EXPLANATORY NOTES AND QUAINT SAYINGS (2)

Verse 3.—“Musing.” Meditation is prayer in bullion, prayer in the ore, soon melted and run into holy desires. The laden cloud soon drops into rain, the piece charged soon goes off when fire is put to it. A meditating soul is in proxima potentia to prayer. This was an ejaculatory prayer shot from his soul when in the company of the wicked.—William Gurnall.

Verse 3.—“The fire burned.” My thoughts kindled my passions.—Matthew Pool.

Verse 3.—“The fire burned.” Meditate so long till thou findest thy heart grow warm in this duty. If, when a man is cold you ask how long he should stand by the fire? sure, till he be thoroughly warm, and made fit for his work. So, Christian, thy heart is cold; never a day, no, not the hottest day in summer, but it freezeth there; now stand at the fire of meditation till thou findest thy affections warmed, and thou art made fit for spiritual service. David mused till his heart waxed hot within him. I will conclude this with that excellent saying of Bernard: “Lord, I will never come away from thee without thee.” Let this be a Christian’s resolution, not to leave off his meditations of God till he find something of God in him; some moving of the bowels after God; some flamings of love, Cant. v. 4.—Thomas Watson.

Verse 3.—His company was bad, but his thoughts were good; even while the wicked was before him his heart was hot within him, while he was musing the fire burned. His thoughts inflame his affections with holy zeal, and this holy fire, as by an ante-peristasis, burnt so much the hotter for the frost of cursed contrariety that was about it. When the careful magistrates or officers of a city break into a suspected house in the night-time, the great question is, What company have you here? So when God breaks in upon our dark hearts, the enquiry is, What thoughts have you here? Why do thoughts arise in your minds? Are ye not become judges of evil thoughts? Luke xxiv. 38; James ii. 4.—Faithful Teat.

Verse 3.—“Then spake I with my tongue, Lord,” etc. It is, indeed, a happy circumstance when that silence which has long been preserved is first broken before the Lord.—John Morison.

Verse 4.—“Lord, make me to know mine end,” etc. But did not David know this? Yes, he knew it, and yet he desires to know it. It is very fit we should ask of God that he would make us to know the things that we do know; I mean, that what we know emptily and barely, we may know spiritually and fruitfully, and if there be any measure of this knowledge, that it may increase and grow more.... We know we must die, and that it is no long course to the utmost period of life; yet our hearts are little instructed by this knowledge.—Robert Leighton.

Verse 4.—“Lord, make me to know mine end.” David would know his end, not so much his death—the end consuming, as Christ the Lord of life—the end and perfection of all our desires; or know it, not for vain science, but in his experience feel the reward of his patience. Though thy chastisement be sharp, it will be but short, and therein sweet; thou shalt lie still and be quiet, thou shalt sleep and be at rest, Job iii. 13, 17, 18, 19. How few and evil soever thy days be in the world, by patience and rolling thyself upon God they will prove unto thee both long enough and good.—Edmund Layfielde.

Verse 4.—“Lord, make me to know mine end,” etc. Seeing that both sorrow and joy are both able to kill you, and your life hangeth upon so small a thread, that the least gnat in the air can choke you, as it choked a pope of Rome; a little hair in your milk strangle you, as it did a councillor in Rome; a stone of a raisin stop your breath, as it did the breath of Anacreon: put not the evil day far from you, which the ordinance of God hath put so near; “Remember your Creator in time, before the days comes wherein you shall say, We have no pleasure in them;” walk not always with your faces to the east, sometimes have an eye to the west, where the sun goeth down; sit not ever in the prow of the ship, sometimes go to the stern; “stand in your watch-towers,” as the creature doth (Rom. viii. 19), and wait for the hour of your deliverance; provide your armies before that dreadful king cometh to fight against you with his greater forces; order your houses before you die, that is, dispose of your bodies and souls, and all the implements of them both; let not your eyes be gadding after pleasure, nor your ear itching after rumours, nor your minds wandering in the fields, when death is in your houses; your bodies are not brass, nor your strength the strength of stones, your life none inheritance, your breath no more than as the vapour and smoke of the chimney within your nostrils, or as a stranger within your gates, coming and going again, not to return any more till the day of final redemption.—John King.

Verse 4.—“Lord, make me to know mine end,” etc. ’Tis worthy your notice, that passage you read of in Scripture, 1 Sam. x. 2. Samuel, when he had anointed Saul king, and the people had chosen him, what signal doth he give him, to confirm him anointed? It was to go to Rachel’s sepulchre. Now the reason is this, that he might not be glutted with the preferments and honours he was entering upon. The emperors of Constantinople, in their inaugurations, on their coronation days, had a mason come and show them several marble stones, and ask them to choose which of those should be made ready for their grave-stones. And so we read of Joseph of Arimathea, that he had his tomb in his garden, to check the pleasures of the place.—Christopher Love.

Verse 4.—“How frail I am.” Between Walsall and Iretsy, in Cheshire, is a house built in 1636, of thick oak framework, filled in with brick. Over the window of the tap-room is still legible, cut in the oak, the following Latin inscription:—Fleres si scires unum tua tempora mensem; rides cum non scis si sit forsitan una dies. The sense of which is “You would weep if you knew that your life was limited to one month, yet you laugh while you know not but it may be restricted to a day.” How sad the thought, that with this silent monitor, this truthful sermon before their very eyes, numbers have revelled in soul-destructive inebriation! And yet this is but a likeness of what we see constantly about us.—Quoted in a Monthly Periodical.

