“He shall be like a tree which is planted near the running waters, which shall bring forth its fruit in due season. And his leaf shall not fall off; and all whatever he shall do shall prosper.” Psalm i. 3.
Among the many images under which the good man is described in Holy Scripture, perhaps there is none more vivid, more beautiful, and more touching than that which represents him as some favoured and thriving tree in the garden of God’s planting. Our original birth-place and home was a garden; and the trees which Adam had to dress and keep, both in themselves and by the sort of attention they demanded, reminded him of the peaceful happy duties and the innocent enjoyments which were the business of his life. A garden, in its perennial freshness and its soothing calm, is the best type of heaven, and its separate plants and flowers are the exactest types of the inhabitants of heaven. Accordingly it is introduced into the last page of Scripture as well as into the first; it makes its appearance at the conclusion of man’s eventful history as in the record of its opening. As in the beginning we read of the Paradise of pleasure, with the great river and its four separate streams, with all manner of trees, fair to behold and pleasant to eat of, and, above all, the Tree of Life,—so, in the last chapter of the Apocalypse, we are told of the river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb, which he that thirsteth may drink freely; and of the Tree of Life, bearing twelve fruits, the leaves of which were for the healing of the nations.
And, in like manner, when we turn to that portion of the sacred volume which more than any other both reveals and supports the hidden life of the servants of God in every age,—I mean the Psalter,—we find, prefixed to the collection, the Psalm from which my Text is taken, in which the obedient and just man is set before us under the self-same image; under the image of some choice specimen of the vegetable world, that innocent portion of the divine handiwork which is deformed by no fierce passions, which has no will and pursues no end of its own, and which seems created only to please the eye of man, and to be his food, medicine, and refreshment:
“Blessed is the man who hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of sinners, nor sat in the chair of pestilence: but his will is in the law of the Lord, and in His law he shall meditate day and night.
“And he shall be like a tree which is planted near the running waters, which shall bring forth its fruit in due season. And his leaf shall not fall off; and all whatsoever he shall do shall prosper.”
This spiritual plant of God is placed by the running waters; it is nourished and recruited by the never-failing, the perpetual, the daily and hourly supply of their wholesome influences. It grows up gradually, silently, without observation; and in proportion as it rises aloft, so do its roots, with still less observation, strike deep into the earth. Thus it determinately takes up its habitation in one place, from which death alone shall part it. Year after year it grows more and more into the hope and the posture of a glorious immobility and unchangeableness. What it has been, that it shall be; if it changes, it is as growing into fruitfulness, and maturing in its fruit’s abundance and perfection. Nor is that fruit lost; it neither withers upon the branches nor decays upon the ground. Angels unseen gather crop after crop from the unwearied never-failing parent, and carefully store them up in heavenly treasure-houses. Its very leaf remains green to the end; not only its fruit, which is profitable for eternal life, but its very foliage, the ordinary dress in which it meets our senses, its beautiful colouring, its rich yet delicate fulness of proportion, the graceful waving of its boughs, the musical whispers and rustlings of its leaves, the fragrance which it exhales, the refreshment which it spreads around it,—all testify to that majestic, serene beneficence which is its very nature, and to a mysterious depth of life which enables it ever to give out virtue, yet never to have less of it within.
Such is the holy servant of God, considered in that condition which is both his special reward and his ordinary lot. There are those, indeed, who, for the good of their brethren, and according to the will of God, are exercised by extraordinary trials, and pass their lives amid turbulence and change. There are others, again, who are wonderfully called out of error or of sin, and have experience of much conflict within or without them before they reach the heavenly river, and the groves which line its banks. Certainly history speaks much more of martyrdom and confessorship on the one hand, and of inquiry and conversion, of sin and repentance, on the other, than of the tranquil Christian course; but history does but give the surface of what actually takes place in the heavenly kingdom. If we would really bring before us what is both the highest blessedness in God’s service, and also in fact the ordinary portion of good men, we shall find it to consist in what from its very nature cannot make much show in history;—in a life barren of great events, and rich in small ones; in a life of routine duties, of happy obscurity and inward peace, of an orderly dispensing of good to others who come within their influence, morning and evening, of a growth and blossoming and bearing fruit in the house of God, and of a blessed death in the presence of their brethren. Such has been the round of days of many a pastor up and down Christendom, as even history has recorded, of many a missioner, of many a monk, of many a religious woman, of many a father or mother of a family, of many a student in sacred or profane literature,—each the centre of his own circle, and the teacher of his own people, though more or less unknown to the world. This had been the blessedness of holy Job, as he sets it before us himself: “I said, I shall die in my nest, and as a palm-tree shall multiply my days. My root is opened beside the waters, and dew shall continue in my harvest. They that heard me … to my words durst add nothing, and my speech dropped upon them. They waited for me as for rain, and they opened their mouth as for a latter shower.” [Job xxix. 18-23.] It is expressed also in the words of the Canticle, which, though belonging in their fulness to our Lord Himself, yet in their measure apply to the benefits which any holy man extends to those who are within the range of his attraction: “As the apple-tree among the trees of the woods, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow whom I desired, and his fruit was sweet to my mouth.”