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.