Four Psalms | Page 7

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._
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