'From whence cometh my help?' The loftier our ideal, the more painful
ought to be our conviction of incapacity to reach it. The Christian
man's one security is in feeling his peril, and the condition of his
strength is his acknowledgment and vivid consciousness always of his
weakness. The exile in Babylon had a dreary desert, peopled by wild Arab
tribes hostile to him, stretching between his present home and that
where he desired to be, and it would be difficult for him to get away
from the dominion that held him captive, unless by consent of the power
of whom he was the vassal. So the more the thought of the mountains of
Israel drew the Psalmist, the more there came into his mind the thought,
'How am I to be made able to reach that blessed soil?' And surely, if
_we_ saw, with anything like a worthy apprehension and vision, the
greatness of that blessedness that lies yonder for Christian souls, we
should feel far more deeply than we do the impossibility, as far as we
are concerned, of our ever reaching it. The sense of our own weakness
and the consciousness of the perils upon the path ought ever to be
present with us all.
Brethren! if, on the one hand, we have to cultivate, for a healthy,
vital Christianity, a vision of the mountains of God, on the other hand
we have to try to deepen in ourselves the wholesome sense of our own
impotence, and the conviction that the dangers on the road are far too
great for us to deal with. 'Blessed is the man that feareth always.'
'Pride goeth before destruction.' Remember the Franco-German war, and
how the French Prime Minister said that they were going into it 'with a
light heart,' and how some of the troops went out of Paris in railway
carriages labelled 'for Berlin'; and when they reached the frontier they
were doubled up and crushed in a month. Unless we, when we set ourselves
to this warfare, feel the formidableness of the enemy and recognise the
weakness of our own arms, there is nothing but defeat for us.