'pious obstinacy' lift our hearts to that, else we perish. I think of one
very flagrant tale, in which the selfishness, the lusts and the cruelties
of modern men are described with the rarest of power, and so as to reduce
the reader to despair, till he realises that the author has emptied the
life of which he treats of everything else, except a fair background of
nature which is introduced only to exhibit the evil facts in more horrid
relief. The author studies sin in a vacuum, an impossible situation. God
has been left out, and the conviction of His pardon. Left out are the
power of man's heart to turn, the gift of penitence, the mysterious
operations of the Spirit, and the sense of the trustfulness and patience
of God with the worst souls of men. These are not less realities than the
others; they are within the knowledge of, they bless, every stratum of
life in our Christian land; they are the biggest realities in the world
to-day. Let us then meet the so-called realism of our times with this
Greater Realism. Let us tell men who exhibit sin and wickedness apart from
God and from man's power of penitence, apart from love and from the
realised holiness of our human race, that they are working in a vacuum,
and their experiment is therefore the most un-real that can be imagined.
We may not be able to eliminate the cruel facts of sin from our universe,
but do not let us therefore eliminate the rest of the Universe from our
study of sin. Let us be true to the Greater Realism.

Again, the whole Psalm is on the famous keynote of the Epistle to the
Philippians: _Rejoice in the Lord_. This is after all the only safe temper
for tempted men. By preachers of a theology as narrow as their experience,
it is often said that our guilt and native vileness, our unquestioned
peril and instability, are such that no man of us can afford to be
exultant in this life. But surely, just because of these, we cannot afford
to be anything else. Whether from the fascination or from the despair of
sin, nothing saves like an ardent and enthusiastic belief in the goodness