3. For my days are consumed like smoke. My grief
has made life unsubstantial to me. To the unhappy, life seems to be surrounded
by so much that is darkening, defiling, blinding, and depressing that, sitting
down in despair, they compare themselves to people wandering in a dense fog,
and themselves little better than pillars of smoke. When our days have neither
light nor fire of energy in them, but become as a smoking flax which dies out
ignobly in darkness, then have we cause enough to appeal to the Lord that he
would not utterly quench us. And my bones are burned as an hearth. His
soul was ready to be blown away as smoke, and his body seemed likely to remain
as the bare hearth when the last comforting ember is quenched. How often has
our piety appeared to us to be in this condition! We have had to question its
reality, and fear that it never was anything more than smoke; we have had the
most convincing evidence of its weakness, for we could not derive even the
smallest comfort from it, any more than a chilled traveler can derive from the
cold hearth on which a fire had burned long ago. Soul-trouble experienced in
our own heart will help us to interpret the language here employed; and
church-troubles may help us also, if unhappily we have been called to endure them.
The psalmist was moved to grief by a view of national calamities, and these so
wrought upon his patriotic soul that he was wasted with anxiety, his spirits
were dried up, and his very life was ready to expire. There is hope for any
country while true hearts are ready to die for it.
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