himself.

Yet it is the abounding message of the whole Bible, of which our twenty-third Psalm is but a small fragment, that for this conscience and this habit of sin God hath made provision, even as sure as those thoughts of His guidance which refresh us in the heat of life and comfort us amidst its shadows.

In Nature? Yes: for here too the goodness of God leadeth to repentance. There is nothing which the fifth verse so readily brings to mind as the grace of the Divine hospitality in nature. Thou spreadest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies. How these words contrast the fever and uncertain battle of our life with the calmness and surety of the Divine order! Through the cross currents of human strife, fretted and stained, the tides of nature keep their steady course, and rise to their invariable margins. The seasons come up undisturbed by crime and war. Spring creeps even into the beleaguered city; through the tents of the besiegers, across trench and scarp, among the wheels of the cannon, and over the graves of the dead, grass and wild flowers speed, spreading God's table. He sendeth His rain upon the just and the unjust. And even here the display is not merely natural, nor spread only in the sight of our physical enemies; but God's goodness leadeth to repentance, and Nature is equipped even for deliverance from sin. Who has come out upon a great landscape, who has looked across the sea, who has lifted his eyes to the hills and felt the winds of God blowing off their snows, who has heard earth's countless voices rising heavenwards, but has felt: What a wide place this world is for repentance! Man does find in Nature deliverance from himself, oblivion of his past, with peace and purity! And yet the provision, though real, is little more than temporary. The herdsmen of the desert are not obliged to furnish to their fugitive guest shelter for more than two nights with the day between. Little more than two nights with the day between is the respite from conscience and habit which Nature provides for the sinful heart. She is the million-fold opportunity of repentance; she is not the final or everlasting grace of God. And, therefore, whatever may have been the original intention of our Psalmist, the spiritual feeling of the Church has understood his last two verses to sing of that mercy and forgiveness of our God which were spoken to men by the prophets, but reached the fulness of their proclamation and proof in Jesus Christ. He who owned the simple trust of the first four verses, saying, 'Thou art right, I am the Good Shepherd,' so that since He walked on earth the name is no more a mere metaphor of God, but the dearest, strongest reality which has ever visited this world of shadows—He also has been proved by men as the Host and Defender of all who seek His aid from the memory and the pursuit of sin. So He received them in the days of His flesh, as they drifted upon Him across the wilderness of life, pressed by every evil with which it is possible for sin to harry men. To Him they were all 'guests of God,' welcomed for His sake, irrespective of what their past might have been. And so, being lifted up, He still draws us to Himself, and still proves Himself able to come between us and our past. Whatever we may flee from He keeps it away, so that, although to the last, for penitence, we may be reminded of our sins, and our enemies come again and again to the open door of memory, in Him we are secure. He is our defence, and our peace is impregnable.

PSALM XXXVI

THE GREATER REALISM

Like the twenty-third Psalm, the thirty-sixth seems to fall into two unconnected parts, but with this difference, that while both of the twenty-third are understood by us, and heartily enjoyed, of the thirty-sixth we appreciate only those verses, 5-10, which contain an adoration of God's mercy and righteousness. Verses 1-4, a study of sin, are unintelligible in our versions, and hardly ever sung, except in routine, by a Christian congregation. So sudden is the break between the two parts, and so opposite their contents, that they have been taken by some critics to be fragments of independent origin. This, however, would only raise the more difficult question: Why, being born apart, and apparently so unsympathetic, were they ever wedded? To a more careful reading the Psalm yields itself a unity. The sudden break from the close study of sin to the adoration of God's grace is designed, and from his rhapsody the Psalmist returns to pray, in verses 10-12, against that same evil with which he had opened his poem. Indeed, it is in this, its most admirable method, more than in details, that the Psalm is instructive and inspiring.

The problem of Israel's faith was the existence of evil in its most painful form of the successful and complacent sinner, the oppressor of good men. This problem our Psalm takes, not, like other Psalms, in its cruel bearing upon the people of God, but in its mysterious growth in the character of the wicked man. Through four verses of vivid realism we follow the progress of sin. Then, when eye and heart are full of the horror, the Psalmist steps suddenly back, and lifts his gaze beyond and above his study of evil to God's own world that stretches everywhere. The effect is to put the problem into a new perspective. The black bulk which had come between the Singer and his Sun shrinks from his new position to a point against that universal goodness of the Lord, and he conceives not only courage to pray against it, but the grace to feel it already beneath his feet. This is not an intellectual solution of the problem of evil: but it is a practical one. The Psalm is a study—if we can call anything so enthusiastic a study—in proportion; the reduction of the cruel facts of experience to their relation to other facts as real but of infinite comfort and glory; the expansion, in short, of the words of verse 9: In Thy light we see light.

The Psalmist's analysis of sin has been spoiled in translation. Take our Old Version, or the Revised one, and you will find no meaning in the first two verses, but take the rendering offered on the margin by the Revisers (and approved by most scholars), and you get a meaning intelligible, profound, and true to experience:

  Oracle of sin hath the wicked in the
    midst of his heart;
  There is no fear of God before his eyes.

The word oracle means probably secret whisper, but is elsewhere used (except in one case) of God's word to His prophets. It is the instrument of revelation. The wicked man has in him something comparable to this. Sin seems as mysterious and as imperative as God's own voice to the heart of His servants. And to counteract this there is no awe of God Himself. Temptation in all its mystery, and with no religious awe to meet it—such is the beginning of sin.

The second verse is also obscure. It seems to describe the terrible power which sin has of making men believe that though they continue to do evil they may still keep their conscience. The verse translates most readily, though not without some doubt:

For it flatters him, in his eyes, That he will discover his guilt—that he will hate it.

While sin takes from a man his healthy taste for what is good, and his power to loathe evil, it deludes him with the fancy that he still enjoys them. Temptation, when we yield, is succeeded by self-delusion.

The third and fourth verses follow clearly with the aggravated effects. Sin ceases to flatter, and the man's habits are openly upon him. Truth, common-sense and all virtue are left behind:

  The words of his mouth are iniquity
  and deceit,
  He has given up thinking sensibly
  and doing good.