Twenty-Five Village Sermons

Twenty-Five Village Sermons, by
Charles Kingsley

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Title: Twenty-Five Village Sermons
Author: Charles Kingsley
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TWENTY-FIVE VILLAGE SERMONS ***

Transcribed by David Price, email [email protected]

TWENTY-FIVE VILLAGE SERMONS

SERMON I. GOD'S WORLD

PSALM civ. 24.
"O Lord, how manifold are Thy works! in wisdom hast Thou made
them all: the earth is full of Thy riches."
When we read such psalms as the one from which this verse is taken,
we cannot help, if we consider, feeling at once a great difference
between them and any hymns or religious poetry which is commonly
written or read in these days. The hymns which are most liked now,
and the psalms which people most willingly choose out of the Bible,
are those which speak, or seem to speak, about God's dealings with
people's own souls, while such psalms as this are overlooked. People
do not care really about psalms of this kind when they find them in the
Bible, and they do not expect or wish nowadays any one to write poetry
like them. For these psalms of which I speak praise and honour God,
not for what He has done to our souls, but for what He has done and is

doing in the world around us. This very 104th psalm, for instance,
speaks entirely about things which we hardly care or even think proper
to mention in church now. It speaks of this earth entirely, and the things
on it. Of the light, the clouds, and wind--of hills and valleys, and the
springs on the hill- sides--of wild beasts and birds--of grass and corn,
and wine and oil--of the sun and moon, night and day--the great sea, the
ships, and the fishes, and all the wonderful and nameless creatures
which people the waters--the very birds' nests in the high trees, and the
rabbits burrowing among the rocks,--nothing on the earth but this
psalm thinks it worth mentioning. And all this, which one would expect
to find only in a book of natural history, is in the Bible, in one of the
psalms, written to be sung in the temple at Jerusalem, before the throne
of the living God and His glory which used to be seen in that
temple,--inspired, as we all believe, by God's Spirit,-- God's own word,
in short: that is worth thinking of. Surely the man who wrote this must
have thought very differently about this world, with its fields and
woods, and beasts and birds, from what we think. Suppose, now, that
we had been old Jews in the temple, standing before the holy house,
and that we believed, as the Jews believed, that there was only one thin
wall and one curtain of linen between us and the glory of the living
God, that unspeakable brightness and majesty which no one could look
at for fear of instant death, except the high-priest in fear and trembling
once a- year--that inside that small holy house, He, God Almighty,
appeared visibly--God who made heaven and earth. Suppose we had
been there in the temple, and known all this, should we have liked to be
singing about beasts and birds, with God Himself close to us? We
should not have liked it--we should have been terrified, thinking
perhaps about our own sinfulness, perhaps about that wonderful
majesty which dwelt inside. We should have wished to say or sing
something spiritual, as we call it; at all events, something very different
from the 104th psalm about woods, and rivers, and dumb beasts. We do
not like the thought of such a thing: it seems almost irreverent, almost
impertinent to God to be talking of such things in His presence. Now
does this shew us