It is quite possible, in taking what we believe to be a broad view of life, to overlook many of the things that go to make life. Too much generalizing makes for a barren heart. The specific has a vital place in the ministry of praise. It is true that the highest flights of praise always carry the soul beyond any conscious reckoning with the details of its experience. Tabulation is not the keystone of the arch of thanksgiving. But to behold the specific goodness of God in each day's life, to review the hours and to say to one's own soul, Thus and thus hath my God been mindful of me, is perhaps the surest and the simplest way to deepen and vitalize the habit of praise in our life, and to set the new notes ringing in our psalm of thanksgiving.
But in this appeal for a new song of praise to God there is something more than a recognition of new blessings. The new song is not merely the response to new mercies and the tuneful celebration of recent good. If there is to be ever a new note in the song, there must be ever a new note in the singer's heart. And this cometh not by observation, but by inspiration. You may change the words of the song and it may still be the old song. You may sing the same words and it may yet be a new song. For as is the singer, so is the song.
_O sing unto the Lord a new song._ That is a plea for a deeper and a wider life. It is a plea that sounds the depth of the heart and takes the measure of the soul. The new song comes not of a truer enumeration of life's blessings, but of a truer understanding of the blessedness of life itself. The key to such understanding is character. When by the grace of the clean heart and the enlightened and responsive spirit a man can get beneath the events of each day's life and commune with that eternal law of love to which each one of those events bears some relation--or had we not better say commune with the Eternal Father by whom that law exists?--then is his song of praise ever new. It is something to catch a glimpse of the mercy of God, and to think and feel as one has not thought or felt before about some part of life's daily good. But it is vastly more to learn to interpret the whole of life in the terms of the goodness of God. The saint sings where the worldling sighs. And if we find in that song only the apotheosis of courage and resignation, we have neither found the source of the song nor the message of it. The new song comes not from the thrill of peril faced and defied, nor from the victorious acceptance of hard and bitter things. It comes from that deep life of the soul in God, a life beyond the threat of peril and beyond the touch of pain. It finds its deepest and freshest notes not in contemplating the new gains and good of any day, but in a growing sense of the timeless gain and eternal good of every day.