id="id00077">So he becomes presumptuous and obstinate.

He devises iniquity upon his bed—which is but the Hebrew for 'planning evil in cold blood'—

He takes up his post on a way that is not good, He abhors not evil.

There we have the whole biography of sin from its first whisper in the centre of man's being, where it seems to speak with the mystery and power of God's own word, to the time when, through the corruption of every instinct and quality of virtue, it reaches the border of his being and destroys the last possibility of penitence. It is the horror of Evil in the four stages of its growth: Temptation, Delusion, Audacity, and Habit ending in Death.

To us sin has not become any less of a mystery or a pain. Temptation is as sudden and demonic. Into every soul, however purged and fenced, evil appears to have as much freedom of entrance as God Himself. It begins as early. In the heart of every little child God works, but they who next to God have most right there, the father and the mother, know that something else has had, with God, precedence of themselves. As the years go on, and the knowledge of good and evil grows, becoming ever more jealous and expert a sentinel, it still finds its watch and fence of the outside world mocked by the mysterious upburst of sin within. The whole mystery of temptation is to have sins suggested to us, and to be swept after them by a sudden enthusiasm, which sometimes feels as strong as the Spirit of God ever made in us the enthusiasm for virtue. 'There are moments when our passions speak and decide for us, and we seem to stand by and wonder. They carry in them an inspiration of crime, that in an instant does the work of long premeditation.'[2] 'An inspiration of crime,' that is the oracle of sin. From that come the panic and the despair of temptation. The heart, which has still left in it some loyalty to God, is horrified by the ease and the surprise of evil. Yet the greater horror is that this horror may be lost: that men and women do continually exchange it for a complacent and careless temper toward the besetting sin which they have once felt to be worse than death. From being panic-stricken at the rise and surge of temptation, they will (and there is no more marvellous change in all fickle man's experience) grow easy and scornful about it, time after time permitting it to overcome them, in the delusion that they may reassert themselves when they will, and put it beneath their feet. The rest is certain. Falsehood becomes natural to him who was born loyal, audacity to him who grew up timid and scrupulous. The impulsive lover of good, who has fallen through the very warmth of his nature, develops into the deliberate sensualist. Natures sensitive and enthusiastic grow absolutely empty of power to revolt against what is unjust or foul. A great writer once said of himself in middle life: 'I am proud and intellectual, but forced by the habits of years to like the base and dishonourable from which I formerly revolted.' Little children have the seeds of all this within them; men and women are born with the inspiration which starts these mysterious and direful changes; the fatal decadence takes place in countless lives.

[Footnote 2: George Eliot.]

Before facts so horrifying—they are within as well as everywhere around us—our real need is not an intellectual explanation of why they are permitted or whence this taint in the race arose. For, supposing that we were capable of understanding this, the probability is that we might become tolerant of the facts themselves, and, perceiving that cruelty and sin had a necessary place in the universe, lose the mind to fight them. Constituted as are the most of mankind, for them to discover a reason for a fact is, if not to conceive a respect for it, at least to feel a plausible excuse for their sluggishness and timidity in dealing with it. Nay, the very study of sin for the purpose of acquainting ourselves with its nature, too often either intoxicates the will, or paralyses it with despair; and it is in recoil from the whole subject that we most surely recover health to fight evil in ourselves and nerve to work for the deliverance from it of others. The practical solution of our problem is to remember how much else there is in the Universe, how much else that is utterly away from and opposed to sin. We must engross ourselves in that, we must exult in that. We must remember goodness, not only in the countless scattered instances about us, but in its infinite resource in the Power and Character of God Himself. We must feel that the Universe is pervaded by this: that it is the atmosphere of life, and that the whole visible framework of the world offers signals and sacraments of its real presence. We may not, we shall not, be able to reconcile this goodness with the cruel facts about us; but at least we shall have reduced these to a new proportion and perspective; we shall have disengaged our wills from the horrid influence of evil, and received a new temper for that contest, in which it is temper far more than any knowledge which overcomes.

This is what our Psalmist does. From the awful realism of Sin he sweeps, without pause or attempt at argument, into a vision of all the goodness of God. The Divine Attributes spread out before him, and it takes him the largest things in nature to describe them: the personal loving-kindness and righteousness of the Most High: the care of Providence: the tenderness of intimate fellowship with God: the security of faith: the satisfaction of worship. He makes no claim that everything is therefore clear: still are Thy judgments the Great Deep, fathomless, awful. But we receive new vigour of life as from a fountain of life, and the eyes, that had been strained and blinded, see light: light to work, light to fight, light to hope. Mark how the rapture breaks away with the name of God:

  LORD, to the heavens is Thy leal
    love!
  Thy faithfulness to the clouds!
  Thy righteousness is like the mountains of God,
  Thy judgments are the Great Deep.

  Man and beast thou preservest, O LORD.
  How precious is Thy leal love, O God!
  And so the children of men put their
    trust in the shadow of Thy wings.
  They shall be satisfied with the fatness of Thy house;
  And of the river of Thy pleasures
    Thou shall give them to drink.
  For with Thee is the fountain of life,
  In Thy light we see light.

The prayer follows, and closes with the assurance of victory as if already experienced:

  Continue Thy leal love unto them that know Thee,
  And Thy righteousness to the upright of heart.
  Let not the foot of pride come against me,
  Nor the hand of the wicked drive me away.
  There are the workers of iniquity
  fallen,
  They are flung down and shall not
  be able to rise.

Two remarks remain.

A prevailing temper of our own literature makes the method of this Psalm invaluable to us. A large and influential number of our writers have lent themselves, with ability and earnestness, to such an analysis of sin as we find in the first four verses of the Psalm. The inmost lusts and passions of men's hearts are laid bare with a cool and audacious frankness, and the results are inexorably traced in all their revolting vividness of action and character. I suppose that there has not been a period, at least since the Reformation, which has had the real facts of sin so nakedly and fearfully laid before it. The authors of the process call it Realism. But it is not the sum of the Real, nor anything like it. Those studies of sin and wickedness, which our moral microscopes have laid bare, are but