Four Psalms XXIII. XXXVI. LII. CXXI. / Interpreted for practical use

by George Adam Smith

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.

We Christians too hastily dismiss from our own uses the so-called Cursing Psalms. It is unfortunate that the translators have so often tempted us to this by exaggerating the violence of the Hebrew at the expense of its insight, its discrimination, and its sometimes delicate satire. If only we had a version that produced the exact colours of the original, and if we ourselves had the quick conscience and the honest wit to carry over the ideas into terms suitable to our own day—in which the selfishness of the human heart is the same old thing it ever was, though it uses milder and more subtle means,—then we should feel the touch of a power not merely of dramatic interest but of moral conviction, where we have been too much accustomed to think that we were hearing only ancient rant. So treated, Psalms like the fifth, the tenth, the fourteenth, and the fifty-second, which we so often pass over, offended by their violence, become quick and powerful, the very word of God to our own times and hearts.

Let us take a more literal version of the Psalm before us:

Why glory in evil, big man?
The leal love of God is all day long.
Thy tongue planneth mischiefs,
Like a razor sharp-whetted, thou worker of fraud.
Thou lovest evil more than good,
Lying than speaking the truth.
Thou lovest all words of voracity,
Tongue of deceit.
God also shall tear thee down, once for all,

Cut thee out, and pluck thee from the
tent,
And uproot thee from off the land
of the living.
That the righteous may see and fear,
And at him they shall laugh.

'Lo! the fellow who sets not God
for his stronghold,
But trusts in the mass of his
wealth,
Is strong in his mischief.'

But I like an olive-tree, green in God's
house,
I have trusted in God's leal love for
ever and aye.
I will praise Thee for ever, that Thou
hast done [this],
And I will wait on Thy name—for
'tis good—
In face of Thy saints.

The character who is challenged is easily made out, and we may recognize how natural he is and how near to ourselves.

In the first verse he is called by a name expressing unusual strength or influence—a mighty man, a hero. The term may be used ironically, like our 'big fellow', 'big man.' But, whether this is irony or not, the man's bigness had material solidity. He was rooted in the land of the living, he had abundance of riches. Riches are no sin in themselves, as the exaggerated language of some people of the present day would lead us to imagine. Rich men are not always sent to hell, nor poor men always to heaven. As St. Augustine remarks with his usual cleverness: 'It was not his poverty but his piety which sent Lazarus in the parable to heaven, and when he got there, he found a rich man's bosom to rest in!' Riches are no sin in themselves, but, like all forms of strength, a very great and dangerous temptation. This man had yielded. Prosperity was so unchanging with him that he had come to trust it, and did not feel the need of trusting anything else. He was strong enough to stand alone: so strong that he tried to stand without God. If he was like many self-centred men of our own time he probably did not admit this. But it is not profession which reveals where a man puts his trust. It is the practice and discipline of life, betraying us by a hundred commonplace ways, in spite of all the orthodoxy we boast. It is sorrow and duty and the call to self-denial. When this man's feelings got low, when he was visited by touches of melancholy—those chills sent forward from the grave to every mortal travelling thither,—when conscience made him weak and fearful, then he made not God his strength, but trusted in the abundance of his riches. With that audacity which the touch of property breeds in Us, he said, 'I am sure of to-morrow,' plunged into cruel plans, gloried in his mischief, and was himself again.

Trusting in riches—we all do it, when we seek to drive away uncomfortable fears and the visitations of conscience by self-indulgence; when, instead of saying I will lift mine eyes unto the hills, whence cometh my help?—and seeking the steep and arduous consolations of duty, we look into our nearest friends' faces and whine for a sympathy that is often insincere, or lie down in some place of comfort that is stolen or unclean.

No man with such habits stops there. This big man strengthened himself in his wickedness and in all manner of guile and cruelty. It is a natural development. The heart which finds life in material wealth is usually certain to go farther and seek for more in the satisfaction of base and sullen appetites. We hear, it is true, a great deal about the softening influence of wealth, and moralists speak of luxury as if its bad effects were negative and it only enervated. But if riches and the habit of trusting to them, if the material comforts of life and complacency in them, only made men sleek and tame—if luxury did nothing but soften and emasculate—the world would have been far more stupid and far less cruel than it is to-day.

