These lines may meet the eyes of some who have lost their faith, and are sorry and weary to have lost it.  Whether the blame be outside yourselves, in the littleness of many of the prevailing aspects of religious life, and the crowding of our religious arenas with the pettiest of interests, or within yourselves, in your own mean and slovenly views of life, your indolence to extricate details and discriminate the large eternal issues among them—­there is for you but one way back to faith.  Lift your eyes to the hills.  Let your attention haunt the spots where life rises most near to heaven, and your hearts will again become full of hopes and reasons for God being at work upon earth.

Let those who, still in their youth, have preserved their faith and fullness of hope, keep looking up.  Amid all the cynicism and the belittling of life, strenuously take the highest views of life.  Amid all the selfishness and impatience, which in our day consider life upon its lowest levels, and there break it up into short and selfish interests, strenuously lift your eyes and sweep with them the main outlines, summits and issues.  May no man lose sight of the hills for want of looking up, till at the last he is laid upon his back,—­and then must look up whether he has done so before or not—­and in the evening clearness and evening quiet those great outlines stand forth before his eyes—­stand forth but for a few moments and are lost for ever in the falling night.

Many men have bravely lifted their eyes to the hills, who have felt nothing come back upon them save a vague wonder and influence of purity.  They have been struck with an awe to which they could give no name, with a health and energy which they could only ascribe to physical infection.  But to this Psalmist the hope and worship which the hills excited were satisfied by the revelation of a Person.  Above earth and her hills he saw a Character.

There have been revelations of God more rich and brilliant than this one.  But its simplicity suits the Psalmist’s point of view.  He is looking to the hills.  It is on that high line he sees his Helper appearing.  Now we all know how a figure looks upon a skyline.  We see just the outline of it—­a silhouette, as it were:  no details, expression, voice nor colour, but only an attitude.  This is all the Psalmist sees of God on that high threshold against the light—­His attitude.  The attitude is that of a sentinel.  The Lord is thy Keeper—­thy watchman.  The figure is familiar in Palestine, especially where the tents of the nomads lie.  The camp or flock lies low among the tumbled hills, unable to see far, and subject, in the intricate land, to sudden surprise.  But sentinels are posted on eminences round about, erect and watchful.  This is the figure which the Psalmist sees his help assume upon the skyline to which he has lifted his eyes.