Help from the Hills

’ I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.” — PSALM cxxi. 1.

MANY people seem to think that the escape from trouble is everything, without regard to the door by which escape is made; and that the finding of help in need is everything, no matter who may be the person of whom the help is sought. But really the door by which we escape from trouble is of more importance than the escape itself. There are many troubles from which it is better for a man not to escape than to escape wrongly; and there are many difficulties in which it is better to struggle and to fail than to be helped by a wrong hand. In these first words of one of the greatest psalms of David, the nobleness which we immediately feel seems to lie in this, that David will seek help only from the highest source. “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.” Nothing less than God’s help can really meet his needs. He will not peer into the valleys. He will not turn to fellow-men, to nature, to work, to pleasure, as if they had the relief he needed. “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord who hath made heaven and earth.”

How instantly we feel the greatness of a man who could write such words as those. He is great in his understanding of his own essential human greatness. Not every man is able to think so loftily of himself as to realize that in every true sorrow of his there is some thing which only God “who hath made heaven and earth” can comfort; and that in every weakness of his there is something which only God “who hath made heaven and earth” can help. This is what we mean, I think, in large part, when we so often say that trouble tests men and shows what sort of men they are. It is the time of need that lets us see what men think of themselves, how seriously they contemplate their own existence, how they estimate their need, by letting us see where they seek their help. Have you never been struck by it? One mourner in the hour of bereavement rushes into society or to Europe; another turns to self-forgetting charity and spiritual thoughtfulness. One bankrupt begins to abuse the world for prospering while he is failing; another rejoices, and finds the relief of his own misery in rejoicing, that some part of the world, at least, is better off by the action of the same forces which have ruined him. One man turns instinctively to the lowest and another to the highest, in his need; and so it is that, in their own way, our hours of need become our judgment-days.

I want to speak this morning of the duty of every man to seek help from the highest in every department of his life. I will not say only from the highest, for we shall see, I think, how the lower helps come in in their true places; but we need to be reminded that no trouble is fully met and no difficulty thoroughly mastered unless the trouble is filled with the profoundest consolation and the difficulty conquered with the greatest strength of which its nature makes it capable. It is the forgetfulness of this truth, I think, which causes a large part of the superficialness and ineffectiveness of all our lives.

For the truth rests upon another truth which we are also always ready to forget, which is that the final pur pose of all consolation and help is revelation. The reason why we are led into trouble and out again is not merely that we may value happiness the more from having lost it once and found it again, but that we may know something which we could not know except by that teaching, that we may bear upon our nature some impress which could not have been stamped except on natures just so softened to receive it. There stands your man who has been through some terrible experience and found relief. Perhaps it was a terrible sickness in which he was drawn back from the very gates of death. Perhaps it was some mighty task which the world seemed to single him out to do, to fail in which would have been ruin, and in which it seemed at one time certain that he must fail. Perhaps it was a midnight darkness that settled down over all truth, so that it seemed hopeless ever again to know anything truly of God or man. Whatever it was, the experience has come and passed. There stands your man, relieved, released, out in the sunlight on the other side of it. What do you ask of him as he stands there? Is your sense of fitness satisfied if he is only relieved, released; if he is only like a man who, after a hard fight with the waves, has got his footing once more just where he was when he was swept away? Certainly not. The human sense of fitness asks more than that. He must have seen something in the dark, or in the transition from the dark back to the light again, which pure, unclouded light could not have shown him. Into this kneaded and tortured life there must have been pressed some knowledge which the life in its best health was too hard and unsensitive to take, some knowledge which the life, restored to health, shall carry as the secret of inexhaustible happiness forth into eternity. Without these revelations the midnight and the torture would be inexplicable and hideous. But these revelations depend upon the way the soul’s eyes look for help. A man may stand in the darkness looking at the ground, and when the dawn gathers round him he will only be glad of the light, but will have no perpetual and precious memory of sunrise. This is the real reason why no release from difficulty or trouble is all that it might be to us, unless we have sought it from the highest and thank the highest for it when it comes. The eye comes out of the darkness trained by looking up. Let your self be helped by the noblest who can help you, that you may know the noblest with that intimate knowledge with which the helped knows the helper, and that the power of knowing nobleness may be awakened and developed in you.