They are not negative tempers, but very positive and aggressive ones, which the Bible associates with a love of wealth, and we have but to remember history to know that the Bible is right. Luxury may have dulled the combative instincts in man, but it has often nursed the meanly cruel ones. The Romans with the rapid growth of their wealth loved the battlefield less; but the sight of the arena, with its struggling gladiators, and beasts tearing women and children, became more of a necessity to their appetites. Take two instances. Titus was a rough, hardened soldier; but he wept at the horrors which his siege obliged him to inflict on Jerusalem. Nero was an artist, and fiddled while Rome was burning. Coddle your boys; you may keep them from wishing to fight their equals, but you will not cure them of torturing animals. Idleness means not only sluggishness, but a morbid and criminal desire for sensation, which honest industry would have sweated out of the flesh. Money often renders those who have it unconsciously impatient with the slowness of poorer men, and unconsciously insolent about their defects. Everywhere, on the high places of history, and within our own humble experience, we perceive the same truth, that materialism, and the temper which trusts in wealth or in success, does not turn men into fat oxen, but into tigers. Hence the frequency with which the Old Testament, and especially the Psalms, connect an abundance of wealth with a strength of wickedness, and bracket for the same degree of doom the rich man and the violent one. Our Psalm is natural in adding to the clause, trusting in the abundance of riches, that other about strengthening himself in wickedness. This is the very temper of a prosperous and pampered life: which seeks lust or cruelty not to forget itself, as a stunted and tortured nature may be forgiven for doing, but in order to work off its superfluous blood.

Observe, too, how much sins of the tongue are mentioned,-, lying, backbiting and the love of swallowing men's reputations whole. Thou lovest all words of voracity, thou tongue of deceit. We are, too, apt to think that sins of speech most fiercely beset weak and puny characters: men that have no weapon but a sharp and nasty tongue. Yet none use their words more recklessly than the strong, who have not been sobered by the rebuffs and uncertainties of life. Power and position often make a man trifle with the truth. A big man's word carries far, and he knows it; till the temptation to be dogmatic or satirical, to snub and crush with a word, is as near to him as to a slave-driver is the fourteen-feet thong in his hand, with a line of bare black backs before him.

These things are written of ourselves. In his great book on 'Democracy in America,' De Tocqueville pointed out, more than fifty years ago, the dangers into which the religious middle classes fall by the spread of wealth and comfort. That danger has increased, till for the rich on whom Christ called woe, we might well substitute the comfortable. At a time when a very moderate income brings within our reach nearly all the resources of civilisation, which of us does not find day by day a dozen distractions that drown for him the voice of conscience: a crowd of men to lose himself in from God and his best friends: half a dozen base comforts, in the lap of which he forgets duty and dreams only of self? Comfort makes us all thoughtless, and thoughtlessness is the parent of every cruelty.

The Psalm makes no attempt to turn this tyrant whom it challenges; it invokes the mercy of God, not to change him, but to show how vain his boasts are, and to give heart to those whom he oppresses. God's mercy endureth for ever; but he must pass away. The righteous shall see his end, and fear and laugh: their satire will have religion in it. But though the Psalm does not design this sinner's conversion, its very challenge contains an indication of the means by which he and all selfish people who are like him may be changed to nobler lives. In this respect it has a gospel for us all, which may be thus stated.

There are poor invalids who ought to get their health again by seeking the open air and sunshine, but who keep between their bed and their hearthrug, cowering over their fire with the blinds pulled down;—to whom comes the wise doctor, pulls up the blinds, shows them that it is day outside, with the sun shining and the trees growing, and men walking about, and tells them that the health they are trying to get inside, and thereby only making themselves worse invalids, they will get out there. This big man was such a moral invalid, seeking strength within his own riches and qualities. And so doing he had developed the nasty indoor tempers, till it seemed pleasant and satisfactory to him to be spiteful, slanderous and false. Meantime, outside the darkened windows of his selfishness, the mercy of God, in which other men gloried and grew strong, rose every day. With one sweep the Psalmist tears the curtains down and lets in the sunshine. The leal love of God is every day. There, in that commonplace daily light: in that love which is as near you as the open air and as free as the sunshine, are the life and exultation which you seek so vainly within yourself.

It was in the sunshine that the Psalmist felt himself growing:

But I am like an olive-tree, green in God's house. I trust in the leal love of God for ever and aye.

This open-air figure suggests (though we have no confirmation of the fact) a tree growing in the high temple precincts, as trees to this day grow upon the Haram around the great mosque in Jerusalem, open to the sunshine and washed by the great rush of wind from the west. The Old Testament as much as the New haunts the open air for its figures of religion—a tree in full foliage, a tree planted by a river, a river brimming to its banks, the waves of a summer sea. Now this is not only because there is nothing else that will reflect the freedom of God's grace and the lavish joy it brings upon the world, but still more because the Bible feels the eternal truth, that to win this joy and freedom a man has got to go outside himself, outside his selfishness and other close tempers, outside his feelings and thoughts about himself, and receive the truths of religion as objective to him, taking the knowledge of God's pardon and peace as freely as he takes the sunshine of heaven, the calm of earth in summer, and the cool, strong winds from off the hills. To those old founders of our faith, religion was never man's feelings about religion: it was the love of God. God was not man's thoughts about God, but God Himself in His wonderful grace and truth, objective to our hearts. Therefore those ancient saints moved to the Spirit as the tree rustles to the wind, and as in summer she is green and glad in the sunshine that bathes her, so they rejoiced in the Lord, and in His goodness. I will give thanks, for THOU hast done it.

