Mourning as doves.
The fugitives from Jerusalem flee to the mountains and hide themselves there, like the doves in the valleys below, whose melancholy notes seem to be a suitable echo to their own sad feelings.
I. NATURE INTERPRETS MAN TO HIMSELF. There is an interpretation of nature by man; there is also an interpretation of man by nature. The glad sights and sounds of spring are commentaries on the fresh joyousness of youth. We should not know the hope and beauty of life so well if May never came. So, also, storm, night, winter, desert, mountain, and raging torrent open the heart of man's grief and despair, and reveal its desolation. The key to human passion is there. Wordsworth, the prophet of nature, who saw deepest into her secret, discerned among the woods and hills "the still, sad music of humanity."
II. SORROW IS RELIEVED BY CONGENIAL SCENES OF NATURE. The mourning exiles will note the melancholy tones of the doves of the valley. To the happy these sounds come as a touching variation from the generally pleasing aspect of nature; but to the sorrowful fugitives among the mountains they express the sympathy of nature. It is well to cultivate this sympathy, which is not all imaginative; "for there is a spirit in the woods." and hills and valleys are filled with a Divine presence.
III. IN THE SECLUSION OF NATURE THE DEEPER FEELINGS OF THE SOUL FIND VENT. While among the mountains the exiles utter their lamentations. In the city, scenes of warfare, bloodshed, fury, and terror absorb all attention. These are the immediate and the coarser experiences in a season of great calamity. For the time they destroy the power of reflection. But in solitude and silence men have leisure to think. Then the sadness of the soul wakes up, and takes the place of the agitation and distress of external circumstances.
IV. THE SORROW OF MAN IS DEEPER THAN THE MELANCHOLY OF NATURE, While the doves coo in plaintive notes that suggest to the hearer a feeling of grief, though they are not really mourning, the exiles from Jerusalem respond to the natural notes of the doves with utterances of true sorrow. Man is greater than nature. He has self-consciousness and conscience. He knows his trouble and he knows his sin. He pays the penalty of his higher endowments in the greater depth of his fall and shame and sorrow. The whole range of nature's experiences is slight by the side of the lofty aspirations and profound griefs of nan. Going from the one to the other is like leaving the soft, undulating landscape of England for the cliffs and chasms and dark valleys and the awful mountain peaks of Switzerland. The chief difference is moral. Man alone has conscience; he only can mourn for sin. This grief for sin—and not merely grief on account of its penalties—is one of the deepest experiences of the human heart. It puts leagues of space between the men who mourn like doves, and the innocent, simple birds whose notes suggest a grief they can never feel. But in this deeper grief is man's hope. Mourning for sin is a part of repentance, and it points to the day of better things, when God has forgiven his guilty children, and when the mourning doves will be forgotten, and the singing of the lark at heaven's gate will be the key to a new experience of heavenly gladness.