1. But we shall understand this better and feel it more strongly if we pass at once to special applications of our truth and see it in its workings. Take first the everlasting struggle with Temptation. Every man who is more than a brute knows what it is. All men whose consciences are not entirely dead engage in it with some degree of earnestness. But how perfectly clear it is that any man who undertakes that struggle may look either to the valleys or to the hills for help, may call the lower or the higher powers to his aid. Suppose a man is wrestling with his passions. Some miserable dissipation which he never hates and despises so much as just when he is ready to yield to it, is haunting him all the time. His lust is all awake. His appetite is one day smiling and persuasive, the next day arrogant and brutal. “You must, you shall give way to me,” it seems to cry to him. But still he fights. And in his weakness he looks round for help. Where shall he find it? It seems to lie close by him, in the very structure of the body in which the lust is raging. There are the laws of health. Shall not they be his safeguard? Let him be convinced that if he gives himself the bad indulgence which he craves, he will feel the quick answer in certain pain and drag a miserable body through a wretched life to a dishonored grave. Let him know that, and will it not give him the strength for resistance that he needs? No doubt it will help him, though it will not be his highest help. Many a man is held back to-day from iniquity which his whole heart desires by the inevitable prospect of the pain, the sickness, the misery, the death, that an indulgence will incur. Indeed it seems as if some people thought that herein lay the gospel for the coming age; that just as soon as men had learned the laws of health completely, vice would be all abolished, and temperance and purity reign where the passions have so long trodden them under foot. Or take another case, and see a man tempted to dishonesty in some dealings with his fellow-men. Where shall he turn for strength to his integrity? Letjiim picture to himself the disgrace that must come if he is found out, the loss of reputation and of his fellow-men’s esteem. Let him imagine himself walking the streets a despised, avoided man, with scornful fingers pointed at the detected cheat. Such visions, such fears as those, may help him, and he may resist the temptation to fraud, and keep his integrity unsoiled. Or yet again when a man is tempted to cruelty or quarrelsomeness he may resist because he considers that, after all, the discomfort of a quarrel is greater than the satisfaction of a grudge indulged. Or one who feels the weakness of indolence creeping over him may put himself into the midst of the most active and energetic men he knows and get the contagion of their energy and be kept alive and awake by very shame. All these are perfectly legitimate helpers for the man beset by his temptation. The fear of pain, the fear of disgrace, the fear of discomfort, and the shame that comes with the loftiest companionship, — we may have to appeal to them all for support in the hours, which come so often in our lives, when we are very weak. But, after all, the appeal to these helpers is not the final cry of the soul. They are like the bits of wood that the drowning sailor clutches when he must have something at the instant or he perishes. They are not the solid shore on which at last he drops his tired feet and knows that he is safe. Or rather, perhaps, the man who trusts them is like a dweller in some valley down which a freshet pours, who drives the stakes of his imperilled tent deeper into the ground; not like one who leaves the valley altogether and escapes to the mountain where the freshet never comes. “I will

lift up mine eyes unto the hills,” says David. Not until a man has laid hold “behind and above everything else” upon the absolute assurance that the right is right and that the God of righteousness will give His strength to any feeblest will in all His universe which tries to do the right in simple unquestioning consecration; not until he has thus appealed to duty and to the dear God of whose voice she is the “stern daughter;” not till then has he summoned to his aid the final perfect help; only then has he really looked up to the hills.

I have already said that when a tried and tempted soul thus flees to God and to the absolute righteousness, he does not cast the lower helps away. Still as he looks up to the hills his eye is led there along the gradually rising ground of lower motives. The man who keeps his purity and honesty and strength because he is God’s child and must do his Father’s will, may still care for his health and his reputation and cultivate a healthy shame before his fellow-men. But these are not the king he serves. They are only, as it were, the servants who bring him the king’s orders; to be heeded and obeyed, but not for themselves but for their king who sends them.

This will seem clear enough if we remember how there come times in all the deepest lives when the ser vant has to be disobeyed in order that the obedience to the king may be complete. The preservation of health, the care for reputation, cannot be the final safeguards and citadels of purity and integrity, because there come times in which, just in order that purity may be kept, health and even life have to be cast away. Just in order that a man may still be upright he has to walk directly across his fellow-men’s standards and forfeit their regard.

