---

"Premes gravissima. Sublevans suavissima et potentissima." So wrote one of our shrewdest commentators about the hand of which the psalmist speaks, in words which may be freely translated, "The hand of God, whilst pressing very hard, supports with utmost tenderness and almighty power."

I. CREATION. How beautifully are the two sides illustrated here. Tim schoolboy can tell us how the atmosphere is weighing upon the slenderest object on the earth's surface with a constant pressure of many pounds to each square inch. The hand seen as "premeds gravissima." Yet the dewdrop is not shattered, nor the harebell bruised, since the same hand is also "sublevans suavissima et potentissima." Again, whilst with irresistible force all things are being dragged towards the earth's centre, the insect with its gauzy wings poises itself in the liquid air, and the tiny child is unhindered in his play.

II. PROVIDENCE. Whatever page of history we study the same facts meet us, — on the one hand discipline and chastisement, disappointment, sorrow, pain, loss — the hand in ten thousand ways "premens gravissima"; on the other, the reaping of a compensating harvest of happy results, the hand "sublevans susvissima et potentissima." Hers tribulation and anguish, there prosperity and peace; nations and individuals groaning beneath the weight of calamity, then led out into a wealthy place.

III. REDEMPTION. By redemption we mean the great process in all its parts by which the Father of Spirits is recovering man from spiritual ruin. Go back to the Fall. In the stern sentence passed on the first sinners, what do we see but the hand "premens"? in the primal promise what but the same hand "sublevans"? And in all that wonderful training, covering so many centuries and conducted in ways so surprising, by which the conscience of man was made alive to the guilt of sin — in all the work done by law — are we not looking at the hand of God as it descends upon the sinner, and makes him groan beneath the intolerable burden, as the psalmist did when "his bones waxed old through his roaring all the day long," and "his moisture was turned into the drought of summer"? And does not that hand become more and more visible as "sublevans suavissima et poten-tissima," as mercy streams across the midnight sky in an ever-brightening track of blessed light, prophetic of the full glory of the dawn?

(T. G. Rose.)

---

---

KJV: For day and night thy hand was heavy upon me: my moisture is turned into the drought of summer. Selah.

WEB: For day and night your hand was heavy on me. My strength was sapped in the heat of summer. Selah.