things that he could kick away with his feet that these believers had
to reject when they sought the living God, but things which he and his
contemporaries felt to be alive and powerful; powerful alike in their
seduction and in their vengeance. They were believed to be identical,
as you know, with the forces of nature; they were supposed to be
indispensable to the welfare of the individual and of society, and
they were fanatically supported at the time by the mass of this man's
own countrymen; so that to break from them in those days meant to
abandon ancient opinions and habits, to resist many pleasant and
natural temptations and to incur the hostility, as was believed, of
the powers of nature, to break with customs and with rites that had
fortified and consoled the individual heart for generations and been
the support and sanction of society and of the state as well. Yet this
man did it. From all that living crowd and system, from all those
visible temptations and terrors he turned to the unseen, fully
conscious of his danger, for he opens his Psalm with a great cry,
"Preserve me, preserve me, O God!" but yet deliberately, and with all
his heart: "I have said unto the Lord, Thou art my Lord." I have no
goodness, no happiness, that is outside Thee or outside the saints
that are in the land, "the excellent in whom is all my delight." Here
we touch another great characteristic of all true faith which is full
of example to ourselves. It is remarkable how, when a man really turns
to God, he turns to God's people as well, and how he includes them in
the loyalty and in the devotion which he feels toward his Redeemer.
His confidence and the sensitiveness of his faith in and toward God
become almost an equal confidence and an equal sensitiveness toward
his fellow believers. So it is throughout Scripture; you remember that
other psalmist who tells us how he had been tempted to doubt God's
providence and God's power to help the good man--"does God know and is
there knowledge in the Most High? Verily I have cleansed my heart in
vain and washed my hands in innocency." The psalmist immediately adds:
"If I had spoken thus, behold I had dealt treacherously with the
generation of God's children." If I had spoken thus, denying God,
I had dealt treacherously with the generation of God's children.
Unbelief toward God meant to him treason toward God's people; and the
author of the Epistle to the Hebrews affirms the same double character
of