But the time never conies when a man to be good has to disobey God. Therefore it is that obedience to God is the only final and infallible help of the soul in its struggle with temptation. The rest are the fortifications around the city. Sometime their destruction may be the only way to save the city which they were meant to guard; but the he&t of the city itself, the citadel where the king sits, the city cannot perish so long as that is safe; and when that falls, the city’s life is over.

I beg you, my dear friends, old men and young men, all surrounded with temptations which will not give you rest, to know and never to forget that there is no safety that is final and complete until your eye is fixed upon the highest, until it is the fear and love of God that is keeping you from sin. It is good for every man to care for his life and his reputation. Let the doctors show us more and more how every wrong we do our bodies shortens and impairs our life. Let experience teach us more and more that he who is mean and base will surely some day find himself despised. But these are not enough. The rectitude which they alone protect is not the highest rectitude. It is a selfish, calculating thing. And it is wholly possible that they may them selves become the betrayers of the rectitude which they are sent to guard; so that a man, to keep his life, may do his body wrong, and to keep his reputation may go down into the most miserable meanness. You are never wholly safe until your eye is fixed on God, and until it is because He is so awful and so dear that you will not do the sin which tempts you.

2. I pass on to speak about another of the emergencies of life in which it makes vast difference whether the soul looks to the hills for help or to the valleys. Not merely in temptation but in sorrow a man may seek the assistance of the highest, or of some other power which is far lower. What does it mean when, the blow of some great grief having fallen on a man, his friends gather round him and dwell upon the blessed relief that time will bring him? Nay, the man speaks to his own heart and says: “Let me drag on awhile and time will help me. It will not be so bad when the days have made me used to it. Let me live on and the burden will grow lighter.” As these words are often said, they are unutterably sad and dreadful. If they mean anything distinct, they mean that by and by the poor man will forget. The face he misses now will grow more dim before his memory. The sweet music of the days that he has lost will grow fainter and fainter in the distance. How terrible that comfort is. How the true soul cries out against it: “I do not want relief which comes by forgetting. I will not seek comfort in the thought that my affection is too feeble and brutish to keep its vividness forever. Let me remember forever, even though everlasting memory only means everlasting pain. You add a new pang to my sorrow when you tell me that some day I shall escape it by forgetfulness.” That is the cry of every noble soul. And no less does it break out in remonstrance when the other relief, the relief 01 distraction, is offered to it. “Come, busy yourself in some absorbing occupation, take some exacting work or some fascinating pleasure, and so your pain shall lose its hold on you.” That is only the same thing in another form. That is only offering the man escape by a side door instead of by the far off gate through which the other offer promised him that he should some day go forth into forgetfulness of his grief. No wonder that the heart, with such relief set before it, grows jealous of the proffered distraction and morbidly shuts itself in upon its sorrow and will have nothing to do with those occupations which it is told are to dissolve and melt away the pain which, with all its painfulness, still has at its heart the preciousness of love. All this is looking to the valleys and the depths for comfort. “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills,” says David. By and by the soul, vexed and distressed by its poor comforters, turns away from them. They have bid it avoid its grief, and the very horror which their advice has brought has shown the soul where its real relief must lie. It must be somewhere in the grief that the help of the grief is hidden. It must be in some discovery of the divine side of the sorrow that the consolation of the sorrow will be found. It is a wondrous change when a man stops asking of his distress, “How can I throw this off?” and asks instead, “What did God mean by sending this?” Then, he may well believe that time and work will help him. Time, with its necessary calming of the first wild surface-tumult, will let him look deeper and ever deeper into the divine purpose of the sorrow, will let its deepest and most precious meanings gradually come forth so that he may see them. Work, done in the sorrow, will bring him into ever new relations to the God in whom alone the full interpretation and relief of the sorrow lies. Time and work, not as means of escape from distress but as the hands in which distress shall be turned hither and thither that the light of God may freely play upon it; time and work so acting as servants of God, not as substitutes for God, are full of unspeakably precious ministries to the suffering soul. But the real relief, the only final comfort, is God; and He relieves the soul always in its suffering, not from its suffering; nay, he relieves the soul by its suffering, by the new knowledge and possession of Himself which could come only through that atmosphere of pain.

