rcy upon me, O God," ending with the
assurance of acceptance, and so remaining for all ages the chart of the
thorny and yet blessed path that leads "from death unto life." In that
aspect, what it does not contain is as noteworthy as what it does. Not
one word asks for exemption from such penalties of his great fall as can
be inflicted by a loving Father on a soul that lives in His love. He
cries for pardon, but he gives his back to the smiters whom God may
please to send.

The other psalm of the penitent (xxxii.) has been already referred to in
connection with the autobiographical materials which it contains. It is
evidently of a later period than the fifty-first. There is no struggle
in it; the prayer has been heard, and this is the beginning of the
fulfilment of the vow to show forth God's praise. In the earlier he had
said, "Then will I teach transgressors the way;" here he says, "I will
instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go." There he
began with the plaintive cry for mercy; here with a burst of praise
celebrating the happiness of the pardoned penitent. There we heard the
sobs of a man in the very agony of abasement; here we have the story of
their blessed issue. There we had multiplied synonyms for sin, and for
the forgiveness which was desired; here it is the many-sided
preciousness of forgiveness possessed which runs over in various yet
equivalent phrases. There the highest point to which he could climb was
the assurance that a bruised heart was accepted, and the bones broken
might still rejoice. Here the very first word is of blessedness, and the
close summons the righteous to exuberant joy. The one is a psalm of
wailing; the other, to use its own words, a "song of deliverance."

What glad consciousness that he himself is the happy man whom he
describes rings in the melodious variations of the one thought of
forgiveness in the opening words! How gratefully he draws on the
treasures of that recent experience, while he sets it forth as being
the "taking away" of sin, as if it were the removal of a solid
something, or the lifting of a burden off his back; and as the
"covering" of sin, as if it were the wrapping of its ugliness in thick
folds that hide it for ever even from the all-seeing Eye; and as the
"non-reckoning" of sin, as if it were the discharge of a debt! What
vivid memory of past misery in the awful portrait of his impenitent
self, already referred to--on which the mind dwells in si