4. Or, again, are you suffering from depression? You hardly know why, but everything seems to go wrong; you seem oppressed with what old writers called "accidie." Your will has lost its spring; the note of your life has lost its hope and its joyousness. You drag through life rather than "rise up with wings like an eagle" or "run," or even "walk." This is all because you have lost faith or never had faith in the splendour of GOD.
5. Or, on the contrary, you are busy from morning till night, and you are too busy for prayer or church; you are immersed in a thousand schemes for making money for yourself or for your family or for the good of mankind. And yet, with all your business abilities, you don't inspire people; you are conscious of a want yourself, and other people are more conscious of it. It is simply that you are without the one thing which matters; you are the planet trying to shine without its sun; you are ignoring the splendour of GOD.
I. For consider how splendid GOD is! These writers of the psalms had many limitations. They had a very inadequate belief in the life after the grave; they knew nothing about the Incarnation; they had no Christmas Day, Easter Day, Ascension Day, or Whit Sunday, to inspire them. But they are bursting with glorious song, because of their sense of the splendour of GOD. "Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever the earth and the world were made, Thou art GOD from everlasting, and world without end."
1. He is splendid, first, in His wonderful _Power_. I should not think of arguing with you as to the existence of GOD; although, to any thinking mind, the marvellous intricacy of the whole creation, from the largest sun to the smallest insect, demands a Thinking Mind; the thunder of the four hundred million consciences of mankind demands a Righteous Person. And a Creator who is at once wise and good is a GOD. No! it is not only His existence which should mean so much to us, but His astonishing power.
I remember when I was at Niagara being taken down to the great power-station, and through that power-station the power of Niagara Falls lighted, among other things, the whole of the great province of Ontario so that the solitary worker in some small town was working with the light from a great power-station which he had never seen, and in which he only, perhaps, partly believed.