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There is scarcely in the Psalter a more touching psalm than this. The writer is probably an exile of the early Assyrian period. He thinks of the blessed past when he worshipped in the Temple, and had his share in "the voice of joy and praise." But now the cruel heathen taunt him with the insulting question, "Where is thy God?" Hence, he yearns for the presence of God. He is like the thirsty stag panting after the distant water brooks; his inmost being is "athirst for God; yea, even for the living God." What a strange phrase, the living God. It points to deities who are not alive. The Hebrews thus distinguish the true God from the false gods of the heathen (Psalm 96:5). Heathenism, according to Scripture, is a lie, and the psalmist's soul thirsted for the living God. And still the soul of man is restless for God. Again and again the human heart has protested against all endeavours to crush the noblest of its aspirations. It wants net pleasures which may degrade, nor philosophies which may disappoint, but "the living God." And now let us see how this thirst has been dealt with by the great speculative systems which more particularly challenge attention in the present day. And —

I. MATERIALISM. This stands high in the world of thought. It bids us believe only what we can see and smell and taste and touch. It does not concern itself with the origin of the universe, "if it ever had one," or with what happens to living beings after death. Chemistry can account for all things. Man's intelligence is as the mass of his brain: this thought is "but the expression of molecular changes in the physical matter of his life, and is impossible without phosphorus; his consciousness is only a property of matter: his virtue, the result of a current of electricity, and it and vice are "products in the same sense as are sugar and vitriol." Science, it is said, does not need such an hypothesis as God, who does not exist apart from the mind and imagination of man.

2. But where is there anything in all this to satisfy the thirst for God of which in his highest moments man is so conscious? How can that which is purely physical touch the sense which appreciates a moral world? It is a merit of Auguste Comte to have recognized the necessity of some answer; and he tells us that it is our privilege and our business to love, reverence, and worship "a Being, immense and eternal — Humanity." Not, mark you, a sinless and Divine representative of the race, such as we Christians adore Jesus. Not even an idealized abstraction, which, in the pure realms of thought, might conceivably be separated from the weaknesses inseparable from humanity. But men know man too well to worship him. All history shows that materialism cannot silence the religious yearnings of the soul of man. Robespierre tried, but failed, as all such endeavours must. A nation of Atheists is yet to be discovered. Man is ever feeling after God.

II. DEISM: this likewise fails because it reduces God to a mere force: and —

III. PANTHEISM also, because if God be in everything He is in human crimes as well as in human virtues. To assert God's presence in His works is one thing; to identify Him with them is another. His omnipresence is a necessary attribute of His Deity; while if He could be identified with nature He would cease to be. If the mystery of life, which attests God's presence in the natural world, was ever felt in all its awe and its beauty by any human soul, it was felt by the great . Witness the often quoted passage of the Confessions in which he tells us why nature was in his eyes so beautiful, by telling us how nature had led him up to God. "I asked the earth, and it said: 'I am not He'; and all that is upon it made the same confession. I asked the sea and the depths, and the creeping things that have life, and they answered: 'We are not thy God; look thou above us.' I asked the breezes and the gales; and the whole air, with its inhabitants, said to me: 'Anaximenes is in error, I am not God.' I asked the heaven, the sun, the moon, the stars: 'We too,' said they, 'are not the God whom thou seekest.' And I said to all the creatures that surrounded the doors of my fleshly senses, 'Ye have said to me of my God that ye are not He; tell me somewhat of Him.' And with a great voice, they exclaimed, 'He made us.' .... God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son." What could He do more in order to convince us that He is not merely a Force or an Intelligence, but a Heart? At the feet of Him who could say, "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father," we understand, and rest upon the certainty, that God is moral as well as intellectual "light, and that in Him is no darkness at all." When a man's hold upon this creed is gone, his thoughts fall back, at best, upon the more rudimentary and less adequate ideas of the Godhead; the darker mysteries of the world's history present themselves with more painful force; and the mind tends inevitably, in the last resort, either to Deism or to Pantheism; to a Deism which just permits God to create, and then dismisses Him from His creation; or to a Pantheism which identifies Him with all the moral evil in the universe, and ends by propagating the worship of new Baals and Ashteroths. But God being really alive, His existence is a fact with which no other fact that the human mind can come to recognize will possibly compare. For nothing that can occupy our thoughts can really compare with it in point of absorbing and momentous-import. Beyond everything else, it must have imperious claims upon the time and thought and working power of every human being who has ever felt, in any serious degree, the unspeakable solemnity of life and death.

(Canon Liddon.)

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KJV: My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when shall I come and appear before God?

WEB: My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God?