But this getting out of self does not only bring a man into the open air, and to gladness in a God who worketh for him. It gives him the company of all good and noble men. I will wait on Thy name, for it is good, in the presence of Thy saints. What a fellowship faith and unselfishness make a man aware of!

* * * * *

Let us turn back for a moment to the man, to whose close character this open air is offered as a contrast. Is it really difficult for us to imagine him? There is not one of us who has not tried this kind of thing again and again,—and has succeeded in it with far less substance than the great man had to come and go upon. He trusted in the abundance of his riches: he lost God for the multitude of his temptations. But for us there is no such excuse. There has been no pleasure too sordid, no comfort too selfish, no profit too mean, no honour too cheap and vulgar, but we have sometimes preferred it, in seeking for happiness, to the infinite and everlasting mercy of our God. We may not be big men, and deserve to have psalms written about us; but in our own little ways we exult in our selfishness and the tempers it breeds in us just as guiltily as he did, and just as foolishly, for God's great love is as near to us, and could as easily chase these vapours from our souls, if we would but open the windows to its air.

Take one or two commonplace cases that do not require the great capital which this fellow put into his business of sinning, but are quite within reach of your and my very ordinary means of selfishness.

You have been overreached in some business competition, or disappointed in getting a post, or foiled along some path of public service. You come home with a natural vexation in your heart: sore at being beaten and anxious about your legitimate interests. It is all right enough. But sit down at the fire for a little and brood over it. Shut God out as care and anger can. Forget that your Bible is at your elbow. Think only of your wrong, and it is wonderful how soon you will find spite rising, and envy and the cruellest hate. It is wonderful how quickly plans of revenge will form themselves in your usually slow mind, and how happy they will make you. Malice is like brandy to a man's brain, and will send him back with a beaming face to the work he left with scowls. Ah, why boast thyself in mischief, O man? God's leal love is all day long! The Bible is within reach of you. The lustre is as fresh on the promises as the rain-drops were under the glints of sun this morning. Walk there with God in His own garden: all God's steps are comfort and promise to the meek who will walk with Him. God is full of gentleness, and His gentleness shall make you great. I will be as the dew unto Israel. Or seek with the Master the crowds of men. Keep near Him in the dust and the crush: watch how He endures the contradiction of sinners, how patient He is with men, how forgiving. Watch most of all how He prays. Bow the knee like Him, and He shall lift thee up a sane and a happy man. To think of it—all that Divine fellowship and solace may be ours by opening the pages of a Book which lies on every table. God's love is all the day.

Let the other case be for young men and young women. For you the fresh air and sunshine are not yet shut out by the high walls of success or the thick ones of material prosperity. The dust of strife for you has not yet hidden heaven. But we all know that passion can build as solidly as wealth, and that a young heart may be as closely prisoned in a sudden temptation as an old one among the substantial accumulations of a lifetime. What is Temptation?

I turned to her: she built a house
And Thought was her swift architect,
And Falsehood let the curtains fall,
And Fancy all the tables deck'd.

And so we shut the world out,
Soul and Temptation face to face,
And perfumed air and music sweet,
And soft desire fill'd all the place.

O brothers, in such an hour, and it comes to every one of us, think upon the vast world outside, and the walls so magically built will as magically fall. God's sunshine is there, and God's fresh air, to think upon which, with the companies of men and women who walk up and down in it and are fair, is the most sovereign charm against temptation that I know. Why glory in this evil? Put that challenge to your heart in the crisis of every evil passion. God's mercy is all day long. Think of the love of the Father: of His patience with thee, of His trust of thee; think of the Love of the Redeemer, Who gave Himself for thy life; think of the great objective truths of religion—righteousness, joy and peace in the Holy Ghost. Or if these seem unsubstantial thoughts, that flash and fade again like clouds on the western sky at evening, come out among the flesh-and-blood proofs of them which walk our own day. Frequent the pure, strong men and women who are in sight of us all, fair on every countryside, radiant in every city crowd. Hearken to the greater spirits who by their songs and books come down and speak with the lowliest and most fallen. And do not forget the holy dead, nor doubt that though unseen they are with us still.

I will wait on Thy name, for 'tis good, in face of Thy Saints.