Four Psalms | Page 7

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._
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