Compared with other experiences of God, this outline of Him may seem bare.  Yet if we feel the fact of it with freshness of heart and imagination, what may it not do for us?  Life may be hallowed by no thought more powerfully than by this, that it is watched:  nor peace secured by any stronger trust than that the Almighty assumes responsibility for it; nor has work ever been inspired by keener sense of honour than when we feel that God gives us freedom and safety for it.  These are the fundamental pieties of the soul; and no elaborateness of doctrine can compensate for the loss of fresh convictions of their truth.

The Lord is thy Keeper.  If men had only not left this article out of their creeds when they added all the rest, how changed the religious life of to-day would have been!—­how simple, how strenuous, how possibly heroic!

The Lord is thy Keeper.  What sense of proportion and what tact does the thought of those sleepless thoughts bring upon our life!  How quickly it restores the instinct to discriminate between what is essential and what is not essential in faith and morals; that instinct, from the loss of which the religious world of to-day suffers so much.  How hard does it make us with ourselves that His eyes are on us, yet how hopeful that He counts us worth protecting!  When we realise, that not only many of the primal forces of character, but its true balance and proportion, are thus due to so simple a faith in God, we understand the insistence laid upon this by the prophets and by Christ.  There is no truth which the prophets press more steadily upon Israel than that all their national life lies in the sight and on the care of God.  The burden of many prophetic orations is no more than this—­you are defended, you are understood, you are watched, by God.  And in the Sermon on the Mount, and in that address to the disciples now given in the tenth of Matthew, there is no message more clear or frequent than that God cares for us, has to be reckoned with by all our enemies, is aware of everything that befalls us, and while He relieves us from responsibility in the things that are too great for us, makes us the more to feel our responsibility for things within our power—­in short, that the Lord is our Keeper.

Of course we shall be able to realise this, according as we realise life.  If we have a heart for the magnitudes of life, it will not seem vain to believe that God Himself should guard it.

If we keep looking to the hills, God shall be very clear upon them as our Keeper.

But this distant view of God upon the skyline, full as it is of discipline and of peace, does not satisfy the Psalmist.  To him the Lord is not only Israel’s Keeper or Sentinel, but the Lord is also thy shade on thy right hand:  the sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night. The origin of these expressions is vague, but their application here is vivid enough.  A sentinel is too far away, and is, physically, too narrow a figure to fulfil man’s imagination of God.  The Psalmist requires something near enough to express both intimacy and shelter.  So he calls God the Comrade as well as the Sentinel of His people; their Champion as well as their Watchman.  The shade upon thy right hand is of course the shade upon the fighting or working arm, to preserve it from exposure, and in the full freedom of its power.