These words, or nearly these words, occur several times in the Bible with different purposes. They are not, properly speaking, a message from heaven to men, unveiling to their eyes some great glory or blessedness, or setting them some high task to be done; but they are a voice of man, thinking aloud about himself, and lifting up his dim thoughts to God above. They are a question, and yet not a question, which asks directly for an answer. They speak as if the state of man were a riddle which is not yet wholly read; but still they arc taken up altogether with facts about which there can be no uncertainty, and with wonder at what is not doubted to be true. They belong to no one age or estate of life: they are equally well suited to happiness or to misery: they seem to spring from ignorance, and yet all the knowledge in the world cannot take away from their fitness. Two lessons alone they contain, which must have been somehow learned before anyone can repeat them: he must have felt his own littleness and weakness; and he must have learned that, little and weakas he is, God cares for him and visits him.

Thus far the sense is substantially the same wherever the words occur. But they are capable of being the utterance of very different moods of mind: and such is what we actually find in the Bible.