Professor W. G. Elmslie, D.D.: Memoir and Sermons

by William Gray Elmslie

He begins, first of all, with the point at which he ends. This is the right result of that struggle of doubt and faith within him; he believes that God is on the side of goodness. But there is a curious little word, very difficult to reproduce in English, that expresses how the firm conviction that he has of goodness having God backing it was reached through painful conflict. "Surely"—yes, after all—"God is good to His people, good to such as are pure in heart." Then we come to the history of doubt, the progress of doubt, in the man's soul. That you have in the first fourteen verses. The first step of it was his recognition of the fact of prosperous wickedness. It is a little difficult to divide the Psalm exactly, and I do not give you the divisions that I am choosing as certainly the precise, original structure of the poem, but roughly they bring out the outstanding thoughts. The first division would be verses 2 to 5—the fact of prosperous wickedness: "But as for me, my feet were almost gone; my steps had well-nigh slipped. For I was envious at bad men—at successful bad men—when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. For they have no barriers, no entanglements; they are never tripped up on to the time of their death"—that, I think, is the real translation—"but their success remains firm. They are not in trouble like other men; neither are they plagued like other men."

That is the first step of doubt. Then comes the second, the effect upon themselves: "Therefore pride is like a golden chain round their neck; violence covers them as a garment. Their eyes stand out with fatness; they have more than heart could wish. They scoff, and in wickedness utter oppression, pour forth oppressive taunt; they speak loftily. They have set their mouth in the heaven, and their tongue stalketh through the earth."

Then there is a third step of doubt, the effect upon good men: "Therefore God's people are prevented that way, and the waters of a full cup are drained by them. They say, How can God know? and is there knowledge in the Most High? Behold, these are the wicked; and being always secure, they heap up wealth."

Then there is the effect on the poet himself: "Surely in vain have I cleansed my heart, and washed my hands in innocency. For all the day long have I been plagued, and chastened every morning." You see here the doubt reaching its last full result.

Then we come to the recoil, the restoration of faith. That also is set in three steps. The first is the perception of the fact of retribution. Verse 15: "Had I made up my mind, I will speak thus; behold, I should have dealt treacherously with the generation of Thy children. When I thought how I might know this—how to read this riddle—it was too hard for me, until I went into the sanctuary of God, and considered the last end of them. Surely Thou didst set them in slippery places; Thou hast hurled them down to destruction. How are they become a desolation in a moment! They are utterly consumed with terrors. As a nightmare when one awaketh, so, O Lord, when Thou awakest Thou dost despise [flout] the presentment of them."

Then there is the next step, the perception of his own stupidity: "My mind was in a ferment, and I was pricked in my heart. How brutish I was, and how ignorant! I was no better than a proud beast before Thee; and I am continually with Thee, held by Thy right hand."

Then there is the last step, the perception of the immeasurable joy, the intrinsic superiority, of goodness. "Whom have I in heaven but Thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee. My flesh and my heart faileth; but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever. For, lo, they that are far from Thee shall perish; thou hast destroyed all them that go straying away from Thee. But it is good for me to draw near to God: I have made the Lord my refuge, that I may tell all Thy works."

Now, for our own help and instruction, let us follow, step by step, the struggle of that good man's heart. Is it evident on the face of things that goodness has the best of it in this world? Now, I am going to say to you a thing that perhaps many of you will think little of me for saying, but I cannot help thinking that the poet exaggerated the actual facts; and I am quite persuaded that a great many people who think themselves very wise, and are very wise, at the present day, make far too much of the external material advantage gained by dishonesty. I am quite prepared to admit that goodness often keeps a man back from earthly joy. I am quite prepared to admit that the prizes of this world go far too much to men that possess no real right to them. There are endless social wrongs and individual wrongs. Things are not rightly adjusted, either in the Church or in the world, in professions or in business. All that is true. Nevertheless, I rather think that the amount of it is exaggerated. I do not think that is the predominant aspect of life. It is only when a man is morbid, when existence is pressing too hard on himself, when he is sharply injured and wronged, that he would take upon him to say that evil out and out, clearly and without question, has the best of it. I am talking, of course, of our society nowadays; but I rather think that in all states of society it could never have been the case that wickedness absolutely had the best of it. I will tell you why: Because this world cannot stand without a good deal of love and a good deal of faith, a good deal of honesty, a good deal of mutual trust. Why, if business were the utter mass of cheating and unscrupulosity that some men would have us believe, you would have an end of all credit, of all business. There must be some brotherliness; there must be a certain trustworthiness; there must be a considerable amount of honesty. It is the very salt of the world; it maintains it; the world would come to an end without it. But all the same, I am willing to admit that that is the superficial aspect of existence, and that it is a very staggering blow to men's faith, especially faith that is inherited from one's father, that is not a man's own; it is a thing to make a young man's heart bitter; it is a thing to make him hesitate and doubt whether he ought to hold to the pathway of honour. It is not, I think, the paramount, the predominant aspect of life, looked at calmly and dispassionately, quite apart from religious faith, but certainly it is a very prominent aspect—prominent because it is superficial. Well, then, that fact of successful wrong-doing is the cause of religious doubt, but not by any means a very dangerous cause.

