We see not yet all things put under man.' Where are the men of whom any portion of the psalmist's words is true? Look at them--are these the men of whom he sings? Visited by God I crowned with glory and honour! having dominion over the works of His hands! Is this irony or fact?
Let consciousness speak. Look at ourselves. If that psalm be God's thought of man, the plan that He hangs up for us His workmen to build by, what a wretched thing my copy of it has turned out to be! Is this a picture of me? How seldom I am conscious of the visits of God; how full I am of weaknesses and imper-fections-the solemn voice within me tells me at intervals when I listen to its tones. On my brow there gleams no diadem; from my life, alas! there shines at the best but a fitful splendour of purity, all striped with solid masses of blackness. And as for dominion over creatures, how superficial my rule over them, how real their rule over me! I can tame animals or slay them; I can use the forces of nature for my purposes; I can make machinery, and bid the lightning do my errands and carry messages, the burden of which is mostly money, or power, or sorrow. But all these, and the whole set of things like them, are not ruling over God's creation. That consists in using all for God, and for our own growth in wisdom, strength, and goodness; and he only is master of all things who is servant of God. All are yours, and ye are Christ's.' If so, what are most of us but servants, not lords, of earth and its goods? We fasten our very lives on them, we tremble at the bare thought of losing them, we give our best efforts to get them--we say to the fine gold, Thou art my confidence.' We do not possess them, they possess us: and so, though materially we may have conquered the earth (and wonderfully proud of it we are now), spiritually, which is the same as to say really, the earth has conquered us.
The same impression of human incompleteness is made by all the records of human lives which we possess. Go into a library, and take down volume after volume--the biographies and autobiographies of the foremost men, the saints and sages whom we all reverence. Is there one on whose monument the old psalm could truthfully be written? Are not the honest autobiographies what one of the noblest of them is called, Confessions'? Are not the memoirs the stories of flawed excellence, stained purity, limited wisdom? There are no perfect men in them--no men after the pattern of David's words. Or if some enthusiastic admirer has drawn a picture without shadows, we feel that it is without life or likeness; and we look for faults and limitations that we may be sure of brotherhood.
And if we take a wider range, and listen to the sad voice of history chronicling the past, where in all her tragic story of bright hopes brought to nothing, of powers built up by force and rotted down by pride and selfishness, of war and wrong, of good painfully sought, and partially possessed, and churlishly treasured, and quickly lost--where on all her blotted pages, stained with tears, and sweat, and blood, do we find a record that verifies the singer's rapture, and shows us men like this of the Psalm?
Or let observation speak. Bring before your minds, by an exercise of imagination vivifying and uniting into one impression, the facts which we all know of the social and moral condition--to say nothing now of the religious state--of any country upon earth. Think of the men in all lands who are helpless, hopeless, full of animal sins and lusts, full of stupid ignorance. Take our psalm and read it in some gaol, or in a lunatic asylum, or at the door of some gin-palace, or at the mouth of a court in the back streets of any city in England, and ask yourselves, Are these people, with narrow foreheads and villainous scowls, with sodden cheeks and foul hands, the fulfilment or the contradiction of its rapturous words?' Or think of naked savages, who look up to bears and lions as their masters, who are stunted by cold or enervated by heat, out of whose souls have died all memories beyond yesterday's hunger, and all hopes greater than a full meal to-morrow--and say if these are God's men. So little are they like it that some of us are ready to say that they are not men at all.
What then? Are we to abandon in despair our hopes for our fellows, and to smile with quiet incredulity at the rhapsodies of sanguine theorists like David? If we are to confine our view to earth--yes. But there is more to see than the sad sights around us. All these men--these imperfect, degraded, half-brutified men--have their share in our psalm. They have gone out and wasted their substance in riotous living; but from the swine-trough and the rags they may come to the best robe and the feast in the father's house. The veriest barbarian, with scarcely a spark of reason or a flickering beam of conscience, sunken in animal delights, and vibrating between animal hopes and animal fears --to him may belong the wondrous attribute8: to be visited by God, crowned with glory and honour, higher than all stars, and lord of all creatures.
It sounds like a wild contradiction, I know: and I do not in the least wonder that people pressed by a sense of all the misery that is done under the sun, and faintly realising for themselves Christ's power to heal their own misery and cleanse their own sins, should fling away their Bibles, and refuse to believe that God hath made of one blood all nations of men,' and that Christ has a message for the world. I venture to believe both the one and the other, I believe that though angels weep, and we should be smitten with shame, at the sight of what man has made of man, and we of ourselves, yet that God will be true though every man fail Him, and will fulfil unto the children the mercy which He has promised to the fathers. All the promises of God in Christ are yea.' And so against all the theories of the desperate school, and against all our own despondent thoughts, we have to oppose the sunny hopes which come from such words as those of our text. Looking around us, we have indeed to acknowledge with plaintive emphasis, we see not yet all things put under Him '--but, looking up, we have to add with triumphant confidence that we speak of a fact which has a real bearing on our hopes for men--we see Jesus.'