There are no times in life when opportunity, the chance to be and do, gathers so richly about the soul as when it has to suffer. Then everything depends on whether the man turns to the lower or the higher helps. If he resorts to mere expedients and tricks, the opportunity is lost. He comes out no richer nor greater; nay, he comes out harder, poorer, smaller for his pain. But if he turns to God, the hour of suffering is the turning hour of his life. Opportunity opens before him as the ocean opens before one who sails out of a river. Men have done the best and worst, the noblest and the basest things the world has seen, under the pressure of excessive pain. Everything depended on whether they looked to the depths or to the hills for help.

3. Again, our truth is nowhere more true than in the next region where we watch its application, the region of doubt and perplexity of mind. A man is uncertain what is true, what he ought to believe, especially about religion, the most important of all subjects, and, as he thinks sometimes, the most uncertain as it is the most important. He wants help. He wants some power to lead him into certainty. Where shall he turn? At once the lower resource presents itself on every side. He is offered authority. Close by his side starts up some man, some church, which says, “I have the truth. It; has been given to me to tell to you. Believe what I declare simply as I declare it and your doubt is gone. The trouble is all over.” It seems an easy thing to do. Nothing is stranger than the satisfied way in which men who, on every other subject, use their own minds and seek the truth by its own proper methods, here in religion only seem to ask that some one shall speak with overwhelming positiveness and they will be lieve him. Indeed here, in religion, men seem to bring forth their most wanton credulity and their most wanton scepticism. Here, in religion, is where you can find men believing without any evidence at all; and, again, disbelieving against all the evidence which the nature of the case admits. A very large part of the power of the Church of Rome to-day comes simply here, that men, bewildered and perplexed, demand an infallible authority upon religious things; and since the Church of Rome stands forth the loudest and most confident and most splendid claimant of infallibility, they give them selves to her. It is not that they have convinced them selves that she is infallible. It is rather that she alone really claims to be; and they have started with the assumption that an infallible authority they must have, and here is the only one that offers. Now of such an escape from doubt as that what shall we say? The deepest, truest thing that we can say about it is that it is not a real escape, because that into which it brings the soul is not really and properly belief. “What should we think,” says a wise writer, “of any man who knew Euclid, but only accepted the demonstrations on the authority of the book?” He who holds a truth of religion, not because he himself has found it to be true but because some trusted friend here by his side, or some great father in the ancient church, or some council which voted on it once, has told him it is true, does not really and properly hold the truth. He has no more escaped from doubt than you have escaped the rain when you have crept under some other man’s umbrella who for the moment is going your way, but who may any moment turn aside, and whose umbrella in the mean time is not big enough for two.

And, beside this, even if the condition which is reached by pure submission to authority could properly be called faith, it would still be weak by the lack of all that personal effort after truth, that struggle to be serious and fair, that athletic, patient, self-denying life which is the subjective element of faith; as true and necessary a part of the full act as is the acceptance of any most perfectly proved objective truth. No; he who looks to authority for his religion is not lifting up his eyes unto the hills. That comes only when a seeker after truth dares to be lieve that God Himself sends to every one of His chil dren the truth which that child needs; that while God uses the Bible, the church, and the experience of other souls as channels for His teaching, He Himself is always behind them all as the great teacher, and the final source of truth; that He bids each child in His family use the powers which belong distinctively to him, and apprehend truth in that special form in which the Father chooses to send it into his life. It is this directness of relationship to God, it is this appeal of the life directly to Him, it is this certainty that no authority on earth is so sacred but that every soul may — nay, that every soul must — judge of its teachings by its own God-given faculties enlightened and purified by devout consecration to God; it is this which makes the true experience of faith. What comes to the soul in such an experience is not infallible certainty on all the articles on which man craves enlightenment, but it is something better. It is an hourly communion with the Lord of truth. It is a constant anxiety to turn the truth which He has already shown into obedience, and a constant eagerness to see what new truth He may be making known. It is a thorough truthfulness. I beg you, my dear friends, not to believe, because of the supposed need of infallible certainty in all religious questions, that therefore religion is a matter of authority. There is no authority short of God. Look up to Him. Expect His teaching. And though between you and the hill-tops clouds of uncertainty may come, never let them make you turn your eyes away in discouragement, or think that on the earth you can find that guidance which is not a thing of earth but which must come to us from heaven.

