are unintelligible in our versions, and hardly ever sung, except in
routine, by a Christian congregation. So sudden is the break between the
two parts, and so opposite their contents, that they have been taken by
some critics to be fragments of independent origin. This, however, would
only raise the more difficult question: Why, being born apart, and
apparently so unsympathetic, were they ever wedded? To a more careful
reading the Psalm yields itself a unity. The sudden break from the close
study of sin to the adoration of God's grace is designed, and from his
rhapsody the Psalmist returns to pray, in verses 10-12, against that same
evil with which he had opened his poem. Indeed, it is in this, its most
admirable method, more than in details, that the Psalm is instructive and
inspiring.

The problem of Israel's faith was the existence of evil in its most
painful form of the successful and complacent sinner, the oppressor of
good men. This problem our Psalm takes, not, like other Psalms, in its
cruel bearing upon the people of God, but in its mysterious growth in the
character of the wicked man. Through four verses of vivid realism we
follow the progress of sin. Then, when eye and heart are full of the
horror, the Psalmist steps suddenly back, and lifts his gaze beyond and
above his study of evil to God's own world that stretches everywhere. The
effect is to put the problem into a new perspective. The black bulk which
had come between the Singer and his Sun shrinks from his new position to a
point against that universal goodness of the Lord, and he conceives not
only courage to pray against it, but the grace to feel it already beneath
his feet. This is not an intellectual solution of the problem of evil: but
it is a practical one. The Psalm is a study--if we can call anything so
enthusiastic a study--in proportion; the reduction of the cruel facts of
experience to their relation to other facts as real but of infinite comfort
and glory; the expansion, in short, of the words of verse 9: _In Thy light