at the
price of righteousness, "Thou fool."

Nor less pregnant with meaning is the psalmist's emphatic
acknowledgment, "Against Thee, Thee only have I sinned." He is not
content with looking upon his evil in itself, or in relation only to the
people who had suffered by it; he thinks of it in relation to God. He
had been guilty of crimes against Bathsheba and Uriah, and even the
rough soldier whom he made his tool, as well as against his whole
subjects; but, dark as these were, they assumed their true character
only when they were discerned as done against God. "Sin," in its full
sense, implies "God" as its correlative. We transgress against each
other, but we sin against Him.

Nor does the psalmist stop here. He has acknowledged the tangled
multiplicity and dreadful unity of his evil, he has seen its inmost
character, he has learned to bring his deed into connection with God;
what remains still to be confessed? He laments, and that not as
extenuation (though it be explanation), but as aggravation, the sinful
nature in which he had been born. The deeds had come from a source--a
bitter fountain had welled out this blackness. He himself is evil,
therefore he has done evil. The sin is his; he will not contest his full
responsibility; and its foul characteristics declare the inward foulness
from which it has flowed--and that foulness is himself. Does he
therefore think that he is less to blame? By no means. His
acknowledgment of an evil nature is the very deepest of his confessions,
and leads not to a palliation of his guilt, but to a cry to Him who
alone can heal the inward wound; and as He can purge away the
transgressions, can likewise stanch their source, and give him to feel
within "that he is healed from that plague."

The same intensity of feeling expressed by the use of so many words for
sin is revealed also in the reiterated synonyms for pardon. The prayer
comes from his lips over and over again, not because he thinks that he
shall be heard for his much speaking, but because of the earnestness of
his longing. Such repetitions are signs of the persistence of faith,
while others, though they last like the prayers of Baal's priests, "from
morning till the time of the evening sacrifice," indicate only the
suppliant's doubt. David prays that his sins may be "blotted out," in
which petition they are conceived as recorded against him in the
archives of the heavens; that he may be "washed" from them, in which
they are c