and loves and gives Himself away.  Nothing can shake that faith, for it rests on the best instincts of our nature, and is the crown of all faithful life.  He was no hireling herdsman who wrote these verses, but one whose heart was in his work, who did justly by it, magnifying his office, and who never scamped it, else had he not dared to call his God a shepherd.  And so in every relation of our own lives.  While insincerity and unfaithfulness to duty mean nothing less than the loss of the clearness and sureness of our faith in God; duty nobly done, love to the uttermost, are witnesses to God’s love and ceaseless care, witnesses which grow more convincing every day.

The second, third and fourth verses give the details.  Each of them is taken directly from the shepherd’s custom, and applied without interpretation to the care of man’s soul by God. He maketh me lie down—­the verb is to bring the flocks to fold or couch—­on pastures of green grass—­the young fresh grass of spring-time. By waters of rest He refresheth me.[1] This last verb is difficult to render in English; the original meaning was evidently to guide the flock to drink, from which it came to have the more general force of sustaining or nourishing. My life He restoreth—­bringeth back again from death. He leadeth me in paths of righteousness for His name’s sake, not necessarily straight paths, but paths that fulfil the duty of paths and lead to somewhere, unlike most desert tracks which spring up, tempt your feet for a little, and then disappear. Yea, though I walk in a valley of deep darkness, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me.  Thy rod and Thy staff are not synonymous, for even the shepherd of to-day, though often armed with a gun, carries two instruments of wood, his great oak club, thick enough to brain a wild beast, and his staff to lean upon or to touch his sheep, while the ancient shepherd without firearms would surely still more require both. They will comfort me—­a very beautiful verb, the literal meaning of which is to help another, choked with grief or fear, to breathe freely, and give his heart air.

[Footnote 1:  The Greek reads:  epi hudatos anapauseôs exethrepse me]

These simple figures of the conduct of the soul by God are their own interpretation.  Who, from his experience, cannot read into them more than any other may help him to find?  Only on two points is a word required. Righteousness has no theological meaning.  The Psalmist, as the above exposition has stated, is thinking of such desert paths as have an end and goal, to which they faultlessly lead the traveller:  and in God’s care of man their analogy is not the experience of justification and forgiveness, but the wider assurance that he who follows the will of God walks not in vain, that in the end he arrives, for all God’s paths lead onward and lead home.  This thought is clinched with an expression which would not have the same force if righteousness