Another lesson taught by the swallow is that _liberty is not license_.
Freedom to wander from land to land does not mean freedom from all
control. Our text speaks of the law of its migration. Like the stork,
the crane, or the turtle dove, the swallow knows the time of its coming.
In France it is spoken of as "the Jew," because of its wandering habits;
and in the science of heraldry it was used as a crest by the crusader
pilgrims to symbolise the fact that they too were strangers in a strange
land. But to the swallow no land is strange. The whole earth is its
fatherland. And while it _does_ wander to and fro over land and sea, it
always observes its appointed seasons. All its wandering is guided by a
purpose. Its freedom is regulated by unfailing instinct. It may speed
its flight to far distant climes, but it comes back to the same nest.
This is the law of its migration; and in obedience to it, the swallows
appear in April and disappear in October with all the regularity of the
seasons or the ebb and flow of the tide. The cause is there, and the
effect follows. The bird of freedom is a slave to its own higher
destiny.
And so ought we. Freedom to wander is not so great a boon as obedience
to a higher, diviner law. Like the needle trembling to the pole, or the
swallow returning to the same old nest, our hearts ought to hark back to
the sacredness of home and to the God and faith of our fathers. "There
is an instinct in the new-born babes of Christ, like the instinct that
leads birds to build their nests" (Rutherford). And this instinct, like
the law of migration, makes us the children of _obedience_. There is no
license in the liberty of Christ. We are only free to _serve_.
III.--IT IS THE BIRD THAT BUILDS
ITS NEST IN GOD'S TEMPLE.
"Yea, the sparrow hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for
herself, where she may lay her young, even Thine altars" (Ps. lxxxiv.
3).
Swallows sometimes build their nests in the most extraordinary
places--on a picture frame, on a lamp-bracket, on a door-knocker, in a
table-drawer, and between the handles of a pair of shears hung on the
wall. James Gilmour, in his missionary travels through Mongolia, found
that they actually entered his tent and built their nests within reach
of his hand. And so fully do the little birds confide in man's
protection, that they will even take up their abode in his places of
worship. The heathen temples, the Mohammedan mosques, and the Christian
churches are all inhabited by the swallow, and here, in the
eighty-fourth Psalm, it is spoken of as having sought and found a home
in the courts of the Jewish temple.
The Psalmist, detained at home, envied the little birds that built their
nests under the eaves of the priests' houses, and thought of the very
sparrows that were allowed to pick up the crumbs in the temple courts.
It reminds us of Samuel Rutherford when a prisoner in Aberdeen. He
often looked back to his country church and manse near the shore of the
Solway Firth, and sighed, "I am for the present thinking the sparrows
and swallows that build their nests at Anwoth blessed birds." These
men, as Spurgeon would say, "needed no clatter of bells" to bring them
to church; they carried a bell in their own bosoms; holy appetite is a
better call to worship than a full chime.
And the lesson is for the young people no less than for their parents.
For the Psalmist adds that the nest of the swallow was for "her young."
The swallow reared her young brood in the temple courts. And this is
the duty and privilege of all Christian parents. The house of God may
be a nest for their little ones. How beautiful to see parents and
children coming Sabbath by Sabbath to the same family pew! In
after-years will not these little ones find their way back to the same
old nest? Yes, "train up a child in the way he should go, and even when
he is old he will not depart from it." Or if, perchance, they are
called upon to suffer, and are not able, like the Psalmist, to come to
God's house, the spirit will still be willing though the flesh be weak,
and they will sit and sing like another great sufferer--
"A little bird I am,
Shut from the fields of air,
And in my cage I sit and sing
To Him who placed me there,
Well pleased a prisoner to be,
Because, O God, it pleaseth thee.
"Nought else have I to do,
I sing the whole day long,
And He whom most I love to please,
Doth listen to my song.
He caught and bound my wandering wing,
But still He bends to hear me sing."
*The Spider.*
"The hypocrite's hope shall perish, ... whose trust shall be a spider's
web."--Job viii. 13, 14.
What is hypocrisy? It is a bird of evil omen that builds its nest on
the tree of religion. It is a kind of homage that vice pays to virtue.
Were there no virtue there would be no need to simulate it. Every act
of hypocrisy is a tacit acknowledgment of its greatness. O Virtue! how
great thou art, when even the bad and the vile are constrained to do
thee homage! No one becomes a hypocrite when he pretends to be
different from what he is, but when he pretends to be _better_ than he
is. In spite of himself he is paying a high tribute to thy greatness
and goodness!
The attempt to conceal the evil heart, however, shall not always be
successful. "The day is coming when hypocrites will be stripped of their
fig-leaves" (Matthew Henry). Their trust shall be as frail as a
_spider's web_. Could any language be more expressive? In Eastern
lands the flimsiness of the spider's web is proverbial. "He shall lean
upon his house (on that light _gossamer_), but it shall not stand: he
shall hold fast thereby, but it shall not endure." The material is so
frail, that the least violence destroys it; and the hypocrite's hope is
so flimsy, that it shall not stand in the judgment. "They weave the
spider's web, but their webs shall not become garments, neither shall
they cover themselves with their works" (Isa. lix. 6).
But turning to the spider itself, we may learn various lessons.