good many wrong things 'in his heart.' The tacit assumptions on which a
life is based, though they may never come to consciousness, and still
less to utterance, are the really important things. I dare say this
'wicked man' was a good Jew with his lips, and said his prayers all
properly, but in his heart he had two working beliefs. One is thus
expressed: 'As for all his enemies, he puffeth at them. He hath said in
his heart, I shall not be moved.' The other is put into words thus: 'He
hath said in his heart, God hath forgotten, He hideth His face. He will
never see it.'

That is to say, the only explanation of a godless life, unless the man
is an idiot, is that there lie beneath it, as formative principles and
unspoken assumptions, guiding and shaping it, one or both of these two
thoughts: either 'There is no God,' or 'He does not care what I do, and
I am safe to go on for evermore in the present fashion.' It might seem
as if a man with the facts of human life before him, could not, even in
the insanest arrogance, say, 'I shall not be moved, for I shall never be
in adversity.' But we have an awful power--and the fact that we
exercise, and choose to exercise, it is one of the strange riddles of
our enigmatical existence and characters--of ignoring unwelcome facts,
and going cheerily on as though we had annihilated them, because we do
not reflect upon them. So this man, in the midst of a world in which
there is no stay, and whilst he saw all round him the most startling and
tragical instances of sudden change and complete collapse, stands
quietly and says, 'Ah! _I_ shall never be moved'; 'God doth not require
it.'

That absurdity is the basis of every life that is not a life of
consecration and devotion--so far as it has a basis of conviction at
all. The 'wicked' man's true faith is this, absurd as it may sound when