XXIV.

The Two Guests.

"His anger endureth but a moment, in His favour is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning."Ps. xxx. 5.

WORD or two of exposition is necessary in order to bring out the force of this verse. There is an obvious antithesis in the first part of it, between "His anger" and "His favour." Probably there is a similar antithesis between "a moment" and "life." For although the word rendered "life" does not unusually mean a lifetime, it may have that signification, and the evident intention of contrast seems to require it here. So, then, the meaning of the first part of my text is, "the anger lasts for a moment; the favour lasts for a lifetime." The perpetuity of the one and the brevity of the other are the Psalmist's thought.

Then, if we pass to the second part of the text, you will observe that there is there also a double antithesis. Weeping" is set over against "joy"; the "night" against the "morning." And the first of these two contrasts is the more striking if we observe that the word "joy" means, literally, "a joyful shout,"

so that the voice which was lifted in weeping is conceived of as now being heard in exultant praise. Then, still further, the expression may endure " literally means "come to lodge." So that Weeping and Joy are personified. Two guests come; one, dark-robed and approaching at the fitting season for such," the night." The other bright, coming with all things fresh and sunny, in the dewy morn. The guest of the night is Weeping; the guest that takes its place in the morning is Gladness.

The two clauses, then, of my text suggest substantially the same thought, and that is the persistence of joy and the transitoriness of sorrow. The one speaks of the succession of emotions in the man; the other, of the successive aspects of the Divine dealings which occasion these. The whole is a leaf out of the Psalmist's own experience. The psalm commemorates his deliverance from some affliction, probably a sickness. That is long gone past; and the tears that it caused have long since dried up. But this shout of joy of his has lasted all these centuries, and is like to be immortal. Well for us if we can read our life's story with the same cheery confidence as he did his, and have learned like him to discern what is the temporary and what the permanent element in our experience!

I.-Note, first, the proportion of joy and sorrow in an ordinary life.

The Psalmist expresses, as I have said, the same idea in both clauses. In the former the "anger" is contemplated not so much as an element in the Divine mind, as in its manifestations in the Divine dealings. I shall have a word or two, presently, to

say about the Scriptural conception of the " anger" of God, and its relation to the "favour" of God; but for the present I take the two clauses as being substantially equivalent.

. Now is it true-is it not true-that, if a man rightly regards the proportionate duration of these two diverse elements in his life, he must come to the conclusion that the one is continuous and the other is but transitory? A thunderstorm is very short when measured against the long summer day in which it crashes; and very few days have them. It must be a bad climate where half the days are rainy. If we were to take the chart and prick out upon it the line of our voyage, we should find that the spaces in which the weather was tempestuous were brief and few indeed as compared with those in which it was sunny and calm.

But, then, man looks before and after, and has the terrible gift that by anticipation and by memory he can prolong the sadness. The proportion of solid matter needed to colour the Irwell is very little in comparison with the whole of the stream. But the current carries it, and a trace of dye-stuff will stain miles of the turbid stream. Memory and anticipation beat the metal thin, and make it cover an enormous space. And the misery is that, somehow, we have better memories for sad hours than for joyful ones, and it is easier to get accustomed to "blessings," as we call them, and to lose the poignancy of their sweetness because they become familiar, than it is to apply the same process to our sorrows, and thus to take the edge off them. The rose's prickles are felt in the flesh longer than its fragrance lives in the nostrils, or its

hue in the eye. Men have long memories for their pains as compared with their remembrance of their

sorrows.

So it comes to be a piece of very homely, well-worn, and yet always needful, practical counsel to try not to magnify and prolong grief, nor to minimize and abbreviate gladness. We can make our lives, to our own thinking, very much what we will. We cannot directly regulate our emotions, but we can regulate them, because it is in our own power to determine which aspect of our life we shall by preference contemplate.

We can choose, to a large extent, what we shall conceive our lives to be; and so we can very largely modify their real character.

"There's nothing either good or bad
But thinking makes it so."

They who will can surround themselves with persistent gladness, and they who will can gather about them the thick folds of an ever-brooding and enveloping sorrow. Courage, cheerfulness, thankfulness, buoyancy, resolution, are all closely connected with a sane estimate of the relative proportions of the bright and the dark in a human life.

II.-And now consider, secondly, the inclusion of the "moment" in the "life."

I do not know that the Psalmist thought of that when he gave utterance to my text, but whether he did it or not, it is true that the "moment" spent in "anger" is a part of the "life" that is spent in the "favour." Just as within the circle of a life lies each of its moments, the same principle

of inclusion may be applied to the other contrast presented here. For as the "moment" is a part of the "life," the "anger" is a part of the love. The "favour" holds the "anger" within itself, for th true Scriptural idea of that terrible expression and terrible fact, the "wrath of God," is that it is the necessary aversion of a perfectly pure and holy love from that which does not correspond to itself. So, though sometimes the two may be set against each other, yet at bottom, and in reality, they are one, and the "anger" is but a mode in which the "favour" manifests itself. God's love is plastic, and, if thrown back upon itself, grieved and wounded and rejected, becomes the "anger" which ignorant men sometimes seem to think it contradicts There is no more antagonism between these two ideas when they are applied to God, than when they are applied to you parents in your relations to a disobedient child. You know, and your child knows, that if there were no love there would be little" anger." Neither of you suppose that an irate parent is an unloving parent. "If ye, being evil, know how," in dealing with your children, to blend wrath and love, "how much more shall your Father which is in heaven " be one and the same Father when His love manifests itself in chastisement and when it expands itself in blessings.

Thus we come to the truth that breathes uniformity and simplicity through all the various methods of the Divine hand, that howsoever He changes and reverses His dealings with us, their motive is one and the same. You may get two diametrically opposite motions out of the same machine. The same power will send one wheel