Sunday, May 31, 2015



RELIGIOUS MEDITATION
An Essay on  Psalm 104:34
Part Two
By William Greenough Thayer Shedd; Edited by Doktor Riktor Von Zhades

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

There are fluctuations in the Christian's faith and sense of God. He needs to school and train himself in this reference. God himself has appointed instrumentalities by which to keep the knowledge of himself pure, clear, and bright in the souls of his children, " until the day break and the shadows flee away;" and among them is the habit of devout reflection upon his being and attributes.

The uses of religious meditation upon God, to which we are urged by both the precept and the example of the Psalmist, may be indicated in the three following propositions:  Meditation upon God is a lofty and elevating act, because God is infinite in his being and perfections.  It is a sanctifying act, because God is holy in his nature and attributes.  It is a blessed act of the mind, because God is infinitely blessed, and communicates of his fulness of joy to all who contemplate it.

In the first place, meditation upon God is a high and elevating mental act, because of the immensity of the Object. "Behold the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee," said the awe-struck Solomon. "God is a most pure spirit, immutable, immense," says the Creed. Reflection upon that which is infinite tends of itself to enlarge and ennoble. Meditation upon that which is immense produces a lofty mood of mind. This is true even of merely material immensity. He who often looks up into the firmament, and views the great orbs that fill it, and the great movements that take place in it, will come to possess a spirit akin to this material grandeur—for the astronomical spirit is a lofty one—while he who keeps his eyes upon the ground, and looks at nothing but his little plot of earth, and his own little life with its little motions, will be apt to possess a spirit grovelling like the things he lives among, and mean like the dirt he treads upon. Says the thoughtful and moral Schiller:1 "The vision of unlimited distances and immeasurable heights, of the great ocean at his feet and the still greater ocean above him, draws man's spirit away from the narrow sphere of sense, and from the oppressive stricture of physical existence. A. grander rule of measurement is held out to him in the simple majesty of Nature, and environed by her great forms he can no longer endure a little and narrow way of thinking. Who knows how many a bright thought and heroic resolve, which the student's chamber or the academic hall never would have originated, has been started out by this lofty struggle of the soul with the great spirit of Nature; who knows whether it is not in part to be ascribed to a less frequent intercourse with the grandeur of the material world, that the mind of man in cities more readily stoops to trifles, and is crippled and weak, while the mind of the dweller

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