To be near unto God - pagina 611

great anxiety, or want in which we almost perished, impelled us to seek aid and comfort with God in his holy nearness. The paths by which the heart comes to God wind themselves through And however often they all the parts of our life. are abandoned, these paths every time disclose themselves anew. But in all this there is no play of sacred ardor. In such moments if left to itself the heart would rather not incline toward God. And it is either an inward necessity or a stimulus from without, that drives the half-unwilling and self-suflBcient heart to God. But in this Psalm the heart drives itself. Irresistible longing after the living God arises not from without, but from within the heart itself. It is not from an accidental circumstance, not from a cause which operates from elsewhere, not from the promptings of conscience, not from urgency of need, neither from prudence nor calculation, but from the new nature itself, from the regenerated nature of the heart, that the longing after God, the sense of inability to do without God, the impetuous hastening after the living God,

some

springs.

Even Augustin's exclamation:

"My

heart

rests in thee," pales before this fervor. For here it is thirsting. Here it is thirsting after the living God, even as a man or a brute,

is restless,

till

it

whose blood through exhaustion is dried up, not merely calls for moisture, but cries out aloud for the same, as far as the parched palate and husky throat still allow this to be done with audible sound. The figure is borrowed from the animalworld, where mention is impossible of a moment's pious purport or intentional callthe hart, which exhausted and dis-

consideration, ing.

From

607

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