DISCOURSE XVII.

I AM A STRANGER ON THE EARTH.

Psalm cxix. 19. I AM A STRANGER ON THE EARTH.

THERE is something very affecting in this expression. You can hardly hear it without some moving of your sensibilities. In your more serious moods, you must have paused over it, and had it return to you with a stirring power. For, in truth, it comes from no superficial or accidental chord of feeling, but swells from the depths of the soul like a solemn dirge. It is emphatically repeated, at long intervals, in the Scriptures. The psalmist says again, "I am a stran- · ger with Thee and a sojourner, as all my fathers were." Once more, he speaks in the name of all the people, "We are strangers before Thee and sojourners." Abraham, ages earlier, uses the same language. The writer to the Hebrews takes up their strain of sacred antiquity, and says, "They confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth."

The emotion which the very phrase excites, running down from the earliest times to the present generation, shows that it refers to something perma

nent in human nature. Plato felt it when he tried to prove, from the nature of the soul's operations, that it was but a mysterious visitor from some pre-existent state. A modern author felt it when he described men as ships passing each other on the ocean, and hailing each other in vain for directions on the way. My friend felt it when he confessed his ignorance before this great question of our being and destiny. Very shallow must have been our experience, very lightly must we have pondered our condition, if we too have never felt it, and responded to the declaration, "I am a stranger on the earth." Very sound must have been that man's spiritual slumber who has not opened his eyes to perceive that his relations to visible objects around him, and to human creatures like himself, do not explain his whole position and being in the world; nay, that his close and endearing connections with kindred and friends do not supply all his wants, and cannot furnish for him a complete home. But to his thoughtful mind, the truth vindicates itself. He is "a stranger." No human love or sympathy, no offices of kindness or earthly respect, can fend off from him the sense of loneliness and need, or give him the feeling here of perfect familiarity and satisfaction.

Even while the fondest ties rest unbroken, the soul in every bosom, as it fully awakes, says to parent, says to husband, says to wife, and says to child, "Ye are very dear to me. God be blessed for the happy and holy bonds that unite us! But, in the so mysterious existence I pass in time, eternity behind and

before and immensity around me, I feel like a 'stranger.' Wafted hither, I know not by what wind, in some vessel of incomprehensible power, I am landed on an unknown shore. A few things I have become accustomed to, a few persons I have formed acquaintance with; but the vast universe around, obscure and shining, stretches beyond this point of my attainment into unfathomed abysses. Pleasant is life, delicious is hope, precious is affection; but my footing is insecure: 'I am a stranger on the earth.""

So is it while all our fixtures of habitual dependence stand. But, when they are smitten down, and those we leaned on, like props sinking in the flood, vanish away, then the feeling of the "stranger on earth" rises with redoubled power. Under any great disappointment or alteration of our circumstances, this alien feeling will arise, the scene around us put on a look of strangeness, and a voice be heard inwardly exhorting us, "Arise and depart, for this is not your rest." The world is beautiful and glorious it lies around us, as one has said, "like a bright sea, with boundless fluctuations." But we are not at home in it. We are lost and bewildered amid its splendors. We are unsafe amid its wasting forces. We are but little versed in its capacious stores. Our hold upon it is faint and transient. So, across the gulf of past ages, we enter into eager sympathy with those old believers who confessed that they too were strangers; and we would seek with them "a city which hath foundations."

But my object is not only to verify the feeling indicated in the text, but to show the deliverance offered us in our religion, from every thing in the feeling that is painful or sad. For it is just this state of ignorance, this sense of exposure, this unquieted search, and this strange and alien feeling of the soul, that the gospel of Christ came to meet. The Christian faith delivers us from such conscious blindness and puzzling insecurity, and defines our position. This authoritative establishment of our actual relations in the universe is the great blessing of the gospel. "In time past," says the apostle, addressing a society of Gentile converts, "ye were aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise. But, in Christ Jesus, ye who sometime were far off are made nigh. . . Now, therefore, ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow-citizens with the saints and of the household of God." Truly not alone to the ancient Gentile or believing Jewish soul did Christ offer this union and rest, but to every solitary, weary wanderer, child of Adam, whom his voice can reach. What an unspeakable gift! Strangers and foreigners have often purchased to themselves, for a great price, the freedom of earthly cities in which they sojourned, or been rewarded with it, in the decoration of golden emblems, for high achievements of heroism and goodness. But the freedom of the city of God, granted through symbols more costly than emblems of jewels and gold, the freedom of the universe, the freedom certified to us of an everlasting progress in

virtue and social blessedness, which no change can interrupt, is bestowed by Jesus Christ. Here is the great point and peculiarity of our religion. This lies not simply in its revelation of the fatherhood of God, and the brotherhood of men, glorious, inspiring, and fruitful doctrines as these are. Still less does it lie in any theory about human nature, or sin, or salvation. It is to be found rather in the assured direction our religion gives to the long-questioning, searching, doubting faculties of the human mind; and in the clear, broad aim with which it raises the affections of the human heart, so long feeling after, if haply they might find their fate, and too often sadly, in their darkness, groping around the gravestone and the narrow house as the last distinct objects in their doom. In short, it is in the home among eternal realities provided for the spirit that is in man, and "a stranger on the earth!"

I trust I do not open a vein of sentiment remote from any of you, or point to a source of relief for merely fictitious necessities. Have you never, in your meditation, in your adversity, in your grief, in your satiety, in your uneasy longing, had the experience? As you have finished the ever-recurring routine of the day's labor, while you listened to the monotonous cries of business, or as you heard the sounds of evening gaiety, have you never become aware, that your soul was very much a stranger among these things; that it had "faculties " which could not be "used" upon them, and needed to abide in some higher objects, before it could be truly