We come to the second source of doubt and questioning—an infinitely more subtle and hazardous one. It is the perception that successful ill-doers do not seem to be miserable. You know how we are all taught that bad men have such terribly evil consciences, that harpies are always behind them, that their hearts are gnawed with dread and anxiety, that they cannot sleep at night, that remorse haunts them. Not a bit of it. You go into the world and pick out men who have gained their wealth, who have wrung it out of the heart's blood of their fellow-men—got it by downright dishonesty; their eyes stand out with fatness, they roll about in their carriages, they have splendid houses, and everybody bows down to them and makes much of them; their faces are wreathed with smiles of self-satisfaction; you sit at their tables, and they tell you how successful they have been; they expect you to envy them; they are not humble and miserable. Then the deadly question comes to you, Where, then, is God? Ah, one can quite understand God letting the external world run its own course! One might explain in some way that God allows, to try men, the prizes of wealth and the joys of life to go to men that do not deserve them. As a good man once said to me, "It is plain that God does not think much of money—why, look at the kind of people he gives it to!" That is so; but the one thing you would believe is this, that in that strange inner world of the human heart, the mind, the conscience God could not keep still. If He gives them the external gift, if He sends them the desire of their flesh, He will send leanness into their soul. Why do you not see their faces haggard? Why can you not trace the lines of care? Why does not shame and degradation sit upon the wealthy man's face who gained his wealth by cheating and lying, by dishonour and meanness? Oh, they seem so happy, so contented, so pleased, so proud, so arrogant! Why does their tongue reach up to heaven, in its pride, and haughtiness, and complacency? Well, you would think that that is a deadly enough doubt to be gnawing at a good lad's heart; but there is a still deadlier one. Here you have the deadliest cause of doubt, when a man, pressed hard by the great fact of prosperous ill-doing, staggered by that blow, does not see the inner, ethical, moral vengeance of God stamped on it. He looks round for confirmation to the good men in the Church; he looks at religious Christian society, he falls back on it, to let it support him, to let it help him; and what does he discover when his eyes pierce through and penetrate? In the heart within him he begins to recognise the hearts of others. Everywhere the Church is secretly doubting too; good men are longing for a share in the ill-gotten gain—ay, tampering with their consciences, themselves turning into the same direction, drinking of the waters of the same cup, and then some of them, more reckless or more honest, speaking straight out: "Yes, I was brought up, like you, to believe in virtue, in honesty, in God, and in goodness; but I have seen throughout that this world is not governed by a good God. If there is a good God, He does not know or does not care; He does not step in; it is the wicked that have the best of it in this world; I am going to take that course." Ah, the moral perversion, the tainted breath of the base, selfish, greedy, unscrupulous world! that detected in the heart of his own father, the good elder, the church member; that detected in his own mother, not valuing or choosing for the society of her home the honourable, the pure, the good, the true, but the people with money, and tainted reputations, and all the rest of it; that is the deadliest thing; that makes the real doubt, the real unbelief; that carries a lad, not to books of philosophy—he will never take much harm from them, even if he has head enough to understand them—but carries him clean away from religion, into shady company too, and takes the virtue and morality out of him, making him sell himself for money in life's sacredest relationships: it is that—the perversion of good. Oh, how much we Christian men and women have to answer for when we denounce sceptics and worldlings, the ungodly young men who stop going to church, and all that! Ay, poor souls, they will have to answer for it! but how much shall we have to answer for it too? The Church, is it not tainted by worldliness? Do we go and take the bravest, the most patient, the most loyal, the most prayerful, the most devout Sunday-school teacher, a working man, and put him in the chair of our Sunday-school assemblies in Exeter Hall? No, no; it is not pure goodness. I do not know that we can help it, but it would be worth while trying that system, instead of the Church, for want of faith, making so very much of the world, of social position, and of purse power.

But I have rather wandered from my point. Doubt has now run its course, completed its curriculum. The question is often raised, Does it matter what a man believes? No, not what he believes about the abstract theories or explanations either of philosophy or theology—it will not matter much what he thinks about these abstruse questions; but it matters infinitely and eternally what he thinks about God, and goodness, and life. Ah, there a man's heart-faiths make his life-conduct! It was so with the poet here, when those dark, demon doubts had filled his soul, when his mind was in a ferment, when his heart was pricked and bitter within him, when he heard good men—men that were good once—round him saying, "Does God know?" and when he felt himself in a God-forsaken world, where there was nothing but each man snatching the best he could get, where everything was given over to wickedness and evil. Ah, then, such a man does not stop at theoretical atheism and scepticism! he goes farther. "Surely in vain have I kept my hands clean; I have been a fool to deny myself forbidden joys and pleasures; I have been punished, I have been injured; those that were unscrupulous, and impure, and dishonest have had the best of it; I have done with being a fool; I am going to have my share too." Now doubt has reached its most dangerous point; it is going to hurry into forbidden action.