through the teaching of the prophets and the discipline of the Law, already achieved a more definite character. The temple was destroyed, the land was laid desolate, but the religion could not be killed. The broken-hearted patriots faced the question that is raised in the text, "Can the religion live in the new conditions, apart from the land that was its original home and without the temple that was the scene and centre of its worship?" At the time it might seem, to the superficial observer, to concern merely the fate of a small, obscure sect; seen in the larger light of history it is a problem of the widest human interest. These people, in different groups, had been driven across the dreary desert to a foreign land, a land, in most respects, opposite in character to their own. Palestine was a small land, a land of hills and dales, a land that with its simple beauty and historic associations took a firm grip of the patriotic heart Babylon was a great land, wonderful in its own way, spacious and splendid, but much more of a man-made land, with its artificial irrigation and its marvellous buildings. There was something overpowering in the vastness of this empire, in its population, its political organisation, and military equipment. Here was religion bewildering in its variety and magnificence, with many gods, immense temples, highly - trained priests and scribes; in fact, the Jews, bereft of their own national sanctuary, were suddenly flung face to face with a mighty empire and a great religion, both resting on centuries of ancient civilisation and culture.

Little wonder that the question was both persistent and oppressive, "How can we sing Jehovah's song in a foreign land; in a land that belongs to other gods and where our religion, so beautiful in its own home, seems to be an alien, helpless thing?" The magnificent declaration of "Deutero-Isaiah," that these great empires crumble to pieces while the word of Israel's God abides for ever was the utterance of a triumphant faith.5 Our psalm, on the other hand, brings to us the restless fear and tormenting anxiety of the doubt and despondency that consumed the strength of the common man.

And yet enlargement came through affliction. Out of this crisis arose a new church, not absolutely new, for no great thing is a mere novelty. The living truth or the institution that meets new needs is always true to the great past The exile does mark a new epoch but it is not an absolute beginning. It threw the true believers more completely on those things of the past that could be preserved and revivified; they learned to understand their own literature and life.

The Jew became a student; in a more special way, the book and the regular meeting for fellowship took the place of the elaborate ritual and the sanctity of the temple. Thus he prepared the way for a simple worship that could be carried into all lands. He became also a missionary because, wherever he went, he must carry his religion with him, and as it was, in so many respects, a noble religion, it made its appeal to receptive souls. In many ways then, here was a severance from merely local elements and an emergence of universal features. Jerusalem must remain the centre of the religion and the ideal city of God; the songs must still be "songs of Zion," but they gained a more than national quality; spiritual feeling tended to break down sectarian barriers.. So when we throw the light of history upon this question, our sympathy for the perplexed patriots is kindled as we remember that in the confusion of their disappointment they could not see the full scope of their own inquiry and the largeness of God's answer.

Another gain was revelation through experience. How do men learn such a great truth as this, a truth so alien to crude, primitive thought, that the true sacrifice is the broken heart and contrite spirit?6 Not by dictation from prophet or priest, nor even by verbal statement from heaven, but by actual experience, sanctified by the guidance of God's spirit. We have to learn it in this way to-day though it has been written in the book and nobly expounded. It was when the temple was lost that men learned its limitation as well as its true glory. It was not wrought out in speculative theory but in the hard facts of a painful discipline that Jehovah's songs, the songs of Zion, could be sung in a foreign land. Thus the presence of Jehovah everywhere was proved and the borders of Zion were enlarged. This could not come to perfection all at once; even our "monotheism" is still limited in practice, though in thought it has attained to universal significance. To do justice to the actual facts we must use the great watchwords of different ages and speak of evolution through election, and revelation through life. These all find their expression in literature, most of all in this sacred literature which tells the story of man's pilgrimage toward the heavenly city, the home of truth.

3. The Lost Song.

What becomes of a song when you cannot sing it? That depends surely upon the character of the song. If it is a shallow jingle, a song of the earth and of the hour, it dies upon your lips in the face of a great sorrow and disappears for ever. If it is of God and eternity it passes through silence to a larger life. Let us not be afraid of silence, it has its part to play as well as speech. When you cannot sing the song you can think upon its meaning and it may strike more deeply into your heart. We can read of men, like Robertson of Brighton,7 who, at a particular period of their career, lost their theology though their religion did not die. To such men the hour of silence was fruitful, they fought their doubts, they gathered strength, they did not make their judgment blind. A larger, richer theology was born of a deeper experience. The expression of this renewed life might seem to the narrow ritualist or hard legalist to be "heretical," but to the great outside world it carried a wealth of inspiration and blessing. Thus the lost song has ever passed through silence to a larger life. The cry "How can we sing Jehovah's song in a strange land?" tells us of the growing pains of the Hebrew religion, it shows us the struggle through which it passed from a small local scene to the forefront of the world's great stage. If Judaism never became completely universal, it gained something of a world-wide spirit. Even those who would fain have kept the music of the song to themselves, when they learned to sing it in a foreign land, rendered a service to humanity and prepared the way for a fuller emancipation and enfranchisement of religion and the soul.

And the music of this song ought to be heard in everything. Our foreign lands are not all a matter of geography. The Church has carried the gospel into every land and translated the Bible into every tongue; but can we say we have no strange lands, no provinces of life, that are still to be won for God? We know well that to-day there must be an historical development, an extension of God's power into every corner of the soul and every sphere of human life.

Sorrow, in all its forms, is still to us a foreign land although it is the common lot of mortals. We have each to face it and find God in it. When it comes upon us suddenly and with great force we cry, "I was dumb, I opened not my mouth because thou didst it."8 When we have looked into the face of some great disappointment that has dislocated all our plans and brought confusion into our life, we have asked the pertinent question, "How can I be expected to sing the Lord's song in this strange land?" Our silence m ay grow sullen and our hearts become bitter under the pressure of pain, but if we come out of our sad experience with a stronger faith, then our joy is purer and richer.

Politics seem to many people to be a foreign land where strict honesty and noble sentiment can scarcely be at home. Some have, in a cynical mood, maintained that we cannot in this region hold the same standard of truth and kindness that we expect in the home and the church. This is a wretched dualism, we can only have two standards if we have two gods. One of these gods is likely to be a devil, a patron of false compromise and corrupt greed. The true patriots are those who are endeavouring to sing the Lord's song in this land, a song of goodwill and helpfulness to those who are in need.

Still less does it seem possible to apply Christian principles to all our relations with men of different blood and language. They are our rivals in commerce and may be our enemies in war; we must watch them keenly and be ready, at any moment, to meet them in fierce strife. If this is true then we must confess that we have not yet solved the problem that faced the patriots in Babylon. There are whole tracts of human life that are in the sway of strange gods and that do not yet acknowledge the Prince of Peace. In all lands, and in all churches, Christian men need to meditate upon this ancient question and find that there is still a deep suggestiveness in the words, "How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" We cannot be content, and the spirit of our religion cannot be fulfilled, until in all spheres of life and in all regions of the world the actual rule of the Christ is accepted, and we can say in the largest sense, "On His head are many crowns."9

1 Cowper.

2 Duhm.

3 Job v. 13; 1 Cor. iii. 19. Of course there are many general similarities of thought and expression, as Job iv. 8; Gal vi. 7, 8, etc.

4 Baethgen.

5 Isa. xl. 8.

6 Ps. li. 17.

7 See Life of F. W. Robertson, by Stopford Brooke.

8 Ps. xxxix. 9.

9 Rev. xix. 12.