Psalms 135:3

Psalms 135:3

I. We can only understand praise when we see in it the fulfilment of at least two great lines of human emotion; the mistakes about it arc, perhaps, all traceable to an attempt to explain in terms of one or the other what is really blent of both. (1) The first of those instincts is admiration. (2) The other has no such definite single name; but assuredly this is not because it plays a small part in our nature and our life, but rather because its forms and objects are so many. I suppose that there is only one word which we can take as its generic name: the word "love;" but, however we name it, what is meant is that attraction of spirit to spirit which is tinctured, in the different forms in which we know it, with varying amounts of instinct, and conscious of choice, of passion and emotion, of duty and even of interest. It is the mightiest thing in human life.

II. Praise is a constant corrective of the earthliness which hangs about the words and even the thoughts whereby it is contained. And the praise of God is for us the expression of a perfect admiration blended with a perfect love. It is the admiration of a Being who claims all our hearts in personal devotion, while containing or being Himself all that we speak of in abstract categories as the ideals of goodness and beauty. It is the most ennobling exercise of the human spirit.

III. But questions of difficulty spring up around us. (1) Is not such an account of praise purely ideal? Is not the praise of religious people a very different thing, and one very far less noble and disinterested? (2) And, after all, is not such praise as has been described impossible for the best of reasons; viz., that there is no such object as I have described? Is the God of whose dealings we have experience in nature and in life One to evoke unmixed love and admiration? Has not our praise got to submit itself to the fatal necessity of idealising its object in order to praise Him? Does it not, therefore, conceal within itself a canker of insincerity, if not of abjectness and servility? (1) The first of these questions is the easiest to answer, because it merely touches our human infirmity. Unquestionably praise may easily be adulterated with some amount of human selfishness. But this is not the question; the question is, What is the ideal exhibited and striven for? what is the form towards which Christian praise tends in proportion as it realises itself more adequately? And about this there can be no mistake. Christian instinct and teaching has always placed praise as the highest part of worship, precisely because it has most of God and least of man, most of what is abiding and eternal and least of what is associated with the things of time, most of love and adoration and least of self. (2) Notice, next, the objection that the God of such a world as this is no fit object for our praise. Watch the history of praise. Nature carries us some way in praise, but does so only by help of some instinct which refuses to let what seem the evil, and the confusion, and the injustice in her destroy the witness borne to a good God by her beauty, and her order, and her kindly provisions, and the good that comes even of what we call her evil. Such an instinctive praise, natural in its origin and persistent against difficulties, yields one element of the praises of the Old Testament; but for its crown and justification it had to wait for a manifestation which shows God's sympathy with the dark things of life and nature, which enables us to trust God for the solution or conquest of those dark and oppressive things of which in the Cross and Passion of Jesus Christ He took upon Himself the burden and the weight.

E. S. Talbot, Oxford and Cambridge Undergraduates' Journal,Nov. 6th, 1884.