There is never the least note of loudness, none of that terrible patriotism which defaces many of the psalms, the patriotism which makes men believe that God is the friend of the chosen race, and the foe of all other races, the ugly self-sufficiency that contemplates with delight, not the salvation and inclusion of the heathen, but their discomfiture and destruction.  The worst side of the Puritan found delight in those cruel and militant psalms, revelling in the thought that God would rain upon the ungodly fire and brimstone, storm and tempest, and exulting in the blasting of the breath of His displeasure.  Could anything be more alien to the spirit of Christ than all that?  But here, in this melancholy psalm, there breathes a spirit naturally Christian, loving peace and contemplation, very weary of the strife.

I have said it is autobiographical; but it must be remembered that it was a fruitful literary device in those early days, to cast one’s own thought in the mould of some well-known character.  In this psalm I have sometimes thought that the writer had Daniel in mind—­the surroundings of the psalm suit the circumstances of Daniel with singular exactness.  But even so, it was the work of a man, I think, who had suffered the sorrows of which he wrote.  Let me try to disentangle what manner of man he was.

He was young and humble; he was rich, or had opportunities of becoming so; he was an exile, or lived in an uncongenial society; he was the member of a court where he was derided, disliked, slandered, plotted against, and even persecuted.  We can clearly discern his own character.  He was timid, and yet ambitious; he was tempted to use deceit and hypocrisy, to acquiesce in the tone about him; he was inclined to be covetous; he had sinned, and had learnt something of holiness from his fall; he was given to solitude and prayer.  He was sensitive, and his sorrows had affected his health; he was sleepless, and had lost the bloom of his youth.

All this and more we can read of him; but what is the saddest touch of all is the isolation in which he lived.  There is not a word to show that he met with any sympathy; indeed the misunderstanding, whatever it was, that overshadowed him, had driven acquaintances, friends, and lovers away from him; and yet his tender confidence in God never fails; he feels that in his passionate worship of virtue and truth, his intense love of purity and justice, he has got a treasure which is more to him than riches or honour, or even than human love.  He speaks as though this passion for holiness had been the very thing that had cost him so dear, and that exposed him to derision and dislike.  Perhaps he had refused to fall in with some customary form of evil, and his resistance to temptation had led him to be regarded as a precisian and a saint?  I have little doubt myself that this was so.  He speaks as one might speak who had been so smitten with the desire for purity and rightness of life, that he could no longer even seem to condone the opposite.  And yet he was evidently not one who dared to withstand and rebuke evil; the most he could do was to abstain from it; and the result was that he saw the careless and evil-minded people about him prosperous, happy and light-hearted, while he was himself plunged by his own act in misunderstanding and solitude and tears.