all, and most obviously, the appeal concerns the contents of the song. It
reminds us of the duty of making our grateful acknowledgement of God's
goodness to us expand with our growing experience of that goodness. It is,
if, one may so phrase it, a reminder to us that our praise needs bringing
up to date. A hymn considerably later in date than this psalm exhorts us to
'count' our 'blessings,' and to 'name them one by one.' This exhortation to
attempt the impossible is perhaps more worthy of being heeded than the form
in which it is presented to us might lead some to suppose. There is no
getting away from the simple fact that a man's thankfulness has a real and
proportionate relationship to the things for which he has cause to be
thankful. If in our daily life the phrase 'the goodness of God' is to have
a deepening and cumulative significance, it must be informed and vitalized
continually by an alert and responsive recognition of the forms in which
that goodness is ever freshly manifested to us. Whilst the roots of the
tree of praise lie deep beneath the surface, and wind their thousand ways
into dim places where memory itself cannot follow them, yet surely the
leaves of the tree are fresher and greener for rain that even now has left
its reviving touch upon them, and for the sunshine that is even now
stirring the life in all their veins. The figure is imperfect. We are not
trees. We do not respond automatically to all the gracious and cheering
ministries of the Eternal Goodness in our lives. We may easily overlook
many a good gift of our God. And though in our forgetfulness and
unthankfulness we profit by the sunlight and the dew and by each tender
thought of God for His creatures, yet the full and perpetual profit of all
good things is for each of us bound up with the power to see them, the
wisdom to appraise them, the mindfulness that holds them fast, and the
heart that sings out its thanksgiving for them. 'O sing unto the Lord a new
song.' Bring this day's life into the song. Bring the gift that has come to
thee this very hour into the song. Look about thee. See if there be but one
more flower springing at the path-side. See if the bud of yesterday has but
unfolded another leaf. Behold the loaf on thy table, feel the warmth of thy
hearth, yea, feel the very life within thee that woke again and stirred
itself with the morning light, and say these gifts are like unto the gifts
of yesterday, but they are not yesterday's gifts. Yesterday's bread is
broken, and yesterday's fire is dead, and yesterday's strength is spent. O
God, Thy mercies are new every morning! So shall a new song break from the
heart.
It is quite possible, in taking what we believe to be a broad view of life,
to overlook many of the things that go to make life. Too much generalizing
makes for a barren heart. The specific has a vital place in the ministry of
praise. It is true that the highest flights of praise always carry the soul
beyond any conscious reckoning with the details of its experience.
Tabulation is not the keystone of the arch of thanksgiving. But to behold
the specific goodness of God in each day's life, to review the hours and to
say to one's own soul, Thus and thus hath my God been mindful of me, is
perhaps the surest and the simplest way to deepen and vitalize the habit of
praise in our life, and to set the new notes ringing in our psalm of
thanksgiving.
But in this appeal for a new song of praise to God there is something more
than a recognition of new blessings. The new song is not merely the
response to new mercies and the tuneful celebration of recent good. If
there is to be ever a new note in the song, there must be ever a new note
in the singer's heart. And this cometh not by observation, but by
inspiration. You may change the words of the song and it may still be the
old song. You may sing the same words and it may yet be a new song. For as
is the singer, so is the song.
_O sing unto the Lord a new song._ That is a plea for a deeper and a wider
life. It is a plea that sounds the depth of the heart and takes the measure
of the soul. The new song comes not of a truer enumeration of life's
blessings, but of a truer understanding of the blessedness of life itself.
The key to such understanding is character. When by the grace of the clean
heart and the enlightened and responsive spirit a man can get beneath the
events of each day's life and commune with that eternal law of love to
which each one of those events bears some relation--or had we not better
say commune with the Eternal Father by whom that law exists?--then is his
song of praise ever new. It is something to catch a glimpse of the mercy of
God, and to think and feel as one has not thought or felt before about some
part of life's daily good. But it is vastly more to learn to interpret the
whole of life in the terms of the goodness of God. The saint sings where
the worldling sighs. And if we find in that song only the apotheosis of
courage and resignation, we have neither found the source of the song nor
the message of it. The new song comes not from the thrill of peril faced
and defied, nor from the victorious acceptance of hard and bitter things.
It comes from that deep life of the soul in God, a life beyond the threat
of peril and beyond the touch of pain. It finds its deepest and freshest
notes not in contemplating the new gains and good of any day, but in a
growing sense of the timeless gain and eternal good of every day.
And if all this be so, it surely follows that the service of praise is not
something unto which we may pass by one effort of the will or that depends
upon the stimulus of outward experience. It is conditioned rather by our
character, and by our power to see the unveiled face of life reflecting
always the light of perfect love. And it is to produce in us the right
character and the true insight that God disciplines us all our days. It is
to set a new song in our hearts. Said a professor of music at Leipzig of a
girl whom he had trained for some years and who was the pride of the
Conservatoire, 'If only some one would marry her and ill-treat her and
break her heart she would be the finest singer in Europe.' He missed
something in the song, and knew it could never come there save from the
heart of the singer. Trouble always strikes a new note in life, and often
the deepest note that is ever struck. But, be our experience joyous or
sorrowful, the true end of it must ever be to deepen our own hearts that
there may be in us ever a more catholic recognition of, and response to,
the Eternal Love.
The human soul is not a mere repository of experiences. Memory is not the
true guardian of life's treasure. That treasure is invested in character.
In the moral world we _have_ what we _are_. So we may recall that which we
have never possessed, and may possess that which we can never recall. And
it is out of that which we have _become_ by God's grace, rather than out of
that which we have received of that grace, that the new song comes.
So, as day by day we pray for the grace of new thanksgiving, we are seeking
something more than a new power to behold what good things each day brings
us, a readier way of reckoning the wealth of the passing hours. We are
seeking for a larger life in God, and for a spirit able, as it were, to
secrete from every experience its hidden meed of everlasting blessing. For
if the heart grow purer, the will stronger, the vision clearer, the
judgement truer--indeed, if there come to the soul each day some increase
of life--it shall surely find its way into living praise. And a living song
is always a new song.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Threshold Grace, by Percy C. Ainsworth