The Psalmist did not offer an impossible prayer when he said:  ’One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord and to enquire in His temple.’  Was David in ’the house of the Lord’ when he was with his sheep in the wilderness, and when he was in Saul’s palace, and when he was living with wild beasts in dens and caves of the earth, and when he was a fugitive, hunted like a partridge upon the mountains?  Was he always in the Lord’s house?  Yes!  At any rate he could be.  All that we do may be doing His will, and over a life, crowded with varying circumstances and yet simplified and made blessed by unvarying obedience, we may write, ‘This one thing I do.’

But we shall not keep this one aim clear before our eyes, unless we habituate ourselves to the contemplation of the end.  The runner, according to Paul’s vivid picture in another of his letters, forgets the things that are behind, and stretches out towards the things that are before.  And just as a man runs with his body inclining forward, and his eager hand nearer the prize than his body, and his eyesight and his heart travelling ahead of them both to grasp it, so if we want to live with the one worthy aim for ours, and to put all our effort and faith into what deserves it all—­the Christian race—­we must bring clear before us continually, or at least with the utmost frequency, the prize of our high calling, the crown of righteousness.  Then we shall run so that we may, at the last, be able to finish our course with joy, and dying to hope with all humility that there is laid up for us a crown of righteousness.

‘CONCERNING THE CROWN’

   ’They do it to obtain a corruptible crown, but
   we are incorruptible.’—­1 COR. ix. 25.

One of the most famous of the Greek athletic festivals was held close by Corinth.  Its prize was a pine-wreath from the neighbouring sacred grove.  The painful abstinence and training of ten months, and the fierce struggle of ten minutes, had for their result a twist of green leaves, that withered in a week, and a little fading fame that was worth scarcely more, and lasted scarcely longer.  The struggle and the discipline were noble; the end was contemptible.  And so it is with all lives whose aims are lower than the highest.  They are greater in the powers they put forth than in the objects they compass, and the question, ‘What is it for?’ is like a douche of cold water from the cart that lays the clouds of dust in the ways.

So, says Paul, praising the effort and contemning the prize, ’They do it to obtain a corruptible crown.’  And yet there was a soul of goodness in this evil thing.  Though these festivals were indissolubly intertwined with idolatry, and besmirched with much sensuous evil, yet he deals with them as he does with war and with slavery; points to the disguised nobility that lay beneath the hideousness, and holds up even these low things as a pattern for Christian men.