nd cruelty with the interests of
religion, and how it at once demoralizes and paralyzes its adherents.
To see it thus is to understand the passionate horror of these words:
"Their drink-offering of blood will I not offer."

It is, however, no mere recoil from the immoral which started the
spring of this psalmists's faith in God. That faith was formed on
personal experience of God Himself. In simple but pregnant phrases the
psalmist tells us how sure he has become, first, of God's providence
in his life; secondly, of God's intimate communion with his soul. God,
he says, had been everything in his life. One does not know whether
the psalmist was a prosperous man or a poor one; the inference that he
was prosperous and rich has sometimes been drawn, but wrongly drawn,
from one of the verses of the Psalm. His indifference to that is
clear, but what he did have he knew he had from God. God, he says, is
all his happiness and all his strength--"The Lord is the portion of
mine inheritance and of my cup; thou maintainest my lot." Whether poor
or prosperous he could say: "The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant
places; yea, I have a goodly heritage." Now that assurance of divine
leading is not analyzable, but we know that it does grow up solid and
sure in the experience of simple men who have put their trust in God,
who have felt life to be a commission from Him and who have done their
duty obeying His call. With such men "all things work together for
good." Tho life about them shake and darken, they feel their own
solidity and have light enough to read the future. Tho stript
and stark, they feel the Lord Himself to be the portion of their
inheritance and of their cup. The portion of my inheritance the Lord
is, i.e., the little bit of land that fell to each Israelite as his
share in the promised inheritance of the nation. "The Lord is the
portion of mine inheritance," as we might say in our Scotch language,
"The Lord is my croft and my cup," so they find in Him all the
ground and the freedom they need to do their work, fulfil their
relationships, and develop their manhood.

It is, however, with the psalmist's second reason for his faith we
have most to do. "I will bless the Lord, who hath given me counsel:
my reins also instruct me in the night seasons." This man held close
communion with God. Is it not great to find the testimony of a brother
man coming down all through those ages, from that dim and distant
past, clear and sur