My God and My Country

RELIGIOUS MEDITATION

An Essay on  Psalm 104:34

Part One

By William Greenough Thayer Shedd; Edited by Doktor Riktor Von Zhades

Psalm 104:34 " My meditation of Him shall be sweet." 

There is no being with whom man stands in such close and important relations as with the invisible God, and yet there is no being with whom he finds it so difficult to have communication. The earth he can see and touch. His fellow-man he can look in the eye and speak to. But "no man hath seen God at any time." Century after century passes by, and the Highest utters no voice that is audible to the outward ear. Thousands and millions of human supplications are sent up to Him who dwells in the heavens, but the heavens are not rent, no deity comes down, and no visible sign is made. The skies are silent. The impenetrable vail between man's body and God's spirit is not withdrawn even for an instant.

As this continues to be the case generation after generation, and century after century, it is natural that those who know of nothing but an external and visible communication between themselves and their Maker should become sceptical concerning his actual existence. Like the pagan idolater, they demand a God who can be seen and handled. Like him, too, they hanker after prodigies and wonders, and desire to be put into palpable communication with the Celestial Powers. "This generation seeketh after a sign." It is not surprising, consequently, that the natural man, finding no response to his passionate and baffled attempts to penetrate the invisible and eternal by the method of the five senses, falls into unbelief, and concludes in his heart that a deity who never shows himself has no real being.

Thus the natural tendency of all men who hold no prayerful and spiritual communication with their Maker is to atheism, so long as they live in a world where he makes no external displays of his person and his presence. A time is indeed coming, when an outward vision of God will break upon them so palpable and evident that they will call upon the rocks and mountains to cover them from it; but until that time they are liable to a scepticism which often renders it difficult, even when they make some efforts to the contrary, to believe that there is a God.

But the child of God—the believing, the spiritual, the prayerful man—is delivered from this atheism. For he knows of an intercourse with his Maker, which, though unattended by signs and wonders, by palpability and tangibility for the bodily senses, is as real and convincing as anything outward or visible can be. He has experienced the forgiveness of sin, and found the disquieting remorse of his soul displaced by the peace of God in his conscience, and the love of God in his heart. He has known the doubts and fears of a sick bed to give way before God's inward assurance of mercy and acceptance. He has been in a horror of great mental darkness, and into that black void of his soul God has suddenly made a precious promise, or a comforting truth of his word, to shine out clear, distinct, and glittering, like a star shooting up into a midnight sky. He has had love, and peace, and joy, and the whole throng of devout and spiritual affections, flow in currents through his naturally hard and parched soul, at the touch of a Spirit, at the breath of a Being, not of earth or of time. And perhaps more convincing than all, he has offered up prayers and supplications, with strong crying and tears, for a strength that was not in himself but which he must get or die, for a blessing that his hungry famine struck soul must obtain or be miserable, and has been heard in that he feared. Thus the Christian's belief in the Divine existence is a vital one. In a higher sense than that of the poet, it is "felt in the blood, and felt along the heart." It is part and particle of his consciousness, waning only as his religious experience wanes, and dying only when that deathless thing shall die.