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 his Sun shrinks from his new position to a point against that universal goodness of the Lord, and he conceives not only courage to pray against it, but the grace to feel it already beneath his feet. This is not an intellectual solution of the problem of evil: but it is a practical one. The Psalm is a study—if we can call anything so enthusiastic a study—in proportion; the reduction of the cruel facts of experience to their relation to other facts as real but of infinite comfort and glory; the expansion, in short, of the words of verse 9: In Thy light we see light.
The Psalmist's analysis of sin has been spoiled in translation. Take our Old Version, or the Revised one, and you will find no meaning in the first two verses, but take the rendering offered on the margin by the Revisers (and approved by most scholars), and you get a meaning intelligible, profound, and true to experience:
Oracle of sin hath the wicked in the
midst of his heart;
There is no fear of God before his eyes.
The word oracle means probably secret whisper, but is elsewhere used (except in one case) of God's word to His prophets. It is the instrument of revelation. The wicked man has in him something comparable to this. Sin seems as mysterious and as imperative as God's own voice to the heart of His servants. And to counteract this there is no awe of God Himself. Temptation in all its mystery, and with no religious awe to meet it—such is the beginning of sin.
The second verse is also obscure. It seems to describe the terrible power which sin has of making men believe that though they continue to do evil they may still keep their conscience. The verse translates most readily, though not without some doubt:
For it flatters him, in his eyes, That he will discover his guilt—that he will hate it.
While sin takes from a man his healthy taste for what is good, and his power to loathe evil, it deludes him with the fancy that he still enjoys them. Temptation, when we yield, is succeeded by self-delusion.
The third and fourth verses follow clearly with the aggravated effects. Sin ceases to flatter, and the man's habits are openly upon him. Truth, common-sense and all virtue are left behind:
The words of his mouth are iniquity
and deceit,
He has given up thinking sensibly
and doing good.
So he becomes presumptuous and obstinate.
He devises iniquity upon his bed—which is but the Hebrew for 'planning evil in cold blood'—
He takes up his post on a way that is not good, He abhors not evil.
There we have the whole biography of sin from its first whisper in the centre of man's being, where it seems to speak with the mystery and power of God's own word, to the time when, through the corruption of every instinct and quality of virtue, it reaches the border of his being and destroys the last possibility of penitence. It is the horror of Evil in the four stages of its growth: Temptation, Delusion, Audacity, and Habit ending in Death.
To us sin has not become any less of a mystery or a pain. Temptation is as sudden and demonic. Into every soul, however purged and fenced, evil appears to have as much freedom of entrance as God Himself. It begins as early. In the heart of every little child God works, but they who next to God have most right there, the father and the mother, know that something else has had, with God, precedence of themselves. As the years go on, and the knowledge of good and evil grows, becoming ever more jealous and expert a sentinel, it still finds its watch and fence of the outside world mocked by the mysterious upburst of sin within. The whole mystery of temptation is to have sins suggested to us, and to be swept after them by a sudden enthusiasm, which sometimes feels as strong as the Spirit of God ever made in us the enthusiasm for virtue. 'There are moments when our passions speak and decide for us, and we seem to stand by and wonder. They carry in them an inspiration of crime, that in an instant does the work of long premeditation.'[2] 'An inspiration of crime,' that is the oracle of sin. From that come the panic and the despair of temptation. The heart, which has still left in it some loyalty to God, is horrified by the ease and the surprise of evil. Yet the greater horror is that this horror may be lost: that men and women do continually exchange it for a complacent and careless temper toward the besetting sin which they have once felt to be worse than death. From being panic-stricken at the rise and surge of temptation, they will (and there is no more marvellous change in all fickle man's experience) grow easy and scornful about it, time after time permitting it to overcome them, in the delusion that they may reassert themselves when they will, and put it beneath their feet. The rest is certain. Falsehood becomes natural to him who was born loyal, audacity to him who grew up timid and scrupulous. The impulsive lover of good, who has fallen through the very warmth of his nature, develops into the deliberate sensualist. Natures sensitive and enthusiastic grow absolutely empty of power to revolt against what is unjust or foul. A great writer once said of himself in middle life: 'I am proud and intellectual, but forced by the habits of years to like the base and dishonourable from which I formerly revolted.' Little children have the seeds of all this within them; men and women are born with the inspiration which starts these mysterious and direful changes; the fatal decadence takes place in countless lives.
[Footnote 2: George Eliot.]
Before facts so horrifying—they are within as well as everywhere around us—our real need is not an intellectual explanation of why they are permitted or whence this taint in the race arose. For, supposing that we were capable of understanding this, the probability is that we might become tolerant of the facts themselves, and, perceiving that cruelty and sin had a necessary place in the universe, lose the mind to fight them. Constituted as are the most of mankind, for them to discover a reason for a fact is, if not to conceive a respect for it, at least to feel a plausible excuse for their sluggishness and timidity in dealing with it. Nay, the very study of sin for the purpose of acquainting ourselves with its nature, too often either intoxicates the will, or paralyses it with despair; and it is in recoil from the whole subject that we most surely recover health to fight evil in ourselves and nerve to work for the deliverance from it of others. The practical solution of our problem is to remember how much else there is in the Universe, how much else that is utterly away from and opposed to sin. We must engross ourselves in that, we must exult in that. We must remember goodness, not only in the countless scattered instances about us, but in its infinite resource in the Power and Character of God Himself. We must feel that the Universe is pervaded by this: that it is the atmosphere of life, and that the whole visible framework of the world offers signals and sacraments of its real presence. We may not, we shall not, be able to reconcile this goodness with the cruel facts about us; but at least we shall have reduced these to a new proportion and perspective; we shall have 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 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.