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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE TWENTY-TRIED PSALM. The twenty-third Psalm seems to break in two at the end of the fourth verse. The first four verses clearly reflect a pastoral scene; the fifth appears to carry us off, without warning or connection, to associations of an utterly different kind. This, however, is only in appearance. The last two verses are as pastoral as the first four. If these show us the shepherd with his sheep upon the pasture, those follow him, shepherd still, to where in his tent he dispenses the desert's rites of hospitality to some poor fugitive from blood. The psalm is thus, so far, a unity, even of metaphor. We shall see afterwards that it is also a spiritual unity; but at present let us summon up the landscape on which both of these features ? the shepherd on his pasture and the shepherd in his tent ? lie side by side, equal sacraments of the providence of God. A Syrian, or an Arabian, pasture is very different from the narrow meadows and fenced hill- sides with which we are familiar. It is vast, and often virtually boundless. It has to be so, for by far the greater part of it is desert ? that is, land not absolutely barren, but refreshed by rain for only a few months, and through the rest of the year abandoned to the pitiless sun that sucks all life out of the soil. It is thus, by no carelessness of speech, but on the regular tide of the seasons that the Hebrew word for pasture has drifted off into the meaning of wilderness, or desert.1 The landscape is nearly all glare, monotonous levels or low ranges of hillocks, with as little character upon them as the waves of the sea, shimmering with mirage under a cloudless heaven. The bewildering monotony is broken by only two exceptions. Here and there the ground will be cleft by a deep ravine, which gapes in black contrast to th...
| ISBN-13 | 9780217348980 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 021734898X |
| Weight | 1.04 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 9.00 x 6.00 x 0.72 In |
| List Price | $23.65 |
| Format | Paperback |
|---|---|
| Pages | 320 pages |
| Publisher | |
| Published On | 2009-08-01 |
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