Twenty-Five Village Sermons

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Twenty-Five Village Sermons, by Charles Kingsley

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Title: Twenty-Five Village Sermons
Author: Charles Kingsley
Release Date: April, 2005 [EBook #7954] [This file was first posted on June 4, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: US-ASCII
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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 that we think about this earth, and the things in it, in a very different way from those old Jews? They thought