Again, the whole Psalm is on the famous keynote of the Epistle to the Philippians:  Rejoice in the Lord.  This is after all the only safe temper for tempted men.  By preachers of a theology as narrow as their experience, it is often said that our guilt and native vileness, our unquestioned peril and instability, are such that no man of us can afford to be exultant in this life.  But surely, just because of these, we cannot afford to be anything else.  Whether from the fascination or from the despair of sin, nothing saves like an ardent and enthusiastic belief in the goodness and the love of God.  Let us strenuously lift the heart to that.  Let us rejoice and exult in it, and so we shall be safe.  But, withal, we must beware of taking a narrow or an abstract view of what that goodness is.  The fault of many Christians is that they turn to some theological definition, or to some mystical refinement of it, and their hearts are starved.  We must seek the loving-kindness of God in all the breadth and open-air of common life. Lord, Thou preservest man and beast.  Or, as St. Paul put it in that same Epistle:  Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honourable, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.  It is, once more, the Greater Realism.  But behind Paul’s crowd of glorious facts let us not miss the greatest Reality of all, God Himself.  God’s righteousness and love, His grace and patience toward us, become more and more of a wonder as we dwell upon them, and by force of their wonder the most real facts of our experience. How excellent is Thy loving-kindness, O God.  Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say unto you, Rejoice.

PSALM LII

RELIGION THE OPEN
AIR OF THE SOUL

With the thirty-sixth Psalm we may take the fifty-second, which attacks the same problem of evil in pretty much the same temper.  It is peculiar in not being addressed, like others, to God or to the Psalmist’s own soul, but to the wicked man himself.  It is, at first at least, neither a prayer nor a meditation, but a challenge and an arraignment of character.

Some may be disposed to cavil at its bitterness, and to say that for Christians it is too full of threats and vengeance.  Perhaps it is; nay, certainly it is.  But there are two noble feelings in it, and two vivid pictures of character.  The Psalm is inspired by a brave contempt for wickedness in high places, and by a most devout trust in the love of God.  And in expressing these two noble tempers, the poet analyses two characters.  He analyses the character which is ruled from within by the love of Self, and he gives his own experience of a character inspired from without by faith—­by faith in the mercy of the Living God.