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 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