and rejoice in the fellowship of God's simpler and more needy and more
devoted believers, however unattractive they may otherwise be.

Consider the way in which the psalmist reached this pure faith in God
and in His people. A factor in the process was distaste for the ugly
rites of idolatry--"Their drink-offerings of blood will I not offer."
Idolatry always develops a loathsome ritual. Sometimes it is cruel
and sometimes it is horribly unclean, but it always debases the
worshiper's mind, confuses his conscience, and hampers his freedom and
energy by the burdensome ceremonies it imposes upon them. Standing
afar off from them as we do, and knowing that there is no heathen
religion but has something good in it, we are apt to think that it
does not in the least matter how crude or how material a nation's
faith be if only it be faith in something more powerful than
themselves, if it satisfy their consciences and have some influence in
disciplining society and helping the individual to control himself.
But you have only to see idolatry at work, and at work with the
habits of ages upon it, to recognize how terrible it can be in its
identification of sheer filth and 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