Sparrows and swallows have very small brains. They build their nests,
and they do not know whose altars they are flitting around. They pursue
the insects on the wing, and they twitter their little songs; and they
do not understand how all their busy, glancing, brief, trivial life is
being lived beneath the shadow of the cherubim, and all but in the
presence of the veiled God of the Shekinah.
There are too many people who live like that. We are all tempted to
build our nests where we may lay our young, or dispose of ourselves or
our treasures in the very sanctuary of God, with blind, crass
indifference to the Presence in which we move. The Father's house has
many mansions, and wherever we go we are in God's Temple. Alas! some of
us have no more sense of the sanctities around us, and no more
consciousness of the divine Eye that looks down upon us, than if we were
so many feathered sparrows flitting about the altar.
Let us take care, brethren! that we give our hearts to be influenced,
and awed, and ennobled, and tranquillised by the sense of ever more
being in the house of the Lord. Let us see to it that we keep in that
house by continual aspiration, cherishing in our hearts the ways that
lead to it; and so making all life worship, and every place what the
pilgrim found the stone of Bethel to be, a house of God and a gate of
heaven. For everywhere, to the eye that sees the things that are, and
not only the things that seem--and to the heart that feels the unseen
presence of the One Reality, God Himself--all places are temples, and
all work may be beholding His beauty and inquiring in His sanctuary; and
everywhere, though our heads rest upon a stone, and there be night and
solitude around us, and doubt and darkness in front of us, and danger
and terror behind us, and weakness within us, as was the case with
Jacob, there will be the ladder with its foot at our side and its top in
the heavens; and above the top of it His face, which when we see it look
down upon us, makes all places and circumstances good and sweet.