Now it is never ideas about God, nor even aspirations after Him, which in the real battle of life keep us fresh and unexhausted.  Ideas, and even aspirations, strain as much as they lift.  They give the mind its direction, but by themselves they cannot carry it all the way.  Nor is the influence of a Personality sufficient if that Personality remain far off.  Reverence alone never saved any human soul in the storm of life.  It is One by our side Whom we need.  It is by the sense of trust, of sympathy, of comradeship, of fighting together in the ranks, that our strength is thrilled and our right hand preserved in freshness.  Without all this between us and bare heaven, we must in the end weary and wither.

Twofold is the experience in which we especially need such compassion and fellowship—­in the time of responsibility and in the time of temptation.  These are the two great Lonelinesses of life—­the Loneliness of the Height and the Loneliness of the Deep—­in which the heart needs to be sure of more than being remembered and watched.  The Loneliness of the Height, when God has led us to the duty of a great decision, or given us the charge of other lives, or sent us on the quest of some truth, or lifted us to a vision and ideal.  The king, the father, the thinker, the artist, all know this loneliness of the height, which no human fellow can share, no human heart fully sympathise with.  Then it is that, with another Psalmist, the heart, exposed to the bare heaven, cries out for something higher than itself to come between the heaven and it:  What time my heart is overwhelmed do Thou lead me unto the rock that is higher than I; and God answers us by being Himself a shade upon the right hand, and the sun shall not smite by day, nor the moon by night.  And there is the Loneliness of the Deep, when we are plunged into the pit of our hearts to fight with terrible temptations—­a conflict no other man knows about or can help us in.  Shall God, Who sees us fighting there, and falling under the sense of our helplessness, leave us to fight alone?  The Lord is thy shade on thy right hand; thy Comrade, fighting with thee, His presence shall keep thy heart brave and thine arm fresh.  It is a truth enforced through the whole of the Old Testament.  God is not a God far away.  He descends, He comes to our side:  He battles for and suffers with His own.

These then are the main thoughts of this Psalm.  What new authority and vividness have Jesus Christ and His Cross put into them?  There are few of the Psalms which the early Christians more frequently employed of Christ.  On the lintel of an ancient house in Hauran I once read the inscription:  ’O Jesus Christ, be the shelter and defence of the home and of the whole family, and bless their incoming and outgoing.’  How may we also sing this Psalm of Christ?  By remembering the new pledges He has given us, that God’s thoughts and God’s heart are with us.  By remembering the infinite degree, which the Cross has revealed,