Four Psalms | Page 6

of all our experiences there is but one which suits this figure of
blood-revenge, when and wheresoever in the Old Testament it is
applied to man's spiritual life. So only do the conscience and the habit
of sin pursue a man. Our real enemies are not our opponents, our
adversities, our cares and pains. These our enemies! Better comrades,
better guides, better masters no man ever had. Our enemies are our evil
deeds and their memories, our pride, our selfishness, our malice, our
passions, which by conscience or by habit pursue us with a
relentlessness past the power of figure to express. We know how they
persist from youth unto the grave: _the sting of death is sin._ We know
what they want: nothing less than our whole character and will. _Simon,
Simon_, said Christ to a soul on the edge of a great temptation, Satan
hath asked you back again for 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