s?" He sees the mystery of pain and death. He does not
attempt to explain it: but he faces it; faces it cheerfully and manfully,
in the strength of his faith, saying--This too, mysterious, painful,
terrible as it may seem, is as it should be; for it is of the law and
will of God, from whom come all good things; of The God in whom is light,
and in Him is no darkness at all. Therefore to the Psalmist the earth is
a noble sight; filled, to his eyes, with the fruit of God's works. And
so is the great and wide sea likewise. He looks upon it; "full of things
creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts," for ever dying, for
ever devouring each other. And yet it does not seem to him a dreadful
and a shocking place. What impresses his mind is just what would impress
the mind of a modern poet, a modern man of science; namely, the wonderful
variety, richness, and strangeness of its living things. Their natures
and their names he knows not. It was not given to his race to know. It
is enough for him that known unto God are all His works from the
foundation of the world. But one thing more important than their natures
and their names he does know; for he perceives it with the instinct of a
true poet and a true philosopher--"These all wait upon thee, O God, that
Thou mayest give them meat in due season."

But more.--"There go the ships;" things specially wonderful and
significant to him, the landsman of the Judaean hills, as they were
afterward to Muhammed, the landsman of the Arabian deserts. And he has
talked with sailors from those ships; from Tarshish and the far Atlantic,
or from Ezion-geber and the Indian seas. And he has heard from them of
mightier monsters than his own Mediterranean breeds; of the Leviathan,
the whale, larger than the largest ship which he has ever seen, rolling
and spouting among the ocean billows, far out of sight of land, and
swallowing, at every gape of its huge jaws, hundreds of living creatures
for its food. But he does not talk of it as a cruel and devouring
monster, formed by a cruel and destroying deity, such as the old
Canaanites imagined, when--so the legend ran--they offered up Andromeda
to the sea-monster, upon that very rock at Joppa, which the Psalmist,
doubtless, knew full well. No. This psalm is an inspired philosopher's
rebuke to that very superstition; it is the justification of the noble
old Greek tale, which delivers Andromeda by the help of a hero, taught by
the Gods