Four Psalms | Page 9

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 puddles in a Universe, and the Universe is not
only Law and Order, but is pervaded by the character of its Maker.
God's mercy still reaches to the heavens, and His faithfulness to the
clouds. We must resolutely and with 'pious obstinacy' lift our hearts to
that, else we perish. I think of one very flagrant tale, in which the
selfishness, the lusts and the cruelties of modern men are described
with the rarest of power, and so as to reduce the reader to despair, till
he realises that the author has emptied the life of which he treats of
everything else, except a fair background of nature which is introduced
only to exhibit the evil facts in more horrid relief. The author studies
sin in a vacuum, an impossible situation. God has been left out, and the
conviction of His pardon. Left out are the power of man's heart to turn,
the gift of penitence, the mysterious operations of the Spirit, and the
sense of the trustfulness and patience of God with the worst souls of
men. These are not less realities than the others; they are within the
knowledge of, they bless, every stratum of life in our Christian land;
they are the biggest realities in the world to-day. Let us then meet the
so-called realism of our times with this Greater Realism. Let us tell
men who exhibit sin and wickedness apart from God and from man's
power of penitence, apart from love and from the realised holiness of
our human race, that they are working in a vacuum, and their
experiment is therefore the most un-real that can be imagined. We may
not be able to eliminate the cruel facts of sin from our universe, but do
not let us therefore eliminate the rest of the Universe from our study of
sin. Let us be true to the Greater Realism.
Again, the whole Psalm is on the famous keynote of the