of His Spirit, which is nearer us than we know.  The thing is no mystery, and not at all vague.  The mistake people make about it is to seek for it in some artificial and conventional form.  We have it travestied to-day under many forms—­under the form of throwing open the heart to excitement in an atmosphere removed from real life as far as possible:  under the form of assent to a dogma:  under the form of adherence to a church.

But do you summon up the most real things in your life—­the duty that is a disgust:  the sacrifice for others from which you shrink.  Summon up your besetting sin—­the temptation which, for all your present peace, you know will be upon you before twenty-four hours are past.  Summon up these grim realities of your life,—­and in face of them give yourself to God’s will, put your weakness into the keeping of His grace.  He is as real as they are, and the act of will by which you give yourself to Him and His Service will be as true and as solid an experience as the many acts of will by which you have so often yielded to them.

Otherwise this beautiful name, this name Shepherd, must remain to you the emptiest of metaphors:  this Psalm only a fair song instead of the indestructible experience which both Name and Psalm become to him who gives himself to God.

Men and women, who in this Christian land have grown up with this Psalm in your hearts, in all the great crises of life that are ahead shall this Psalm revisit us.  In perplexity and doubt, in temptation and sorrow, and in death, like our mother’s face shall this Psalm she put upon our lips come back to us.  Woe to us then, if we have done nothing to help us to believe it!  As when one lies sick in a foreign land, and music that is dear comes down the street and swells by him, and lifts his thoughts a little from himself, but passes over and melts into the distance, and he lies colder and more forsaken than before—­so shall it be with us and this Psalm.

But if we do give our hearts to God and His Will, if day by day of our strength we work and serve, live and suffer, with contented hearts—­then I know what we shall say when the day of our darkness and loneliness comes down, whether it be of temptation, or of responsibility, or of death itself.  In that day we shall lift our faces and say:  Yea, though I am walking in the Valley of the Shadow of Death I do fear no evil, for Thou art with me, and Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me!

III.  But some one may turn round upon all this and say:  ’It is simple, it is ideal, but the real man cannot reach it out of real life.  For he is not the mere sheep, turned easily by a touch of the staff.  He is a man:  his life is no mere search for grass, it is a being searched; it is not a following, it is a flight.  Not from the future do we shrink, even though death be there.  The past is on our track, and hunts us down.  We need more than guidance:  we need grace.’