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There is something very affecting in this expression. It is emphatically repeated, at long intervals, in the Scriptures. (Psalm 39:12; 1 Chronicles 29:15; Genesis 23:4; Hebrews 11:13.) The emotion which the very phrase excites, running down from the earliest times to the present generation, shows that it refers to something permanent in human nature. 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. 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." 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 is splendours. 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 everything in the feeling that is painful or sad. By the terrors of doubt that cloud the prospect of the unspiritual, I would warn — by the satisfaction of Christian hope, I would win you, vitally to embrace the peculiarity of the Gospel, in the ties of fellowship it offers you, not only with the living and present, but with the unseen beings of another world — no longer the dim, shadowy, flitting, uncertain phantoms they were to the pagan faith — with the saints, truly worthy that name, elder and younger, in "the household of God." As the New Testament is true, this association is offered us. Death, terrifier of the world, stands back to let the light stream through his gloomy house, and reveal the holy and happy assembly. Sorrow bends aside her head, so as not to obstruct the inspiring vision. Sickness lifts from the couch her heavy eyes, to catch a glimpse of it. What refinement! What elevation! What generosity and joy! What motive and impulse! There, alive, appear to us the good departed, whom we have known here below, and those we have not known; the celebrated in the calendar, and the uncanonized, as worthy as they; those whose names stand as monumental exemplars on She page of the Bible, with names no less pure, written only in the Lamb's book of life; — and we "strangers on the earth," in these crumbling garments of clay, are invited to be fellow-citizens with them all. But there are conditions. We must give up our selfishness, and every shape of sin. We must leave behind our spiritual sloth and our sensual excess. "So live," says our subject to us, cultivate such sympathies with the departed "wise" and "good," that, when the body goes to mingle with theirs in the dust, the soul may meet theirs in the heavens, not as an alien and a stranger, but as a fellow-citizen and a friend.

(C. A. Barrel.)

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KJV: I am a stranger in the earth: hide not thy commandments from me.

WEB: I am a stranger on the earth. Don't hide your commandments from me.