4. I want to speak in very few words of only one more application of our truth. It is with reference to man’s escape from sin. There is a need of help which, when any soul has once felt it, seems to surpass all others. “What shall become of the wickedness that I have done? How shall I cast my sin away and be once more as if I had not sinned? “And then there always have stood up, there always will stand up, two answers. One answer says,” God will forgive your sin. He will remit its penalties. He will not punish you. In view of this or that persuasion every penalty of sin is lifted off and you are free.” The other answer says,” You cannot be wholly free from sin till you cease to be sinful

No taking away of penalties can free you. You must be another creature. God will give you a new heart if you will be obedient to Him. Every release from punishment has value only as it wins your grateful soul for Him who pardons you and makes you ready to receive the new heart which He has to give.” No doubt both answers have their truth. But no doubt also, the second answer promises a more divine and perfect mercy than the first. The help of transformation is a loftier benefit than the help of remission. I can picture to myself the first without the second. I can image a soul with all its penalties removed, but yet not saved. I cannot picture to myself the second without the first. I cannot imagine a soul in any region of God’s universe, turned from its wickedness and made holy by His grace and yet bearing still the spiritual penalties of the sins which it committed long ago. Therefore it is that the best spiritual ambition seeks directly holiness. It seeks pardon as a means to holiness. So it lifts its eyes up at once to the very highest hills. I wish that I could make the thoughtful men, especially the young men who are just deep in perplexity about Christianity, see this. You must not think of Christ’s redemption as a great scheme to save you from the punishment of sin. That is too negative. That is too low. It is the great opening of the celestial possibilities of man. Expect to escape, know that you can escape, from the consequences of having been wicked, only by being good. Crave the most perfect mercy. Ask for the new life as the only real release from death. So only can your religion glow with enthusiasm and open into endless hope.

In these four illustrations then I have tried to enforce the message that I wanted to bring. 0 for that spirit which is content with nothing less or lower than the highest help. To turn in temptation directly to the power of God; to cry out in sorrow for God’s company; to be satisfied in doubt with nothing short of the assurance that God gives; to know that there is no real escape from sin except in being made holy by God’s holiness, — these are what make the man’s complete salvation. I turn to Jesus, and in all His human life there seems to me nothing more divine than the instinctive and unerring way in which He always reached up to the highest, and refused to be satisfied with any lower help. In the desert the Devil offered Him bread, good wholesome bread. Apparently He could have had it if He would; but He replied, “Man shall not live by bread alone but by the word of God.” At Jacob’s well His disciples brought Him food and said, “Master, eat;” but He answered, “I have meat to eat which ye know not of. My meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me.” On the cross they held up to Him the sponge full of vinegar; but the thirst that was in Him demanded a deeper satisfaction, and He gave His soul to His Father and finished His obedient work. So it was everywhere with Him. The souls beside Him found their helps and satisfactions in the superficial things of earth. They laid hold on petty distractions, outside ceremonies, superficial assurances, and so seemed to forget their cares and questionings. He could not rest anywhere till He had found God His Father, and laid the burden which was crushing Him, into the bosom of the eternal strength and the exhaustless love,

It is your privilege and mine, as children of God, to be satisfied with no help but the help of the highest. When we are content to seek strength or comfort or truth or salvation from any hand short of God’s, we are disowning our childhood and dishonoring our Father.

It is better to be restless and unsatisfied than to find rest and satisfaction in anything lower than the highest. But we need not be restless or unsatisfied. There is a rest in expectation, a satisfaction in the assurance that the highest belongs to us though we have not reached it yet. That rest in expectation we may all have now if we believe in God and know we are His children. Every taste of Him that we have ever had becomes a prophecy of His perfect giving of Himself to us. It is as when a pool lies far up in the dry rocks, and hears the tide and knows that her refreshment and replenishing is coming. How patient she is. The other pools nearer the shore catch the sea first, and she hears them leaping and laughing, but she waits patiently. She knows the tide will not turn back till it has reached her. And by and by the blessed moment comes. The last ridge of rock is overwashed. The stream pours in; at first a trickling thread sent only at the supreme effort of the largest wave; but by and by the great sea in its fulness. It gives the waiting pool itself and she is satisfied. So it will certainly be with us if we wait for the Lord, however He delays, and refuse to let ourselves be satisfied with any supply but Him.