Verse 5.—“My days.” Man’s life is styled days because it is not conferred upon us by wholesale, by months and years, but by retail of days, hours, minutes, moments, as to check our curiosity in making enquiry how long we have to live (verse 4); so acquainting us with the brevity thereof, we may learn to depend upon God’s bounty for the loan of our life, employ it for his glory, and every day prepare for the Bridegroom, Christ.—Edmund Layfielde.

Verse 5.—“My days an handbreath.” That is one of the shortest measures. We need not long lines to measure our lives by: each one carries a measure about with him, his own hand; that is the longest and fullest measure. It is not so much as a span: that might possibly have been the measure of old age in the infancy of the world, but now it is contracted to a handbreath, and that is the longest. But how many fall short of that! Many attain not to a finger-breadth: multitudes pass from the womb to the grave; and how many end their course within the compass of childhood!—Robert Leighton.

Verse 5.—“Behold, thou hast made my days as an handbreath.” The line wherewith our lives are measured, is made both of coarse and fine thread. 1. It is measured by itself, and considerable in its own frailty; so the just length of it is “an handbreadth.” 2. Secondly, with eternity, so it is found to be as nothing: “Mine age is as nothing before thee.”... “An handbreath,” and is that all? So he saith, that exactly measureth them all, and whatsoever else was created with his own hand. A handbreath is one of the shortest kind of measures. There is an ell, a cubit, and a palm or handbreath, whereof there be two kinds, the greater and the less. The greater handbreath is the whole space betwixt the top of the thumb and the little finger, when the hand is extended, called a span, in account near twelve inches. The lesser handbreadth, in a more proper and strict signification, is the just breadth of the four fingers of the hand closed together, here chiefly intended, this interpretation best agreeing with the original, and complying most with the prophet’s mind, by the unanimous consent of the choice interpreters.—Edmund Layfielde.

Verse 5.—“Mine age is as nothing before thee.” 1. David might truly have said, Mine age is short in respect of Methuselah’s; the days of Methuselah are said to be nine hundred sixty and nine years; the days of David, by computation of the time when he began and how long he reigned were not much above three score and ten, so that he lived not so many tens as Methuselah did hundreds. 2. David might have said, Mine age is very short in comparison of the age of the world. St. Paul saith of the fashion of this Macrocosm, it passeth away (1 Cor. vii. 31); but the age of the microcosm, man, passeth away far swifter. 3. David might have said, Mine age in this world is exceeding little in comparison of the duration of the other world. 4. Finally, David might have said, Mine age is scarcely anything before the angels, whose duration began with this world and shall continue in the world to come, and so is coætaneous with both the worlds. But all these are far short of this comparison which he here maketh of his age with God which is eternal, both a parte ante, and a parte post, from everlasting to everlasting.—Nathanael Hardy.

Verse 5.—“As nothing.” If a man be so diminutive a creature, compared with the fabric of that great world, and the world itself so little that it cannot contain the Lord, so little and light that he feels not the weight thereof upon the tip of his finger, man will well merit the name “nothing,” when he is placed before the Lord. The keel of man’s life is laden with more vanity than verity and substance, if the searcher of the reins and heart come aboard to view it. Ten thousand of our days will not make God one year, and a thousand of our years in his sight are but “as a day when it is past, and as a watch in the night.” As drops of rain are unto the sea, and as a gravel stone is in comparison of the sand, so are a thousand years to the days everlasting.—Edmund Layfielde.

Verse 5.—“Verily every man at his best state is altogether vanity.” The Holy Spirit is pleased elsewhere to speak more sparingly, as it were, in favour of man; he discovers the nakedness, but yet comes backward to cast a garment of lenity over it, that somewhat shadows the shame of it. “Man is like to vanity (Ps. cxliv. 4); their days consume in vanity (Ps. lxxviii. 33); Man is vanity” (Ps. xxxix. 11); but here with open mouth and unveiled terms full of emphasis, he proclaims every man to be abstracted vanity; and as if that were short he adds, he is all vanity; mere vanity, all manner of vanity, altogether vanity: nothing else, nothing less; yea, somewhat more than vanity, “lighter than vanity” (Ps. lxii. 9); and “vanity of vanities.” Eccl. i. 2. And that no place of dubitation may be left, he ushers the doctrine unto our hearts with a strong asseveration; assuredly, in truth, without all controversy, “man is altogether vanity.”—Edmund Layfielde.

Verse 5.—“Verily every man at his best state is altogether vanity.” Bythner expounds it thus. “Every man at his best state is altogether vanity;” hoc est omni ex parte, ita ut vanitas et miseria quæ per creaturas frustratim spargitur in uno homine aggregata videatur: sic homo evadit compendium omnium vanitatum quæ in creaturis extant: that is, he is the sink and centre of all the vanities in the world; he is as it were the universe of vanity.—Quoted in William Reynold’s Funeral Sermon for the Honourable Francis Pierrepont, 1657.

Verse 5.—“Every Adam standing is all Abel.”—See Hebrew Text.

Verse 5.—“Selah.” A little word, yet of no small difficulty to explain. Left out of the Bible by the vulgar translators as though it were impertinent, where, let them consider, whether they come not within the verge of that malediction in Revelation xxii. 19. The ancient interpreters did not much meddle with it, and our editions leave it uninterpreted. But seeing “whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope” (Romans xv. 4), and till “heaven and earth pass, one jot or one title shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled” (Matt. v. 18), we have sufficient warrant after the example of the learned, and encouragement to make enquiry after the mind of the Holy Spirit, in that which he hath both commanded to be written, and hath commended unto us. Wherein, like the crystal glass, I will rather present you with the true visage of antiquity, than use any new-framed feature or painting of my own.