THE PREACHER'S STUDY
of The Everlasting Mercy. Inexpressibly moving is the long falling close of Matthew Arnold’s poem, in which—after the noise and dust of conflict, and the desolating grief of the father who unwittingly has slain his son—we are made to see the majestic river Oxus flowing on
Out of the mist and hum of that low land,
Into the frosty starlight. …
A foil’d circuitous wanderer:—till at last
The long’d-for dash of waves is heard, and wide
His luminous home of waters opens, bright
And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bath’d stars
Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea.
You have it superbly in the twenty-ninth Psalm, where whirlwind and tempest and thunder give way in the last verse to a still small voice: “The Lord will give strength unto His people; the Lord will bless His people with peace.” You have it at the end of St. Paul’s magnificent description to the Corinthians of death and the hereafter, of crashing worlds and tempest blasts, of judgment and the resurrection: suddenly comes the subduing hush—“Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the Work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.”
Let these things be your pattern. Men are not saved by declamation, nor are souls carried on the wings of peroration into the Kingdom of Heaven. Cultivate the quiet close. Let your last words of
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