Now to a pure heart and a hungry heart this is always what a mountain view effects.  ‘A hill-top,’ says a recent writer, ’is a moral as well as a physical elevation.’  He is right, or men would not have worshipped on hill-tops, nor high places have become synonymous with sacred ones.  Whether we climb them or gaze at them, the mountains produce in us that mingling of moral and physical emotion in which the temper of true worship consists.  They seclude us from trifles, and give the mind the fellowship of greatness.  They inspire patience and peace; they speak of faithfulness and guardianship.  But chiefly the mountains are sacraments of hope.  That high, steadfast line—­how it raises the spirits, and lifts the heart from care; how early it signals the day, how near it brings heaven!  To men of old its margin excited thoughts of an enchanted world beyond; its clear step between heaven and earth made easy the imagination of God descending among men.

So it is here.  At the sight of the hills our Psalmist’s hope—­instead of lying asleep in confidence of a help too far away to be vivid, or dying of starvation because that help is so long of coming—­leaps to her feet, all watch and welcome for an instant arrival. Whence cometh my help?  My help cometh from the Lord, that made heaven and earth.  This is not fancy; it is an attitude of real life.  This is not a poet with a happy phrase for his idea:  it is a sentry at his difficult post, challenging the signal, and welcoming the arrival, of that help which makes all the difference to life.

But we may widen the application of the Psalmist’s words far beyond the hills.  This is a big thing to which he lifts his eyes to feed his hope.  God is unseen; so he betakes himself to the biggest thing he can see.  And therein is a lesson which we need all across our life.  For it is just because, instead of lifting our eyes to the big things around us, we busy and engross ourselves with trifles, that the practical enthusiasm which beats through this Psalm is failing among us, and that we have so little faith in God’s readiness to act, and to act speedily, within the circle of our own experience.  Trifles, however innocent or dutiful they may be, do not move within us the fundamental pieties.  They reveal no stage worthy for God to act upon.  They give no help to the imagination to realise Him as near.  A church which never lifts her eyes above her own denominational details, petty differences in doctrine or government, petty matters of ritual and posture, cannot continue to believe in the nearness of the living God.  The strain on faith is too great to last.  The reason recoils from admitting that God can help on such battle-fields as those on which the churches are often so busy, that He can come to help such causes as the sects, neglectful of the real interests of the world, too often stoop to champion.  And so the churches insensibly get settled in far-off, abstract views of God, and are sapped of the primal and practical