The Joyousness of Piety

“As long as she lay desolate she kept Sabbath.”

2 Chron. xxxvi. 21.

IS religion, then, so unfavourable to cheerfulness? Are the Sabbaths of the Lord such miserable days that we can only keep them when we are desolate? The idea is exactly the reverse; it is that we come to value God’s happy Sabbaths when we ourselves are miserable. The desolateness comes not from God, but from the world. The desolateness is not the preparation for the Sabbath; it is the contrast to the Sabbath. Men flee to the Sabbath to avoid the desolation. We sometimes say, “As long as the rain fell they kept under shelter.” The rain is not the preparation for the shelter; it is the contrast to it; the shelter supplies a want which the rain creates. The worship of God does not propose to make me miserable; it proposes to cure my misery. Men have spoken of religion as a state of asceticism,

of individual loneliness. It is entirely the opposite; the 2uorld is a state of individual loneliness; we fly to God that our solitude may be broken. The burden of this world is its isolation of human souls; men are not properly united. There is a desolateness in purely secular life. We are not social enough, not comrades enough. There is as big a gulf between each of us as between Dives and Lazarus. There are times when we realise this, and then we cry aloud — cry aloud for the communion of Christ, for the voices of the great multitude, for the noise of many waters, for the breaking of solitude by the general assembly of the first-born. And the prayer we breathe is the prayer for a larger world.

Lord, take us out of the desert — out of the desolate places! We are too much alone here. It is not the happiness of earth that makes it unfit for us; it is its zf;ihappiness. This world is not our rest — not our Sabbath. It fails to be our rest because it is not sufficiently a world. It is too lonely, too devoid of human cheer. We want more gaiety, more company, more interchange of thought, more genuine social joy. That is why we come to Thy world, O Christ. It is because in Thy Father’s house we hear the sound of music and the tread of dancing. It is because in Thy hall of banqueting we see a table spread for guests innumerable. It is because, from within Thy courts, we catch the strains of melody — the songs of voices redeemed from selfishness. It is because in the streets of the New Jerusalem ‘’ the boys and girls play.” It is because the very hired servants of Thy Father have bread and to spare. Train us for Thy joy! Prepare us for Thy feast! Ripen us for Thy year of jubilee! Let us feel our want on earth that we may protest; let us learn our famine that we may clamour; let us experience our chain that we may struggle to be free! It will be worth while to be led into the desert of Sinai if in the stillness of its lonely hours we shall hear the Sabbath bells of Canaan.